You’re familiar with Pocky Sticks, right? Iris is. Today we went to H Mart, a huge Asian supermarket that recently opened in Federal Way, and when I mentioned to Iris that we might get some Pocky, she started chanting “POCKY POCKY POCKY” with a crazed look in her eye. It was like that episode of Alias where the guy turned into an assassin whenever someone said the code word, only in this case Iris only assassinated a pack of chocolate cookie sticks.

Pocky has a sister product of sorts, a savory stick called Pretz. It’s available throughout Asia and elsewhere in a wide variety of flavors including tom yam, larb, and corn. One of the cool things about Japan, at least as far as I can tell having never been there, is that many things are corn-flavored. Another true thing is that there’s a flavor of Pringles in Asia called Wild Consomme.

I figured the sticks would be made of corn, but it turned out they’re baked wheat sticks dusted with corn powder, made from dried ground sweet corn. There’s a weird fake butter flavor to them, but the corn flavor is quite honest. The possibilities of corn powder are endless. Would it be wrong to put it on popcorn?

The box of Pretz was pretty small, but they crammed an impressive number of sticks inside. Kind of like Japan. When I had finished all the Pretz (singular: Pret), I felt just like this kid:

The story of lard must be told. Not just to faithful blog readers, but to the people at large. Hence today’s feature.

Probably we’re a few years past the time when this was a bold declaration, but I like sweet wines better than dry wines. I was trying to figure out why this is so–I do have a sweet tooth, but I like my savory food unsullied with sugar and have no problem with sour or bitter flavors. Then I realized it has everything to do with price.

Right now, I’m finishing up a great bottle of madeira. It’s the Rare Wine Company’s Boston Bual. The bottle was a gift, but for journalistic purposes I looked up the price, and it was probably about $45. This bottle brightened at least a dozen evenings, which makes it a great deal. This is another nice thing about fortified wines in particular: you can keep them around for weeks and they don’t go bad. I try to keep port and sherry on hand, too.

But you don’t need to spend anything like $45 to get a bottle of sweet wine that will make you tingle. A couple of years ago, when the great 2001 vintage was released, I got a bottle of German riesling auslese for $22 that knocked me on my ass–not in the way you’re thinking, since this is a low-alcohol wine.

Because dry wines are still the fashionable choice, sweet wines are comparatively underpriced. When was the last time you spent $20 for a dry wine and had it rock your world, oenologically speaking?

A great introduction to the world of sweet wines is James Peterson’s book, Sweet Wines.

Bartender: One Bonnezeaux, one Sauternes, one Okanagan Valley icewine, please. (Sweet wine drinkers always say please.)

While paying bills, you eat chocolate to take your mind off the bills. Then you lick the envelopes and get chocolate all over them.

I share this slice of life to take my mind off the fact that Red Line is closed.

Yesterday we sailed across the choppy waters of Elliott Bay on the water taxi. We alighted in West Seattle by a rocky beach where divers were practicing. I thought this was totally cool. Iris was not so interested. She was busy “skipping rocks”–that is, throwing them into the water. We found a cool rock with four barnacles on it. Iris wanted to throw it in. I wanted to take it home. I prevailed, but only after promising that next time we came to this beach, we could bring the rock back with us and throw it in.

Incidentally, this beach is a gold mine of skipping rocks.

Laurie, who had read a review in the Seattle Times, suggested we have lunch at the restaurant just off the pier where you disembark the water taxi. It’s called Alki Crab and Fish, and it looks like a terrible place. See, here it is:

It’s that flat building that you can see through the bars of the boat. Here’s what it doesn’t have going for it:

* It has a gift shop.
* It has a great view.
* They advertise on the water taxi.
* It specializes in fried seafood combos, the kind where they fry up a cross-section of sea life.

If I owned a place like this, I’d put up a combo of fried things that aren’t actually edible, just to see who would order it. The #4: Fried nudibranch, sea squirt, anemone, and coral. With french fries.

You can see the punchline coming here: Alki Crab and Fish is not bad at all. We did get a fried combo, with shrimp, clams, calamari, halibut, and fries. The halibut is fresh. The rest isn’t, but with the exception of the overly processed calamari, everything was tasty and well fried. Iris actually liked the clam strips better than the french fries. We also had a cup of clam chowder (good, but I like homestyle chowder better than thick restaurant chowder) and an insanely meaty crab cocktail.

They also have ice cream, including “new and improved” Dreyer’s Butterfinger flavor, which really was good–not as good as Baskin-Robbins Peanut Butter and Chocolate, but close.

I did have some ill effects from our outing, but it had nothing to do with the seafood. My arm is sore from skipping rocks. Iris said, “You could put that arm in my bath and it’ll feel better in ONE MINUTE.”

**Alki Crab and Fish**
1660 Harbor Ave SW
Seattle, WA 98146
(206) 953-0237