Voila! Our Experience

We dined at a small French restaurant, Voila!, in the Madison Valley area of Seattle last night. We began with an hors d oeuvre of escargot and a salad. The Escargot was placed on French bread baguette rounds dripping with a garlic butter mixed with finely chopped parsley and basil. Hank is fond of the escargot; I loved the garlic butter mixture in which I dipped the French bread served at the table. The salad was three endive leaves topped with rough chopped endive, leeks and walnuts, finely chopped shallots, vinaigrette, and blue cheese chunks.

For the main course I ordered the Cassoulet topped with buttered breadcrumbs and Hank the veal liver. The Cassoulet wasn’t quite as good, I felt, as Café Campagne near the Pike Place Market but was tasty. (Leftovers brought home were even better the next day.) It had the requisite duck, pork and sausage (and I thought I tasted some lamb), Cannalini beans and, for texture and taste, the breadcrumb topping. I felt it had a stronger tomato base to the sauce than I prefer.

Hank’s veal liver was served in 2” medallions in a sauce consisting basically, he felt, of dark wine and onions. He didn’t like the sauce and wasn’t impressed with the dish in general. The meat was surrounded with a mashed and piped yams seasoned mildly and poorly. One taste that came through was nutmeg. The liver wasn’t overdone, but not impressive.

We finished the meal with coffee and Sambuca (they didn’t have our desired anisette and Sambuca doesn’t hold it’s own in the coffee as well.)

I believe I’m sounding like a bit of a snob here, The entrées were in the $15 range, less than Café Campagne, The small chandelier and candle lit interior was pleasant.

Hail Tupperware!

It just doesn’t seem possible that the last entry here was before Christmas. Hank’s been through a successful knee replacement and three weeks recuperation at his sister’s in Issaquah. Thanks Helen! Here it is, mid February, the sun is shining on a Saturday afternoon. I’ve been making Snickerdoodles for Valentine’s gifts to neighbors. A small gesture, but a good Snickerdoodle is always a treat. I spent the day cleaning out the refrigerator and then the pan hole. I suppose on a boat it’s more properly called the pan hold, but hey. Pans on our boat are kept in a hole. To clean it out you have to get on hands and knees and sometimes lay flat on the kitchen floor to reach the bottom. Today I purged pans. Actually mostly I purged plastic ware that sneaks into the pan hole. I had to rematch all the Tupperware and sundry lids. I have more lids than containers, as usual. Tupperware is like socks; for some unknown reason you are always losing the lid or its matching container.

I fondly remember attending Tupperware parties with my Mom. It was the 1950’s and in-home parties were a new source of fun. Mary Kay was probably still selling Fuller brushes while Earl Tupper started setting the pace back in 1945. I remember burping lids, nested bowls, those pastel colored tumblers and cereal bowls and the amazing deviled egg carrying container (this was an era before the obsession with cholesterol) everybody made deviled eggs. They were the quintessential hors d oeuvre.

Things have come a long way. The last Tupperware party I attended was a couple years ago. A very fun-loving single guy friend of ours was talked into throwing a Tupperware party. He hardly knew what Tupperware was but was up for fun. He invited 30+ people and just about all showed. People brought wine and hors d oeuvres and he’d arranged live music (a neighbor couple, he played piano and she sang French love songs and show tunes). The Tupperware Lady was game – she demonstrated mango salsa in the Quick Chef hand chopper (throw in a tomato, a mango, an onion, some cilantro some lime juice, a couple spins of the handle and Viola! salsa) Bowls of chips and salsa circled the room and I bought the Quick Chef. I also bought the Tupperware cutting board and the deli meat and cheese storer and I love them all! The more wine people drank the more Tupperware they ordered. Based on amount of sales the host ended up with just about every hostess gift available (I don’t think Earl Tupper thought in terms of Host gifts).

I still love Tupperware, especially because moisture is a boat dwellers bane and glass breaks no matter how hard you try to store it creatively. Ironically, when I was first invited over to my sister-in-law’s house some thirty years ago I took deviled eggs as an hors d oeuvre (I’ve found even in the ‘age of cholesterol’ whenever you show up with deviled eggs they get scarffed up quickly). She was ecstatic about the treat from her past. She went to a high cupboard and returned with a Tupperware deviled egg-carrying container. “It was our mothers”, she proclaimed, “and I am gifting it to you with the mandate that you bring deviled eggs to all family dinners!” Hail Tupperware, it connects us through the generations.