Winter is here, but one of the tastiest gold of the sea has been in season since mid-November in the area: sea urchin, uni. The local ethnic seafood markets occasionally stock live uni harvested on local waters. We’ve had the luck to check the markets when they had uni in stock, so this has been a great year for enjoying uni so far. Here on the west coast the harvested uni can be green, purple, but more abundant is the red type. At the sushi restaurants you can never get your fill of uni, so getting them live from the market and prepare them yourself is a must if you want to satisfy your crave. Six urchins are enough for 2 people to savor for 2 days. The uni deteriorates fast even when kept in the fridge, so finish them within 2 days for the best texture and taste.

Be warned: cracking up the sea urchins and getting to the delicious yellow gold can be both an intimidating task and an appetite killer, but the result is rewarding if you are really into uni. I would recommend not eating the uni right after preparing it, to give it a bit of time to mellow out a bit, and also time for you to clean up the sea smell from preparing all that good stuff.

To prepare, you need a duckbill pliers or a small ax, a pair of tweezers, salted water, and trays of strainers.

Extraction: Lay the uni so the mouth faces up, then crack the shell into halves straight down. Use a long handled spoon to scoop out the pieces of gonad. The gonad (called roe, or uni) from both sexes are equally valuable. Rinse the roe in cold water, using a pair of tweezers to clean out the remaining membranes.

Cure: soak the roe in cold salted water for up to 15 minutes, but I normally just give them a 5 minute bath at most. Then drain them and place onto the strainers, covered and place in the fridge overnight.

The best quality roe has good clor and apprearance, smaller than 5cm (~ 2 inches), and free of leaking fluid, thus many prefer the smaller urchins which they believe tend to produce higher quality roe. It’s all in the perception. Commercially prepared uni is soaked in a chemical (anhydrous potassium alum) to keep them firm, so the freshly prepared homemade stuff definitely has a taste advantage there.

On a whim, I stopped by the local seafood store yesterday on my way home from work. Just wanted to see what they had that day.

Were they spot prawns in the live tank there? Sure they were! I immediately grabbed a pound and ran to the car. I could hear them kicking now and then in the bag while I was driving home on the freeway. Once home, I fired up the charcoal grill, threw the shrimps into a rub of coarse salt, chilli powder, crushed garlic and cilantro, and waited for my wife to get home.

These shrimps could be eaten raw like sushi, but we just took off the heads and saved them for deep frying later, then threw the tails directly onto the hot coal. A quick turn and it’s ready in a minute. The meat is sweet just as claimed.

The heads we deep fried quickly, and they came out crunchy just like salty crackers. Legs, antennae, we tummied them all.

Oh yummy!

The Memorial Day Weekend was fun. We stayed with our sister’s in Vancouver WA and enjoyed great company and great home-cooked food. We also drove out to Hillsboro to have a Venture Shield protective film put on the front of our Prius. Great job done by ClearBra of Oregon, located right next to the Hillsboro airport. It’s here that we also discovered 2 new gems, Insomnia Coffee house and Vivi’s Vietnamese restaurant. Insomnia uses great Sleepy Monk beans. Vivi’s is a charming little mom and pop restaurant serving pleasant food prepared with love and lots of attention to details, comparable to home cooked food. The owner moved here from Canada and opened this restaurant 2 years ago. See our reviews for bothplaces on Yelp.

Being Vietnamese natives living in America, we’ve been looking for a consistently good baguette that has the power to bring back memories of the French baguettes that we grew up with on the streets of Saigon. I almost gave up on it, but today I think I’ve found several bakeries that make great baguettes:

1- Wild Wheat Bakery in Kent. I buy their baguettes from Whole Foods Market in Bellevue where I work. It’s a bit inconvenient so I only get them if I happen to go by there, or if we are craving for some pâté as well. Edited 11/18/2008: I heard that it might be available closer to home at the just-opened PCC Market in Edmonds. Will check it out.

2- A La Francaise baguettes available at our local QFC. Funny thing is I don’t remember they ever carrid this before. I read here that A la Francaise was purchased by Sara Lee Bakery in 1999. By the way, this article, though a bit dated (2005), gives a nice history of Seattle bakery tradition.

I tried Tall Grass baguettes also available at Whole Foods, but don’t like it a bit, too hard and chewy.

I heard of these great bakeries that are owned by Vietnamese folks but have yet to try them:

- La Boulangerie, 2200 N 45th St Seattle, WA 98103 (I-5 exit 169)

- Baguette Box, 1203 Pine St, Seattle, WA 98101, though this place probably don’t sell baguettes on their own