Tom Douglas

Serious Pie in Food and Wine Magazine

Serious Pie featured in Food and Wine Magazine’s Seattle City guide.  Check it out here.

May 18th, 2009 | No Comments »

My Veggie Garden May 16 by Shelley Lance

Plenty of arugula.  Lettuces starting to get big.  We’ve been enjoying salads with our own fresh greens for more than a week.  Snap peas are doing fine.  One pole bean sprout has poked itself out of the ground so far.  I finally took the plastic cloches off the tomato plants so they could enjoy the beautiful weekend weather.  To my delight and amazement, despite the previous 2 weeks of mostly chilly weather, there already are a couple little tomatoes (see photo, right).

May 16th, 2009 | No Comments »

I Love Antipasti! by Don Sefton, Event Manager/Catering

We had some good friends over last night and started out with a wonderful antipasti selection.  I think that it is one of the best ways to start out a dinner party, as it is casual and can be prepared ahead of time.  The key is to find things that are of the best quality, easy to eat, and a variety of tastes and textures.  My selection had the incredibly meaty castelvetrano olives, balsamic marinated cipollini onions, gigantas bean salad, and a really amazing giardiniera from my favorite Italian deli in Milwaukee called Glorioso’s. ( I had a jar of it mailed to me after a recent visit as I could not take it on the plane.)  Anyone who goes to Milwaukee has to go to this wonderful, family owned institution that has been around for over 60 years! Their hot and juicy sliced Italian roast beef sandwiches on hard roll with peppers is to die for!!!  Really!

We also had the euphoric Salumi rosemarino salami which is made just for De Laurenti here in Seattle.  We had a variety of different cheeses: the very red and aged Leicester (UK), the creamy and decadent Pierre Robert (France), and the Ten Willow Tomme, raw sheep’s milk cheese from Adna, WA.  It is a small creamery right up by Carnation. They lost 60% of their flock of sheep from the floods of last year because they were in a valley.  (A very sad amount of livestock across Washington was lost due to the flooding.)  This is one of the cheeses of their comeback, and we should support them.  Of course, we had sliced baguette.

We washed all of this down with a delightful rosé brut from France by Louis Bouillot.  Delicious!

May 14th, 2009 | No Comments »

Extreme Makeover:Oatmeal Edition, by Tiffany Hankins, Lola Server

Lola’s oatmeal is like Cinderella dressed up for the ball, a humble grain whose virtuous work in health and nutrition has earned itself the godmother’s touch for a gorgeous showing out at the ball…. or brunch, if you will.  Sugared strawberries and sugared toasted almonds dress up the oatmeal at Lola this spring season.  For an extra indulgent treat, have the oatmeal at brunch with a glass of Champagne or a glass of the cuvée rosé.  If you are watching your diet, oatmeal with fresh strawberries and low-fat milk with a little brown sugar is a light and refreshing alternative that is low in sugar and high in fiber.  Our oats are of the steel-cut variety which means that the whole oat groat is slashed into small pieces by steel blades rather than steamed and rolled.  Quick-cooking rolled oats lose a great deal of their nutritional quality when they are steamed.  Oats contain beta-glucan, and B vitamins are known to slow digestion and stabilize blood-glucose levels, so oats have been a popular health food for years.

Oatmeal became popular in Scotland where the short, wet growing season made oats the staple grain of choice in that country.  While most people would balk at oatmeal for any meal besides breakfast, the pre-modern Europeans often ate a porridge of oats or some other grain at every meal.  And the way Lola dresses their oats in the best of the season makes me wish they served this hearty and healthy treat at every meal.

May 13th, 2009 | No Comments »

Do Locavores Eat Lay’s Potato Chips? by Shelley Lance

Corporate agribusiness embraces the concept of “eating local” to sell commodity crops, according to this article in the New York Times.  One example is Frito-Lay, which is rolling out an ad campaign featuring the faces of five Florida potato farmers who grow some of the 2 billion pounds of starchy potatoes that go into making Frito-Lay potato chips.

Others jumping on the locavore bandwagon are Hunt’s canned tomatoes, Foster Farms chickens, and Kraft cheese.

Why the new marketing focus?  “Concerns over food safety, quality and cost are driving people beyond hard-core locavores to seek out food that has traveled fewer miles and has a traceable provenance,” says Stephanie Childs, a spokeswoman for the food conglomerate ConAgra.

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, comments: “The ingenuity of the food manufacturers and marketers never ceases to amaze me. They can turn any critique into a new way to sell food.  You’ve got to hand it to them.”

San Francisco Bay Area food writer Jessica Prentice is credited with creating the term “locavore.” Her comment: “The local foods movement is about an ethic of food that values reviving small scale, ecological, place-based, and relationship-based food systems.  Large corporations peddling junk food are about the exact opposite of what this is about.”

May 13th, 2009 | No Comments »

Hudson’s Hamburgers by Joe Labatt, Etta’s Sous Chef

I love hamburgers.  Some of the best hamburgers (and I’ve had many) can be had at Tom Douglas’ restaurants.  But on a recent trip to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, I had to  make yet another stop at Hudson’s Hamburgers on Sherman Ave in historic downtown Coeur d’Alene.  Hudson’s is probably my favorite burger joint on earth.  They have been in operation for 102 years.  Yep.  They opened the place in 1907.  Four generations of the same family have operated it the entire time.  The youngest Hudson stands over the flattop flipping burgers to this day.

They have a very limited menu, consisting of their famous burgers, which come with or without cheese, and you can add sliced pickle and raw onion for free, a few variations of a ham and egg sandwich, and slices of pie for dessert.  Nothing more.  No fries, no soup, no salad.  Don’t even ask.  Uncompromising simplicity, beautifully executed.  Only recently did they begin providing ketchup for their burgers again.  Originally, they had ketchup on the counter, but during the Great Depression people would make “tomato soup” with hot water and ketchup, so the frugal owner pulled it and concocted a secret sauce- a spicy mustard (which is delicious)- to put out in its place.

If you find yourself in North Idaho, stop in to a classic American restaurant, a Coeur d’Alene institution, and enjoy a Huddy Burger.  I like mine “cheese, pickle, onion.”

May 13th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Tom and Shelley Demo Mom’s Day Brunch

In addition to brunch at Lola, Etta’s, and Dahlia Lounge, a special Mother’s Day Brunch was served in the Palace Ballroom yesterday.  Tom and Shelley demo’d monkey bread with caramel sauce, cucumber panna cotta, ricotta crepes with gravlax, wild mushroom strata, and coconut cream pie.  Some of the Moms wore fancy hats; they ate, watched demos, and sipped bubbly wine.  Thanks for everything, Moms!!

May 11th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Jamie Oliver comes to America with New TV Show, by Shelley Lance

I just found this article about an upcoming TV series featuring British Celebrity Chef, Jamie Oliver, on one of my favorite food blogs, Josh Friedland’s The Food Section.  Apparently Jamie will be traveling around to find the unhealthiest places in America so he can demonstrate how to prepare and cook local foods in order to improve eating habits. The name of the target US city for the show has not yet been revealed, but it’s purported to be one of America’s “fattest cities.” ABC expects the show to air in 2010.  (The Food Section also found some Texans tweeting that Houston wants the honor of being the first city to go on a diet and be “Oliverized!”)

May 11th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

A Good Article on Food Safety by Shelley Lance

An article called, “Outbreaks Put Worry on the Table,” in today’s New York Times, addresses the question of why we seem to endure one food scare after another these days.  Certainly the growing complexity of our food supply, including more handling of products such as bagged salad and food that comes to us from all over the world, is an issue.  Safety advocates also argue that government oversight is inadequate because the FDA lacks both funding and authority.  At any rate, the Obama administration has promised to put an intensive focus on food safety.

May 11th, 2009 | No Comments »

Mother’s Day 2009 by Sean Hartley, Palace Kitchen Chef

The only request my wife, Julie, had for Mother’s Day was homemade lasagna.  Flowers are easier, but much less fun.  Everett, our 7 year old son, and I have made pasta before, but this time, he spent more time helping, less time eating raw dough.  The results were fantastic.  Of course, Julie got flowers also.

May 11th, 2009 | No Comments »