One thing we have been looking at during the Sustaining Straight Edge Vegan Foods During September in Spokane (Challenge) is raw food. This is simply uncooked and unprocessed foods that haven't been heated to anything above 104-115 degrees (sources vary). It's certainly not a lifestyle I'd participate in fully or anything, but it's a good healthy addition to an overall diet.
Chakraw is a Spokane... outfit? Let's call it that... specializing in raw foods. They have classes and workshops, and they sell some products at Fresh Abundance.
And while not super cheap, some of their stuff is worth picking up, if only as inspiration for your own raw cooking. Their onion bread, for example, is excellent. It's not as much of a bread as it's a chewy cracker or cookie or whatever, and it's also very very flavorful. In fact, easy as it might be to stereotype raw food if you haven't tried it, I didn't even think of this as "raw." It was just really good.
Of course, we probably slapped the makers of the onion bread in the face when we crumbled it in some decidedly un-raw tomato soup. You know what, though? It was a good combination!
Some of their "scones" and breakfast cookies aren't bad either, if not quite as flavorful. There are a handful of other products to try out too. All at Fresh Abundance.
There are plenty of recipes online for raw foods, none of which seem overly complicated. For inspiration, though, check out Chakraw. They're not shabby at all.
Downtown Spokane is all about its new bike lanes and sharrows and bless it for that. Hey, why not, we like it too; the zoo of having an anarchy of shared lanes downtown was not good. The new bike lane on Howard and the sharrow on Spokane Falls work just fine.
The lane on Main, however, is not good. It almost feels that its implementation was designed to cause accidents.
Here's the issue: You cross Monroe and there are two car lanes, no bike lanes in sight. When you reach the intersection at Lincoln, the "designer" decided to put a bike lane in on the right side of Main, east of Lincoln. It's actually a chunk of the right car lane.
The problem? As it is now, the left lane west of Lincoln lines up with the right lane east of Lincoln, while the east right lane lines up with the new bike lane. Not necessarily a huge issue one would think, but I have been pushed into the bike lane multiple times by drivers who have a problem understanding you need to skew slightly to the left while crossing the intersection to stay in your lane. That is not awesome and, honestly, not 100% the driver's fault either. It's a confusing intersection if you're not used to it.
It doesn't stop there.
At Main and Howard the situation sort of reverses itself. The lanes aren't aligned properly, and you have to skew a hard right to stay in your current lane. The problem here are drivers coming north from Howard, taking a right turn onto Main. If you don't pay proper attention -- and again, this is equally a fault of the design as it is of the driver -- it's easy to think the right lane is open, when it actually is not.
Making the bike line go all the way down Main would help the situation a bit, I'm sure.
So, yes. Bike lanes are great. But only when they're implemented properly.
So here's a diner that doesn't suck. This is actually quite a compliment, seeing that most Spokane diners, with a few exceptions, tend to be average Sharis clones. If that is why Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives didn't visit any diners while in town is anybody's guess.
Anyway!
The Cottage Cafe actually manages to capture the ambiance of a small-town British pub pretty well, though the food is pretty standard diner fare done well. I am always the masochist who orders Eggs Benedict at diners, lord knows why, as it never ends well, but here I was actually pretty pleased. I wouldn't walk through snow to try them again, but they were tasty.
Sure, I've had better Hollandaise sauce, but even if this did come from a packet, it came from a good packet.
Better yet were the potatoes, pictured above. I had expected some greasy slop, but these were nice and clean tasting, and I assume at least partly baked.
The "fresh" orange juice, meanwhile, I'm pretty sure came from a carton. Not worth the price.
Overall I think the Cottage Cafe was very decent. There's quite a wait during the weekends, and it could be argued any which way if hanging around is worth it or not. But I'd at least give it a shot.
Well. It definitely wasn't bad. Not really too mindblowing, but still a good kick off to what hopefully will become a tradition here, and one that will grow gradually.
More importantly, but the event seemed well attended. I haven't heard any official numbers, but the lines in front of the tents were good, as were the crowds in front of the entertainment. Judging by the amount of people carrying around the larger steins that were not included with the price of admission, we can only hope the breweries pulled in some profits from the event.
The beers weren't much different from what was previously expected. Mostly usual suspects, all from Washington, with very few surprises. I had, for whatever reason, forgot about Iron Horse's 509 Style, which had made its way there, and that was probably the only beer that really was a surprise to see. (Even though it shouldn't have been!) But more about that one on a later day.
Other than that, there was just something very Washington State about the whole thing. If there is one thing Washington State likes to do, it's to create arbitrary rules and restrictions, and Oktoberfest was no exception, even though it was not quite as bad as I had first feared. But the stern posters telling us to take it easy... They were displayed in a way that made them feel like a disapproving grandmother sadly shaking her head, tut-ing over the state of the kids of today.
For whatever reason all the beer tents had been pushed into the smallest corner possible, too. This while the vast majority of the (rather large) Oktoberfest area was empty.
But, whatever. Overall I found this to be a fine beer festival. Not huge, not overly exciting, but still fun.
