Cost Cutter
The store I was going to wasn’t open, and I knew we needed a couple groceries, so I headed across the parking lot to the Cost Cutter (yep, it’s raining):
As soon as I got inside, I knew this was not just any old grocery store. The cashiers, the manager and the butchers all looked Mexican! And when I got to the deli section, the specialities were things like Dulce de Leche, all packaged up for people who eat a LOT of dulce de leche:
To my delight, there was an aisle labled Middle East foods, with tabbouleh, canned hummus and muttabel, foul, and Lebanese olive oil:
And a huge aisle with East European foods (I am not sure what East European foods are!)
And, while most stores hide their beer selection in some dark corner of the store, Cost Cutter has a huge aisle down the center of the store, with all kinds of neon signage – it looks very festive:
Stores like Cost Cutter, that serve the large and varied population of immigrants are one of the reasons I love Seattle.
Ivar’s Acres of Clams
In Seattle, there are three restaurants, Ivar’s Acres of Clams (the original, established in 1938), Ivar’s Salmon House and Ivar’s Landing in Mukilteo, and several smaller, more casual, fast-food kind of Ivars, famous for fish and chips.
This was one very smart man. The first Ivar’s Acre of Clams was built next to the ferry terminal in Seattle and provided both oceanfront dining and a quick place to grab some fish and chips coming to and from the ferries. It was a Seattle landmark; everyone knew Ivar’s Acres of Clams.
He also did a lot of promotions, appearing on TV in his own ads, often singing. The ads were very very bad, so bad that everyone remembered them, so in fact . . . they were so bad that they were good.
(Photo courtesy Paul Dorpat from the HistoryLink.org collection of Pacific Northwest History.)
(Kuwait needs this Wikipedia kind of historical page, gathering data and stories before the old Kuwaitis are all gone, and their stories with them. This would be a great thesis program, getting this set up and running.)
Some of my earliest memories are meals at Ivar’s. As a child, visiting from Alaska, the whole of my father’s clan, aunts, uncles, cousins, would all gather at Ivar’s for a grand dinner. Later, as a starving college student, from time to time a kind aunt would invite us to dinner or lunch there, taking us out of the university environment. As a young married, it was the restaurant where my husband-to-be met my extended family for the first time. Ivar’s is full of memories, as well as good food!
To this day, I often meet my old friends at Ivar’s. The food standards remain high – good Pacific Northwest Seafood, prepared so that their flavors come through. Dungeness crab Louis, salmon and chips, prawns and chips, halibut and chips – even plain old fish and chips, fresh out of the deep fryer. Even Ivar’s fast food is delicious, and as well as the fish and chips you can get their great clam chowder, also smoked salmon chowder, and a salmon ceasar salad, or a shrimp or crab cocktail – at the fast food Ivars. Great quality food, not the supersize me kind of food.
These are photos of the original Ivar’s Acre of Clams:
This is what their seafood cocktails look like (YUMMMMMMM!)
This is one of their dine-in fast food places; there is a long line of people ordering!:
This is the Ivar’s motto:
The Mukilteo Landing Ivars suffered so much damage in a recent storm that they were closed for over a year as they remodeled to be able to seat more people:
This big fish is part of the interior:
You sit in this beautiful restaurant, inside or outside, and watch the Mukilteo ferry come in and out of the dock. The restaurant is right next to the dock, and also has a fast-food Ivars outside to sell fish and chips or chowder to all the people in line waiting for the next ferry.
Ivar Hagland isn’t alive anymore, but his restaurants live on, thriving, after all these years. The concept holds true – have a great product in a great location and the profits will follow. You can read more about his restaurants, and even look at their menus by clicking Ivar’s.
Long Sleeves in Seattle
The weather is back to Seattle’s normal for late July – early August – absolutely gorgeous. At sundown, we watch the light shift over the mountains and the sound, watch the cruise ships coming and going, watch the clouds change colors until they go that bright smokey fushia just before all color disappears. The sky does not actually become dark until after nine at night.
And it can be chilly! My first day here, I got to wear a little long sleeved hoodie I haven’t worn since February! It was overcast and rainy, and there was an occasional chill wind blowing . . . brrrr! I love it! Even though it can be cold, it isn’t really cold, just a tiny bit cold, just enough to make you move a little faster and get the blood going, and you will be warm enough. I love it.
The weather is shifting, and should be like spring in Kuwait – in the high 70’s, low 80’s Fahrenheit.
My Mom is looking great. We did a little shopping, had a great lunch . . . it has been a hard year for her, with my father’s death, and she is still recovering. Today she will have her hair trimmed up; she knows her birthday is coming and that will mean PHOTOS. My entire family is as camera-happy as I am, and an event like a birthday means a minimum five cameras. I am amazed at how good she looks!
Seafair in Seattle
If you are planning a trip to Seattle, one of the very best times to go, in terms of things to do, is during the Seattle Seafair. Every neighborhood has a parade (The Chinatown Parade – ooops! politically incorrect! The International District Parade is my all time favorite, followed closely by the downtown Seattle Torchlight Parade, held at night), the Blue Angels perform their acrobatics overhead, and the festival ends on a bang – a day long hydroplane race (very very very fast speed-engineered boats) on Lake Washington.
One year, the Torchlight Parade, my Mom’s favorite, fell on her birthday, and we were able to rent a hotel room for the night, right over the street, from which she and Dad could watch the parade. To do so, we had to get on a waiting list, and then to sign a waiver that we understood that the room was just for THIS one night, and that we understood it gave us no rights to that room on any future Torchlight Parade nights. Families in Seattle have standing reservations, year after year, for these precious rooms.
Many people head for the lake for the hydroplane races. My very favorite race, favorite of all, was at my sister’s house, when her husband brought a big TV out to the pool, facing the pool, and we all spent the very hot August day floating on rafts in the cool pool, watching the races. We were SO burned, but oh, what fun.
August is a great month in Seattle, with blue skies and great warm daytime temperatures, cooled by the sea breezes at night. It’s a great time to go to the market (THE Market, the Pike Place Market) and to visit the huge flower farms, the beaches, and beautiful little towns on Puget Sound.
7 Million Muslims
In today’s Kuwait Times is an Independance Day message from the American Ambassador, Richard LeBaron, in which he states:
Numbering some seven million, there are more Muslims in America than in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE combined. In our more than 1,200 mosques that stand peacefully alongside churches and synagogues, you will find congregations as diverse as America itself. . .
I had no idea. I know in the Seattle area there are many mosques, many Moslems; Seattle is a city built on the energy and hope of new immigrants. But I had no idea we had seven million Moslems in the USA.
If you want to read the full text of the message you will have to buy the paper – it’s not on the website.
Tang Chow in Kuwait
I grew up eating Chinese food. When we would visit my father’s large family of sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, one of my favorite memories is going to Chinatown, (now called International District by the politically correct, although the Chinese still call it Chinatown) for Chinese food.
Everyone got an eggroll. And every person, even kids, ordered one dish, and then the dishes would get passed along a table of twenty something people. Of course, as kids, there was always some cousin who, being funny, would order something gross, like octopus, or shark or something that seemed very strange, but we would all take a bite.
One of our favorite recent memories was being in Seattle on Christmas Eve Day, and getting a call from a good friend asking if we were busy. It just happened that we had everything done, and we could spare time to get together with these very good friends. She is Chinese. She took us down to China Town, to a place we would not have even recognized as a restaurant. We were seated in the back room. I asked her if we were in the back room because we were the only non-Chinese there, and she said no, just wait, and within minutes, the back room was also full. The dim sum cart would come around and my friend would tell them what we wanted – we trusted her to know what was good or not so good. It was a wonderful day, and a great memory with some very special friends.
So I was so delighted to see so many Chinese restaurants when I came to Kuwait. The only problem is, most of them are so dumbed-down that you can barely recognize the food as Chinese. We have tried many, and come away mildly unsatisfied. That is, until we tried Tang Chow.
Tang Chow isn’t cheap. We often groan when the bill comes, and figure it’s just the price you pay for food you really like, and in a hotel (it’s in the Holiday Inn on Gulf Road in Salmiyya.) But we never have any complaint about the food. The food, and the food preparation, is excellent.
My all time favorite is the Peking Duck. I love the little tiny pancakes, the slivered green onions and the hoisin sauce. My husband gravitates towards the prawns with black bean sauce, which is also a little gingery. We both love the Hot and Sour soup, although the Seafood Soup is also very good. There is a mixed appetizer you can order with bites of dim-sum, also very good. Actually, we have never left there unhappy. And we always order too much, so we have a bag of leftovers to enjoy again. My husband says when you think of what you pay covering two or three meals, then it cost averages out pretty well. 😉
They have taken classic, even trite Chinese decorations and used them in new ways – those little red Chinese lanterns blown up to giant size and hung in a high-ceilinged room have a totally new look. The little beaded lamps which could be so tacky look surprisingly elegant when grouped together, five or six times normal size.
We also enjoy the luxury of space, and privacy, and spare elegance at Tang Chow, being able to have conversations without others nearby listening in, being able to entertain friends without the curious eyes of others prying into our business. Tang Chow provides all that. We also like the easy parking, and the open kitchen, where you can watch meals being prepared.
If you have other recommendations for Chinese restaurants, we would love to hear them!
Sparkle Plenty Jumps In
Sparkle Plenty has always loved good jewelry. She is on first name terms with the major jeweler in our home town, and they always grin when she walks in. Her blogging name is well chosen!
She is my sister, although almost of another generation. She is the youngest aunt, the “fun” aunt. Everyone likes hanging around Sparkle Plenty’s house – and all the cousins gather there around the pool – or the pool table. Sparkle Plenty and her husband have all the fun toys, the fun gatherings and her house is full of laughter.
Her house is also full of pets. She and her husband, Mariner Man, have a soft spot for anything lost or injured or abandoned. One by one, they have gathered a menagerie of cats, dogs and birds who are all grateful not to be out on the streets. They take the ones who limp, the ones no-one else wants. Sparkle Plenty and Mariner Man are all about heart.
After a couple months of commenting, now she had jumped in to the blogging party, and her theme, Flashes of Light that catch the eye, the mind and the heart is perfectly expressive of her goodness and her compassion and her yearning to be a force for good in the universe. Welcome Sparkle Plenty, and may the force of good be with you!
Please visit Sparkle Plenty and welcome her to our virtual community.
Bad Laws Encourage Breaking the Law
Going to university in Seattle, I did a paper on Washington State “Blue Laws” and how they were repealed. In Washington State, they have some really cool ideas that encourage citizen participation – one is called the initiative, and the other is called the referendum.
What this means is that citizens, just common, ordinary citizens like you and me, can gather support and signatures, and initiate proceedings to get a proposal on the ballot, in front of all the voters. They can also refer an existing law to the voters to get it repealed (made not a law anymore.) It’s hard work – but citizens do it all the time.
I just used my internet phone to change my car reservation, because KLM has “delayed” my flight by one night. I broke the law. It’s a bad law, and I am not by nature a law-breaking kind of person.
I also break the law by bringing in real vanilla flavoring when I enter Kuwait. Yes, it contains alcohol. I only use it for cooking, and I never serve it to Moslems. I have alcohal-free vanilla, too, that I use for when I cook for Moslems, but it doesn’t taste the same.
I probably bring in books and DVD’s that I am not supposed to, although I have never seen a list telling me what books might not be allowed. Most of my books are about ideas, and yes, ideas can be a dangerous thing.
Bad laws force normal law-abiding people to break the law.
(This does not apply to speed limits, which are good laws, and if they were obeyed, would save hundreds of lives in Kuwait every year. Think of every life as something precious, a resource, and you will see that disobeying the speed limits is like throwing resources down the drain.)
I know this entry is really all over the map, but I have all this angry energy and I don’t have anywhere to expel it. If I could, I would kick KLM all over Kuwait for what they have done. They have robbed us of one day with our son and his wife and I am really really angry. They didn’t even tell us, just changed the reservation. One flight was “delayed” 24 hours, so all the passengers on the next flight were also “delayed”. That’s not a DELAY! You cancelled a flight! And now you are going to have hundreds of angry passengers, angry phone calls, and people PO’d at KLM. Shoddy way to do business.
Dying Laughing: Al Qaeda in Seattle
My niece, Little Diamond has found a SATIRICAL article (I can’t figure out where, it is not The Onion ) on Al-Qaeda buying property in Seattle. If you know Seattle, and the pride Seattleites take in civility, friendliness, and neighborliness, then you, too, will die laughing. Click on A Diamond’s Eye View of the World for your grin to start the week.
And a part of me thinks – isn’t this what we are supposed to be doing? Be kind to our neighbors? Isn’t it the only way to interrupt the spiraling cycle of hatred and violence? Sometimes, an unexpected kind word changes everything – I know it has in my own world.
Pacific Northwest Day
Brrrr. .. .. Weather Underground: Kuwait tells me it’s 54 F / 12 C out this morning, but from my window all I can see is a lot of fog, whitecaps on the waves, and a steady cool breeze blowing. Am in in Kuwait? Or am I back in Seattle? This is a very Seattle kind of day.
A friend and I went to lunch yesterday, sat outside in a beautiful garden area eating mezze and grill . . . the weather was perfect. Warm, sunny, without being hot. It’s such joy to be able to eat outside, in the fresh air. Later in the day, I needed a jacket, and this morning . . . well, maybe the sun will burn some of the fog off and we will have another gorgeous day.
I turned the air conditioning off back in November – I want to see how long we can go before we have to turn it back on again. I want a beautiful LOOOOONNNGGG Spring.
High expected of 68 F / 20 C – yep, that’s spring, sometimes even summer, in Seattle.
Mom called last night – she says Seattle is very very cold this winter, lots of snow, and very very cold. She has gone back to her exercise classes now, to get stronger for some trips she has coming up. She tries to keep busy. She misses my dad.
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