catchy.

Thanks to two friends of ours who turned us on to Lykke Li, we caught her show at the Doug Fir last night. Let me just say, the Swedes know how to do cultural dissonance right. Her stage presence is like a spastic hip hop back-up dancer dressed like Stevie Nicks singing electro soul through a bullhorn. Because her music is bouncing around in my head today, I thought I'd post this video of one of her songs. This take sounds just like her awesome live version and it's just a little bit spooky for Halloween:



Breaking it up – alternative live video. Filmed by: Christian Haag from Lykke Li on Vimeo.

catching up

Whew. After the blitz of the last few months, we are just starting to get our bearings again. Now that we've surfaced, we've looked around and realized we are very out of touch with the new happenings in Portland. And just in time for the holiday rush of Thanksgiving planning, Christmas baking, and overeating to put us even further out-of-the-loop.

So it's time for some house-cleaning before the coming cheer steamrolls us. We've fixed-up the look of our blog, updated some of our links, added pictures to our Flickr page and, most importantly, re-vamped our map of favorite Portland places. A few weeks back, we picked up a copy of the Willamette Week's 2008 Dining Guide and knew we had to update our list of places-to-try. Now, our map points out some of our beloved places in town (food and otherwise) and the ones we are still looking to check out. I've tried to color-code the recommendations (with a key below), and I will continue to work on organizing the list (maybe by neighborhood) and adding new places. If you're looking for somewhere to go in Portland, we stand by our recommendations as a highly personal list of favorites. If you're looking for someone to go with to any of these places, we're in.

You may have to scroll down on the map to see Portland.



View Full-Size Map

never again

I have a serious fixation on candy corn. I'll admit that it's not a classy candy. It has no exotic ingredients and it's not crafted by French monks. You could argue that it has a slight honey taste, but eating a handful of them is really just like mainlining sugar. Most people I talk with turn up their noses at bad memories of a stale bowl of the candy sitting on a coffee table. I'd eat those ones, too. Each week, A, loving wife that she is, looks the other way as I toss a bag of candy corn into our shopping basket. It's an insatiable addiction.

Still, when it comes to my corn, I'm a bit of a purist. Candy corn is best consumed in October. It also should not taste of chocolate like the so-called "Indian Corn." The most leeway I am willing to allow is for a mellowcreme pumpkin, which is little more than GIANT candy corn. Therefore, I don't want to see "Bunny Corn," "Reindeer Corn," "Cupid Corn," or "Veteran Corn" when it is inevitably created. Other holidays don't need their own candy corn; Halloween needs candy corn.

And I need candy corn. So when I came across a recipe for homemade candy corn, it seemed like the perfect, mildly neurotic cooking activity for last weekend. As candy goes, it even seemed simple. No candy thermometer. No esoteric ingredients. Food coloring was the only ingredient we didn't have on hand. And here is where ethics collides with fun - New Seasons carries only a few large bottles of standard food coloring (none of the primary-color sample packs) and a couple shades of all-natural alternatives for a lower price. Thanks to their ethics (and my stinginess) we bought one bottle of beet coloring instead of a bottle each of industrial red and yellow dyes. I ended up with pastel pink rainbow corn.


Making the candy was the most tedious process imaginable. For some reason, I disregarded the fact that every single person online who has tried the recipe complained about the time it took. Chalk it up to sugar-induced mania on my part.


The process starts out alright - you heat the ingredients, knead in the dye, and roll out ropes that you press together into three-color bands. Then comes the shaping. You cut and cut and cut and end up with piles of rough triangles that need to be individually pressed and rolled between your fingers to take on that classic kernel shape. Sticky hell.


Two-and-a-half hours later, we finally had enough to fill a 99 cent bag. But hey, at least A didn't have to shamefully hide my candy addiction underneath our bulk grains and organic produce at the grocery store.

festival weekend

Pancake breakfast. Corn roast. Sausage dinner. Clambake. Chowder cook-off. Grape stomp.

Whatever name they go by, we don't make it to nearly enough food festivals. After reading Calvin Trillin earlier this year, I had a real taste to get to some festivals (the dream would be Breaux Bridge in time for the crawfish), but the busy-ness of the summer meant that the prime festival season got away from us again. So imagine our luck to find ourselves at two (2!) food-centric festivals this last weekend. We made sure to get our fill.


A good friend of ours has parents that run an apple root-stock farm out in Gaston. Now it only makes sense that someone growing the roots would happen to grow a few apples as well, but what do you do with them when a few hundred pounds ripen all at once? Make cider. For years, her family has been pressing their apples into jugs of cider (unfortunately not the hard sort) and it has grown into a huge, apple-themed gathering. This was our first year out for the festivities and while we missed the 70s cover-band, we did get an overload of fruit.


We spent our Saturday afternoon touring around our friend's family farm, chopping apples and wrestling with the rattling, roaring press. I have never seen nor eaten so many apples in one day. We ate some off the vine. We snacked on the chopped slices. We sipped cider. We ate fritters. Oh, the fritters: one family member was manning a propane-fueled deep-fryer, into which he dropped batter-dipped apple rings to puff up nicely. Once out of the oil, they received a quick toss in cinnamon-sugar. It was a perfect chance for me to practice the old "Leonard burn" by biting into the rings even when I knew they would scald the roof of my mouth. Hot, but delicious. If only I could have tasted them. Luckily, for all of our labor (if you count eating fruit off the vine and riding around in the farm jeep as "labor"), we left with two liters of the fresh-pressed cider.


After a full day of cider festivities, we couldn't bear the thought of a typical Sunday. That's where my Polish heritage came in handy. When we moved a month ago, we realized that we ended up only a few blocks away from St. Stanislaus, just a month prior to their annual Polish festival. What could be better than church-sanctioned mid-day drinking?

Growing up, my steady diet of chicken fingers and grilled cheese was supplemented on holidays with cabbage, sauerkraut, and things stuffed in cabbage. I don't think that went over too well. Fortunately, as I've gotten older, I've definitely developed a taste for the bitter, stinky and pickled, renewing my interest in some of my family's food heritage. It doesn't hurt that there were always some categorically tasty Polish foods (pierogi, potato pancakes, kielbasa - I'm looking in your direction).

Ever since we visited New York in the spring and missed Lomzynianka, we'd had a bit of an odd craving for some Polish food. The Portland Polish Festival (apparently the largest West coast celebration of its kind) had pierogi in excess. They also had an excess of bad (though technically good, I suppose) polka.


We had soft, fried plocki (potato pancakes) topped with applesauce and sour cream, great sauerkraut and mushroom pierogi, and kielbasa-studded bigos (a sauerkraut stew). Polish food is by no means a "light" cuisine; the word "hearty" comes to mind. And "leaden." It certainly helped to have some Polish beer to wash it down and a plum-filled donut to cap it off. I, for one, felt closer to my roots, or at least a good deal stockier.