new york bound

Christoph Niemann contributes to an illustrated blog in the New York Times called "Abstract City." Earlier this year, the rooted through his kids' legos to construct his quintessential New York experience. These were two of my favorites:



With that, we're off to New York for a week for a hardscrabble week of five meals a day and little else. When we return, you can expect stories of Russian Jews, cookbook stores, upstate farm cuisine, and more doughnuts.

cake tasting

A lot of our own wedding planning went by in a blur. Where other couples might have deliberated for weeks over which caterer to use or where to hold the event, we ended up making quick, clear-cut decisions. When you get right down to it, can you really imagine us not knowing what kind of food to have for the reception?

Still, we probably could have played the planning card a bit more, if only to leverage it for samples and handouts. I mean, we didn't even once go cake tasting - we just picked what we wanted and ordered it. No nonsense, but possibly nonsensical.

So imagine our luck when our good, soon-to-be married friends invited us along (or maybe we invited ourselves) to sample the offerings at two Portland bakeries. Could we really say no when they so clearly needed our help?


What I found out was that wedding planning can be pretty fun when it isn't your wedding. Without the pressure of having to consider what flavor cake my aunt would like, I was free to ask questions of the bakers like, "Now if the bride and groom decide on 'ruins of Italy' theme, can you make a leaning cake that looks like the tower of Pisa?" "If they want a dark chocolate cake, could you still make it entirely pink?" "Can you photo-transfer their pictures onto the ganache?"

It was funny for a while, until I realized that people do, in fact, request cakes that are exactly this stupid. So I pulled it together and focused on the flavors. Aside from how delicious they are, I want to high five Baker & Spice for their "build-your-own-cake" presentation. If it were my choice, the decision for which bakery to use would have been cinched by the scoops of frosting alone. I could have happily mixed-and-matched spoonfuls of buttercream with forkfuls of cake all morning. If our friends want to make me happy at their wedding (and isn't that the point?), then they'd be wise to set up a cake construction bar. I want to see sprinkles, frostings, ganaches, edible flowers and miniature sugar bride-and-grooms. And I want to be able to put them together myself.


So, here's my advice (and you can't say it's unsolicited, since you invited A and me along!):

Don't pick a flavor you're allergic to.
If you go with frosting calligraphy, make sure your decorator can spell.
And if you really want to impress us, you should bake it yourself.

(Oh, and I vote for the chocolate with mascarpone cream-cheese frosting.)

sproutpocalypse

A finally finds the time to write something for the blog again, and what do I do but rain on her parade? Well, it wasn't me, actually, and it wasn't rain; it was hail. Boatloads of it.


Nothing smacks you in the face quite like the hubris-deflating blow of a mid-Spring hailstorm. We thought our sprouts were doing so well.

A block from our house when it started to fall, we couldn't see anything, so I parked the car in the middle of the street and made a mad dash for our porch to rescue our seedlings. Our lettuce, radishes, and peas were two inches buried by hails and standing water - it wasn't pretty. When the storm passed by (not two minutes later), A parked the car and came to find me sitting in a puddle and picking hailstones out of our planters one at a time. She went and got me a spoon (isn't she helpful?).

It's been a few days since the hail and about fifty percent of the little starts seem to have made it. Now we just have to see if they can survive the on-and-off windstorms that have followed the hail.

Oh, and I promise this hasn't become a gardening blog.

extraordinarily ordinary

There is nothing more satisfying then leaving the oven light on to watch pita bread steadily puff and brown before your eyes. Unless it's noticing the first tiny sprouts peak up from the seeds you planted five days ago. Today was a good day; it included both. The radishes, lettuce, and peas began to push through the soil, which made me so delighted - so giddy - that when I called a gardener friend to tell her the news she nearly didn't recognize my voice. "I've never heard you so excited," she said.

Then, I decided to try my hand at baking pita bread to accompany our spring-inspired dinner of lemony asparagus and chickpea salad and a bottle of rosé. I recently discovered Bernard Clayton's Complete Book of Breads, a massive Joy of Cooking-esque baking bible that has everything from vollkornbrot to Chinese steamed buns (bao, or "bread with a heart"). I can't get enough of it, which is too bad for the rest of Portland; I've shamefully had it out of the library for the past five weeks.

Last week, we used some of our Square Peg Farm pork chops to make our own version of Char Siu Bao. You know, the steamed buns you get at dim sum restaurants filled with delicious bbq pork? Yes, those are the ones. They happen to be P's favorite, so I felt I was doing him a favor and getting to make yet another of Clayton's breads at the same time. Two birds. One baking stone.

The bao went so well, that I looked to Clayton to help me through another bread I'd never tried. Pita bread is one of those things that seems so mysterious and difficult, and yet in parts of the world thousands of people are making it every day. In that way, I suppose it's a little like gardening for me. I am not known for my green thumb; in fact, I am notorious for letting even the heartiest, lowest-maintenance plants slip away for lack of attention. I have always imagined that, for me, an edible garden would be the same. Millions of people garden - far fewer today than did fifty or a hundred years ago - and yet I was sure I would be the one-in-a-million who would be utterly and completely hopeless when it came to growing food.

I know it was this skepticism surrounding both the pita and the seeded edibles that heightened my excitement when both seemed to be behaving as they should. It's amazing that something so basic can be so thrilling, but I suppose it's not really so surprising given how far we've strayed from knowing how to feed ourselves. Cooking, baking, and growing my own food has made me feel very special and very ordinary at the same time. Each time I take a loaf of bread out of the over, I feel this extraordinary sense of satisfaction at what I have made. Me. And each time, I also feel connected with thousands upon thousands of people that are doing the exact same thing: feeding their families and themselves with their own two hands. It's not so unusual after all, and yet it's still quite extraordinary; we can plant a tiny seed and watch it grow into a garden, we can roll out a lump of dough and watch it puff into dinner.