Cal's American Kitchen Grand Opening

It being date night, Dan came over to South Lake Union to hang out until I got off work.  Our original plan was take Hilo to Norm's in Fremont - a well known dog-friendly bar.  While walking around the neighborhood, however, Dan stumbled on the Grand Opening of Cal's American Kitchen - and texted me to meet him there.

I'm officially off sugar and booze for the month (again), so didn't get to indulge in any of the fun sounding cocktails on their menu (which I'll be back for next month).  Instead, I got an iced tea.  It came in a frosty metal cup - just like the ones I used to use to make milk shakes at Baskin-Robbins.  (Yes, I was a soda jerk for a year in college.)  I don't know if it was form or function, but it seemed to keep the drink colder.



 The full restaurant wasn't yet open, but the Happy Hour menu was available and had some yummy sounding items.  Dan & I went for a sampling of four of their (very reasonably priced) happy hour offerings.



First to the table were my favorite of everything we tried:  Cheese Puffs.  I had no idea what to expect, but was completely delighted when a plate of savory profiteroles showed up on a plate next to a beer cheese fondue sauce.  The profiteroles (cream puffs minus the cream) were perfect for dipping after being torn in half, creating a little spoon.  I had a hard time not eating the whole plate myself.



Next to arrive was the simply named 'Cauliflower' - which was just that, baked with cheese (according to our attentive, friendly server, the same beer cheese sauce).  The cauliflower was cooked really nicely - not raw but not mushy.  Just right.  And enough of a nod toward a vegetable so we wouldn't feel guilty.




Their take on steak tartare, "American Tartare" showed up next, paired with crisp potato chips.  The beef seemed shaved, not chopped, as (I'm told) tartare should be, and was mixed with capers and other deliciousness.



Last but definitely not least were the "Tots in the Style of Tater".  Perfectly crispy and golden brown, with a bbq spice mix on them, and a smokey dipping sauce on the side.  The sauce was yummy, but I couldn't help but dip my tots in the beer cheese sauce.



Although our menu choices were a bit heavy (potatoes always make me feel so full!), we enjoyed them thoroughly and can't wait to try the full menu in the restaurant.  The atmosphere was nice (similar to Brave Horse, a little more country club than club house, but still a contemporary palette of browns, blacks and metals), the staff were great, the food was excellent, and the prices ($3-5 per happy hour item) were extremely competitive.  The place was packed by the time we left, which was no surprise.  Now Dan's going to have another choice of a place to wait for me while I finish up work (he gets off work much earlier than I do, since he gets up at 4:30am these days).

Frugal Fridays: Fresh Table

On my walk to Thoa's the other night for dinner, I checked out the menu in the window of Fresh Table at 4th and Spring and saw something promising: Salad Wraps for $4.25 (plus tax). I wondered whether these wraps could be a satisfying lunch and vowed to give them a try.



They have four Salad Wraps to choose from: Beverly Hills Chop, Chicken Caesar, Greek - Feta Lover's, and Asian Crunch. I went for the Chicken Caesar, which turned out to be a full sized Roma tomato tortilla filled with Romaine lettuce, grilled chicken, parmesan cheese, croutons and dressing - and served with a lemon wedge. True to their name, it tasted fresh and it was definitely a filling lunch.



(Frugal Fridays is a series dedicated to finding Seattle lunch spots where you can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with a fulfilling, preferably healthy, lunch. If you have suggestions of places in the Seattle area with a great lunch for under $5 after tax, post a comment - I'd love the help.)

Frugal Fridays: Tig Asian Tapas Bar

This week, I had another Frugal Friday find while wandering down in Pioneer Square. Just two doors down from the Seattle Underground Tour I saw a sign in a window advertising lunch specials - REAL lunch specials (as opposed to the spots claiming $7.95 is a special) - at TIG Asian Tapas Bar, which occupies the space at 614 1st Ave.



After a few moments without anyone popping up at the vacant host station up front, I peeked around a wall dividing the entrance from the dining room to find a mostly empty restaurant with no art on white walls except for some graffiti scrawls. I caught the eye of the only staffer, but had to ask if I should seat myself. I definitely got a vibe that this was a nightclub, not a restaurant - which had me questioning my choice. Fighting against my intuition to turn around and leave, I sat down and was brought menus and a glass of water.



I was happy to see quite a few cheap eats on the lunch specials menu, including Chicken Teriyaki ($3.99) and Spicy Ramen ($2.99). I went for the one that sounded the healthiest and heartiest despite the price tag: Veggie Bibimbap for just $3.99.



When the bartender/server brought out a huge bowl of food and a little bowl of hot sauce, I was a little surprised by how big it was and how beautiful the sunny side up egg was on top of all the fresh veggies. I took a moment to take it in and get ready to photograph it, when the server returned to tell me how to eat bibimbap - mixing the egg, veggies and rice together first. He explained that the word bibimbap' actually means 'mixed rice' in Korean. The culinary education definitely won me over. I stirred it up and dug in.

The generous portion was brimming with carrots, cabbage, arugula, zucchini, scallions, onion and mushrooms over white rice, and blanketed by the egg. The hot sauce wasn't all that spicy - more spicy/sweet - so after a tentative taste I stirred the whole thing in. The veggies were cooked well - still crisp and offering their distinct flavors to the dish. It wasn't greasy or oily, and was filling in a good way.

If my bibimbap was any indication of the quality of the rest of the dishes, I highly recommend checking out TIG at lunch - just don't be shy about walking in and seating yourself.



(Frugal Fridays is a series dedicated to finding Seattle lunch spots where you can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with a fulfilling, preferably healthy, lunch. If you have suggestions of places in the Seattle area with a great lunch for under $5 after tax, post a comment - I'd love the help.)

Frugal Fridays: La Vaca

For this week's Frugal Friday adventure, I made my way over toward the Pike Place Market, but stopped just before at the little walk-up window at 1429 1st Ave that is La Vaca.



I'd been searching the web for ideas of new frugal lunch spots, and kept running across mention of La Vaca - a little Mexican restaurant that I used to go to fairly often, when they had a second location close to Cherry Street. The posts I saw about it were pretty outdated, but I thought it was worth a trek to see if they still have the cheap, tasty burritos I remember.



I went for the $3.95 veggie burrito with black beans - the only, or one of the only menu items still falling under my self-imposed cost limit. After tax, it came to $4.35.



The burrito was big - heavy even - so as I walked back to my office I had high hopes. I'm usually not one to say I didn't like something, but I have to be honest that I wish I'd spent my money at Amigos & Bebas instead - where my dollar would've stretched further and the burrito would've been better.

As you can see from the photo, the burrito was nearly all rice, with a little bit of beans and a tiny amount of lettuce/tomato. It didn't seem to have any sauce at all. I kept eating further down, hoping to find the hidden pocket of flavor and fresh ingredients, but only found more and more bland rice. After many years of vegetarianism, I know that you can make a delicious veggie burrito, but sadly, this particular burrito wasn't one.

A passage contrasting eating establishments in Europe and the US that I read today in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life seemed to capture the experience well:

"In our country [the US] it's a reasonable presumption that unless you have gone out of your way to find good food, you'll be settling for mediocre at best."

I also couldn't help but remember my old office mate Jorge, who would tell me about food from Mexico, and explain that burritos don't have rice inside them - that's an American addition. I honestly don't mind rice in a burrito. But in this particular burrito, rice was nearly all there was, and it made for a flat taste and unsatisfying (though certainly filling) lunch.



(Frugal Fridays is a weekly series dedicated to finding Seattle lunch spots where you can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with a fulfilling, preferably healthy, lunch. If you have suggestions of places in the Seattle area with a great lunch for under $5 after tax, post a comment - I'd love the help.)

Frugal Fridays: Breakfast Muffins

Due to an erratic schedule this week (house hunting kinda throws one's routines off), I didn't find time to track down a lunch deal this week. So instead, I've decided to quantify the frugality of the choice Dan & I have made for keeping our breakfasts ultra-cheap.

Each week, we bake up a batch of 1 dozen large fruit muffins, which we eat throughout the week for breakfast. I've never added up the cost of a muffin, but thought it would be interesting to discover how much we're actually spending. I used prices I found on Amazon Fresh for the various ingredients, which will of course vary based on all sorts of factors, but probably not by a lot.

3 cups of flour ($0.57)
1/2 cup brown sugar ($0.60)
1 tspn salt ($0.01)
1 tbspn baking powder ($0.10)
1 tbspn flax powder ($0.02)
1/2 cup honey ($1.82)
2 eggs ($0.46)
1 cup milk ($0.13)
1 stick butter ($0.83)
2 cups fruit ($0-5, depending on season and fruit choice)

So if you do what I do and pick blackberries from overgrown lots, canes coming over your fence from the neighbor's yard, or from along the road, you can easily get a couple cups of berries for free - putting the cost per muffin at just $0.38.

If you go for organic berries during an off season, you might pay upwards of $5 for around 2 cups - making your cost per muffin skyrocket to a whopping $0.80 (is my sarcasm coming through okay?)



Berries tend to be pricier (except the free ones), whereas a couple apples, peaches, bananas, or other larger fruit will be cheaper and is all you need to get a good 2 cups. And of course, you can mix and match to create apple-huckleberry muffins, or black & blueberry muffins, or apple-plum muffins. And frozen fruits and berries are often even cheaper. Another trick is to always buy extra fruit when it's in season in your area, and toss it in the freezer. Then you can have delicious muffins throughout the winter, with flavors that remind you of summertime - without paying the costs (both economic and ecological) of buying imported fruits from the Southern Hemisphere.



Besides the flexibility to change out the fruits and berries used, you can also replace up to half the all purpose flour with whole wheat flour. You can also use 1/2 cup of granulated sugar, maple syrup, or molasses in place of the honey - each of which lends different flavors to the muffins. The flax powder can be replaced with an extra egg, if preferred. You can sprinkle some oats or even granola on top of the muffins, to add a little texture and fiber.



And you can press chunks of fruit or berries into the center of the muffins, after distributing the batter, to get a little fruit burst in the center of the muffin.



We've made everything from decidedly un-local coconut-poi muffins to rhubarb-raspberry muffins made from fruit bought at our local farmers market. We made poha berry muffins while in Hawaii, and recently made 4-berry muffins using blackberries & raspberries from our yard, and blueberries & huckleberries from my Mom's garden. We've used bananas, passion fruit juice, peaches, apricots, pluots, plums, apples, chocolate chips, strawberries, cranberries, and even tossed in macadamia nuts or walnuts once in awhile.

The recipe below makes 12 large muffins - perfect for breakfast. But you can stretch it to 2 dozen if you make smaller muffins (and cook them a little less time). And you can stretch it even farther if you make mini-muffins, which should bake for just 10 minutes instead of the full 20.

Fruit/Berry Muffins

3 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 Tbspn baking powder
1 tspn Flax Seed Powder/Meal
1 tspn salt
1 cup milk
2 eggs
1 stick of butter, melted
1/2 cup honey
2 cups chopped fruit or berries

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Mix flour, brown sugar, baking powder, flax powder, and salt in a large bowl and stir until well blended. Gently beat milk and eggs together in a medium bowl. Combine melted butter and honey, then pour into milk/egg mixture, whisking constantly. Fold wet mixture into dry mixture just until almost all dry mixture has become moistened, being careful not to over mix. Fold in fruit very lightly, just until the dry and wet mixtures blend and the fruit is distributed. Spoon or ladle into a well-greased muffin tin (each will be filled to the top. Bake for 20 minutes. Makes one dozen large muffins.

(If using a drier fruit, such as apples, you might also want to add up to 1/4 cup of water to the batter.)

(Frugal Fridays is a weekly series dedicated to (normallY) finding Seattle lunch spots where you can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with a fulfilling, preferably healthy, lunch. If you have suggestions of places in the Seattle area with a great lunch for under $5 after tax, post a comment - I'd love the help.)

Frugal Fridays: Quizno's Torpedo:

This week's Frugal Friday had me stumped at first, and I made my way over to a salad bar place called Chew Chew's, right next to Amigos over at the Municipal Tower. I took a gander at the selection at their salad bar, and decided it wasn't worth it - so I turned around and walked out the door. And that's when I saw the signs with the big "$2", "$3" and "$4" advertisements.



One bonus of the economic downturn is that restaurants catering to a lunch crowd are catching on that people don't really want to spend upwards of $10 bucks every day to eat - and are finding ways to create smaller, but still satisfying lunch options for under $5.

Quizno's is no exception, arguably leading the way with their $2 'Sammies' earlier this year. But now they've added two more under $5 price points to their menu: the $3 Bullet and the $4 Torpedo.

I opted for the Toasty Torpedo - a 15 inch long, slim Ciabatta roll sandwich for $4 (pre-tax; $4.40 after tax).

They have five varieties - Pesto Turkey; Italian; Turkey Club; Beef Bacon & Cheddar; and the Big Kahuna Tuna. All of them come with cheese, chopped lettuce, tomato, and condiments - plus the meat component.



I went for the Turkey Pesto, expecting it to be rather small for the price - but at 15 inches long, it's a filling sandwich. I wouldn't say it's overflowing with meat, but it's probably a more appropriate serving size than your average foot long sub, for sure, and had good flavor for the money.



(Frugal Fridays is a weekly series dedicated to finding Seattle lunch spots where you can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with a fulfilling, preferably healthy, lunch. If you have suggestions of places in the Seattle area with a great lunch for under $5 after tax, post a comment - I'd love the help.)

Frugal Fridays: Noah's Bagels 'Wrapper'

Once again for Frugal Fridays, I was lured in by a sandwich board on the sidewalk advertising a too-good-to-be-true deal: $1.99 for a chicken bagel wrapper sandwich, at Noah's Bagels.



Once inside, I discovered I could upgrade that to a combo, adding chips and a drink, for just $3.99 - which, being still under the $5 after tax price point, seemed like an imperative.

It turns out you do get what you pay for, as the chicken bagel wrapper is fairly small, but actually surprisingly satisfying. It's a big chunk of white meat chicken, wrapped in bagel dough, and combined with either cheddar cheese, or swiss cheese & honey mustard. I went with the latter, while my office mate later got the cheddar and said mine smelled better.

He also noted that it might be a better use of your $5 to get two chicken bagel wrappers, and just drink water. Or you could always get one, and pick up some fruit to go with it, to make it a little more well rounded.

According to the signs, this is a limited time offer - though it's unclear how limited. So if you wanna check out the Noah's Bagels Chicken Bagel Wrapper - "What Bagels Do for Lunch" - do it soon.



(Frugal Fridays is a weekly series dedicated to finding Seattle lunch spots where you can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with a fulfilling, preferably healthy, lunch. If you have suggestions of places in the Seattle area with a great lunch for under $5 after tax, post a comment - I'd love the help.)

Frugal Fridays: Amigos & Beba's Redux

For my third week of revisiting previous Frugal Friday spots in search of additional deals, I returned to my very first frugal friday spot: Amigos & Beba's on the terrace of the Municipal Tower at 5th and Columbia. The restaurant is two in one: Amigos Fresh Mex, and Beba's Sandwiches - all run by the same folks.



Scanning the Amigos menu, I realized just how many of their menu items fall under the $5 price point - even after tax. Although tempted by my usual veggie taco, I decided to see what their Veggie Burrito was like. My answer: ENORMOUS.

For just $3.75 ($4.13 after tax) you get a large flour tortilla stuffed to the gills with beans, lettuce, pico de gallo salsa, sour cream, and guacamole.



Add to that any or all of the salsas and condiments on hand, like spicy pickled carrots, onions, and jalapenos, or fresh cilantro, and you've got a serious meal for a pittance. It's more than enough for me for lunch, though perhaps not quite enough to share with someone else - so do yourself a favor and plan on having some leftovers. Maybe it'll be the perfect thing to get you over that 3pm hump when the end of the workday seems far off, but dinner is still too close for you to chow on anything too substantial.



(Frugal Fridays is a weekly series dedicated to finding Seattle lunch spots where you can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with a fulfilling, preferably healthy, lunch. If you have suggestions of places in the Seattle area with a great lunch for under $5 after tax, post a comment - I'd love the help.)

Frugal Fridays: Cherry Street Coffee House Redux

I previously wrote a Frugal Friday about Cherry Street Coffee House titled 'Is This Cheating?', because my lunch was largely paid for by a friend. And that's not really in the spirit of Frugal Friday... but it was all I had for you that week.



But this time around, my lunch buddy Leah and I met up at Cherry Street again, and I scanned the menu more thoroughly for something under the Frugal Friday $5 after tax price point. And I spotted the Hummus Platter at $4.25 pre-tax.

It includes a generous portion of hummus topped with a couple kalamata olives, along with some pita bread, carrots, mint and a small orange wedge. It was no Chicken Salad Sandwich, but it was pretty filling, very flavorful, and certainly well rounded.



(Frugal Fridays is a weekly series dedicated to finding Seattle lunch spots where you can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with a fulfilling, preferably healthy, lunch. If you have suggestions of places in the Seattle area with a great lunch for under $5 after tax, post a comment - I'd love the help.)

Frugal Fridays: Goes Hollywood!

For this Frugal Friday, I intended to swing by one of my favorite lunch spots, grab something other than my usual fare, and write about that. But when I got to Cafe Zum Zum, I was startled that the prices had been raised somewhat significantly. The special is still just $3.99, but other menu items looked to have jumped in price.

So instead of an oversized takeaway container filled with lentils and rice, I wandered over to another lunch spot nestled in the Food Court at 3rd and Marion St: Hollywood Burgers.



Anything beyond a basic burger is over $5 with tax (the cheeseburger is $4.75 pre-tax), so that's what I went for. Their basic burger is their namesake - the Hollywood Burger, and comes with a respectable array of condiments, including lettuce, tomato, pickles, onion, and "Hollywood's Sauce", all for $4.39 after tax. I walked back to my office with my bag o' burger, noting that it felt a bit light and worrying that it would be more akin to a slider in size, and anxious that the condiments would be sad.

But I was happily surprised when I pulled a decent sized burger, with a good amount of lettuce, onion, tomato, pickles and sauce on board. It wasn't overly greasy for a fast-food burger, and was plenty of food for lunch. Fries or a milkshake would've pushed it way over the top, and I didn't miss the cheese at all. All my fears were for not, and once again I learned that you really can get a decent lunch for $5.



(Frugal Fridays is a weekly series dedicated to finding Seattle lunch spots where you can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with a fulfilling, preferably healthy, lunch. If you have suggestions of places in the Seattle area with a great lunch for under $5 after tax, post a comment - I'd love the help.)