Have you ever been in a group where everyone wanted something different? Well, one of our favorite lunching places in Walla Walla solves that problem. With variety on the menu and fresh ingredients at hand, the Green Spoon offers something for everyone.
Food
Advertised as serving food that is fresh, healthy and delicious, we found the Green Spoon to be just that! The vegetables looked as though they had just been picked, crisp and ripe, from the garden and the sandwiches are hearty and well stuffed. The menu offers many styles of food from Greek, Thai and Mexican, all the way to a classic BLT or mac n’ cheese.
Location and Atmosphere
On Main street in downtown Walla Walla, the Green Spoon is located near several tasting rooms and shops, making it a convenient place to stop for a fresh lunch or hearty dinner after a long day of tasting and shopping. The atmosphere is light and modern, with art from local artists displayed on the walls.
Writeability and Purchased Presence
During non-peak hours, the Green Spoon is a great place to grab a bite and a drink and linger for a while with your notebook. The staff is very accommodating and often happy to answer questions about the menu, or even non-menu related questions. However, out of courtesy, keep an eye on the traffic flow and make sure you’re not taking up a table too long during rush hours unless you’ve ordered a full meal.
Price
Lunch prices can range from $9-12 and dinner entrees can get up to $22, which is reasonable for the quality of ingredients and portion size.
Parking
Free parking is on Main St. and side streets.
Writer’s Tip
To get your writing juices flowing, try this writing exercise. Once you’ve placed your order, as your server two quick questions. #1 What’s the most popular item on the menu, and #2 What is an item not frequently ordered. With this in mind, imagine your character sitting in the Green Spoon, would they order the most popular item, or something else? Jot down notes for a scene in which your character is sitting with someone who makes an unusual request from the menu, how does your character react?
Find It
The Green Spoon Walla Walla
13 E Main St
Walla Walla, WA Website
This meal was complimentary, courtesy of Tourism Walla Walla.
We know Fridays can be a drag. They can start out great because you wake up and realize, “It’s almost the weekend!” But then the lulls strike. The first time you look at the clock, it’s only 10 A.M. You brace yourself and remember, keep busy and the day will fly by, right? Then 2 P.M. rolls around, still the day isn’t over. Ugh!
Well, we’d like to introduce our Friday Forum. A pleasant little something to break up a dragging day. Not unlike the office, we’ll be gathering here around the metaphorical water cooler catching up on what writers are talking about. New book releases, writing techniques, maybe even a little celebrity gossip. Who knows!? It’ll be up to you. Because what it really comes down to is we’d like to hear from you!
Here’s how it works, every Friday we’ll post a question, quote or chatter that we’ve been hearing about and you respond letting us know what you think! Easy peasy. So check back tomorrow and join the conversation!
It’s the middle of a new week. And I barely have any writing to show for it.
Time is whirling a little out of control right now. Do you know what I mean? Just a couple of weeks ago I felt like a writing superwoman. I was at the top of my game. I was writing, writing, writing, and produced some things I felt pretty darn good about.
Today you should see my office (it’s a mess). And my list of personal to-do’s (it’s backlogged). My blogging schedule is all out of whack. Deadlines are the only things keeping things going.
However, lest you think I’m complaining, I should say that life is good. Outside of the digital world and my office, things couldn’t be better. I’m blessed beyond measure. And enjoying and maintaining that other world–the one that’s more important, in all reality, than the one that resides on a desk chair and in front of a computer screen–has led to my current situation. I wouldn’t change a thing.
As the week goes on I’ll work at regaining a little ground here in this office of mine. I’ll keep writing, keep blogging, keep trying to get organized. Because that’s where a core part of my life and identity reside. But in the meantime, it’s good to know that I can find balance, that I can identify my priorities and live life accordingly. Now if only I could master my time management, find a way to be too places at once, and always be on top of everything…
What are your tactics for maintaining balance in your own writing or creative life?
(By the way, that photo up there shows tea and a cookie, a Nooks & Cranberries-style way to slow down and reflect. But it gets better than that–the cookie is a delicious Scandinavian almond bar, from recipe I remember from my childhood. I’ll be sharing it over at Outside Oslo soon, so be sure to visit in the coming days!)
There’s nothing like a little French inspiration to get us in the mood to write. We may not be able to time travel to Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s 1920s Paris, but Brasserie Four in Walla Walla comes close. So it seems like the perfect way to start our Walla Walla-based Destination Inspiration series.
Food
From an artfully composed salade niçoise to macarons with just the right balance between chewy and light, this French bistro in Downtown Walla Walla is one of our favorite spots in Washington wine country. Owner Hannah MacDonald has come up with a menu that celebrates the best of classic French fare, while managing to keep it fresh, fun, and never too heavy.
Location and Atmosphere
Located on Main Street in Downtown Walla Walla, this is the perfect place to people watch, especially if you can get a seat on the patio or by a window. We lingered a while after our meal to enjoy our macarons and just take in the scenery and its people. We noticed business taking place one table over and a man seated behind us raved about the food and said he always stopped by when he was in town. Â The atmosphere and cuisine are such that people keep coming back and you can count us among them!
Writeabilityand Purchased Presence
Come with a notebook and a pen–and ideally a writing partner. This is a great place to brainstorm over a couple of bubbly wines. Keep the mood fun, and not too serious, and be mindful of the crowd when deciding how long to linger.
Price: $$
Expect to pay around $8 for a starter, or $10-20 for an entree. While pretty typical for a restaurant of this caliber, consider your writer’s budget before deciding in a moment of epicurean bliss that you’re going to come here every day for lunch.
Parking
Street parking is often available along Main Street. We’ve never had trouble finding a good spot more than a block or two away from our destination.
Writer’s Tip
One of the few restaurants around with a designated kids’ play area, this is the perfect place for a writing meeting when you have to bring the kids along. They also offer a kids’ size to virtually anything on the menu, and offer high chairs, which can be hard to come by among Walla Walla’s fine restaurants.
Find It
Brasserie Four
4 East Main Street
Walla Walla, Washington Website
After a long, international flight, your jet lagged character arrives in her hotel room. Too exhausted to even take off her shoes, she slouches into a chair and stares out the window. What’s going through her mind as she looks at the sights outside?
Tuesday:
Smell
It’s dinnertime in this Parisian apartment building. Focusing on the smells wafting out of the windows, create a series of vignettes about what’s taking place in several homes.
Wednesday:
Sound
Your character takes one last trip to the beach before the sun sets on the final day of vacation. Do the sounds of the waves make her lonely, pensive, happy, relaxed, or anxious? Why?
Thursday:
Touch
The warm water circling your ankles, sand grinding between your toes, fish swimming by–think back to a trip to the beach and recapture that day in as much sensory detail as possible.
Friday:
Taste
What’s the most adventurous thing you’ve ever eaten? Describe the taste and the whole experience in such a way that readers will feel like they’re eating it at that moment, too.
Grab Bag:
Cats roam the ruins of ancient Ephesus, millions of tourists tread the ancient roads of Pompeii. Think about the contrast of the ancient past and the present and write down five possible story ideas that come to mind. Don’t worry about developing them right now, just write down everything that comes to mind, then file them away for a future date when you’re feeling stuck.
Bringing our Walla Walla book & wine pairing series to a close, we’ll have a chat with Kirsten Telander, a freelance writer in Walla Walla and co-author of “Wine Taster’s Survival Guide.†I first met Kirsten as she was representing Tero Estates and Flying Trout wines in their tasting room in downtown Walla Walla. Little did I know that she was the perfect person to ask about pairing wine with books. With her background in writing and her history in the wine industry, she pointed out some pairings that I never would have thought of! She also shares with us a bit about how she got her start as a writer and how she came to embrace her secret affection for chick lit.
Kirsten Telander. Photo from Kirsten.
What would you consider to be signature wines for Tero and Flying Trout?Â
Flying Trout Malbecs have a cult-like following. Her 100% vineyard designate Malbecs are what she’s best known for. Ashley Trout was the firstWashingtonwinemaker to dedicate her brand to Malbec and Malbec blends. She definitely pushed the envelope with the blends. For example, some would say to use only 5% Malbec or go 100%, but she’ll put together blends with 30% for example and she makes it work. But, if you’re asking for 1 wine as signature? Mary’s Block Malbec – 100% off the estate vineyard (Windrow)
The signature wine for Tero is the Windrow. It is named after the estate vineyard (Windrow is the oldest commercially planted vineyard along with the adjacent Seven Hills Vineyard in the Walla WallaValley). Winemaker Doug Roskelley is the only winemaker that I know of in WA (if not the U.S.) doing a true field blend, which is what Windrow is. Field blends are an age-old tradition in Europe. Cabernet, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Malbec are harvested at the same time in proportion to their planting in the estate vineyard and co-fermented. The result is an expression of the vineyard, not the varietals, for that year. The 2008 was ranked #44, 92 points in the 100 best bottles in Washington by Seattle Metropolitan Magazine. The 2009 will be released at the end of September.
Flying Trout wine. Photo by Daytona Strong.
What are some of your personal favorites?
I’m a Cabernet Sauvignon gal. Give me a good Cab and I’m happy. That being said, I think that the Tero Herb’s Block Merlot is one of the best Merlot’s I’ve had. Washington Merlots in general are bigger with more structure (drinking in the direction of Cabs with killer aromatics) than any other wine region I’ve found. Flying Trout Torrontes is one of the most kick-ass whites I’ve had. It’s different. Clean, light, and hugely aromatic – she actually travels to Mendoza, Argentina every year just to make this wine. If she stopped people would protest, including me.
If you could sit down right now with one of your personal favorites and something to read, what would it be?
Cover photo from Amazon.com
I’d drink the Torrontes with Vanity Fair magazine or one of my favorite chick lit authors, not total fluff, but a bit of a beach read. Holly Peterson’s “The Manny” comes to mind, or Pam Houston’s “Cowboys Are My Weakness”. Anything, and I mean anything, but “Fifty Shades of Gray”. I threw it out, even while heavily drinking.
A good cab by the fire (Tero Estates 2008 Hill Block) would call for a re-read of Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast,” or something quirky and original like “No One Belongs Here More Than You” by Miranda July. Or Michael Byers’ “The Cost of Good Intentions.”
In the realm of reading, what are some of your favorite authors or books?
I’m a sucker for good memoirs. “Just Kids” by Patty Smith, “Eat, Pray, Love” (yes, I loved it despite certain critics), and I just finished a wonderful memoir that is little known – “Chance of Sun: An Oregon Memoir” by Kim Cooper Findling. I got hooked on memoir years ago with Mary Karr’s “The Liar’s Club” – I love the combo of tragic and comic and she pulls this off brilliantly. Raymond Carver is a genius in my mind. I really admire the work of Lorrie Moore (just finished “A Gate at the Stairs”), Amy Hempel, and Ron Carlson (love “Hotel Eden”).
Can you tell us a bit about your writing life?
After graduate school (where I studied creative writing) I was paralyzed. Colleagues were either writing inaccessible (in my mind) poetry or literary fiction, and I struggled to find my voice. I got caught up in journalistic stuff just to write (and make a few bucks and I mean a few) but I’m not a journalist and knew that wasn’t my future. A few years ago, I carved out a little time and started to write a few essays about my experience managing a tasting room – behind the scenes stuff that isn’t so glamorous. But I realized I could never publish them because nobody in the wine biz here would ever talk to me again. That’s when the idea of a novel sounded good. And I had an epiphany: I don’t want to write literary fiction. I admire it, but it’s not what I want. I want to be somewhere in between chick lit and something with some intelligence and heart. I joke that I came out of the closet as a writer of chick lit! It was so liberating! So in addition to freelance writing about wine, food, and lifestyle, I have started a novel based in the wine business. Is it based in Walla Walla? Yes. Does it have a few people that appear that are based on winemakers here? Yes. But there’s enough fiction to free me up and have fun with it. I am re-building my website (www.kirstentelander.com) which will include sample chapters 🙂
Any advice for our wine-drinking, book-loving writers?
Wine drinking is such a sensory experience, and I am drawn to books that draw on the sensory. I would think book-loving writers that drink wine would agree. “Joy for Beginners” and “The School of Essential Ingredients” by Erica Bauermeister are good examples of someone who uses her craft of writing and love of sensory and sense of character to create great novels; Frances Mayes has made a career out of her non-fiction. Speaking of characters, wine tasting is the perfect excuse to create characters! People really open up in tasting rooms often revealing their very interesting stories (or not and even those make for good material). Take your writer’s notebook with you and make note of all the sensory details and the people you meet along the way.
Sometimes you just need to bake. You need to open a cookbook, find something that you have all the ingredients for, and get to work whipping butter, eggs, sugar, and flour into some magical concoction. Maybe you’re suffering from writer’s block. Maybe you’re just hungry. In any case, a little time in the kitchen can be a great source of inspiration if you’re anything like me.
Take yesterday, for example. As I stood in the kitchen, coring pears and stirring a pot of simmering fruit sauce on the stove, words came to me as though I was writing in my head. I was spending the day baking some things I was planning to feature on Outside Oslo, my Scandinavian food blog, and the words just started coming together, making me excited to get to the computer and see what would happen.
As the day went on, the aroma of fruit and spice from the Scandinavian fruit soup* and the pear sauce I was making started to mingle with the deep, sensual fragrance of warm, chocolate cake.** Little did I know when I got to work in the kitchen yesterday that I was going to fill my home with the warmest, most inviting scent, the kind that makes you feel all cozy inside. If that’s not enough to inspire creativity, I don’t know what is.
*The Scandinavian fruit soup is from my latest article in Pregnancy & Newborn Magazine. The article–“Double-duty dishes: Autumn soups to satisfy the whole family”–is on page 36 of the October issue (the digital edition is available here).
**I’ll be featuring the recipe for chocolate cake later this week on Outside Oslo.
Continuing our series on wine & book pairings, we take a look at Cadaretta. I asked Brian Rudin, resident winemaker, about his choice wines and how they compliment some of his favorite reads. While the Foundry is focused on art, the folks at Cadaretta are all about the science of wine. Brian says that what sets them apart from all the other wineries in Walla Walla is their scientific approach, and a new plot of land they are developing for grapes.
Brian Rudin blending wine. Photo by Kyle Madson.
To Brian, beyond the taste, what captivates him about wine is the complexity and history behind every blend and bottle. Not surprisingly, his taste in books is much the same.
What are some “can’t miss” wines you’d like to be sure our readers know about?
Cadaretta 2011 “SBS†Sauvignon Blanc / Semillon blend. We are well-known for the quality of our whites. Our white winemaking style is very different from our neighbors and friends inWashington, as we make super-crisp, racy, mineral and citrus-driven juice. We make this white blend with 75% Sauvignon Blanc and 25% Semillon. The trick is to use absolutely no oak, and to forestall the malolactic fermentation. The next wine people should seek out is our 2008 Cadaretta Cabernet Sauvignon. On reds, we have a reserved style that a delayed-gratification: this is a wine that is just starting to blossom, but will age gracefully for 10-15 years in your cellar. When a wine has the stuffing to age like that, amazing things can happen to the aromas and textures. But it has to be built sturdy for the long-haul, and this one is. This is an “archival wine†as we discussed, that will deliver a small piece of history to your senses when you open it 15 years from now. It reflects the vintage very well.
Cadaretta wine bottles. Photo by Kyle Madson.
Can you recommend a wine for the following book categories – heavy, medium and light reads?
HEAVY: Reach for Cabernet Sauvignon. Like thick reading, it is not always easy at first, but tends to reward more deeply by the ending. Some messages just take time and gravitas in order to fully understand. The wines are gripping and challenging in their youth, but with time come to display their meaning with power and finesse.Â
MEDIUM: WashingtonStateSyrah: We’ll make a comparison to Chuck Palahniuk here for medium reading. It can be weird and yet enjoyable the entire ride, but will undoubtedly keep you coming back for more. The notes you detect can be funky, racy, and sometimes downright disturbing; but you will find the individualism and the honesty endlessly refreshing.Â
LIGHT: Unoaked whites and roses: a wine needn’t bowl you over with heavy themes for you to enjoy it. Unoaked whites and roses can be perfectly pleasing and refreshing, to be enjoyed in the moment while you unwind and reflect on some of the other (non-wine, non-literature) things in life.
Has there been a book you’ve read that has stuck with you? What was it and how would you describe it in wine terms? Â
A few titles come to mind. For non-fiction: “Undaunted Courage,†by Stephen Ambrose, which details Lewis and Clark’s four year expedition to be the first overland trek to the Pacific Coast of the Territiorial US and back. This one resonated with me on a personal level because Lewis and Clark passed throughWalla Wallaand theColumbiaValleyas part of their expedition. They painstakingly chronicled the geography, flora, and fauna of the land with the aim of publishing the opportunities for the American people, during the infancy of the republic. Now, 210 years later, we are still discovering the potential of this land. I never ceased to be amazed by how much we still have yet to learn about our own young wine region. We owe thanks to the people who pioneered this region, came out on foot and horse with no more than they could carry. They risked their families’ lives to have a chance at a new world. Now we are here, with a duty to do the very best we can with this gift.
Cover photo from amazon.com.
For fiction, I most recently devoured “Freedom†by Jonathan Franzen. The core theme of the book is the idea that the freedom of our choices will be manifest in the lives of those we touch. Franzen takes it a little further to link the American experience, which has felt the positive and negative impacts of being populated by misfit immigrants, opportunity seekers, profiteers, sturdy industrialists, and any other castoff from Europe or beyond who didn’t have the freedom of choice in their own native land. These people came to America, populated the west and realized they could do whatever they wanted. The results could be beautiful or devastating. We are at the same juncture with wines in the New World: because in Europe, regional laws closely dictate how wines are made, down to the last details of what grapes you can use, which can be blended, when you may legally start picking, etc…. In the new world, we are only governed by the market, by what people will like and choose to buy. We are pushing the limits of what can be done with wine, and breaking a lot of rules in the process. Like the characters in Franzen’s work, the results of our choices can be beautiful or terrible. They can also be flawed, honest, and captivating.Â
About Nooks & Cranberries
[quote]There are many excuses not to write, but we're here to ensure that a lack of creativity isn't one of them.[/quote]
Nooks & Cranberries was created by two friends, Sarah Madson and Daytona Strong, who are freelance writers based in Seattle.
