What if I told you there’s an island of abortion rights in the Mountain West, born of a state constitution so forward-looking that it started out by enshrining abortion rights a full year before the US Supreme Court’s landmark abortion decision Roe V. Wade in 1973?

Hey from Montana, a strange, gigantic state that people have all kinds of ideas about. When I travel, which is often, telling someone I’m from Montana typically elicits one of two responses: The first is, “Oh, Trump Country!” I’ve had this one blurted at me from Mongolia to Michigan, no matter that Montana barely has a million people and almost no say in presidential electoral politics. The second tends along the lines of, “Oh I’m obsessed with Montana and I want to move there/vacation there/buy a fourth home there.” Okay.

I miss the sun: Expect a cloudy day with a high near 50 degrees. There’s a 40 percent chance of rain near midnight, which will likely carry into tomorrow morning until around 10 am. Take that midday walk if you can. The sun sets around 4:18 pm tonight.

Watch out for your immigrant neighbors: The Edmonds School District cancelled an immigrant know-your-rights event with the Mexican Consulate of Washington after receiving a flood of threats and hostility inspired by a post from the far-right account Libs of TikTok. The school wanted to help prepare immigrant families with children for Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan, but cancelled for safety reasons. Libs of TikTok has been linked to threats of violence before, including bomb threats against gyms, children’s hospitals, doctors, drag shows and more. The district says it remained committed to helping families prepare for enforcement. It didn't say how, but the district encourages undocumented parents to submit up-to-date emergency contacts to care for their children if Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detains them. 

Ah, finally an opportunity to give the Big Pink Cookie her flowers. The palm-sized pink frosting-covered treat is a Northwest delicacy that has sat in local grocery stores and on coffee cart counters for as long as I can remember. It’s one of those snacks that is so ubiquitous in Seattle that I suspect the public has stopped noticing. When Stranger Managing Editor Megan Seling asked about BPC’s at her local Thriftway, the employee said something like, “I don’t know when they get restocked, we always just… have them.” 

My memory of the Big Pink Cookie consists of a large crumbly Danish shortbread slathered in pale pink cream cheese frosting that’s perfumed with almond extract and the tiniest bit of cardamom. Uncle Seth’s Cookies claims to be the founding father of the cookie, which has an origin story that’s just as weird as I expected. PNW wholesaler Marsee Baking, who has carried on the Uncle Seth brand since 2012, writes:

I’m a 45-year-old cis woman. I’ve been married to a cis man for almost twenty years. About a year and a half ago, I made out with a woman at a party, and everything clicked. I realized something was missing in my life, and I started exploring my attraction to women with my husband’s blessing. I had always felt attracted to women but didn’t fully acknowledge it, thinking it was normal for “straight” women to be attracted to other women while only dating men. (I’ve since learned about compulsory heterosexuality.) I met a wonderful woman, and we dated for over a year. While I was with her, I realized I’m gay. We spent a lot of time together, I had the best sex of my life, saw shows, went out to dinners, had sleepovers, met each other’s kids. It was a real relationship. But she ended things because I wasn’t ready to make major changes in my life — she wasn’t included in our large family gatherings, as some family members don’t know about our open marriage. My husband has a girlfriend now, and I’m happy for him, but he feels certain family members wouldn’t understand. This made my girlfriend feel deprioritized, despite my reassurances and all the time I spent with her.

Stuck the landing: A bow hunter hiking above Lake Serene in Snohomish County fell off a cliff. He plummeted 100 feet, hitting rocks along the way before he plunged into the frigid lake. He pulled himself from the lake and activated a personal locator beacon to call for help at around 10 p.m. He sustained serious injuries. A search and rescue team flew him to Harborview Medical Center at around 1:45 am. 

Deadly Bellevue police shooting: On Monday morning, Bellevue police responded to an emergency call at a house for “report of a harassment with a knife.” The call ended with one officer involved in a shooting, killing a 67-year-old man. As the Seattle Times reports, "an initial police news release did not clarify what kind of threat the man posed."

Seattle’s election results were an unalloyed victory for the left, with progressive Alexis Mercedes Rinck winning decisively over Tanya Woo, and Shaun Scott heading to Olympia as the first socialist elected to the Legislature in a very long time. But Trump’s reascension to the presidency should cause us some soul-searching.

By now, eagle-eyed hindsight has started to answer the “why:” Incumbents around the globe are paying the price for post-pandemic anxiety, inflation, and voters’ grim assessments of the state of the economy and the world. People are in a kick-’em-out mood; the modest margin by which Trump won the popular vote reflects, if anything, his weakness as a candidate. Perhaps there was a path to a Democratic victory, but it was a narrow one and the party didn’t take it.

Ever since Matthew Wendland (from Burien Press and Fable) opened the all-day cafe Seasmith inside Capitol Hill Station, I’ve become completely enamored with its Fruity Pebbles cookie. It’s a full-fledged textural journey, featuring citrusy, crackly bits of Fruity Pebbles embedded like rainbow jewels inside a toothsome cookie with chewy edges and a soft center. I’m also sometimes tempted to tear off pieces and dunk them into my drink, which is weirdly good in a crispy-gone-soggy kind of way.

When Seattle City Council Member Tammy Morales announced her resignation last Wednesday, Southeast Seattle did not just lose a longtime, battle-tested representative—we are once again being punished for daring to elect a leader who fought fiercely for our community’s interests.

As residents and workers of Southeast Seattle, we share the generational traumas and daily realities of living our lives in historically oppressed, redlined, and underinvested working-class neighborhoods. These struggles shape our politics—it’s why we twice elected Tammy Morales to champion progressive policies and investments our communities desperately need. With so many Black and brown communities concentrated in District 2, Morales understood the need to center racial equity,  prioritize authentic community engagement, and repair the harm that has been inflicted upon our communities.

The year of our lordt 2024 is quickly drawing to a close, but that doesn't mean December is leaving us with bottom of the barrel events. There's still plenty worth throwing on your calendar, from You're Wrong About and American Hysteria present A MASSIVE SEANCE to Velocity's Next Fest NW and from Short Stories Live: Rogue’s Christmas to the Christmas Ship Parade of Boats.

MONDAY

SHOPPING

Holiday in the Sun
The Big Dark has me daydreaming about an escape to sunny Santa Fe or Sedona, but in the meantime, I'll content myself with this Southwestern-themed holiday market at Capitol Hill's desert motel-inspired bar The Wash. Check out vintage ranch apparel from Heavy Duty Vintage (run by former EverOut employee Kim Selling), bone art and pyrography from Pyromanced, greenery from Seattle Plant Daddy, curiosities from Cryptic Crate, asdzáán/wuhti-made jewelry from Feral, bone jewelry and vintage wares from The Metal Botanist, small-batch hot sauce from Bootsie’s Sauce Co., themed flash ink from tattoo artist Cecil Whitney, and sterling silver jewelry and bolo ties from Down Poor Jewelry. The local org Project Nightlight will also be present to discuss harm reduction and public health. JULIANNE BELL
(The Wash, Capitol Hill)

Five shot at International District Hookah Lounge: Around 4 am on Saturday morning, police responded to reports of gunfire at Caravel Hookah Lounge in Seattle's Chinatown International District. While they found evidence of a shooting—shell casings inside and outside of the building—the police found no victims. Instead, four people with gunshot wounds took themselves to Harborview Medical Center and a fifth called 911 while wandering around Sodo. According to nearby businesses, this is not the first late night shooting at Caravel. The hookah lounge has been a hotbed of late-night drama. 

Hmmm... maybe the mayor's approach isn't working: A new Seattle Times piece ties the surge in International District neighborhood crime with Mayor Bruce Harrell's policies to clean up downtown. By prioritizing sweeping and cleaning up visible homelessness downtown, Harrell has pushed people on the street elsewhere. Harrell is failing to address the problem by prioritizing short-term punitive measures, such as increasing misdemeanor arrests, instead of providing adequate shelter or housing. People have left downtown and flocked to places without regular police patrols or three-times-a-day sidewalk power washes, like in the ID's Little Saigon. But at least the business owners in the Downtown Seattle Association are happy. 

Did you know that there’s a difference between a Black and White Cookie and a Half Moon Cookie? I didn’t, and I fell down a deep google hole so you don’t have to. 

So to start, neither the Black and White nor the Half Moon are technically cookies at all—they’re drop cakes. As the New York Times explained in the '90s, “the batter resembles the batter for a cupcake, with a little extra flour so that the dough does not run all over the place when it is dropped, dollop by dollop, on the baking sheet.”

You know the story. A Tik Tok food critic, Keith Lee, with a gazillion followers visited a local sushi joint, FOB Sushi Bar, ate some raw fish, and gave the experience a mostly positive review. But before FOB Sushi could enjoy the boom of a "Keith Lee Effect," his fans claimed they saw a worm or something move in a piece of sushi he consumed. I do not want to go into whether there was worm or not, and besides I think we should eat more insects (and let me not get into how much I miss eating the hairy caterpillars sold in markets in and around Gaborone, Botswana), but the controversy was so loud, so viral, so relentless that it forced FOB Sushi Bar to close "Until Further Notice" its Seattle and Bellevue locations on Nov 19.  

 

 

 

 

 

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What I didn’t realize when putting together my list of favorite cookies for this countdown is that I am very obviously going through a ✨cornflake phase✨. There are cornflakes in Cakes of Paradise’s Butter Dream and, sneakily, in Good Luck Bread’s cereal cookie, too. Cereal in cookies isn’t anything new, of course. It first became a trend almost 20 years ago when Christina Tosi shocked the stuffy food world by putting a cereal milk panna cotta on the dessert menu at David Chang’s very hip and still relatively new restaurant, Momofuku, and BOOM! Cereal and cereal milk was being added to every pastry and dessert menu under the sun, including at Tosi’s eventual chain of dessert shops, Milk Bar.

NEW OPENINGS & RETURNS

Desi Pizza Kitchen
This restaurant serving pizzas with Indian toppings like palak paneer and butter chicken recently made its debut in Queen Anne. Besides pizza, the spot also offers gyros, subs, burgers, momos, and more.
Queen Anne