Alaska Cooks

Sunday morning rises crisp, cold, and clear. It is 14 degrees below zero at my house, and I am not an early riser: It’s 9:15 before the sun starts to clear the Chugach mountains and lights up Anchorage below. The mercury starts to tick upwards, but not quickly enough. I should not complain about the weather much. It is all relative, but we live in the banana-belt of Alaska: A few hundred miles north of us temperatures have been holding steady in the -50 range for weeks. We are to meet friends at a trailhead in the mountains for a back country ski before settling in for the Super Bowl, but the French press, a thick Sunday paper, and the new DWR catalog all beckon. The excuses are all there, but we need to get outside for awhile, at least. We also need to feed, and time is short. It’s cold, we’re going to be exercising hard, and breakfast doesn’t really count unless it involves a pork product. Seriously. This afternoon there will be burgers, nachos, good beer, but now we need something quick and easy.

At Christmas we found neat little French place in Seattle that a friend recommended. Good food prepared simply, for the most part. The highlight of our pre-lunchtime visit was about as simple as it gets. Crack a couple of eggs into a shallow baking dish lined with good cured ham. Grate a little hard Gruyère over it, and toss it under a broiler for few minutes. The trick is to get the edges of the ham crispy without getting the eggs too hard. How long you leave it in the oven depends on your preference for runny eggs, but it doesn’t take long at all before over-easy turns to over-hard. There are several softer cheese sold as Gruyère, and I think they make the dish a little mushy. The real stuff crisps up better over the soft egg. Make sure you have some fresh crusty bread and butter for wiping out all of the corners of your bowl. That is it is just stupid simple doesn’t take away anything from how good it is, so it has made it into the near weekly lineup here at the Alaska Cooks Corporate Headquarters. Something this easy and good works for last minute dinners as well as pre-skiing fuel.

original photo by scott dixon
So maybe heading for one of the more popular restaurants in Seattle’s Belltown on Christmas Eve afternoon isn’t the brightest idea, but it worked out. We walked in and grabbed the only open table. Le Pichet is just up the street from Pike Place Market, and we had ridden the ferry over from Bremerton just to walk the market and be a part of the holiday scene in downtown Seattle. The place is small, and was full of folks enjoying the neighborhood and wrapping up last minute shopping. If you airlifted this restaurant across the world into any neighborhood in Paris, it would be indistinguishable from any other cafe or bistro there. The dim lighting, old tile, the rolled zinc bartop, the slate tables; everything but the smoky atmosphere is right. Run by owners Jim Drohman and Joanne Herron (he cooks, she works the front of the house), the place is a Francophile’s dream. A friend had stopped in one lazy fall afternoon, rated it highly, and it has been on my list ever since. Yes, I actually carry a list of places I want to eat when I travel. It rarely works out that I get to cross anything off of said list, but I have one.

The menus are small, but there are three: Le Casse Croûte, Le Déjeuner, and Le Diner. The choices are few and the dishes simple, but it would be hard to not find something tasty. Only the Le Casse Croûte menu was available to us at 10:30 in the morning (it’s available all day) and we settled on pain et buerre, ouefs plat, jambon et fromage, les tartines.

Sadly we weren’t in town long enough to try the dinner menu, but I’ll be back. Spécialités de la maison include a whole chicken roasted to order, with Walla Walla onions, orange-rosemary butter and eggplant caviar or local mussels sauteed with bacon, leeks, saffron cream, and fried potatoes. Prices range from 5$ to $34, and the highest is for the whole chicken - meant for two. The prices here are unreal, in the best way possible. There are artisanal cheeses available by the ounce or by the plate, with the selection varied daily. Wine is available by the glass,the pitcher (le pichet…), or bottle.

Restaurant Le Pichet
1933 1st Avenue
Seattle, Washington 98101
Telephone: (206) 256-1499
8 am to 12 am Sunday through Thursday
8 am to 2 am Friday and Saturday

Merry Christmas to all.

It was 45 degrees and raining in Anchorage, and didn’t feel much like summer was almost here. We had left work early on Friday afternoon, trying to sneak out of town ahead of the Memorial Day weekend traffic. So had everyone else, and it was a long, slow ride down the Kenai Peninsula to Homer. A “drinking village with a fishing problem,” Homer is literally the end of the road, 250 miles south of Anchorage. Every year a group of us heads down over the holiday weekend to spend the three or four days on a beach across Kachemak Bay. It started as a kayaking adventure, but with the advent of multiple kids, dogs, and expectations, the annual trip has grown into a beach party (kayaking optional) where the only requirement is that you provide your own camp chair - no poaching.

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Alaska Cooks & Company are wandering through Ireland and France, basically attempting to eat our weight in cheese and baked goods. Please hang in there for another week or two - I’ll be back soon with tales and pictures.

jared