Apparently there's some sort of game on February 6th, and if you're a lady, you can kick the day off (well before said game starts) with the SouperBowl. This is a snowshoe and cross-country ski event at Mount Spokane, where the proceeds go to Women's & Children's Free Restaurant.
You can donate anything from $30 and up. For that you get free use of snowshoes as well as reduced price ski rental, and the option to partake in a 10k cross-country race. If racing isn't your thing, you can snowshoe in marked trails. On top of that they will have soup and bread.
It runs from 10am to 1pm, so you can get back to join the men for the Super Bowl.
All in all, this is a good event supporting a good cause, so why wouldn't you want to go? Surely you're not a cold hearted grinch, are you? Of course you're not! Now, sign up.
We don't like clutter here at Team SpoCOOL, and anyone who do their fair share of cooking will know it can be a clutter-y experience. With the amount of gadgets, pots and pans you accumulate... It's not good.
The Vitamix, then, is one solution to this problem. At first glance it looks like a blender, but it's more. A whole lot more. That's not to say it's not a great blender, as it does that extremely well. Just throw some ice, fruit, milk, chocolate, what have you, in there, and it'll have it blended in seconds.
It's the more part that makes the Vitamix worth its rather steep price point, particularly the engine which probably could power a small airplane. This means the thing can make piping hot soup in minutes, no pots or pans needed. Throw in some broth and veggies (and even meat), set it to high, and there you go. Soup will make itself.
Pasta sauces, chicken salad, and so on and so forth. The Vitamix does it really well. Throw in some ice and chocolate and you'll have ice cream without any actual cream. Any juice you can imagine.
More importantly is the process of cleaning it. A pump of soap and water, run it for thirty seconds, and the thing is clean. That's it. It's as magical as an iPad.
So our apologies to our Black & Decker blender, Jack LaLanne -- and holy crap he just died?! -- juicer, and their cousins, all now Goodwilled. The Vitamix replaces much of everything, and it has changed how we prepare food.
Or to use its full title: "Owen Roe 7 Course Winemaker's Dinner with David O'Reilly," and it's going down on January 31st at Sante.
What makes these types of dinners sweet is how they are the lazy person's dream. You sit back and great food -- this time ranging from chocolate braised Berkshire pork belly to turbot -- just keeps coming at you with wine paired by Owen Roe's winemaker, David O'Reilly. There is, in other words, no way this could be anything but an Event. Yes, I pulled out the capital "E" and italics, just this one time.
There is, however, a bittersweet side to the Event, which also doubles as the sending-off party for our favorite Spokane server, Eric. While the food scene has improved significantly here over the past few years, we are still often seeing a stagnant quality with servers, which is, despite what some may think, an extremely complex profession. There is an incredible amount of facets that has to be taken into considerations for anyone working front of house, and few are good at all of them. Eric, meanwhile, has always shown true top level professionalism across the board, and he will be missed.
(On the flip side, we are glad to see Alyssa from our favorite now-gone coffee house, Natural Start, working at Sante.)
Anyway! The Event sounds like it will be a real Event, and we are definitely looking forward to it. Run over to Facebook for more information.
Perfect as you might think Norway is -- and you'd for the most part be right -- beer culture is one aspect where it has, until recently, been lagging behind. This because of alcohol laws that makes Washington seem downright liberal. (The Nøgne Ø website, for example, has to be in English, as alcohol advertisements are illegal in Norway. That's right -- they have to prove they aren't marketing to Norwegians by writing in English...)
A few breweries have set out to change this over the past few years, and Nøgne Ø in particular has sailed up as an international player over the past few years. Peculiar Yule -- one of their winter brews -- can now be found at Huckleberry's, and it is kind of glorious. I would, in fact, name it the best seasonal of 2010, no matter what season it was.
It is based on the Norwegian version of gløgg, a Northern European mulled wine which packs a spicy kick. This could easily have gone wrong when translated into an ale, what with danger of the overpowering flavors and what have you, but it worked out beautifully.
The color is darkly amber with a good couple of fingers of head. Smell it, and the sweet spices hit you straight away. How they managed to nigh perfectly replicate the gløgg nose -- which certainly is sweetened by wine -- is beyond me, but there you go.
Tasting it, the answer might be the caramel chocolate malts. The unmistakable qualities of a great base beer is here, and it melds perfectly with the spices. As far as a marriage of gløgg and beer goes, I don't see how this could have been any better. There is a nice mellow lingering flavor of cloves, reminiscent of the latest edition of the Abyss.
This is very drinkable and one wine fans might even get in on.
Peculiar Yule -- Underlig Jul if we're too be technical about it -- weighs in at a relatively mild 6.5%, so you shouldn't hit any walls after a bottle. And really, if you like beer, you'll like this one.
