bitte orca

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Dirty Projectors brought it to the Aladdin last night. Stylish folks with mind-blowing melodies and some crazy guitar work. We'll put that show in a small pantheon of epic concerts. Who else would be in there? Early Modest Mouse. Elliot Smith. The Magnetic Fields. Antony & The Johnsons. The Flaming Lips.

They're killer live and plugged in.
They're just as good acoustic.

There's a little Talking Heads, a little B-52s, a little Zeppelin in there. A little something else, too.
Humming and drumming my fingers on the desk all day.

First show in a while that we didn't want to end. The bastards kept us up past our bedtime. And we liked it.

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A MAN OF FEW WORDS: Dave Longstreth is big on musical chops. No time for stage banter. That's alright by our standards. Keep it short and simple and focus on the damn music. Our kind of man.

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FILE UNDER: ROCK OPERA'S NOT DEAD
An animated opera about a fictional Don Henley? Not a joke. Not even an exaggeration. Here's a taste.

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PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS? I guess there are a few folks who'd like to work with the Projectors. Björk. David Byrne. Big names.

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REQUIRED VIEWING: The Projectors on Jimmy Fallon.



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HOCKETING: That's what you call that sound? 13th century monastic chorale music. Split melodies. Reminds me of singing Row Your Boat in rounds. Whatever the case - it is some crazy shit. The man himself explains it here.

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IMITATION IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF FLATTERY:
This post finds us in a DDC kind of mood. Good schtick. Good designers. Check 'em out.

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ON THE PLAYER:

01. Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca
02. Dirty Projectors - Knotty Pine
03. Dirty Projectors - Mount Wittenberg Orca

ps

Through a summer of job transitions, art festivals, and over-extending ourselves with Slow Food, this blog has been pretty quiet. To get back into a rhythm, it's probably a good idea to look back, but, since I'm not overly ambitious, I won't be looking back very far.

Earlier this week, I walked over with a few of my co-workers to visit a pop-up publishing house. Publication Studio, the brainchild of Matthew Stadler and Patricia No, has squatted in the Ace Hotel Cleaners, where they are cranking out small-run novels and books. So far, they've published a catalog for a local gallery show, two short debut novels, and an annotated urban planning reader. When my work descended on the studio en masse, we bought them out of their day's printing of Lawerence Rinder's thinly-veiled fiction about his time as a curator at the Whitney. I guess working at an arts organization has made us predictable

It's true that I love a good book project, but I also love a good machine. To publish their on-demand books, the PS team has a high-speed duplex printer, a paper trimmer, and - to seal the deal - a perfect binder. I could watch this dreamy little video all day:

Publication Studio Makes A Book from Mike Merrill on Vimeo.

So far, I've been really impressed by what PS has released, and they already have exciting projects lined up through fall. In late October, they'll be participating in the 2009 Amsterdam Biennale, a decentralized art fair with satellite pavilions operating around the world. Portland's contingent will print a collection of single-run artist books, including some by two of my friends and co-workers. I'll certainly try to attend kick-off party on the 24th, with on-the-spot collaborative writing and early-morning gin. It's good to know that some (more creative) parts of the publishing industry still have a reason to celebrate.

foragers

Couple a nationwide recession with a burgeoning food movement and you're bound to wind up with some foraging. Stylish foraging. News outlets have picked up on the trend (right behind the urban chicken coops craze), and they've raised its caché, even labeling it "the underground fruit economy." But these make-do tendencies have been around for a long time. Just think of old-school gleaners. Hell, foraging has even had indie cred for a long time.

Take LA's radical artist collective Fallen Fruit and their anarcho-ecological, Marxist guerrilla gardening. They started out by collecting the ignored produce of Los Angelenos' yards on nocturnal fruit walks, which have in turn become popular art scene happenings. The group recognized unused fruits and unplanted lots across the city, and have set out to expose the urban potential for food sovereignty.

Closer to home, Portland boasts the less-radical, but still exceptional Portland Fruit Tree Project and the community-generated wiki, Urban Edibles. The former is practically a fresh-fruit food bank, while the latter is much more DIY and under-the-radar. A and I have long thought about joining up on a Fruit Tree Project picking party or skipping the u-pick farm and gathering cherries on the streets. And yet, apart from some furtive handfuls of blackberries as we walk down an alley, we've always copped out.

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I remember when we lived in Northwest Portland, I'd pass a Chinese couple in the mornings on my way to work. Both elderly, they'd be bent over collecting gigko nuts from the sidewalk. Others would pass by holding their noses against the sour odor of the trees, but the two people would stay crouched to the pavement with their bulging plastic bags. It was always jarring to see the two of them actually putting the wasted bounty to use.

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Each year, A and I talk about all of the foods we'd like to experiment with preserving, usually after their seasons have passed. This summer, however, we had a seredipitous chance to both cross a new recipe off of our list and to scout out some neighborhood edibles. I can't remember when I'd first read about nocino, the Italian walnut liqueur, but something about it stuck with me. Ever since then, I've talked wistfully about tracking down green walnuts, but have never followed through. I'd thought this year's season had passed me by again, only to see a macerating jar of walnut fruits on the bar counter at Laurelhurst Market. While the tight-lipped bartender wouldn't reveal his walnut source, he did let us know that we probably had a few remaining days when the walnuts would still be soft enough to use.

That weekend, A and I fired up the Urban Edibles database and found a few clusters of trees in our neighborhood. On an early Saturday morning, we went out with grocery bags in hand and managed (after a lot of leaping and stretching) to knock down enough pounds of the hard green fruits to steep. We even found a few nut-bearing trees that we later added to the map.

At home, we chopped the nuts (which leak a thin liquid that stains everything it touches golden to green to inky black) and mixed them with a liter of cheap vodka according to David Lebovitz' simple recipe. The stuff smells high-test, and it's beginning to look potent; we have a few weeks left, and the brew already resembles motor oil. I suppose that's a fitting use for some walnuts we picked above our neighbor's parked cars.

cherry-pickin'

Last Saturday we woke up way-too-early for a way-too-cold-for-July morning adventure. Yet, in spite of our groggy protestations, we knew we'd made a good decision as soon as we arrived at Sherwood Orchards. We discovered the farm in mid-October of last year when I got an itch to make quince paste, but refused to pay the premium at the markets in-town. After a little research, we found this farm just down highway 99 that had a few rows of quince trees, along with dozens of varieties of heirloom apples. We picked boxes worth of fruit and went home happy, redolent of quince's potent and flowery aroma.

Following a few months off, Sherwood Orchards opened for this year's season at the beginning of July. And with that announcement, we returned in search of another hard-to-find fruit: pie cherries. Luckily, the fiery older couple that runs the farm have sour montmorency cherries in spades. Pie cherries are almost comically perfect in their appearance, resembling a child's drawing of a cherry: plump, glossy red, and paired off on dangling stems. They also happen to be bracingly tart, which makes them perfect for sour jams and well-balanced pies. We picked 9 pounds for canning and freezing.

But we didn't leave before gathering 11 more pounds of Sherwood's sweet varieties. While the richly-colored, inky Vans were few-and-far between, we managed to find a few dozen of the grape-flavored fruits. We had much better luck with the Royal Annes, which also happen to be one of my favorite varieties. They usually have a blushing hue and marvelous sweetness, but these particular Royal Annes also gave off the strongest almond scent I've ever smelled in a cherry. I finally understood the French tradition of including stone fruit pits in desserts for their almond-like flavor. A and I were so taken by the heady perfume of the cherries that we had to stop ourselves from eating more fruits than we put in our buckets.



Last year, we ended up making far too many jars of each jam that we tried, which meant we didn't try as many varieties as we would have liked. To spread out the enjoyment and expand our options, we're trying to make smaller batches this year and try new recipes like fig preserves or plum jam. We're already planning on returning to Sherwood Orchards for some August peaches.

You can view more of our photos from last fall's visit to Sherwood Orchards here.

city-slicker campfire gourmet

Temperatures were pushing the mid-nineties and A and I were tiring of the nightly, clockwork, 10pm report of our neighbor's pre-4th fireworks. When our friends Kate and Kalin invited us along for a last minute holiday weekend camp-out, we jumped at the chance to skip town. It sounded like fun, until we dug out our tent and camp stove from the crawlspace to find a heavy layer of dust. I guess it's been a while since we've been camping.

In reality, we had little to worry about, since Kalin served as the quartermaster for our college's Semester in the West program. If he could handle two dozen co-eds for 4 months in the rural West, he could probably keep A and I out of trouble for one night in the woods. That is, if we were even able to find a spot to sleep. Most seasoned campers would probably scoff at the 4th of July weekend as a foolhardy time to go camping, but with Kalin's re-assurance, we let go of our anxieties and trusted that if worse came to worse, he would hack through the underbrush to clear us a site.

We drove toward the coast to stop at Nehalem Falls, where we completely lucked out by finding what well may have been the last remaining camp site in all of Oregon. It was small, but totally serviceable, and within earshot and a short walk of the nearby water. We spent a lazy afternoon along the river, counting salamanders, drinking beers, and by turns paddling against and floating with the current. But eventually, we had to eat.


Our friends, wisely assessing the range of our outdoor survival skills, put us in charge of dinner. To prepare, A and I spent a few nights weighing out the merits and challenges of an ongoing list of "simple" foods. Unfortunately, we quickly realized that "home" simple is different that "woods" simple. In fact, a lot of our quick knock-out meals use a lengthy list of pantry and fridge staples, not to mention a bewildering array of pots and pans. If we'd wanted simple, we should have gone with hot dogs. In any event, we had a culinary reputation to maintain, so we settled on a few dishes that we could make with a limited range of camping cookware.


The menu? Penne puttanesca, kale and cherry salad, boozy campfire cheese and, of course, smores. We figured that by mainly using tinned or preserved ingredients (kalamata olives, tuna, anchovies), puttanesca would be easy to transport. To make matters simpler, we pre-cooked all of the noodles so that boiling water wouldn't be a strain on our water supply. The pasta was a good choice, since it tasted just as good once it cools off, which seems to happen quite rapidly when camping. The only hitch we hadn't anticipated was chopping herbs and garlic, but the back of a Rubbermaid tub lid made for a serviceable cutting board.


As for the salad, it was our spin on a favorite dish from Dove Vivi. There, they finely shred lacinato kale leaves and toss them with a lemon-and-garlic heavy dressing and shards of ricotta salata. For our purposes, we made a creamy lemon-chevre dressing and threw in a handful of pitted and smashed cherries for a sweet counterpoint. It greatly helped to lightly sauté the kale to take just a bit of the bite off of it (though a longer bath in the dressing would likely accomplish the same thing). I think the salad was so good that we'll probably re-visit it at home; hopefully the taste compares even without the wood smoke.

We were eating well, but we certainly weren't stuffed yet. To fill that what-do-we-eat-now period between dinner and dessert, we took a cue from Chow.com's camp-food article and tried out their campfire cheese. Simply put, douse a wheel of soft-ripened, bloomy-rind cheese with liquor, wrap it in foil, and bury it in the coals. In place of the recommended brandy, we used the bottle of bourbon we had on it. American-made booze for an American holiday. It came out beautifully.


For dessert, smores were an easy choice. What wasn't so easy was talking A out of trying to make her own marshmallows to bring along with artisan chocolate and fresh-baked graham crackers. As much as we care about ingredient provenance, there are some things that just aren't worth messing with. Our only innovation came thanks to Kate and Kalin's telescoping, rotisserie marshmallow skewers. Well-fed, it seems that life in the great outdoors ain't so bad. We hope we earned ourselves a repeat invitation.

new york glimpses: farm-fresh

If you were worried that our week in New York left us starved for the bountiful Portland markets, you can rest safely assured that we did manage to find some good farm-to-table meals. While it might be hard to imagine that such a bustling metropolis leaves much room for agriculture, New York has a surprisingly vibrant farm-fresh community. Let's not forget that NYC does play home to urban CSAs, a thriving Greenmarket network, two Edible publications, and Slow Food USA's national office. We made an effort to see it all.

A lot of the sustainable food efforts begin in Brooklyn (space is, afterall, a bit more available than in Manhattan). Just a week before we arrived, the first-ever Brooklyn Food Conference drew food movement heavyweights to discuss social equity and local food access. And a week after our return, I read about a rooftop farm in industrial Greenpoint that's beginning to supply local cafes. Good things are growing.

Off a side street in Williamsburg, egg is dishing up simple, farm-fresh meals in a bright and spare space that belies its hearty Southern appetite. With crayons on the tables and groggy, bleary-eyed hipsters waiting on the sidewalk, we should have known to expect some serious hangover-busting vittles. To share, we ordered a serving of the house-made sorghum granola (a breakfast appetizer?), while A chose the biscuit sandwich and I went for the "Eggs Rothko." What a glorious mistake. Of course it was too much food, but at least it was too much delicious food. A's sandwich split a crisp, craggy biscuit to contain a mound of fried country ham, fig jam and farmhouse cheddar. My Eggs Rothko took a spin on a classic egg-in-a-basket by cooking an egg inside a thick slab of brioche, then broiling it all beneath a generous heaping of grated cheese. Taken with a forkful of country ham shavings and broiled tomatoes, every bite was a toothsome wonder.


We enjoyed our meal in the scant shelter of a small front patio, bordered by a miniature vegetable garden. To supplement their adorable street-side tomato planter, the chefs of egg have started a farm in the Catskills, which they document on their simple and engaging blog. Any size garden is an exercise in humility, but for a restaurant, it also offers a hearty dose of empathy with your suppliers.

That same in-house commitment to ingredients and artisan labor informs the staff at Diner, along with their sister restaurants Marlow & Sons and Bonita. We've written before about the Diner family of restaurants and our huge crush on their work, which ranges from in-house butchering to an awesome food journal. Well, after a long time of ogling from afar, we finally had a chance to taste their cooking. Now A and I don't cook meat all too often (even though we still have two hens and 20 lbs of pork in our freezer), but we do like to sometimes order it out if we trust the source. Given the fact that Diner buys whole-animals from local farmers and breaks them down to their chef's specifications, there was no way we were going to miss the meat when we stopped by Bonita early in the week. I had a trio of killer steak tacos, while A went for a deliciously juicy pork burrito. It was worth the wait.


A few days later, after a morning of sustainable food gab with the gracious staff at Slow Food USA, we made our way over to the train-car diner named Diner for an early lunch. The interior was bright and quiet on a weekday morning and charmingly worn-down, with old tile floors and wooden booths. A immediately zeroed in on a bowl of mussels swimming in a tomatillo and green onion broth (with a hearty helping of thick-cut fries, of course), while I ordered Diner's tomato-based risotto with housemade sausage. Both dishes were tangy and savory and completely comforting for a cool, overcast day.


Just around the corner from Diner, Marlow & Sons vends local artisan products from a specialized grocery store/oyster bar. Had we not just eaten, we probably would have grabbed a stool for some local half-shells, but as it was, we contented ourselves by purchasing a food literary magazine and a collection of local chocolates.

We were bolstered to see (and sample) so many restaurants that were emphasizing local sourcing and old-school skills, yet one establishment puts them all to shame: Blue Hill. After last year's Slow Food Nation, A and I started nursing a longtime, big-time chef crush on Dan Barber. Apparently, we weren't alone. Just a few nights prior to our reservation, the Obamas chose it for their NYC date night, garnering some big points for supporting sustainable ag in the process. You see, Blue Hill isn't just any restaurant; it's not even just any restaurant with it's own farm. It is a restaurant with a fully-fledged agricultural education center. A few years after founding Blue Hill on a side street near NYU, Dan Barber connected with the Rockefeller family to open the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, just 30 miles up the Hudson River Valley. The center runs tours and classes about four-season agriculture and livestock husbandry, while also playing home to a very farm-focused, on-site restaurant.

As much as we wanted to visit the farm, we didn't exactly want to hitchhike out to Stone Barns, so we decided to stay in town and visit the Greenwich Village restaurant. We were seated on the back patio, which has the quiet feeling of an urban greenhouse. From the moment we sat down, we knew this meal would be unique. Before we'd even ordered, our server presented us with a row of diminutive, raw vegetables suspended on a small fence of skewers. This was immediately followed by homemade butter and lardo, paired with kale- and carrot-scented salts, and two adorable asparagus "burgers" on tiny brioche buns. Currently, a lot of chefs are getting awfully coy and playful with their amuses bouches, but something about Blue Hill's approach made it clear that these starters really were an introduction to the restaurant's farm-centric philosophy. They aren't just little foodie jokes, each bite is a primer for the simple, distinct flavors to follow.



I could truly write a lot about this meal, but I'll try to just outline what A and I shared. I ordered:

Spring vegetable salad with pistachio and homemade chevre
Cobia (a firm whitefish) with ramps and prosciutto-wrapped asparagus in a pistachio-caper sauce

Steamed almond "bread" with citrus

A chose the "Farmer's Feast" tasting menu, which included:

Soft-shell crabs with rhubarb and spring lettuce salad
Poached egg in spring greens puree
Berkshire pig with burdock root and rhubarb
Chilled rhubarb soup with fromage blanc sorbet

Hazelnut Parfait with chocolate rice crispy and chocolate sauce

Everything was phenomenally fresh and displayed a complete devotion to the essence of each vegetable. Every individual component of the composed salad we shared was prepared to best show-off its flavor; some were crisp and raw, others were lightly blanched, while still other ingredients were lightly marinated. I've never had a meal that tasted to simply, so clearly of the fresh produce it used. And I can think of no higher compliment for what Blue Hill is trying to do.

new york glimpses: on the move

Chalk this one up as a victory for Portland: our food cart scene puts New York to shame. True, it's a city of 12 million people and probably 1 million food carts, but most vendors don't venture much beyond the hot nuts/soft pretzels/hot dogs triumvirate. Meanwhile, in our Portland neighborhood alone, there is a waffle taco cart, an ice cream and pancake cart, a grilled cheese bus, and a retro trailer slinging baked goods and juices. In every neighborhood, food carts circle their wagons on overgrown lots and in empty parking spaces, creating an impromptu culture of makeshift cafes. Now, that's not to say that New York doesn't have any good cart food - they do have their own awards ceremony, after all - just that they're a lot more mobile than their Portland brethren, making them harder to track down.

On our first day in town, we went with our friend Hannah down to the weekly vintage bazaar called the Brooklyn Flea. Yes, we did want to check out the mid-century baubles and funky thrift-store clothes, but we knew we wouldn't be lugging home a suitcase full of Fiestaware; we came for the food. After we returned from last year's adventure to Red Hook, we heard tell of some amazing Central American cooks grilling up food for the neighborhood's weekend ballgames. While we didn't venture to Red Hook again, the Red Hook Ball Field Vendors made the trip up to Fort Greene for the Flea. We zeroed in on their stand and ordered a bean-and-cheese pupusa, along with a sweet corn tamale. The pupusa was crisply grilled on the outside and was filled with a savory melted cheese that tasted delicious with the pickled cabbage and hot sauce mounded on top. The tamale was unlike any other we'd ever tried: it had no filling inside the soft, steamed masa, but tasted exactly like a meltingly sweet ear of mid-summer corn.


Keeping with the stuffed-and-filled theme, we queued up for two other flea market street vendors. First up was Elsa's Empanadas, where we quickly downed an order of spinach, cheese and raisin handpies. They were nice and flaky and the filling had the right balance of tangy and sweet. Tantalizingly, the Empanada stand was right next to Asia Dog, but A steered me away from a kimchi-garnished hot dog and over to dessert.

Salvatore Bklyn does handmade ricotta with hipster street cred. What caught our notice were their hand-stuffed cannoli. I have a real weakness for cannoli - we've even made them ourselves once, which entailed no small amount of deep-frying and pastry bags. Best to leave it to the experts. And these were certainly expert, with the right amount of outside crunch and a lightly sweetened, curd-y filling. The more I consider it, the more that I realize that stuffed foods are pretty much made for street carts. Well, those and foods-on-sticks. But as far as portable edibles go, it's hard to beat a cannolo.


From then on, our mobile eating stayed on a decidedly sweet note. Walking down Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg, A nearly shrieked when she saw a buttermilk-colored truck passing our dishes of small-batch ice cream. Van Leeuwen ice cream uses simple ingredients to craft simple flavors. With our friend Hannah, we ordered a peppermint-chocolate chip scoop and a dish of red currant and cream. Both flavors had a fresh creaminess, despite being custard-based, but the currant ice cream was particularly memorable for its balance between tangy fruit and sweet milk.


The next evening, after making dinner with our friends Catherine and Quincy, we were struck by two realizations: we hadn't bought dessert, and we were just a few blocks from Dessert Truck's late-night parking grounds. You might recall our nighttime sugar-fix from last-year's visit, but if not, I should fill you in: Dessert Truck sells haute cuisine desserts in paper cups for six bucks. It's a brilliant business plan. On this visit, A ordered a goat cheese cake, while I opted for the pavlova. Individually, the components of the pavlova (crisp meringue, red fruit gelee, creme fraiche) were spot-on, but for some reason, they just didn't quite jive. I'm sure some of it had to do with the difficulty of breaking a meringue with a plastic spoon. That said, A's cheesecake choice more than made up for mine: a few blackberries and a drizzle of rosemary-scented caramel were a great accompaniment to the rich cake. This is one we might have to work on re-creating at home.


After a few days of going without a mobile-food-fix, Hannah informed us of a weekly fixture just around the corner from her midtown workplace: the Treats Truck. Late one afternoon, we strolled up Lexington to where it was parked, only to be generously barraged by samples. Normally, I take a free taste (and I think most people are like me on this matter) and walk away thinking, "Sucker...you didn't trick me into buying anything!" But hell, the Treats Truck proprietess more than tricked us; she up-sold us two brownies, when we'd only meant to get a double-peanut-butter sandwich cookie. I have to hand it to her, though - she knows her product. The PB cookie was really good, but imagine downing an entire box of Girl Scout Tagalongs, and you'll begin to get a sense of its mouth-parching stickiness. We also enjoyed our Mexican chocolate brownie, which tasted more of Ibarra hot chocolate than the overly-infused chile concoctions everyone else seems to love. Of everything we ordered, though, the pecan butterscotch bar ranks among the most addictive desserts I've ever had; it was decadently sweet and sticky in that slightly under-baked way. With sweets this good, I suppose I could be okay with having to follow a moving target.