Other than overcooking, Wild Salmon co-owner John Speltz maintains that there is virtually no way to ruin a good piece of fish. To make it even easier, the store provides a number of recipes on its Web site and sells a variety of homemade, prepared foods, including salmon, crab or halibut cakes, fantastic clam chowder and house-smoked salmon that'll make you forsake all others. In addition, don't hesitate to ask this helpful staff for suggestions about how to cook your fish; I've gotten advice ranging from the best way to fry razor clams to the recommendation that I grill shrimp with their shells on.The following recipe was given to me by employee Michael Helde when I was looking for a new way to serve Washington state's delicate Penn Cove mussels (a farmed shellfish, best during fall and winter months).
For those of you who thought that you had to brave throngs of tourists in order to experience the freshness and variety of Seattle's fish markets, I'm happy to introduce you to one of the premier fish stores in town: Wild Salmon Seafood Market, fortuitously located right here on Queen Anne.Wild Salmon Seafood Market was born in 1977 when a group of local, troll (line) fishermen formed a co-op and opened a small store on Dravus Street, accurately believing that it would be more profitable than selling their catch off the docks. Led by Gary Tiege, who was since lost at sea, they were young men with 12 boats between them, referred to as the "hippie fleet" by old-timers. The store became known for the freshness of its fish and had a strict policy of selling (or freezing for the off-season) all of their salmon within five days of being caught, a pioneering practice for that time. Although the co-op prospered until the early '80s, it was sold when newly enacted, stricter trolling restrictions put most Pacific Northwest trollers out of business. Today, Wild Salmon Seafood Market is owned by the husband-and-wife team John Speltz and Paula Cassidy. They purchased the business in 1996, when it was incongruously selling both farmed and wild salmon, and immediately set out to return the store to the philosophy of the co-op: selling exclusively wild salmon, as well as a multitude of other fish.
Down past Cleveland High School, over the railway tracks and abruptly right onto Airport Way, with big trucks moving fast, cars going at a clip and the high-pitched tooting of trains adding to the cacophony, sits a lunch counter treasure. I gingerly crossed the traffic to the Kurry King, located in a characteristic Georgetown brick building. Owner Lawrence Lin had the good taste to keep the 1950s illuminated sign faintly reminiscent of an old-time soda shop. A bright billboard boldly tells it all - $4.99 Lunch Special.
In a high school as culturally diverse as Franklin, many different artistic representations should be expected at its annual art fair, and on May 7, that is what happened. Both student and adult performers and vendors were on hand to create a day-long event of artistic fun for the community.Selling a variety of plants grown inside the school's greenhouse as part of the National Honor Society Club, Franklin senior Margareth Tran summed up the Arts Fair as, "bringing the community together to share the culture that's in Franklin."Outside the main entrance where the fair began, a barbecue burned hot, a group of adult musicians were strumming Beatles tunes, a vendor was making custom T-shirts and ceramic artist Pat Epsey was selling her vases and kitchenware. Although she is not a graduate of the high school herself, Epsey and many other adult vendors took part in the fair. Epsey was very impressed with the enthusiasm of the kids and said she enjoyed the fair.
Saturday, April 30 marked the 30-year anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the end of four decades of struggle for independence and re-unification by the Northern Vietnamese leadership.In the metropolis, now called Ho Chi Minh City, hundreds of aging Communist veterans, legendary general Vo Nguyen Giap, Cuba's Raul Castro, and the country's top leaders commemorated the day by watching a parade of soldiers, government workers and performers march toward the old South Vietnamese presidential palace gates. The unified march stood in contrast to those held in Seattle, where the young Vietnamese community, most of them forced to leave their homeland because of the Communists, is still struggling to grasp its identity, and forgive.
The problem with political correctness - even if I subscribe to some of its core beliefs, especially making sure that opportunity is truly equal for minorities - is that PC's most-rigid followers misread the world with their blinkered view, just as surely as those folks who follow an allegedly conservative bent in their natures to the exclusion of other viewpoints.One of the major problems with following any ideology is that you often can't see the variety in the forest for the darkness of the trees in the aggregate.
Headlines in a recent issue of a state newspaper gave an eye-blink story of our state, nation and world:"GOP legal challenge to election kept alive.""Entrepreneurs seek new ways to mine the Web.""Abu Ghraib defendant: I knew abuse was wrong.""Seattle law firm caught in glare of spotlight aimed at lobbyist.""Seattle climber dies in bid to help fight fatal disease."Of course, in the first few pages there were headlines celebrating the macabre: "Worker's finger found in frozen custard," and "Fiance stands by runaway bride."It was on Page A9 of this particular daily paper that the first headline concerning current news of the wars - Afghanistan and Iraq - appeared: "Dozens die in Afghan explosion." It was right next to a headline: "Hitler 'sank into himself' in final days, nurse says."The Afghan story was on Page A13; the smallish headline appeared at the bottom of the news columns, just above a Newspaper in Education serial story titled "Class Pets." The story was about two U.S. soldiers and an improvised explosive device at the Baghdad International Airport.
Original Artists' Showcase in Seattle (OASIS), a new business in Wallingford, offers a selection of works by more than a dozen artists, an informal setting to drink a cup of tea and an opportunity for those with developmental disabilities to study art.Alex Strazzanti and his wife, Jeannie Trimarco, started the business together. The two met in Seattle doing social-service work for those with developmental disabilities. A portion of the proceeds from everything sold at OASIS provides funding for creative workshops on ceramics, photography, painting and more for people with disabilities, which are offered every other month. Strazzanti also teaches a five-week beginning photography course at OASIS for the general public.
From Fremont to Wallingford, from the University District to Phinney-Greenwood, it's rare to step into a restaurant and catch scent of cigarette smoke anymore. It's just not cool. For those who still consider cigarette smoke as an accompaniment to their meal - there's always Paris.And yet smoking, or partial-smoking establishments, still exist in North Seattle. Those holdouts and their statewide brethern have inspired the Washington State Department of Health to sponsor a Smoke-Free Sunday on May 15.
Mars theorist Maureen Clemmons prepares University Prep eighth-grader Patrick Slack before her presentation about how Egyptians may have used kites to move heavy stones for the pyramids.
It was the antithesis of the motorcycle gang Hells Angels: Dozens of pint-sized do-gooders on bicycles, racing around in swarms like the mosquitoes that filled the last gasps of the sunny, spring evening at Magnuson Park on Thursday, May 5.But unlike the mosquitoes, these were no pests, and unlike the aforementioned biker gang, there were no grizzly appearances or riding leathers - only baseball caps and toothy grins. Any teeth that were missing from this group had fallen out on their own and were probably waiting under a pillow somewhere.This was Cub Scout Pack 144's annual Bike Rodeo, just one of the many activities and adventures that the group participates in each year.
Throw logic and reason aside and enjoy Intiman's 33rd-season opener "The Mystery of Irma Vep" for what it is: a hilarious, gender-bending Gothic romp of anagrams and quick-changes that goes from silly to sillier. The idea is to have fun. The playwright did. The actors do. And so does the audience.Written in 1984 by Charles Ludlam for his notorious Off-Off Broadway troupe The Ridiculous Theatre, "Irma Vep" blatantly borrows from Hollywood suspense classics, particularly "Rebecca," Hitchcock's Academy Award-winning thriller starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson. Ludlam's shameless plot - if you dare call it one - also raids those wonderful Universal horror flicks of the 1930s and boasts campy line readings from Poe, Ibsen, Shakespeare and the Brontë sisters.
Jacques Offenbach's "The Tales of Hoffmann" is a fantastical opera with an equally eccentric past. When Offenbach died before completing the opera's score, Ernest Guiraud whipped it into shape for its world première at Paris' Opéra-Comique in 1881. The score has been fiddled with multiple times since then, usually whenever more pages of Offenbach's original work surface. This tinkering is not always in the best interests of Offenbach's final opera. In the Choudens version in 1907, for example, the stories the poet Hoffmann tells about his disastrous relationships are rearranged into an order that decimates the opera's logical dramatic progression.The end result of the twisted evolution of "The Tales of Hoffmann" is that today's opera companies aren't comfortable relying on any one version, instead creating their own particular blends of the three basic editions. Seattle Opera is following suit with its new production of this transmogrifying opera, in which the young poet Hoffmann tells a group of fellow drinkers three often fantastical and humorous stories about his failed love affairs.
If you love the sheer, sensuous richness of color, texture and motion that defines movies at their most primal, Ridley Scott's the director for you. As early as "The Duellists" (1977), his first feature film after a long career making TV commercials, Scott seemed able to reach out into cinematic space to manually shade and shape heroic action, epic weather and fall of light."Kingdom of Heaven," his first effort in this vein since "Gladiator" (2000), focuses on the Crusades, Europe's religiously inspired pillaging of the Middle East (1100-1300), a period of historical excess that offers ample room for Scott's visual opulence.
Here, hold this! So goes the unofficial motto of the Fremont Arts Council (FAC) Solstice Parade. Every year passers-by get inexorably pulled into the vortex of our anxiously awaited, always festive and occasionally notorious parade. Stop by the FAC workshop space to check it out or ask a question and inevitably you get asked to "hold this."Monica Miller, last year's workshop coordinator, saw this phenomenon over and over. Visitors might mention some skill or interest they have and, in FAC's open way, a previously unknown application appears where that talent or training would prove invaluable to the creation of the parade.Last year, Monica had thousands of origami peace cranes that needed folding, and hundreds of volunteers stopped by to help.