The Slice: Mustard Seed restaurant serves up tasty crosstown surprise

Sunny and Roger Hanson had a routine.

Once a week, on Thursdays, they met for lunch at the Mustard Seed in NorthTown Mall.

Then Sunny, who is 49, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

Roger, who is a doctor, explained to their friends at the restaurant that while undergoing treatment and testing, his wife had to stay on an incredibly restrictive diet. That made Mustard Seed fare off-limits.

On Thursday, while dining there alone, Roger mentioned in passing that Sunny would be liberated from the limited diet the next day. But he would not be free to take her out.

So on Friday, the Mustard Seed surprised Sunny at her South Hill home with the delivery of a complete, free dinner.

“Thanks to those who helped pick my new mug shot: Picture No. 2 received most of the approximately 200 votes cast.

“Slice answer: Here is Slice reader Keri Yirak’s No. 1 tactic for getting it all done: “Lower your standards.”

“Two for Tuesday: 1. U2’s song “Pride (in the Name of Love)” gets the time of day wrong re: the shooting of Martin Luther King, Jr. on this date. It didn’t happen in the morning.

2. Richard Brautigan wrote “Trout Fishing in America” in Idaho.

“Slice answer: “The Palouse ends in my back yard,” wrote Toni Nersesian. “We live north of Spangle in the far corner of an open area.”

She said it is good bird-watching country. Big birds, that is.

“When it’s windy, the hawks float above the trees at the edge of the meadow for hours on end. We watched bald eagles soar over the meadow all winter.”

“Speaking of birds: Coeur d’Alene’s Debbie Miller said one sign of spring for her family is a woodpecker rapping on a metal chimney cap connected to a metal sleeve that descends to a gas fireplace in the basement.

“In the basement, it sounds just like a jackhammer,” she wrote.

“Feedback: In last Tuesday’s column, I approvingly referred to a “Spokane-honed sense for right and wrong.”

That prompted reader Dave Sherwood to write. He was kind enough to say he enjoyed The Slice. But he wondered if that would be the same sense for right and wrong that prompted so many people here to ignore or be blasé about everything from Jim West’s dating habits and the behavior of certain Catholic priests to the initial handling of that firefighter/teen sex incident and aspects of the S-R’s conduct in the River Park Square controversy.

“Slice answer: “If everyone went with low-maintenance landscaping, a lot of men would lose their summer identity,” wrote Maggie Fritz.

“Today’s Slice question: What novelist’s characters would make for the best pet names?

(My pick? Jane Austen. I’d like to name a cat Mr. Darcy.)