**Name:** Matthew Amster-Burton

**Age at first sushi exposure:** 9

**Verdict:** Hated it

**Age at subsequent sushi exposure:** 26

**Location:** Shiki Sushi

**Verdict:** Loved it

**Favorite sushi pieces:** Toro and mackerel

**Least favorite:** Uni

**Name:** Iris Amster-Burton

**Age at first sushi exposure:** 11 months

**Verdict:** An 11-month-old will eat anything

**Age at subsequent sushi exposure:** 23 months

**Verdict:** The rice was okay

**Age at most recent sushi exposure:** 2 years, 2 months

**Location:** [Blue C Sushi](http://www.bluecsushi.com/)

**Verdict:** Loved it

**Favorite item:** Cream puff

**Favorite non-dessert items:** Salmon nigiri, unagi, shrimp tempura roll, potato croquette, pickled ginger, soy sauce. And rice.

**Least favorite:** Mackerel

**Percentage of Iris’s mackerel eaten by Matthew:** 100

Laurie and I had our tenth anniversary last week, and we went out to one of our favorite neighborhood restaurants, Dinette. We had rabbit rillettes with celeriac slaw, French onion soup, and similar homey winter delights.

For her main course, Laurie ordered a gratin of campanelle pasta with sauteed cauliflower and pickled peppers. (I had agnolotti with pork and chard.) It was a hearty portion of pasta and vegetables with bechamel, topped with cheese and breadcrumbs and baked until crunchy on top.

I’m a big fan of sauteed cauliflower, or any cauliflower prepared well, so without asking permission I poked at Laurie’s dish with my fork. (This is as good a reason to stay married for ten years as any.) I withdrew what looked like a large piece of cauliflower and popped it into my mouth. It turned out to be a piece of pasta. I tried again, sure this time that I’d speared the brassica I was after. Pasta again. I don’t think I ever actually got a piece of cauliflower, but I got a good laugh out of it, at least.

This blog is not one to toot its own horn. I did not mention it when we were featured in Affluent Golfer magazine, or profiled on Al-Jazeera. (Okay, neither of those things happened, but there really was once a magazine called Affluent Golfer). But check this out:

> Den Seattle-baserade matskribenten och bloggaren Matthew Amster-Burton hade inte så stora förhoppningar på mejlprogrammet.

Furthermore:

> Amster-Burton har tagit till sig vad han skämtsamt kallar en “webblivsstil”.

The article goes on to use the word “exempelvis.” Citizens of Ballard, enjoy!

Like clock radios, kitchen timers are a frustrating category: they’re cheap, but mostly poorly designed.

Until recently, most digital clock radios (and this is still true of many) could only be set ahead, not back. So if you overshot the time you were trying to set the alarm for, all you could do was sit there with your fingers cramping on the buttons, waiting for it to roll around again. Why did anyone put up with this? I probably wasted hours of my life setting alarms this way.

Kitchen timers today are as bad as clock radios were ten years ago. Nearly every timer on the market has the same flaw. Here’s a typical one:

Those Hour, Minute, and Second buttons are murder. If you want to time 45 minutes, you have to either hit the Minute button 45 times, or hold it down and hope you don’t go over 45, or you’ll be back in clock radio hell. Why do these still exist? There’s better technology available right now.

Here’s a different approach:

The ring around the red timer face is a dial that you turn to set the timer. Unfortunately, the way it works is that first you set the hours, then the minutes, then the seconds, and you have to wait between each setting. Unacceptable. However, it’s easy to imagine a timer like this where you just spin it fast to advance the time a lot and spin it slow to advance it a little, like on a digital car radio with tuning knobs. Maybe something like this already exists.

This is the timer I use:

As you can see, it lets you enter the time just the same way you would on that wacky new technology known as a telephone keypad. If you want to time 13 minutes and 42 seconds, you punch 1-3-4-2 and you’re ready to roll. Furthermore, the Polder has a powerful fridge magnet and a satisfyingly loud beep.

The only thing it doesn’t have is multiple timers, although you could always buy more than one Polder.

Or, you could always get something like this:

Each of those analog timers can be removed from the base and stuck on the fridge. Now that is cool.

I know that sign over there says I’m at work. And I am at work. But I have to share.

I’m working on a story about dried chiles, and I was just at a Mexican restaurant talking salsa. As we were wrapping up, the bartender said to the cook, “Hey, there are chiles in the *chapulinas,* right?”

“What are chapulinas?” I asked.

“You want to try one?”

“Sure.”

It turns out there are no chiles in the chapulinas. Just some salt, garlic, and a whole roasted grasshopper. They showed me how to pull off the legs (“They get caught in your throat,” said the cook) and bite the head off.

It tasted disturbingly like Parmesan cheese. I can’t say I liked it. However, I did earn the right, next time I take people to this restaurant, to say, “Hey, you guys want to try some chapulinas?”