Inside Pike Place Market

Pike Place Market is a Seattle landmark and a very large place filled with strange and yummy things, so B and I signed on with a Savor Seattle walking tour, to learn and munch.













Stephanie, our charming guide, wore a microphone that broadcast directly to tour members' earphones. This allowed her to speak to all of us in a normal tone of voice, and we could hear her clearly over the market bustle, without disrupting the scene.

We tasted smoked salmon at Pike Place Fish, ducking the famous flying fish as they hurtled by. The folks here claim that the fish-throwing started simply as a way of getting business done faster, but I think they just wanna throw fish.

We also visited the 90-year-old Market Spice. We sampled their famous orange spice tea and a seasoning mix dubbed Healthy Heart (it's salt-free), which worked quite well as a savory appetizer or a sweet when mixed into cream cheese and served on a cracker.

We could smell the deliciousness emanating from the Russian bakery Piroshky, Piroshky long before it came in sight. The cute fish-shaped piroshky stuffed with smoked salmon was good, but the more traditional potato-onion-cheese piroshky was my favorite. I wished I could try one of the dessert varieties, but all those little bites were already adding up.





At Beecher's Handmade Cheese, workers were mixing and salting the curds in this huge vat as we peered from the sidewalk through the large window. "Twenty-four hours ago, this was grass," Stephanie announced as she passed around tastes of Beecher's Flagship cheddar.

The award- winning New England clam chowder at Pike Place Chowder was tasty, but to my surprise, I preferred the vegan "Lime in 'd Coconut" chowder. I licked the last of it from the inside of the shot-glass-sized plastic cup and made plans to come back for lunch. There are at least half a dozen chowder varieties on the menu each day -- smoked-salmon chowder, hmm -- and the indecisive can get a sampler of four.

Our last bite was this perfectly sized triple coconut cream pie from Etta's Seafood, the original restaurant opened by Tom Douglas, one of Seattle's top chefs. It would have been a good place to have lunch, after our tour broke up, but who could eat at this point?

Summer bounty

The University District farmers' market is Seattle's oldest and largest "farmers-only" market, comprising some 50 farmers and operating year-round.

The market was busy at the opening hour, and I enjoyed walking slowly through the displays. I tried tayberries, which I'd never seen before. They look like elongated raspberries, with the soft core of a blackberry. (They're a cross between the two, I learned.) The large green globes are gooseberries.

It was just a quick visit, but I managed to sample two other foods that were new to me: albacore tuna jerky (really tasty, better than beef!) and chocolate chip sharp cheddar cheese (better than it sounds, just a hint of chocolate).

In the middle of the market, I saw a sign with a picture of the Eiffel Tower, the single word "crepes," and an arrow, so I hurried right over. Anita, the owner of the stand, was still setting up, and we had to wait while she darted into the market to purchase a few ingredients, but the result was definitely worth the wait.

I had ham, spinach, egg and cheese on a buckwheat crepe. The egg was soft-cooked from the heat of the griddle, the yolk still runny, which normally would not have pleased me, but the taste was so fresh that I didn't care.

Anita mentioned that the egg came from a pullet, a hen less than a year old. A bit of Web-surfing finds some suggestions that pullet eggs are more flavorful, and that they tend to have a greater proportion of white to yolk, but I couldn't really verify any of this.

What we saw @ the fireworks store

Fireworks Factory Outlet
Cody, WY

I am SO over Costco

Costco, I've grown weary of this love-hate relationship I have with you. I've come to realize that your appearances are deceiving, and I think it's time we go our separate ways.

Your outsized personality amused me at first. It made me think about lively parties, my house full of friends, occasions at which I might serve heaps of bite-sized crabcakes, sheets of moist carrot cake, and table-crowding platters of cocktail shrimp.

I nodded in recognition when I read news articles about how Costco has become the yuppie Wal-Mart. Yes, I prefer Starbucks coffee to Maxwell House. Why pay department-store prices for designer jeans? I thought you were the store for me.

The food samples at every turn, served forth by cheery ladies in white hair nets, were enough to make a meal. I tried things I'd never considered purchasing: chicken taquitos, "energy drink," canned turkey chili, garlic parmesan dip.

There was always something new to discover, something that made me laugh. I never knew what I'd find -- a jungle gym erected atop a mountain of pallets, a digital grand piano, a moonbounce, a tank full of live lobster, or an entire suite of office furniture.

But after a while, this very unpredictability began to bother me. That fresh-scented body wash I wanted would disappear, sometimes for a few months, sometimes indefinitely. I couldn't be certain that the 12-box pack of white-cheddar macaroni and cheese would always be there for me.

Where once I happily carted home 24 rolls of paper towels, pleased that I wouldn't have to add them to my shopping list for months, I began to feel a bit disappointed that I couldn't get the select-a-size brand, which was really more suited to my needs.

Each encounter left me more confused, with more unanswered questions. Is a 48-ounce bag of dried cranberries a bargain at $6.85, compared with the 6-ounce bag I usually buy? If I want three pounds of barbecued pulled pork for a potluck dinner, should I settle for the six-pound package and hope the remainder won't end up discarded, an icy brick at the back of my freezer?

After a summer apart, my perspective has changed. The bounty spilling into those wide aisles looks less like a wealth of possibilities and more like super-sized excess.

Unless you're stocking a soup kitchen or feeding a family of twelve, who needs a can of tuna fish the size of your head? That generous bag of chopped, ready-to-cook broccoli didn't really help me include more vegetables with my meals, not when I ended up throwing out half of it because it spoiled before I could use it all.

My last visit left me feeling exhausted and somehow let down. The scrum around the serving ladies' microwave ovens seemed ridiculous, grown people grabbing for pinkie-sized bagel dogs and morsels of bourbon chicken. An apple pie the size of an automobile tire was vaguely disgusting. I considered and rejected a fruit platter, a bag of coffee beans, a moisturizer. None of it was quite what I wanted.

Costco, it's not you -- it's me. I'm too set in my ways, too inflexible to adapt to what you have to offer. A case of 27 juice boxes, 100% organic, no added sugar -- what's not to love? Yet all I can see is the pile of unrecyclable trash I'd leave behind. You offer a low price on gallon jugs of apple juice, but I'm thinking about the calcium-enriched brand in my local grocery store.

The truth is, we have different values. I don't want a bargain-priced crate of glossy Gala apples; I want to try all the different varieties at the farmers' market, where I can be pretty sure that they've just come off the tree. A freezer stocked with ground beef and strip steaks doesn't appeal to me. I put together menus on the fly, based on what looks fresh, what I want to eat today. I just can't commit to bulk purchases.

With so many admirers standing in line, you'll never miss me.

She seemed like a reasonable woman

The customer in front of me in line at the Trader Joe’s grocery store this afternoon was an interesting personality study.

I didn’t take much note of her at first. All that registered was her light grey hair, worn in a no-nonsense, chin-length style, and the unusual pattern of her sleeveless blouse in shades of orange.

This customer began taking her groceries out of the cart and piling them at the checkout. At Trader Joe’s, the usual procedure is that the checker pulls your shopping cart behind the counter and takes everything out, ringing up items as s/he goes, and then quickly and efficiently bags everything while you’re paying.

The checker politely asked the woman to stop unloading the cart and allow her to handle the bagging. (There is very little room at the customer’s end of the counter.) Customer explained, nicely, that she was late for an appointment. Checker responded that things would go faster as soon as she was done with the previous customer and could empty the cart herself.

Customer kept unloading groceries, repeating that she was in a hurry and was trying to help. Checker kept pointing out that this was not helpful. They finally achieved a sort of stalemate, probably because there was no more room to stack anything. Customer said, in a mildly offended tone, “OK, I’ll just stand here and do nothing.”

Checker suggested that Customer could bag the groceries, that this might speed things along a little. “Oh, I’m not a professional bagger,” Customer said. “None of us are,” Checker answered, even more politely, with only the tiniest roll of her eyes.

Customer then proceeded to 1) caution Checker not to make any bag too heavy, as she had an injured back, 2) repeatedly and emphatically tell another employee who stepped up -- either to bag or to run interference, I couldn’t tell -- that they should stop moving items around in the store because she couldn’t find anything, 3) state that she never shopped in this store, and 4) offer a faux apology for “just trying to help.”

The entire conversation was conducted in calm, measured tones. If you didn’t listen to the content, you’d think they were chatting about the weather, or the price of Trader Giotto’s Marinara Sauce.

The peculiar part was the insistence of Customer that she WAS, actually, helping. It was as if she wanted to force Checker to retract her previous statement and express thanks for the interference.

I wondered about Customer. Is this a woman who always has to be right? Is she a little confused? (If she “never” shopped at this store, how did she know they were rearranging it?) Is she always so passively aggressive, or does she only pick on people who are in no position to tell her off?

To be fair, Checker also seemed intent on making Customer admit that she was being a pain in the derriere. At one point, when Customer was gone and Checker was waiting on me, she said quietly, to no one in particular, “I just don’t feel like arguing with anyone today.” I said nothing but thought: So don’t argue. Why do you have to be right? She might have sent Customer on her way a little faster if she’d smilingly agreed to everything Customer said while doing it her own way as best she could.

When I waited tables in college and graduate school, it was drilled into me that the first order of business was to pleasantly do all that was in my power to make the customer happy. If that didn’t work, I was to summon a manager and hand the problem over to him or her. The manager has more power and, ultimately, more responsibility. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to argue with even the most flaming idiot. I wasn’t getting paid enough to do that.

All I can say is: Be gentle with each other, folks.