Waiting for Christmas

Here's a little peek at the Christmas Tree you won't be seeing at Salisbury House this week. We cut it down at the farm the day after Thanksgiving and conscientiously put it in water when we got home, not suspecting we were going to get a week of weather with highs below freezing. It's frozen solid, canted at the angle it rests against the house, in a large galvanized wash tub, awaiting our usually more temperate winter weather, hopefully we'll get a thaw next week.

But with the free time offered by not having to trim the tree, we have most of the other decorations in place and we are busy baking. Here's the coffeecake you'll want to serve on Christmas Morning

Orange Chocolate Coffee Cake

• 2 eggs
• 1 C orange juice
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 3 C flour
• 1 C sugar
• 1 T baking powder
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 C butter, room temp.
• 2-11 oz cans mandarin oranges, drained
• 1C semisweet chocolate chips
• 1C flaked coconut

Preheat to 375. Butter & flour a 9X13” baking pan.

In a small bowl mix eggs, juice and vanilla.

In a large bowl, stir flour, sugar, baking powder, & soda. Using a pastry blender, or fork, mix in butter until crumbly. Add wet ingredients and mix. Fold in orange segments and chocolate chips.

Pour into pan.

In a medium bowl mix coconut with ½ C sugar and 1T butter. Sprinkle over cake and bake for 35-45 minutes until tests done.

Enjoy!!!

Getting Soaked

To protect the innocent-and the naked-no photos accompany this blog post.

It's been the usual autumn weather smorgasbord in Seattle, stunningly shiny days with bright blue skies, monsoon-like, warm and wet from a "pineapple express", or just cold and drizzly with gusty winds. On one of these latter afternoons three of my "girls" and I gathered with towels to try out Hothouse, a woman's spa and sauna on Capitol Hill in the Pike/Pine Corridor. We spent a toasty hour soaking in the hot tub, sweating in the sauna or steam room and refreshing ourselves in the cold plunge shower. Not for the bashful, they encourage nudity; but the lights are low, the air is steamy and even though there's a lesbian bar upstairs, we straight gals felt perfectly comfortable. It helps that we've been friends since we were teenagers when the flesh was firmer. So if you don't mind dropping trou with strangers, I can't recommend a better way to spend $12 and a chilly afternoon. They also offer massages by appointment.

Afterwards, damp and relaxed, we walked up the street to Boom Noodle for a little supper. Boom is owned by the same folks who have a local chain of very popular conveyor belt sushi restaurants called Blue C. We snacked on spring rolls, katsu prawns, ahi tacos and calimari and washed them down with cold beer or mojitos. We recommend sitting in the bar, it's slightly quieter since the main dining has very high ceilings, long uncovered tables and the night were there, some noisy kids slurping noodles and fidgeting in their chairs. Deciding to skip the dessert menu, we stopped into Cupcake Royale just a few doors down to indulge in some of their very pretty cupcakes. Is this a great town or what?!

Cathy Wiese-Innkeeper

Remembering Mary

Co-founder of Salisbury House in 1985, Mary Wiese passed away recently after a severe stroke in late August. She retired from innkeeping about ten years ago but her imprint remains. Her paintings and photographs hang on the walls of the inn and the curtains she designed and sewed flutter in the windows, and she collected, and read, most of the volumes in the library. We are still serving her very popular Oatmeal Pancakes for breakfast at least once a week, look for the recipe in the latest addition of the Best Places Northwest Cookbook and on our website.

She was a traveler, reader, gardener, wife and baseball fan. A talented cook and seamstress, a realtor, innkeeper and community activist-when she was president of the Chamber of Commerce she lobbied hard for what became the #8 bus line that joins Capitol Hill with the Seattle Center. Her mother was a suffragist and Mary remembered coming home from school to a house on Queen Anne Hill that was domestically neglected while her mother was out working on some campaign. Mary was strongly opinionated, but fair-minded and respected the toil and dignity of workers. Her father was a builder in the Midwest, she was born in Lake Forest, Illinois. Affluent as a child, they slowly lost everything in the Depression, the house in Minneapolis and farm in Wisconsin; her father headed to Seattle to find work, first picking hops in the Kent Valley and then again as a builder, when he could finally send for the family.

Mary was the youngest of four and the only girl, wan as a child but a beauty as a young woman. Smart, she skipped a couple of grades and was the first in the family to graduate from college. After college she went to work for United Airlines in San Francisco where she met Charles Wiese, a Marine on recruiting duty, he recruited a wife in addition to scores of grunts. They moved up and down the coast and then in 1961, outside of San Diego, she had a baby girl and this writer came into the picture; because Mary was a lot of things, but most important to me, she was my mother.

--Cathy Wiese, Innkeeper