Lunch Break at the Urban University Forum

At the Urban University Forum on Thursday we met in two rooms, one set up for chairs and one set up for meals. In the room with the meals were the Urban Studies student projects listed in our program as a symposium.

One student project was about a neighborhood above UW Tacoma. Before World War Two, there was a Japantown there. Briefly mentioned was that the Japanese produce market there was the first public market in Tacoma. I had not known it was the first. There are to be discussions as the university enters a phase of development farther uphill around Market Street and Fawcett. Discussion should include representation of immigrant groups.

I became a vegetarian in 1987. I had notified organizers by email that I wanted vegetarian. With a cookie and chips and fruit inside my box was a large sandwich with a large dark mushroom. I ate half the sandwich and saved the other half and the mushroom. Friday morning I toasted the bread and used the mushroom in this recipe which is slightly adapted from Gittleman's Super Nutrition for Menopause:

Bisque

3 cups rolled oats

12 cups water

3 cups vegetables

4 tablespoons miso

Simmer the first three ingredients until it is all hot and softened. Add miso and blend thoroughly in a blender. Usually I divide the recipe by ten.

Maybe somewhere there is some record of the routes, but along the Tacoma Waterfront produce wagons carried produce to customers. My grandmother would walk down the hill to the road near Old Town where the Japanese vegetable man had arrived to sell produce.

So the Japanese vegetable market extended all along the waterfront and probably into other neighborhoods. And along the Old Town waterfront have been restaurants. In a walk in Old Town recently I came across a monument to an Old Town waterfront restaurant, Top of the Ocean.