Here’s your opportunity to be a part of history in the making, as well as a chance to win a $300 gift certificate to Top Ten Toys! A new one-way lane is being built from 1st to Greenwood Ave at the level where 86th Street would be. The lane will be for people, bikes and cars and is intended to promote gathering and community.
More information here
>>end post<<
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Saturday, November 22, 2008
All Hopped Up!
Here's one for the beer drinkers... From the blog Crooked Timber the question is: What's a Good American Beer?
Budweiser, eh?
I asked the brewmaster, Jean-Marie Rock, which American beer he likes best. He thought for a moment, squinting down his bladelike nose, and narrowed his lips to a point. Then he raised a finger in the air. “Budweiser!” he said. “Tell them that the brewer at Orval likes Budweiser!” He smiled. “I know they detest it, but it is quite good.”
Thanks very much for the heads up to Luis Enrique and Unfogged. Sweet vindication, albeit coming from a guy with pointed lips. Other gems from the article:
“When a brewer says, ‘This has more hops in it than anything you’ve had in your life—are you man enough to drink it?,’ it’s sort of like a chef saying, ‘This stew has more salt in it than anything you’ve ever had—are you man enough to eat it?’”
Microbrewers, gahhh.
More here Pay attention to the Comments.
So what do you think? What's a Good American Beer?
>>end post<<
Budweiser, eh?
I asked the brewmaster, Jean-Marie Rock, which American beer he likes best. He thought for a moment, squinting down his bladelike nose, and narrowed his lips to a point. Then he raised a finger in the air. “Budweiser!” he said. “Tell them that the brewer at Orval likes Budweiser!” He smiled. “I know they detest it, but it is quite good.”
Thanks very much for the heads up to Luis Enrique and Unfogged. Sweet vindication, albeit coming from a guy with pointed lips. Other gems from the article:
“When a brewer says, ‘This has more hops in it than anything you’ve had in your life—are you man enough to drink it?,’ it’s sort of like a chef saying, ‘This stew has more salt in it than anything you’ve ever had—are you man enough to eat it?’”
Microbrewers, gahhh.
More here Pay attention to the Comments.
So what do you think? What's a Good American Beer?
>>end post<<
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Flush Away!
This by popular demand! When the folks in the PNA offices got wind (sic) of it there was no stopping the mirth that followed!
From the Seattle PI's blog "Dateline Earth"It's World Toilet Day! A word from the *other* WTO...
Yes, indeedy, that's right: World Toilet Day, Nov. 19, is being promoted by the World Toilet Organization* today. Now, I'm not 100 percent certain this isn't a put-on, but after looking over the Web site it sure looks legit.....
Could it be that someday we'll get away from central wastewater treatment? There is, as some commenters have pointed out, an alternative: the composting toilet. I thought those would be gross until I looked into it a little after Michael Broili mentioned it when I was in his rainwater harvesting class a few years ago at the Phinney Neighborhood Center.
From the Seattle PI's blog "Dateline Earth"It's World Toilet Day! A word from the *other* WTO...
Yes, indeedy, that's right: World Toilet Day, Nov. 19, is being promoted by the World Toilet Organization* today. Now, I'm not 100 percent certain this isn't a put-on, but after looking over the Web site it sure looks legit.....
Could it be that someday we'll get away from central wastewater treatment? There is, as some commenters have pointed out, an alternative: the composting toilet. I thought those would be gross until I looked into it a little after Michael Broili mentioned it when I was in his rainwater harvesting class a few years ago at the Phinney Neighborhood Center.
>>end post<<
Monday, November 17, 2008
Photos of Recent PNA Events
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Dia de los Muertos Celebration at the PNA
Thanks to our neighbors at Parsons Public Relations for this post on their blog:
Parsons Public Relations is fortunate to be located across the street from one of Seattle’s most prominent community centers, the Phinney Neighborhood Association (PNA). As an active part of our community, PNA often hosts events to foster neighborhood involvement. Friday, as I was walking back to the office after having dinner with a friend, I came across a parade and festival for Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Crowds of people from the neighborhood were gathered in the street watching music and dance performances and honoring this traditional Mexican celebration of life and death. The performance troop moved inside PNA’s building and I was curious enough to join the crowd. Inside, I found an entire set up of art, food, crafts and a community altar.
... more at the Parsons blog
>>end post<<
Parsons Public Relations is fortunate to be located across the street from one of Seattle’s most prominent community centers, the Phinney Neighborhood Association (PNA). As an active part of our community, PNA often hosts events to foster neighborhood involvement. Friday, as I was walking back to the office after having dinner with a friend, I came across a parade and festival for Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Crowds of people from the neighborhood were gathered in the street watching music and dance performances and honoring this traditional Mexican celebration of life and death. The performance troop moved inside PNA’s building and I was curious enough to join the crowd. Inside, I found an entire set up of art, food, crafts and a community altar.
... more at the Parsons blog
>>end post<<
Monday, November 10, 2008
UNTITLED [INTERSECTION]
Friday 21 November 2008, 7p
Concrete poet NICO VASSILAKIS & Subtext cohort MICKEY OCONNOR present poetry to challenge your brain, followed by a collaboration between nationally-touring, movement artist BETH GRACZYK and experimental musician ANGELINA BALDOSZ. Starting at 7P on Friday 21 November, Phinney Neighborhood Center on Phinney Ridge in Seattle. This is Untitled [Intersection]'s 3rd stellar event of Fall 2008 and you're invited!
Artists manifestos will be offered as usual.
NICO VASSILAKIS, MICKEY OCONNOR, BETH GRACZYK, ANGELINA BALDOZ
Thank you for supporting these NW artists!
A. K. Allin
Curator, Untitled [Intersection]
Artists
NICO VASSILAKIS - Nico Vassilakis is working on "Nothing". He collects shoehorns and enjoys colanders. His most recent book is Orange: A Manual. He is a member of the Subtext Collective.
MICKEY OCONNOR - Mickey O'Connor lives and writes in Seattle. He is the author of THE CHARLESGATE APARTMENT POEMS, NOT EVEN MERELY END & the forthcoming WEIRD WIND INSIDE WORDS.
BETH GRACZYK is a movement-based artist who works as a contemporary dancer, choreographer, teacher and producer based in Seattle, WA. She has performed both nationally and internationally working extensively with Locate Performance Group (Pablo Cornejo, Paige Barnes) (2002-2006), Sheri Cohen & Co. (2000-2004), Corrie Befort
(2003-present) and Scott/Powell Performance (2004-present). Beth co-produced and performed in 12 Hour Play and several dance/music improvisations in Seattle and Portland. She is a GAP grant recipient for Salt Horse through Artist Trust. www.salthorseperformance.com Beth earned a double degree from the University of Washington in Dance and Molecular Biology. She was recently published in Nature Cell Biology for her work in mitosis.
ANGELINA BALDOZ has been performing and composing in the Seattle improvisational music and dance communities since 1996. Her distinctive trumpet playing has been presented in collaboration with Deborah Hay, Gust Burns, Lori Goldston, Ellen Fullman, Susie Kozawa, Beth Graczyk, Jason E Anderson, Paul Hoskin, and Torben Ulrich. Last fall she scored the feature film "Aliens Cut My Hair", as well as composed and performed for an evening length dance concert with Portland choreographer Linda Austin. Currently, Angelina can be heard around the Northwest with the newly formed quartet Instead Of, and playing electric bass with the rock band BC Campbell & The Celebrity Orphans.>>Back to main blog page
Concrete poet NICO VASSILAKIS & Subtext cohort MICKEY OCONNOR present poetry to challenge your brain, followed by a collaboration between nationally-touring, movement artist BETH GRACZYK and experimental musician ANGELINA BALDOSZ. Starting at 7P on Friday 21 November, Phinney Neighborhood Center on Phinney Ridge in Seattle. This is Untitled [Intersection]'s 3rd stellar event of Fall 2008 and you're invited!
Artists manifestos will be offered as usual.
NICO VASSILAKIS, MICKEY OCONNOR, BETH GRACZYK, ANGELINA BALDOZ
Thank you for supporting these NW artists!
A. K. Allin
Curator, Untitled [Intersection]
Artists
NICO VASSILAKIS - Nico Vassilakis is working on "Nothing". He collects shoehorns and enjoys colanders. His most recent book is Orange: A Manual. He is a member of the Subtext Collective.
MICKEY OCONNOR - Mickey O'Connor lives and writes in Seattle. He is the author of THE CHARLESGATE APARTMENT POEMS, NOT EVEN MERELY END & the forthcoming WEIRD WIND INSIDE WORDS.
BETH GRACZYK is a movement-based artist who works as a contemporary dancer, choreographer, teacher and producer based in Seattle, WA. She has performed both nationally and internationally working extensively with Locate Performance Group (Pablo Cornejo, Paige Barnes) (2002-2006), Sheri Cohen & Co. (2000-2004), Corrie Befort
(2003-present) and Scott/Powell Performance (2004-present). Beth co-produced and performed in 12 Hour Play and several dance/music improvisations in Seattle and Portland. She is a GAP grant recipient for Salt Horse through Artist Trust. www.salthorseperformance.com Beth earned a double degree from the University of Washington in Dance and Molecular Biology. She was recently published in Nature Cell Biology for her work in mitosis.
ANGELINA BALDOZ has been performing and composing in the Seattle improvisational music and dance communities since 1996. Her distinctive trumpet playing has been presented in collaboration with Deborah Hay, Gust Burns, Lori Goldston, Ellen Fullman, Susie Kozawa, Beth Graczyk, Jason E Anderson, Paul Hoskin, and Torben Ulrich. Last fall she scored the feature film "Aliens Cut My Hair", as well as composed and performed for an evening length dance concert with Portland choreographer Linda Austin. Currently, Angelina can be heard around the Northwest with the newly formed quartet Instead Of, and playing electric bass with the rock band BC Campbell & The Celebrity Orphans.>>Back to main blog page
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Gizzards and Gravy
This article originally appeared in the 2008 Holiday Edition of the Phinney Ridge Review
How to fix up your turkeys, partridges, turtle doves and other holiday birds.
By: AP Hurd
I call them gizzards, but gizzards are really a subset of giblets. Little bits that don’t look like much when you pull them out of the bird: the heart, liver and gizzard make up the giblets. The gizzard is the neck of the bird, and if you’ve ever wondered why it’s so muscular, it turns out that in the absence of teeth, it actually grinds the grain up before it reaches the stomach. Crazy.
If you’re in holiday mode, and fixing up your bird, you can probably ditch the liver. Though chicken livers are lovely in quantity, fried with butter, onion, sage and thyme, it’s probably not worth it if you only have one. Most people don’t find chicken livers that festive on the other hand, if you’re eating a fattened goose, chances are the liver is worth enough that the butcher won’t throw it in for free.
The heart and the neck should go straight into a small pot of boiling water as a base for gravy. Apart from the liver, giblets are golden. When you first look at these little pellets, you wonder that they could have much flavor at all, but if you boil the heck out of them, the resulting scummy-looking broth is exceptionally flavorful. If you use that liquid to deglaze your roasting pan after taking the turkey out of the oven, it’s hard to go sideways on your gravy.
Full disclosure: If it’s not already apparent, I am a gravy perfectionist. We used to have Christmas at my stepmother’s family’s house and the people who usually ran the show couldn’t make gravy to save their lives—it was grey, fatty, salty and lumpy. After about two years of enduring this, my father and I resorted to dramatic measures, one of us staging a distraction in another room (setting off the smoke detector, encouraging the dog to tear into the wrapped gifts, etc.) while the rest of us focused on the gravy amidst the resulting hubbub.
Here are some of our other foolproof strategies, besides the giblets, just in time for the holiday season.
1. Siphon off some of the fat in the pan before you make the gravy. This is especially important if you are roasting a fatty bird like a goose or duck.
2. Don’t go to the other extreme and siphon off all the fat since it adds a lot of flavor.
3. If you run out of giblet broth, use regular broth.
4. Worcestershire sauce and/or liquid browning. I don’t know what’s in there, but it’s good stuff.
Keep tasting the gravy and doctoring it. Work it until it tastes right. This is one of those things that you need to taste and work on for a while. Think about how salty it is. Think about adding red wine, white wine, port (for gamier birds)—make sure you boil off the alcohol. Consider adding sage, thyme, caramelized onion, onion powder, even current or cherry jam for sweetness.
Only when you’ve got the flavor just right should you thicken your gravy. For goodness’ sake, take the extra step to mix your flour or cornstarch with water before you add it to the pan. If you do this and you stir hard, you won’t get lumps. If lack of flavor is a sin of omission, then lumps are a sin of commission. Once you add the flour or cornstarch, how long you keep boiling will determine how thick it is, so you don’t want to be fooling around with the flavor at that point. If it gets too thick and you have to add water, you’ll only dilute the flavor.
That’s the whole secret. The gizzards—I mean giblets—and the tasting. Taste, taste, taste.
Happy Holidays. >>Back to main blog page
How to fix up your turkeys, partridges, turtle doves and other holiday birds.
By: AP Hurd
I call them gizzards, but gizzards are really a subset of giblets. Little bits that don’t look like much when you pull them out of the bird: the heart, liver and gizzard make up the giblets. The gizzard is the neck of the bird, and if you’ve ever wondered why it’s so muscular, it turns out that in the absence of teeth, it actually grinds the grain up before it reaches the stomach. Crazy.
If you’re in holiday mode, and fixing up your bird, you can probably ditch the liver. Though chicken livers are lovely in quantity, fried with butter, onion, sage and thyme, it’s probably not worth it if you only have one. Most people don’t find chicken livers that festive on the other hand, if you’re eating a fattened goose, chances are the liver is worth enough that the butcher won’t throw it in for free.
The heart and the neck should go straight into a small pot of boiling water as a base for gravy. Apart from the liver, giblets are golden. When you first look at these little pellets, you wonder that they could have much flavor at all, but if you boil the heck out of them, the resulting scummy-looking broth is exceptionally flavorful. If you use that liquid to deglaze your roasting pan after taking the turkey out of the oven, it’s hard to go sideways on your gravy.
Full disclosure: If it’s not already apparent, I am a gravy perfectionist. We used to have Christmas at my stepmother’s family’s house and the people who usually ran the show couldn’t make gravy to save their lives—it was grey, fatty, salty and lumpy. After about two years of enduring this, my father and I resorted to dramatic measures, one of us staging a distraction in another room (setting off the smoke detector, encouraging the dog to tear into the wrapped gifts, etc.) while the rest of us focused on the gravy amidst the resulting hubbub.
Here are some of our other foolproof strategies, besides the giblets, just in time for the holiday season.
1. Siphon off some of the fat in the pan before you make the gravy. This is especially important if you are roasting a fatty bird like a goose or duck.
2. Don’t go to the other extreme and siphon off all the fat since it adds a lot of flavor.
3. If you run out of giblet broth, use regular broth.
4. Worcestershire sauce and/or liquid browning. I don’t know what’s in there, but it’s good stuff.
Keep tasting the gravy and doctoring it. Work it until it tastes right. This is one of those things that you need to taste and work on for a while. Think about how salty it is. Think about adding red wine, white wine, port (for gamier birds)—make sure you boil off the alcohol. Consider adding sage, thyme, caramelized onion, onion powder, even current or cherry jam for sweetness.
Only when you’ve got the flavor just right should you thicken your gravy. For goodness’ sake, take the extra step to mix your flour or cornstarch with water before you add it to the pan. If you do this and you stir hard, you won’t get lumps. If lack of flavor is a sin of omission, then lumps are a sin of commission. Once you add the flour or cornstarch, how long you keep boiling will determine how thick it is, so you don’t want to be fooling around with the flavor at that point. If it gets too thick and you have to add water, you’ll only dilute the flavor.
That’s the whole secret. The gizzards—I mean giblets—and the tasting. Taste, taste, taste.
Happy Holidays. >>Back to main blog page