Butterflies, sweetbreads, and pommes frites

Seattle has two butterfly exhibits, one at the aquarium and one at the zoo. We’re not big butterfly fans (Karen, you’ll recall, is a tarantula-keeper, Jake loves his kitties, and I’m into poison dart frogs), but there’s still something mighty cool about being surrounded by hundreds of gorgeous butterflies.

At the Pacific Science Center, you enter and leave a large greenhouse-like enclosure through an antechamber. That way, the butterflies have a harder time making a break for it. The docents are vigilant about brushing butterflies off the path, so we didn’t see any colorful corpses.

Weather, for Seattle, was unseasonably hot and rain-free. The butterfly enclosure felt like a sauna. Still, how often do you get to see so many of these cuties in one place?

As for the zoo, their tarantula collection impressed Karen. Hers is better (of course!) but she was happy with their obese Poecilotheria regalis. (Arachnophobes, don’t click on that link.)

We just missed the lions having sex by about two minutes. We were within earshot and it was kind of obvious. Roar. Roar. Roar. Roar roar roar roar roar roar . . . eh, you get the idea.

We did the zoo on our last day in Seattle. We didn’t have any plan for dinner, so I suggested we park down by Pike’s Place Market and walk around until we found something good. I had spied an Ethiopian restaurant and a falafel joint on our first day, and I had hopes one or the other might be open for dinner. No such luck. Campagne was open, but crap, it’s a French restaurant, and we were dressed in shorts and tee-shirts . . .

To hell with it. I popped in and asked the maitre d’, “How formal is Campagne?”

“You look great,” he said. Good answer. And that’s how we ended up eating at one of the priciest (and highest rated) restaurants in Seattle.

In my opinion, one of the best features of French restaurants are the waiters. These guys and gals invariably put me at ease and make me feel like Somebody. When I asked for a dry martini, he didn’t blink an eye when I didn’t know what “neat” meant. Then I asked for Sapphire gin and he acted like I was effing brilliant. All very subtle, mind you; no one would accuse him of kissing my ass. But my ass felt kissed nonetheless.

For appetizers, we ordered a charcuterie platter with an evilly good assortment of veal tongue, potted duck, and pate. That tongue . . . oy. I could live off that stuff. We also ordered pomme frites fried in duck fat, and that was the only disappointment. I know how flavorful duck fat is — or should be — and I tasted rather little of it on these fries.

That’s my favorite butterfly picture of the three.

Jake ordered Guinea hen, Karen ordered quail, and I ordered sweetbreads. No, I had never eaten sweetbreads before, but I figured that if any place new how to prepare the stuff, this place should. If I didn’t like it here, I wouldn’t like it anywhere. Anyway, why go to a place like this and order something I could make for myself? I’m no fool.

Sweetbreads, according to Wikipedia,

is the name of a dish made of the thymus (neck/throat/gullet sweetbread) or the pancreas (belly/stomach/heart sweetbread) of an animal younger than one year old. These animals are usually piglets or calves. However, llamas may also be preferred.

The two organs have very different biological functions, but look fairly similar and so are considered, for the purpose of cooking, to be comparable. Thymus sweetbreads are slightly longer and more irregular, with pancreas sweetbreads being larger and more rounded. To connoisseurs, the pancreas sweetbreads are the “real deal”, whereas the throat variety are sometimes shunned.

I didn’t ask if I was getting pancreas or thymus, but from the Wiki description, I suspect it was thymus. Mmmm. Doesn’t it look luscious?

General thoughts: interesting. Delicate for the most part, but with chewy bits. The flavor was not immediately die-and-go-to-heaven, but I could see how this might grow on a dude. A fine vehicle for a delicious sauce.

Karen’s and Jake’s dishes were great, too. They have such dinky appetites that I’m usually able to taste their dishes, and at Campagne, I must have eaten a third of each dish. Jake’s Guinea hen came with an escargot sauce, and while I’m a fan of escargot, these snails were sour and chewy, not salty and garlicky (which is how I like ’em).

We ordered two of the tarte pommes for dessert. Imagine an apple clafouti with a caramel sauce, buttermilk vanilla ice cream on the side. Fabulous.

And then they brought out three chocolate truffles, which reminded me of this guy.

Mr. Creosote notwithstanding, I managed to eat 1.5 chocolate truffles without puking or exploding.

Our verdict on Campagne: three thumbs up.

D.