A month ago, I returned from a long overdue “summer” vacation to Washington. We started in Seattle, then clipped a corner of the mountains (Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helens) before driving up the Olympic peninsula, ferrying across the sound to Whidbey Island, and dropping back down into Seattle. It was the farthest west I’d ever been so everything was new to me. I took pictures of every minute detail–my first glimpse of the Pacific, clusters of starfish, my half-eaten coffeecake, the deep green darkness of the forest. I half-believed that a greater number of photos could somehow help me remember the smell of salt spray or the moodiness of the ocean fog. I took more than 900 photos.
Then on our last full day of the trip, I lost my camera.
We were back in Seattle by the time I realized it was missing–ninety miles from the beach where I lost it. Back at the beach, I had been preoccupied with collecting driftwood. When I finally looked inside my purse, all I saw was a tangled cluster of sticks. No camera. It wasn’t a fair trade if you ask me.
We are a photo-centric society. People share photos of everything with each other. Like a lot of people, I’ve become dependent on photos to retell my stories, to remind me how an event unfolded. Sometimes I nearly miss meaningful moments because I’m trying too hard to capture them with my camera. My boyfriend has frequently tried to point out that sometimes it’s more important to fully be in a moment than to spend time documenting it for posterity’s sake.
That’s not a lesson I cared to learn firsthand, but now I have no choice. Instead of cycling through hundreds of photos, I’ve been forced to cement my vacation memories in different ways. One way I’ve planned to do that is to recreate the flavors and scents of our time in Seattle. The photos of my experiences are gone, but maybe this is a better way of reliving it all.
Experiencing Seattle’s coffee culture was one of the trip highlights for me. For my boyfriend and I, coffee is not only one of our favorite drinks, it’s a full-fledged hobby. We visited seven coffee shops and I bought beans at nearly every one: Stumptown Coffee Roasters, The Boiler Room, Useless Bay Coffee Company, Mukilteo Coffee, Espresso Vivace, Seattle Coffee Works, and the original Starbucks (which felt more like a Disney World attraction than a coffee shop). Now that we’re home, we plan to roast our own coffee beans together. We bought green (unroasted) coffee beans at Seattle Coffee Works and found instructions for roasting them in a popcorn popper here.
But what good is a cup of coffee without something sweet to go with it? While drinking the best lattes of our lives at Espresso Vivace, we ate fresh madeleines. Naturally, we won’t be able to roast and drink our own coffee without making these too. I bought a madeleine pan and we did a test run of this recipe. Unfortunately, my boyfriend doesn’t own an electric mixer so instead of beating the batter with an electric mixer for 10 minutes, I beat it by hand for 15 minutes. I wouldn’t recommend it. (It didn’t seem to effect the madeleines at all, but you have better things to do than beat batter by hand for 15 minutes.)
Along with coffee, Washington has an abundance of fresh seafood. Living in a landlocked state, I doubt I could recreate the grilled salmon I ate on our first night. One thing I do hope to make is chowder. After reading some online reviews, we went to Pike Place Chowder for their highly-praised chowder sampler–four bowls of any chowder you’d like. It was a classic Seattle scene I imagined before we even arrived–eating chowder on a rain-soaked day as it warmed us from the inside out. Unfortunately, that wasn’t our experience. On the day we ate our chowder, the sun had been shining in Seattle for 45 days straight, the temperature was pushing 90 degrees, and people kept commenting on what a beautiful day it was. In other words, it wasn’t chowder weather. Nonetheless, the chowder was fantastic. I found some recipes to try here:
Slow Cooker Chicken Corn Chowder
As I write this, chowder weather has descended on the Midwest. It’s enough to make me run to the grocery store for clams, or at least pull out my souvenir Starbucks mug and brew some full-strength coffee.
