Seattle Restaurant Week and Elliott’s Oyster House

Seattle Restaurant Week

My recent Seattle trip happened to coincide with the first part of Seattle Restaurant Week (SRW), where local restaurants entice diners out of their normal routines with 3-course dinners for $30.

SRW goes through Thursday, October 29, so if you’re in Seattle, you can still join in!

Check out the full list of 165 participating restaurants on the SRW site. You can sort by neighborhood, dietary restrictions, etc. Click on your restaurant of choice for location and menu information (subject to change).
Ask for the SRW menu at the restaurant. It may only be available by request and may differ from what’s listed online.
Look for lunch. Many (but not all) SRW restaurants also offer lunch menus with 2 courses for $15.

Elliott’s

SRW recommended Elliott’s Oyster House, located right on the Seattle Waterfront, near Pike Place Market.

Really, it felt like a bit more of a touristy joint than I may have chosen on my own. But (a) I do like to eat seafood when I’m actually on a coast, (b) sometimes even the touristy locations can surprise you, and (c) SRW offered to pick up the tab.

So I thought it was worth a shot. And it was. The food was good and so was the view. You can see Puget Sound from just about any table inside or out on the patio.

Phillip’s sister Liz (along with her two boys) braved the traffic/parking to drive us. I think both situations are currently worse than usual, due to some city project that has put a gaping canyon of construction directly in front of the restaurant. (Don’t worry, there’s a bridge.)

Oysters

When you walk into Elliott’s, you see bins and bins of different varieties of oysters. So many. And they change up the selection seasonally.

The oysters remain intact and unshucked until ordered. Fortunately, the staff includes some fast shuckers.

Their SRW menu included other types of seafood that aren’t in the name of the restaurant, as well as beef and vegetarian dishes. The day we were there the offerings varied a bit from what was online. So Phillip, Liz, and I perused our options, while the boys set to work coloring their sea-life-themed kids’ menus with those cool triangular crayons that don’t roll off the table.

One nephew decided to color the fish and everything around them blue.

I asked him “Is it all blue because they’re underwater?”

He looked exasperated and simply said, “no.” Then went back to coloring.

Sometimes it’s better not to question art.

The kids’, plates piled high with fish and chips, were served at the same time as our first course, which we all appreciated. (Bringing us food and not the boys would’ve been fun for no. one.)

Liz had a delicious New England style white clam chowder made with a good dose of bacon. I had coconut prawns on top of a mango salsa. The prawns were crispy and coconutty yet kind of needed the accompanying Thai chili sauce to complete them.

For the second course, I ordered the blackened trout salad. While the fish wasn’t cooked the way I’d expected, it wasn’t bad. It was served under a salad of mixed greens, walnuts, and apples, so that (literally) covered any minor flaws.

Phillip thoroughly enjoyed his salmon reuben, and Liz had a really good steak sandwich.

Lunch is not a contest. But I think Liz won.

Near to Elliott’s:

Argosy Sightseeing Cruises is actually in the same building.
Seattle Aquarium is a short walk. If you’re visiting both, you can get a combo Argosy/Aquarium ticket. They’re also both part of the Seattle CityPass.
Seattle Great Wheel
Pike Place Market
Seattle Art Museum
Olympic Sculpture Park (about 1.1 mile away)

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Thank you to Seattle Restaurant Week for the Elliott’s gift card. We also received CityPasses from Visit Seattle.

October 26, 2015October 16, 2015

Seattle Revisited

Right as plans were really falling apart for an Italy trip this year, an event popped up in my Facebook feed.

The authors of the Four Windows project (including my brother) have all finished the novels they’ve been writing over the past year and would be doing a reading in Seattle.

I saw the invitation for their reading and thought, “I wish I could be there.” Then I realized I could.

Turns out that, when you’ve been trying to figure out how to get from Arizona to Italy, getting to Seattle suddenly seems very doable and inexpensive by comparison.

In fact, by the time you read this, I plan to already have been there and come back home.

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October 22, 2015October 22, 2015

Leaf Love: 7 Fall Craft Ideas

Whether or not the leaves change where you live, you’ll fall for these projects!

Embellish Leaves

Try applying paint or glitter directly to leaves. You can use leaves that are green or autumnal, real or silk, dried or pressed – you can even print your own!

1. Gold-Painted Leaves: Gold paint against richly-colored fall leaves is just gorgeous! A single painted leaf or small grouping of them in a simple frame would be lovely.

2. Hojas Pintadas / Drawn-on Leaves and Wreath: You could also go with an earthier palette and use ultra fine tip sharpies or paint pens where you wanted more detail. Once you have a stack of patterned leaves, you can gather them into a fall wreath.

3. DIY Falling Leaves Garland: All you need is some glue and glitter to make your leaves sparkle! Then hang them from a ribbon to create a garland, sprinkle them across a table, or display them in a glass jar. If you wanted to use real leaves instead of silk ones in your garland, you might want to skip punching a hole in favor of tying the ribbon around the leaf stems or attaching with clothespins or hot glue.

Leaves for Embellishing

Use real leaves (any color) to stamp, shape, or decorate.

4. Stamped Leaf Mandala Journal Page: Use leaves as stamps for your journal pages to remind you of the local flora. Stamped leaves in different colors can form the basis of a pattern like this mandala.

5. Leaf-Imprinted Clay Necklace: Press a small leaf into clay to make a one-of-kind pendant.

6. Sand-Cast Birdbath in a Leaf Shape: This is the most involved project on the list, but the step-by-step instructions make it look totally doable. A large leaf becomes the form for a concrete birdbath. You could also skip the pedestal-making steps and create an oversized leaf-shaped bowl, which would be a fantastic base for a fall centerpiece.

7. Foliage Pumpkins: Decopauge ferns or fall foliage on white pumpkins for an alternative to the traditional orange jack-o-latern. (original project, left photo)

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Photos via respective sites.

October 19, 2015October 13, 2015

Fall in Sedona

Travel writer Sherry Ott posted a list of “Most Unusual Destinations for Viewing Fall Colors” and suggests “While everyone heads east, why not just head North” to Minnesota or Alaska or across the ocean to walk the Camino de Santiago in Spain or trek the mountains of Nepal.

For travel a little later in the season, you could look another direction: Southwest. Season-seekers in Phoenix are used to heading to Flagstaff and Sedona to get their fall color fix, but Northern Arizona isn’t on the radar for most people.

In Sedona, the fall color is set against the backdrop of its gorgeous red rocks. The peak color is on the later side. A lot of times we’re in Sedona over Columbus Day weekend, when the leaves are just beginning to turn.

Do the leaves change where you live? Have you ever travelled for fall color?

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October 15, 2015

Florence

Not everyone gets to spend an anniversary in Italy. And I feel really lucky to be celebrating 11 years with Phillip.

We arrived in Florence mid-afternoon. We didn’t have time to visit the monastery, so our first stop was a winery just outside of the city. The entrance gate was open, and we were taking photos of some adorable donkeys munching when a woman rushed out and said they weren’t open that day.

So we headed back and decided to stop at the visitor center, which shares a building with a museum of the history of Florence. The building itself has been many things over the years, including a hospital. The museum held artifacts from World War II, old medicinal bottles, and stories about Florence’s important families of the past from a time when it was the economic center of the region.

There is a nice little park across the street. We sat on a bench to rest before walking through the old part of town, past a church surrounded by olive trees to the courthouse, just as the sun was starting to turn the landscape golden.

The visitor center had recommended a restaurant that makes fresh bread daily. The weather was practically perfect, so we sat in the courtyard, dipping that delicious, house-made bread in olive oil while we waited for our meal.

At some point in the day, Phillip said something like “hey, we are in Florence!” And we laughed about it.

Because we were in Florence. But we weren’t in Italy. The trip we had hoped to take across the Atlantic this year didn’t work out. I’m not gonna lie, that’s a bummer. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t enjoy the afternoon on Phillip’s day off. He suggested we take a drive and wanted to check out Florence, Arizona (about an hour southeast of us). While it’s not the birthplace of the Rennaissance, we still laughed, ate good food, and explored together.

Not everyone gets to spend an anniversary in Italy. And I feel really lucky to be celebrating 11 years with Phillip.

Photos:
1. Statue next to The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Roman Catholic Church.
2. Donkeys at The Windmill Winery. The tasting room is open Wednesday through Saturday.
3-4. Items from Italian and German WWII prisoners’ camp in Florence – on exhibit at the Florence Visitor Center/McFarland State Historic Park.
5. Brick building on Main Street.
6-8. A&M Pizza. Not fancy, but they did have some seriously good bread, great service, and a nice big outdoor seating area.
9. Main Street.
10-11. A&M.
12. Pinal County Courthouse

Also:
Saint Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery: Visiting hours are 10:30a-2:30pm daily. Dress code and other rules must be observed.
31st Annual Historic Florence Home Tour: February 13, 2016

Month: October 2015