Eat

Press release:

The City of SeaTac is pleased to announce the opening of SeaTac Market, a multicultural grocery store and bakery. The 10,500 square foot grocery opened to a crowd of 500 people on January 24.

“This is the only grocery store of this size to serve the nearby community,” said Jeff Robinson, economic development manager for the City. “Not only does this market allow the neighborhood to have access to fresh produce and a large selection of grocery items, but it creates a more walkable community where people don’t have to get in the car or on the bus to shop.”

Located in the SeaTac Center on 152nd and International Boulevard, the store is dedicated to a mix of food and grocery options including American, African, Asian and Mexican food, a bakery and coffee shop. The second floor includes a growing collection of furniture from around the world that is for sale.

Press release:

The 8th Annual Burien Empty Bowls was a great success! A huge thank you to the Burien community for joining us for a meal and helping raise $16,762 for the Highline and White Center Food Banks! Over 930 people came to the event on Friday, Jan 25th.

This annual fundraiser, always on the last Friday in January, is a great opportunity to support the food banks and have a meal with your neighbors! All the food is donated by local businesses, and all the bowls are made and donated by potters at the Moshier Community Art Center…and even past potters from as far away as Chicago! The event is hosted by Burien Parks, Recreation and Cultural Services and Discover Burien.

We would like to thank our wonderful donors:

Federal USDA Under Secretary Kevin Concannon and USDA Regional Administrator Allen Ng will visit SeaTac’s Madrona Elementary on Monday to recognize four Highline elementary schools that received Silver honors in the Healthy US Schools Challenge.
Concannon and Ng will eat a school lunch with students in the cafeteria.
Four Highline elementary schools have received recognition in the Healthier US School Challenge (HUSSC). Beverly Park, Madrona, Southern Heights and White Center Heights Elementary schools are all being recognized for creating healthier school environments through promotion of good nutrition and physical activities.

To qualify for recognition, schools must meet stringent criteria for the school meal program, nutrition education, physical activity and school policies which support a wellness environment, with efforts to:
improve the nutritional quality of the foods served,
provide students with nutrition education, and
provide students with physical education and opportunities for physical activity.

Burien residents now are able to get fresh organic produce and local artisan foods delivered conveniently to the Burien Community Center. The City Parks Recreation & Cultural Services (PaRCS) Department has teamed up with Full Circle Farms, a farmers' cooperative, to be a host site for their delivery program of Farm-to-Table produce. The program in Burien is modeled after a similar effort at Tacoma's community centers. The first delivery in Burien was on May 3.
Residents can sign-up online to receive routine delivery of customized orders containing fresh fruits and vegetables. Boxes are delivered to the Community Center on Tuesday mornings. Members are able to pick up their boxes on Tuesdays from 3 - 7 p.m. or Wednesdays from 8:30 a.m. - 2 p.m.
The PaRCS Dept. is participating in the program to provide a healthy service and promote good nutrition in the community as part of the "Healthy Highline" initiative. PaRCS also hopes to attract new community members to the community center through this program and expose them to its many programs.
To sign up for the program or for more information, go to the website: http://www.fullcircle.com/

More than 5,000 people started off the holiday season in Scandinavian fashion this weekend at the Nordic Heritage Museum’s Yulefest.

The annual Scandinavian Christmas festival has been an organized event in Ballard for nearly thirty year and included dance and musical performances, hundreds of hand-crafted gifts and traditional Nordic cuisine.

Jolie Bergman started volunteering at Yulefest as a 14-year-old in 1994 and has been involved ever since.

“Yulefest is a great thing to maintain as it opens minds and taste buds to Nordic culture,” Bergman said.

Holiday revelers could indulge in the round Danish pancakes called Aebleskiver in one room, watch Finnish dancing in another, and listen to a Swedish accordion duo while drinking Glogg or Nordic beer in the Bodega.

Bergman said that this Yulefest is the largest festival in the Northwest which highlights all the Nordic countries.

“Music, food and dance are the entry points of an ethnicity,” said Ralph Koschi, a dancer who performed Finnish folk dance at the festival.

“So maintaining a tradition like Yulefest to showcase these dances and cuisine is huge," he said.

By Katy G. Wilkens, MS, RD
Northwest Kidney Centers

Ginger – you either love it or hate it. That spicy hot, somewhat sweet, savory taste is hard to describe. Eat enough at once and it can almost make you cry.

It turns out that ginger doesn’t fit into the usual categories of sweet, sour, bitter, or salty flavors. It fires up your taste sensation by stimulating your trigeminal nerve. Other foods that do this are hot peppers, carbonated beverages, horseradish and wasabi. If you like these tingly, spicy flavors, you will love ginger.

You can buy fresh ginger in any grocery store now and it keeps for about two weeks. Put it in a brown paper bag and keep it in your vegetable compartment. To keep ginger for longer than that, put it in a resealable plastic bag and freeze it. Whenever you need to add zip to a meal, or make a wonderful sweet/spicy dessert, just take it out of the freezer and grate it frozen. Some people like to peel the brown skin off with a vegetable peeler but you don’t have to.

Some great ways to get ginger in your diet include:

When Rizzo's French Dip opened on 15th Avenue Northwest in July 2009, it created a buzz with its small space, smaller menu and the larger-than-life family that owned it. Now, the restaurant is for sale as the Rizzo family prepares to leave Seattle.

About a month ago, owner Frank Rizzo moved back to Los Angeles to take care of family business and got stuck there, son and Rizzo's employee Anthony Marks said. Now, the rest of the family is preparing to join him, Marks said.

Though business at Rizzo's has been good, Marks said it would be too difficult for them to continue to manage it from California.

"It's been doing pretty good," he said. "It's just one of those things we can't take care of anymore."

Frank Rizzo said it has been tough to keep the business up to his standards while he has been in California, but he has savored his time at the helm of Rizzo's

"I enjoyed it," he said. "It's not hard work, and we sell a lot of sandwiches."

Rizzo said he is hoping to sell the business, not just the space, in order to make some money and because he believes there is a future in the Rizzo's brand.

The Neighborhood Farmers Market Alliance is looking for public input to improve the Phinney Farmers Market, which ends its 2010 run Oct. 1.

The alliance surveyed more than 200 shoppers at the Phinney Farmers Market Sept. 24 to find out how they can improve the market shopping experience and create a healthier market.

The Neighborhood Farmers Market Alliance is hoping to reach more residents through an electronic survey. Click here to take the survey.

The Phinney Farmers Market is held in the lower parking lot of the Phinney Neighborhood Center, located at Northwest 67th Street and Phinney Avenue North. Its final day of operation in 2010 is from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. Oct. 1. It will open again in the spring.

Marco D’Ambrosio left the wine industry to go into the gelato business. But, he insists that his new investment in a quintessential Italian dessert is not all that different from his previous career with wine.

“I consider myself to have always worked in the fine food industry because wine, for me, is a food product; it’s not an alcoholic beverage," said the owner of D'Ambrosio Gelato on Ballard Avenue. "That’s what it’s considered in Europe. And, gelato at this level is a fine food as well. So I didn’t really move much.”

D’Ambrosio moved to Seattle nearly six years ago to work in the wine industry but later decided to go into business with his father, who had spent years making gelato in Italy. After six months of remodeling a small shop space in Ballard, D’Amrbosio’s gelateria opened in May.

Tiffany Silver-Brace is the motivating force behind a brand new market in West Seattle, The Highland Park Sunday Market.

The first vendors will offer fresh eggs (laid by Highland Park hens), fresh sourdough bread and sourdough starter, fresh herbs, handmade clothing, jewelry, pillows, napkins, t-shirts, onesies, photographic prints and note cards, hand-etched pint glasses, paintings, hand-dyed yarn and roving, and cat toys.

Silver-Brace said, "I am waiting to hear from some local farmers that are very interested, as well as a couple of local charities selling plants and starts to raise funds for their causes."

Future vendors will offer soaps and oils, pickles, kettle corn, fresh dips and spreads and hand-blown glass.

In the spirit of keeping things local all of the vendors are West Seattle residents.