Slumberland

Photo by Waffle Whiffer.

While browsing Flickr this weekend, I stumbled on an amazing photostream with lots of great pop culture stuff, particularly packaging and advertising characters from the 1960s-1980s. If you grew up in that era as I did, you’ll see a lot of familiar stuff in Waffle Whiffer’s great photostream. Look and reminisce. The photo here is just one example of the fun stuff found there: a late 70s Kool-Aid package with the classic Kool-Aid design, before the envelopes got busy and over-designed. I didn’t even like Kool-Aid that much as a kid, and yet the envelope always made it look so good! Heyyyyyy Kool-Aid!

Photo by dfinnecy.

When I was a kid in the 70s, we had milk delivered by a milkman. We had a little white wooden Vitamilk box on the porch, and every few days the milkman would put a couple of bottles of milk in the box. To me, it seemed like magic. After a while, they stopped using glass bottles, and then they stopped delivering milk at all. Like much of the rest of America, we had to start buying our milk at the grocery store. This was a sad thing.

A few years ago, I was surprised to see that milk delivery still existed in the Seattle area. I contacted a local dairy to inquire about service. “Sorry,” they said, “we don’t deliver to Beacon Hill.” I was disappointed.

This year, though, I browsed around to the Smith Brothers Farms website and discovered that now they do deliver to Beacon Hill. Joy! I signed us up for regular delivery.

A week later, the milkman showed up and dropped off our delivery box with our first delivery. Like my childhood Vitamilk box, it is white. The milk inside, sadly, is not in glass bottles, but in cardboard cartons. But it is fresh and tasty.

The one problem, however, is that there is a minimum order of two half-gallons per week. We don’t always drink that much in a week; usually we have up to half a carton left over. I don’t want to be wasteful, so tonight I went looking for ways to make use of extra milk.

I found this. Homemade soft cheese (basically the same as paneer), made from milk and lemon juice. I took the leftover milk, heated it to 190F, added lemon juice, and was amazed to see that, yes, it works, and it tastes really, really good!

We ate some of the cheese in our dinner tacos (with pico de gallo), and will probably snack on the rest. It’s darned good, and I should have no trouble using up every drop of milk the milkman brings us from now on.

Next experiment: homemade yogurt!

(The photo here is not my cheese, but it looks just like the cheese I made. Thanks to dfinnecy on Flickr for making this photo available in Creative Commons.)

Photo by Chris Breeze.
(Creative Commons)

It’s that day again; yes, the day when all Irish pubs are jam-packed full of people and you can’t hear yourself think.

On St. Pat’s, I recommend going to a Mexican place. It will be dead quiet.

Cinco de Mayo — now that’s the day to visit the Irish pubs.

If you decide to stay in, how about a couple of Irish recipes from the always great gumbopages.com website? Stew with Lamb and Guinness and Scallion Champ oughta do the trick.

As a kid growing up in a Seattle home with a P-I subscription (and later the Times), every Thanksgiving for many years I read a familiar recipe: Emmett Watson’s Thompson Turkey. Watson printed it in his column every year, and though I’m sure it was just an easy way to slack for a column, and I’ve never actually cooked or eaten a Thompson Turkey, the recipe itself is part of the Thanksgiving ritual, right down to the closing lines: “You do not have to be a carver to eat this turkey. Speak harshly to it and it will fall apart.” Another local columnist, John Owen, had this to say about the Thompson: “A Thompson Turkey emerges from the oven neither white nor dark. It is usually charred blacker than a newspaper columnist’s soul. ” Jean Godden, another P-I columnist and now city councilperson, said “No one has ever eaten a Thompson Turkey and lived to tell about it. But that’s understandable because no one has ever actually baked one of the things either.”

So. Has anyone tried it? Anyone dare? I don’t eat turkey anymore or I would have tried it by now. Really.

The Daily Dozen Donut Company at the Pike Place Market is a wonderful thing. They make these little mini-donuts, and you can buy and eat them while they are still fresh and warm. The P-I did a nice audio slideshow about the Daily Dozen that makes me want to go out there and buy donuts!

Photo by LemonDrizzleCake.

It’s not quite Eastertime yet, but there are already Cadbury Creme Eggs to be found at some shops. Have you noticed that they’ve been getting smaller and smaller? LemonDrizzleCake, on Flickr, has. Her grandma has knitted chicken-shaped egg covers for them for 20 years, to give as gifts to children. She’s gradually had to change the pattern to make the covers smaller, and has ended up with enough leftover yarn to make wings for the chickens!

It’s sad that the eggs have gotten smaller, but in a way I don’t mind, because they are so darned sweet that one egg is really too much sweetness anyway. I’ve also noticed they don’t taste as good as they used to, but I’m not sure if the egg recipe has changed or if it’s just my taste that has.

I found this at QFC tonight: Tailgate Bagels and Tailgate Bread, from Brenner Brothers bakery. The bread and bagels come in local football team colors: Seahawks blue and green, Cougar crimson and gray (!) and Husky purple and gold.

This bread is scary. Bread is not supposed to be blue, or gray. How do you know if it’s gone moldy?

Is it just me or is this flavor combination sorta wrong? “Oh, yum, raspberry cream cheese!” (Eats bagel expecting a tasty almost dessert-like treat…) “WTF?” (Sorry for the bit of blurriness in this pic.)

Los Taco Trucks Unitos reviews Seattle-area taco trucks, and posts links to their health department reports as well. (Admit it. You wonder about the cleanliness of any eating establishment based in an old bus.) Tacos El Asadero gets rave reviews from them — I really should get down there sometime, as it’s near our house. Unfortunately, the taco truck that set up shop across the street from us didn’t stay around very long, so we can’t just walk to tacos…

I am always looking for cheap eats. Who isn’t, really? So I got a kick out of the Cheap Eats blog that I stumbled on today. Unfortunately they don’t talk about Seattle cheap eats — hey, the nearest Del Taco is probably in California — but it’s not all fast food.

Here’s a more local Cheap Eatin’ recommendation: the Tostadas de Camarones at Taqueria El Rinconsito — less than $5 and way tasty. I wish they’d open a branch up here on Beacon Hill.

I found the Sushi Encyclopedism page the other day, via a mention in Looka!. It’s full of sushi information, including sushi etiquette (the soy sauce goes on the fish, not the rice!), a sushi glossary, the history of sushi, sushi comics, and more! Now I am craving sushi for dinner.