Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Dinner on Friday night for pdcawley's birthday at Abeno in Museum Street. It's an okonomiyaki restaurant, serving what can best be described as a Japanese cross between a Spanish omelette and a large pancake.

The restaurant mixes up a batter of cabbage, egg and yam flour (with spring onions, ginger and tempura crumbs stirred in), adds all sorts of ingredients, ranging from pork, prawns or squid to lotus root, salmon, kimchi and kobe beef, and then cooks it all on the table in front of you. It's all rather good - and very filling (especially if you take the option with the added noodles). One of the starters was a small okonomiyaki with natto...

Natto is/are fermented soy beans. Apparently they're not very nice, so I'd been avoiding them up to now. However, I seemed to like them. In fact, I'd actually eaten them before, just without knowing what I was eating!

Ah well...

Dinner tonight at Abacus - a rather wonderful tasting menu that ran the gamut from Japan to France. Well worth visiting for the red curry lobster scallion shots alone...

Back to the Bay area tomorrow.

derb points out the rather useful looking Recipe*zaar.

Perhaps best thought of as the Flickr of the foodie world, Recipe*zaar is a database of more than 150,000 recipes, tied in with a community site. Lots to browse here, and the ability to search for recipes by ingredient is rather useful if the nice man from Ocado hasn't been around for a while...

The only thing that's missing is an ingredient translator (at least you can switch between US/UK/metric weights and measures). It's an aubergine, not a bloody "eggplant" (though this recipe for Kuku does look nice)...

I wonder if it'll work on the old Vadem Clio Windows CE HPC we keep as a web appliance in the kitchen...

Chris Pirillo lists plenty of good Seattle restaurants here.

We've been to I Love Sushi, and it's pretty damn good. However, we'd also recommend one of elimloth and spiritmoving's favourite places, Cafe Flora. It's a wonderful vegetarian place that puts most other vegetarian restaurants we've eaten at in the shade...

Then there's the Essential Baking Company, near Gas Works park, for excellent breads and sandwiches - and of course the option of grazing through Pike's Place Market (for excellent chowder, chicken wings and doughnuts).

...or at least the babyplane: a set of wings you clip onto a spoon.



"Speedbird Heavy 156 now cleared for landing with a cargo full of Gerbers..."