Lara Ferroni held a photo contest. The winner in the “edibility” category was a photo of phad thai from Rice and Noodles, a blog by Mae Gabriel. I wanted to eat it immediately. If you don’t want to eat it immediately, I’m not sure we’re going to hit it off.

The recipe called for Maesri phad thai sauce in a jar. When I make phad thai, I make my own sauce. It’s good, but as Strong Bad would say, it has officially reached rigamarole status. Mae’s phad thai is streamlined. No garlic or shallot beyond what’s in the jarred sauce. Just egg, noodles, phad thai sauce, fish sauce, scallions, and bean sprouts, cooked in peanut oil and then garnished.

First, I had to find Maesri phad thai sauce. They didn’t have it at Uwajimaya. Ordering it online would have been absurd. Then I remembered Mekong Rainier Grocery, at 3400 Rainier Ave S. It’s the only Thai supermarket in town that I know of. (Actually, I think the owners are Lao, but the ingredient overlap is nearly total.) They had it for $1.29, along with a bunch of other Maesri sauces, plus many brands of fermented gouramy fish.

Because I’m a meddler and because I was making this for myself for lunch, I simplified the recipe even further. I left out the meat, threw some chile flakes in with the sauce, and garnished with just bean sprouts, peanuts, and lime juice.

It was excellent, of course. I’d use a little more sauce next time, but a lot of lime juice made it more than flavorful enough. The most time-consuming part was boiling the water and then waiting for the noodles to soften. They should make frozen rice stick noodles that you can just thaw in the microwave and have them ready to stir-fry. That’s my kind of convenience food.

There’s an odd vacuum in the local hamburger bun market. You like sesame seed buns, right? I do. What I don’t like is a bun so large that it dwarfs my patty or forces me to make a gargantuan meat disc. When I go to the supermarket, however, all I ever see is normal-sized plain buns or huge sesame buns, such as Franz BBQ buns.

But you can get an ideal bun in town, if you’re willing to patronize a top-quality independent local bakery. Oh, you are? Then head to Columbia City Bakery. Their sesame buns (which are used at the excellent Roy’s BBQ–as well as other local restaurants, I’m sure) are five for $3.50, and they’re great. A little sweet, little resistance to the bite, and a dense crumb. I wish they were baked a little longer, but that’s about all I can complain about. You even get to slice them yourself, which means you can avoid the skinny-bottom-bun problem.

Pick some up on a Wednesday afternoon, when you can visit the adjacent farmers market, one of the best in town. You can even get your grass-fed beef patties at Skagit River Ranch.

Natalie asks:

> Were you and Iris on the food network? I don’t have cable, but my parents swear that they saw a bit with you and Iris in it. I want to believe them, yet I’ve heard nothing of it from your side of the family.

Okay, it’s true. You can view the spot online.

The Power of Food: Feeding Iris

It doesn’t seem to work at all on my Mac, so here’s a Quicktime version if you’re Mac-oriented.

I’m not sure what to say, except “thanks.” To Eric and Judy and the rest of Seesaw Studios, who made the filming painless and even fun; to the Food Network for airing it; and especially to [Shauna James](http://glutenfreegirl.com) for making the whole thing possible.

I’m an enthusiastic consumer of new and limited-edition candy bars, but I rarely write about them, because I leave that to the expert: Cybele May of CandyBlog.

But there’s a new bar that I’m so excited about, I have to sing it loud. (Don’t worry, there won’t be an actual song.) For a long time I’ve preferred Peanut Butter Twix to original Twix. The peanut butter version has always been hard to find, but I grab it when I see it. Now it’s been replaced. This scared me, of course. It’s bad enough that I had to hunt around, but now they’ve killed off Peanut Butter Twix altogether.

Don’t worry! It’s just like when they killed off Peter Petrelli on Heroes. Peanut Butter Twix has been resuscitated in a much cooler version with the candy bar equivalent of a better haircut. The new kid is called PB Twix, or possibly Twix PB. They’ve replaced the vanilla cookie layer with a chocolate cookie. Usually these “endless chocolate” variations don’t work, but this one does. I like it better than the original.

I just stopped at Safeway and bought three PB Twix. You never know when the product might explode.