Birthday dinner - Matt's in the Market

Ok ok, really this is the last time I will talk about Matt's this summer. :)

I am not much of a cake person so I wanted some bread pudding. Gathered a small group, my cousins, my coworkers, and my friend Pat, all whom have never been to Matt's before. I was pretty excited to share this experience with them.

By the way, found the pike place flag featuring the illustrated interpretation of me on our way there! I was pretty excited. Back story here.

I apologize in advance that I did not want to take the time to take nice photos of the food just because I wanted to enjoy myself, but here we go:

I ordered myself a fancy glass of wine (apparently it was worth $18). I wanted it because it had crushed rose petals in it. I can't even remember the name. How useless am I. Here is Pat being fancy and me laughing at him.
We started with the soft shell crab which was breaded and fried, served with fingerling potatoes. Whatever the sauce was, it definitely was amazing. It had a smokey spiciness to it.
I had the steak with bing cherries served on a grilled onion and fava beans. Medium rare of course. AMAZING.
Two of my cousins ordered the whole fish (Snapper), which was fried I think. And served with a seafood broth and mussels. It looks pretty intense.
Pat had the King Salmon, which just like the copper river salmon I had, was cooked to perfection. Pat did note that the Mint Jubilee he had was the best one he had ever had.

Of course then there was bread pudding. Which I did not take photos of because I've eaten it a million times now. We should note that there was Strawberry Shortcake on the dessert menu. Strawberry Shortcake is my absolute favorite, so I felt torn between that and the bread pudding. But Pat helped me out by ordering the Strawberry Shortcake so I could have Bread Pudding and we could share. Turns out the Strawberry Shortcake was not what we had envisioned at all and was a bit dissapointing. It tasted great, it was just not what we were expecting. We wanted light fluffy cake with fresh fruit. Instead it was a creative interpretation of Strawberry Shortcake. A biscuit with strawberry and lemon sorbet. Sprinkled with candied blackberries. Again, it tasted fine, it just wasn't what we wanted. But I was ok with that. Earlier today, my coworkers brought in strawberry shortcake for my birthday. :)

It was a good day. Thanks Matt's for treating us so well and for a very lovely birthday dinner.

Funny Pike Place story

So my friend Margi works for this fancy advertising agency. One of their clients is Pike Place Market. One day she showed them this:

Then they asked me to be a model for Farm Days. I literally could not stop laughing when I heard this. Modeling is not my thing and I'm terrible at it. But I did it for Margi because I like her and it's not like it would cost me anything. Plus it did sound kind of neat.

So after our shoot, the illustrator made this:
I thought it looked pretty neat as a first sketch. And then here is the final version:
Apparently they went with a "subtle smile" instead and I am still all smiley in my eyes so hence why it actually doesn't look like me at all. But....if you're walking along Pike, you can see it hanging it up like this:


Yup yup...that's me...haha. I haven't seen it yet but hope to soon. It's a pretty funny story.

*EDIT* Found the flag!


*All images used in this post is copyrighted to Copacino + Fujikado LLC except for the first one of me with the pumpkin and the last one of the flag. My mom took that one. :)