From the Office and Backyard to the Road, Boat, or Plane–Backstories and
Side Stories While on Assignment. Updates on Personal Projects, Too.

Archive for April, 2008

04.22

2008

Seattle-ing

I’ve got a new travel piece in the works, “The days we ate Seattle,” and thought I’d post a few of Peter Frank’s images. This was a trip we took last month, five days of coffee and Washington state wines, of trying restaurants that cook with local ingredients (red skinned potatoes, steelhead and halibut, leeks, ciders, cracked wheat, greens), such as the 30 to 40-seat Tilth with the young female chef, who since we ate there is up for a James Beard. We visited farmers’ markets for samples of soup and cheese, bread and milk, and then went out to a couple of the farms to see where the food was produced.

Fauntleroy ferryVashon

We boarded ferries, and we tried restaurants. There were a lot of high points, including our stop at The Monkey Tree on Vashon Island, a vegetarian cafe and bakery that serves huge portion open face sandwiches on fresh bread, bundt cakes, beet soups, much more. There were big mixing bowls on the countertops and flour in the air. You get to Vashon by ferry ride… a dreamy boat passage the day we went, on smooth water with sunlight at nice angles in window-lined passenger areas of molded aqua seats. We stopped, too, at the Loki salmon boat (west wall, Fishermen’s Terminal) to talk fish stories. And we ordered our toasted crumpets and jam in the cozy Crumpet Shop, watching the batter poured and baked.

crumpet makingLoki salmon

I’d Seattle again anytime – the farm-and-sea-to-table scene is very cool to see, delicious to taste. Our article is due to be published in June in Charleston Magazine.

– Sandy Lang, April 2008

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Food, Travel

Over a couple of days this winter, I had an interesting collaboration with April Lamm, a Berlin-based writer who’s been a great friend since we both worked at a South Carolina surf shop during high school/college. When I got her latest call, she was in Germany in the thick of finishing a piece for Sleek, an art and fashion magazine that prints articles both in German and English.

Sleek Spring 2008 cover

My contribution was to remind April what I knew of the “House of the Future” from the 1991 Spoleto Festival, a tiny treasure which, thankfully, still stands on Charleston’s East Side. There’s so much to wonder about every time I see the arms’ width house, which I’d say is largely forgotten to most in Charleston. (But not to the neighborhood that protects it, or to Albert Allston, who built the “Site Specific” art piece for a project of the visiting artist David Hammons.) I photographed the very narrow single house, and my image ended up as a full-page picture with April’s story in the Spring 2008 issue. Wunderbar.

Sleek in print, Lamm article

– Sandy Lang, April 2008

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Art, Craft, In print/published

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