... stumptown p & a ...

the newspaper is dead, long live the newspaper.

2010-02-15T14:58:00.000-08:00

Since taking over as the Communications Director for PICA, I've spent a lot of time considering the future of journalism and the prospects of print. Until recently, print media was our sole venue for advertising and editorial coverage, but that fact has changed rapidly. Where it gets tricky is that print hasn't yet been wholly eclipsed by digital technologies; rather, the two mediums have to coexist in a tenuous shared existence. They're not so much neighbors as reluctant co-owners of the same house, each waiting for the other to sell off their share. In considering the merits of each, I have to admit that I've fallen on both sides of the debate equally often.

I've often lamented the snarky tone and ADD brevity of the web, but I've also scorned the resistance of mainstream printed media to intelligently and unflinchingly re-assess their ailing industry. I'm speaking in broad strokes here, but where one medium has written itself into irrelevance by reporting staid news to an ever-shrinking audience (newspapers), the other medium has established an overly-democratic overabundance of shallow content (the internet). If you stop and look at the two outlets, then you come to realize that both in fact suffer from a similar flaw: a lack of well-considered news.

Now, that's not to say that you can't find good writing in both. Old standards like the New York Times continue to support incisive editorial writing and good columnists, and some blogs and websites offer analysis and reporting to rival the best of the traditional media. But part of the appeal (and shortcoming) of the internet is the openness; anyone can post their own take on the news without the oversight of fact checkers or editors. Sometimes this works, and sometimes this devolves into self-indulgence.

The issue (in my mind) is that as the internet has courted the market share traditionally held by newspapers, those papers have frantically tried to ape the qualities of the web - namely short, quick stories with little shelf life and a casual tone. Very infrequently has the internet tried to mimic newspapers. And why should they? They seem to be doing just fine as they are. But this begs the question: if the internet focuses mainly on up-to-the-second news and personal opinion - and newspapers try to follow this lead - then who is left to cover long-lead stories and in-depth investigative reporting? I have a hard time seeing the internet stepping up to fill this role.

I've spoken a few times with people about whether or not blogging encourages sloppy writing. The counterargument runs that the text is what matters, the rest is just container. To them, you could write a novel on a stack of post-it notes. But I think if you set out to write on post-it notes, you'd simply end up jotting down reminders. Humans suffer from a bias of "functional fixedness" - we're not, as a species, particularly good at imagining new uses for old tools. Once something works for a particular problem, what's the sense in shaking things up? There are many great writers throughout the span of the internet, but most people have trouble seeing the point in using the tool for anything other than gossip, banter, and infotainment. And even those who do see the point will have trouble finding any way to generate an income to fund good writing, good reporting, and investment in a news story.

But these are just musings. I don't have any answers about just how exactly newspapers will continue, or whether the internet will assume the many abandoned posts of traditional journalism. I think there is a great potential in both forms and have an unabashed love of each (for different reasons). But lingering on print for a moment, I have some hope for the future thanks to inspiring experiments like the McSweeney's Panorama.

I received a copy in the mail back in December and just finished reading it (all of it) last week. I can honestly say that I've never read that much of any single newspaper. I read the cover, the op-eds, the Book Review, the sports section, the arts coverage, the Sunday Magazine, the comics, and the food section. And I read a whole lot more that wouldn't easily fit into any previous newspaper I've ever seen.

But it wasn't a real newspaper; it was a one-off conceit of a literary magazine, an attractive daydream of what a newspaper could be. This is not to fault McSweeney's, just to acknowledge that the medium hasn't yet been revived. In truth, McSweeney's was probably the best possible outfit to attempt a project of this scope (320 pages! 150 contributors!). They have a breathless enthusiasm apparent in all of their ventures. Their approach is certainly infectious.

As I paged through each section on my first time looking at the paper, I kept interrupting A to exclaim at whatever new spread I held up in wonder. The whole experience felt like revisiting a childhood tradition. Lingering over a newspaper is one of those experiences that we sadly reserve today for those rare, lazy Sunday mornings. In reality, the experience of delving headlong into a newspaper should happen much more frequently.

The diversity of subjects is amazing. In the course of reading The Panorama, I read about DVD cover art, the environmental impact of Mendocino County marijuana operations, the 49ers, the Bay Bridge, lamb butchering, an out-of-print novel by an Irish author, and the reasons behind choosing public education for your child. Say what you will about the glories of the internet, but it strikes me that newspapers were the original form of rhizomatic learning, weaving an ever-deepening web of relationships, new leads, and wide-ranging (but interconnected) ideas.

Oh, and the design. What design! A large part of the pleasure of skimming the Panorama is sensory - 15 x 22" broadsheet pages with full-color, full-spread images. There are simply some things the internet (or, more accurately, a computer screen) can't approximate, and that is exactly the strength of McSweeney's newspaper gambit: to highlight the unique strengths of printed media. In-depth, lengthy stories; gorgeous design; immersive imagery. It would be a shame to lose these things to text-heavy, design-ignorant websites, but they already happen to be rare in newspapers. Perhaps this will serve as a wake-up call for newspapermen to embrace the limitations (and glories) of their medium.

I have a real fetish for printed objects: books, magazines, journals, daily and weekly newspapers. Let's hope The Panorama wasn't a last hurrah, but a rallying cry for creative explorations of the form.

the very best

2010-01-09T17:30:00.000-08:00

Near the end of 2008, we sat down to outline a very selective and disjointed list of year-end favorites: tastes, sounds, reading materials, and good experiences. It was maybe a bit quirky, but it gave us a nice chance to reflect on our best discoveries from the year and set the tone for 2009. Then, just into January, we followed it up with a firm resolution for the New Year: live awesomely. Simply put, if 2008 was a year of learning self-sufficiency and DIY basics, then 2009 would be a year of looking at how our decisions impacted our community, and how we could live more happily with our choices. Out went chain-store shopping, in came considered purchases for things we truly loved. Out went disposables, in came quality.

All in all, it went pretty well for us. Apart from underwear, we largely avoided major retailers and focused our spending on local and independent businesses. When we went out to eat, we made sure we to visit restaurants we loved. I'm not going to suggest that we staved off the recession in Portland (maybe just a little), but I am proud to see how many good local shops and chefs made it through last year. Here were a few of our best finds that summed up our year:

Mc Sweeney's
After years of coveting, we got a subscription. Our first issue was a set of dystopian shorts set in 2034. Issue two arrived as a full Sunday-edition newspaper with a magazine and book review. They may not single-handedly solve the problems of the publishing industry, but they'll certainly keep my interest.

Ned Ludd
With a good friend working there from Day One, we had the chance to watch this little restaurant go through their entire first year. Wood-fired foods, farm-direct sourcing, and salvaged interiors make this the quintessential Portland restaurant for these times. The owners are awesome and generous folks and 100% deserve all of the love they've received.

Cabinet subscription
Year 2 and we're still in love. It's like the hipster Harper's.

Pendelton
Part of shifting away from IKEA obsolescence and into heirloom hand-me-down territory meant replacing our pill-ridden fleece throws with two beautiful wool blankets. Totally timeless. Also awesome? Their amazing collaborations with contemporary fashion companies. P loves his Opening Ceremony x Pendelton cardigan.

Rediscovering hamburgers
Seriously, where have you been all my life? Grass-fed beef done rare with bacon, carmelized onions, cheese, and pickles on a good bun. There's something totally illicit about pressing down on an over-loaded bun and letting the juices run together. I certainly wouldn't eat a burger just anywhere, but I think about them all the time.

Dirty Projectors
Favorite album and favorite concert of the year.

iPhone
Totally worth it. It's a little, futuristic joy that makes up for the childhood birthday when I didn't receive a Dick Tracy walkie-talkie watch.

Pork
A spur-of-the-moment decision to order a half hog from a local farm led us to buy a chest freezer, which led us to a lot of summer preserving. The payoff has been huge, so we upped our share to an entire pig for year 2. The Portugese have a saying that the two happiest times in life are just after marriage, and just after a pig slaughter.

Bryant Terry
It's maybe a bit odd to follow up 75 lbs of pork with a shout-out to a vegan chef, but Terry really was that cool. We brought him to town for a weekend with Slow Food, and completely fell in love with the guy. His dishes never front as anything other than what they are - no faux-meats or cheese substitutes - just flavorful, vegetable-packed, and Soul Food-inspired vittles.

Indian cooking
The spices showed up after our visit to Montreal, but were only really put to work when we picked up a copy of Yamuna Devi's Lord Krishna's Cuisine. With freshly-ground masalas for every dish, our home-cooked dals and biryanis now rival most restaurants we've tried.

Edible Geography
Of all the blogs I follow, this one stands out among this year's discoveries. With recent posts on North Korean food propaganda, soil flavors, plant quarantines, and sexual kitchen puns in Vermeer's paintings, this site offers the intellectual balance to all of the wonky food policy sites and cutesty cooking blogs out there.

Lucky Strike
A far-flung restaurant that inspired a lingering obsession with Sichuan cooking and authentic Chinese food. Fiery-hot dry-fried chilies and the numbing, citrus electricity of prickly ash.

Pet pha lo from Ping
Thanks to our geeky obsession with Pok Pok, we earned an early bird invite to the preview dinner for their new restaurant. The stand-out dish? An aromatic, star anise-infused duck leg stew, paired with pickled mustard greens and a vinegary chili sauce. We've been back four times and have never missed a chance to order it.

Anything served in a glass (or on a plate) at Beaker and Flask
This place works some serious cocktail magic. The longer we spend time at the bars, the more and more we realize that the basics are always best. Martinis. Manhattans. Gin and Tonics. Stray too far from those drinks and you'll end up with a syrupy-sweet, pink-hued mess. And yet, Beaker and Flask nails every drink every time, using stonepine liquer, rare herbal tinctures, and more booze than is probably healthy. The cocktails are consistently unique and always balanced. Couple the bar with an amazing kitchen turning out dishes like grilled romaine salads, smoked mackarel, and pork cheeks with pickled octopus, and it's definitely one of the best new places to open in Portland.

bitte orca

2009-11-04T09:22:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-07T08:18:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-07T18:25:00.000-07:00

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'

2009-07-16T21:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-13T21:24:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-09T19:52:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

2009-06-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

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.

new york glimpses: written city

2009-06-20T10:54:00.000-07:00

For an amateur type-geek, New York is a veritable specimen book of fantastically quirky found signage and lettering. There are literally entire city-blocks worth of hand-lettered signs, molded plastic type, painted announcements, and bizarrely expressive awnings. If it weren't for my overwhelming fear of looking like a tourist, I would have been walking the streets with my camera out, wildly snapping photos of every storefront we passed.

I did still manage to take a few pictures of some of the awesome vernacular type I saw on our trip, mostly in Coney Island. To be honest, that was my main impulse for heading down to the boardwalk; Coney is like a musty old collector's basement full of ephemera. The beachfront is a collision of arcade neon and hand-painted, hyperbolic side-show banners. And it sadly won't be around for much longer before it begins to look like an Atlantic City resort. I try to imagine if Coney ever looked classy, or if it always just felt like a bit of working class exoticism. Either way, it has a uniquely nostalgic feeling that I hope they can preserve.

On that note, here's a little photographic interlude between our food-fueled travel stories:

If this slideshow was a little heavy on design and a bit light on edibles, you can always see the rest of our photos here.

new york glimpses: easy-bake

2009-06-18T20:47:00.000-07:00

As long as we're at the beginning, we might as well start with breakfast. Easily, one of the best aspects of staying with friends in the city was that we could get an early start to try a different bakery nearly every day. We've written about our wishy-washy indifference to brunch before, but baked goods we heartily support.

So as soon as we had a morning in the Lower East Side, we made a return pilgrimage to Doughnut Plant to see if it matched our sugar-coated memories from last year. Since their flavors rotate seasonally, we snagged two new creations - a creme brulée doughnut and a rose petal one - along with a classic "Blackout." Excellent doughnuts, terrible coffee. But, oh, how those pastries tasted! The creme brulée was a tall dome, glazed with a hard sugar crust and filled with a light, eggy custard. While it was good (though no comparison to it's namesake dessert), I preferred the rose petal doughnut and the heady perfume that came through in each bite of its glazed exterior. The verdict, however, relied upon the Blackout, which won us over to doughnuts when we first tried it last year. In every way, its dense, gooey, chocolate crumb held up to our memories. We spent a good 20 minutes reasoning out how they could possibly make a doughnut taste so much like flourless chocolate cake. We may never know.

As we left Doughnut Plant, I looked up at the neighboring storefront to see a sign for Kossar's Bialys. I remembered the name from Mimi Sheraton's poignant (downright sad if you're the type to cry over a food book) The Bialy Eaters, and knew that we had to stop in for a second breakfast. According to Sheraton, Kossar's is among the last places in America where you can find a decent bialy, so we selected two of their garlic versions (along with some more "nouvelle," though delicious, challah bagels). Kin to the bagel, bialys are a bit flatter and have a rougher crust and a shallow depression in the center. While bagels gain their glossy exterior from a pre-bake dip in boiling water, bialys are simply put in the oven, as-is. Nestled in its dimple, the Kossar's bialy had a smear of salty, poppy-seed studded garlic mince that made the roll absolutely addictive. With the experience of Kossar's under my belt, I can say that until now I have tasted some sorry bialy impostors.

Later in the week, we continued our search for early-morning, Yiddish baked goods; next on our list was Yonah Schimmel's Knishery. While A and I have commendable appetites, we very well may have met our match in the knish. I have to admit that prior to Schimmel's, I was as unfamiliar with a knish as most gentiles. Helpfully, Edible Manhattan just ran an article on the endangered knish - that lost icon of New York cuisine - which sheds some light on this overlooked pastry. A classic knish is composed of an imposing mound of seasoned, mashed potatoes, which is wrapped with a pastry band and baked to steaming perfection. It easily weighed a pound and even split between the two of us, that thing was a struggle to complete. That's not to say it wasn't a savory delight, particularly with a dab of deli mustard.

The further along we went in our breakfast escapades, the larger our pastry discoveries seemed to grow. On our last day in the city, our friends Macy and Annie took us to Carrot Top Pastries to witness some terrifyingly-large croissants (frisbee-sized!) and the squarest muffins I've ever seen. We smartly steered away from the croissants and ordered their signature carrot muffin, with heaping tops spilling over the lip of the muffin pan. Like a moist, lightly-spiced slab of carrot cake, the muffin was a meal unto itself and went great with some pretty decent diner coffee.

Finally, our stomachs led us to Momofuku Milk Bar later that afternoon. While not technically breakfast (I'm not sure you could confidently call any of Milk Bar's offerings the best start to your day), there were early-morning staples peppered throughout a menu of decadent sweets. A branch of the David Chang's coyly inventive Momofuku mini-empire, Milk Bar was set up to showcase the creations of pastry chef Christina Tosi, who was profiled as a bit of a sugar-coated evil genius by the New York Times. In a crowded, standing-room-only space, they serve up compost cookies, crack pie, candy-infused soft-serve, and their infamous cereal milk - the infused leftovers of a bowl of soggy cereal. If we weren't down to our last few hours on the trip (and their food weren't so damn filling), we could have easily committed ourselves to slowly working our way through their Wonka-esque array of surreal sweets.

As it was, we sampled the sour gummy soft-serve (which won that hilarious remark, "It really does taste like sour gummies!") and order a serving of chocolate mint ice cream, an English muffin sandwich, a loaf of green-curry banana bread (for the plane!) and something called, "The Volcano." The soft-serve was redolent of Thin Mints and incredibly satisfying. A's English muffin cradled a poached egg, bacon and meltingly sweet onions, while my "Volcano" seemed to include a little of everything. Bacon, braised onions, gruyere, cream, potatoes were held inside of what resembled a sourdough bread bowl. Think of it as a neo-knish, stuffed with scalloped potatoes. Of course, we enjoyed everything with the ubiquitous bottles of sriracha sauce at each counter. It's really no wonder we had such stomachaches for the flight home.

new york glimpses: city living

2009-06-12T19:40:00.000-07:00

Well, we're back at home and (mostly) caught up. We're also (mostly) recovered from all of the eating and drinking we packed into our week in New York. It's been slow getting this first post up, but that is largely because this trip was so different from the last time we visited the city. Though it also might have something to do with how lethargic we've been with all of that extra food in our system.

When we went last year, we stayed with my uncles in Jersey, just outside of the city. Their home was lovely and they couldn't have been more gracious hosts, but when a few of our friends recently moved into the city proper, we knew we couldn't turn down the offer to crash on their hide-a-beds. Anyone who knows us has heard how we prefer incognito tourism on vacation, so spending all of our time in the city let us indulge our penchant for "playing local."

I'm sure that our perennially-patient NY friends will roll their eyes and sigh at this one, but we really did feel like our trip was much closer to day-to-day life (if you didn't work) than our usual tourist blitz. I mean, we actually saw other people, and largely tried to keep our full meals to only 3-per-day. We even visited a lot of local grocery stores, though I guess that's pretty typical of our travel M.O.

Eschewing sightseeing in favor of everyday living made our trip unique; it was genuinely interesting to take stock of how our friends live and to transpose our lifestyle onto New York, imagining how we might adapt to life there. We spent a lot of our trip discretely looking for local iterations of the most important parts of our life (farms, markets, cooking shops), as well as seeking out the amenities we lack in Portland (first-class museums, new ethnic foods). In the process, we also noticed the absence of certain things that characterize our experience of Portland - easy bicycling, for one. Yeah, A and I both might walk faster than the average Portlander, but there is something to be said for Stumptown's quiet, unassuming pace-of-life.

Happily, our friends Catherine and Quincy offered an encouraging example of New York living. They had homemade stock in the fridge, dried beans in the pantry, and compost beneath the sink. When they looked in their fridge, they likely just saw the humor of trying to live the life they do in a cramped, walk-up, East Village apartment, but we saw simplicity.

Oddly, when we look back on our trip, our rose-colored visions of a dream life in New York all center on getting back to essentials. Ever since early this year, A and I have both had simplicity on the mind and have (ineffectively) dreamed of paring down our possessions. Now that we're back, we'll turn to one another and wistfully muse on our "simple" life in New York. "We'd only bring the essentials," we say, "who needs all of this extra closet space? Imagine how much free time we'd have to read and relax if we could just start over without all of these obligations to friends and volunteer commitments..." Ha. I can't imagine that "simplicity" ranks very highly on many people's reasons for moving to New York. This puts us squarely in the "idealistic dork" category.

Regardless of our naivete, it was still fun to act out local life for a week. Of everything we saw (and ate) in the city, there were two particular breakfasts that probably best encapsulated all of the quotidian romance of our New-York-living fantasy. For A, it was our early morning visit to Saxelby Cheese in the Essex Street Market. Purchasing a pint of Amish farmstead yogurt just might have made the entire trip for her. I could see the gleam in her eye as she imagined her daily trip to the fromager for a plougman's lunch of cheese and bread.

Now, as for myself, I was taken with the same place that entranced me last year: Russ & Daughters Appetizers. Brimming with unique foods and buzzing with old-world knowledge and class, this place epitomizes New York food to me. Whenever I walk in, I dream of incrementally working my way through their cases of smoked fish. Think of it: me, a modern-day Calvin Trillin, noshing my way down Houston Street. I could easily live on their smoked sturgeon alone.

But taken together, these reveries are all part of that soft-focus idealism that comes with travel (like the allure of Cleveland in 30 Rock). There's always that moment when you want to pack it all up and start a new life in an adopted hometown. It wouldn't be a good trip without it.

--------

Instead of our usual day-by-day breakdown, for the rest of our posts on our trip, we'll be writing up themed impressions of our best finds in the city. Hopefully it ends up being a little more engaging than a slide-by-slide narration of the museums we visited. Or, I should say, the foods we sampled.

Right upon our return, we came across a broadcast of KCRW's Good Food, which toured New York, visiting many of our favorite places (and giving us a few ideas for our next trip). It's a consistently great radio show, and this episode, in particular, is worth a listen.

big ups

2009-06-12T14:50:00.000-07:00

High fives to Navarre, one of the most deserving restaurants to ever receive the Oregonian's nod for 2009 Restaurant of the Year. When I think about the best meals I've ever eaten in Portland, Navarre pops up again-and-again. They're a slow-burn kind of place - the sort that sneaks up on you as a dawning realization that you're part of something really unique. And I think they like it that way: they're a little under-the-radar, definitely not-for-everyone, and very much an idiosyncratic reflection of very specific seasonal moments. The O writes:

"You come here to eat food from a serious chef who cooks like a Frenchman in a cabin, pickling and preserving, butchering meat, turning it into sausage and pâté, whipping up pies and jams and making it all work with the fresh supplies at hand."

John Taboada has created a restaurant that responds to local farms, roving cultural cues, and personal whims. Whenever I visit the restaurant, I always think of my cooking teacher who liked to tell stories of Taboada navigating the French markets and returning with the very best-of-the-season produce and an old French housewife's recommendation for cooking it. His place is intimate and entirely inviting. Whether we were enjoying brown butter razor clams or a slab of gateau d'epices, the food has always made us swoon.

All of the acclaim is well-warranted. The only downside is now we'll have even longer waits.

new york bound

2009-05-22T19:15:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-18T19:35:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-04T21:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-02T17:06:00.000-07:00

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.

planting blind

2009-04-22T20:34:00.000-07:00

For the past several years, A and I have patiently made do with a back-stoop container garden. We told ourselves, "When we move into a house with a yard, then we'll start a real garden." Well, that time came and apparently, it also went. Call us chickens (hey, that sounds like a good idea for next year's garden), but we dragged our heels not knowing what (or how) to plant and settled for another year of pots. But we have BIG PLANS for those containers.

I suppose if we were really to consider the logistics of container gardening, we'd realize that we're just undertaking a costlier, less effective version of in-ground sowing. And yet those little, plastic, "terra cotta" pots exude safety - they woo us into believing that they'll protect our little herb starts from the fits of our gardening inadequacy. "Why trust the soil?" they ask, "It's just so deep - you have no idea what's down there." In reality, the containers probably reduce our success rates (and yields) and require more attention and watering. The problem - at least this year - was that damn up-front business of planning. Well, that and a skewed sense of scale.

By the time we worked up the confidence to turn our entire backyard over to raised beds, we were already kind of behind in the process of building frames, tending our compost, and stomping out the extant weeds. We wouldn't have even known about these steps if it weren't for the well-intentioned advice of a good friend of ours. This friend is a qualified gardener, grade A - the sort whose footsteps sprout fully-grown plants in her wake (she even writes well about her garden). Maybe she can't conjure vegetables from thin air, but she is sprouting heirloom bean starts on her office desk, meaning she's leaps-and-bounds ahead of us in terms of gardening skill. And that means that her "simple" advice is predicated on years of accumulated planting know-how. For A and I (who both have unhealthy needs to feel like experts), her gardening encouragement unintentionally pointed our our complete lack of experience.

Time to scale the plans back a bit. Maybe cardoons and fruit trees wouldn't make the cut this year, but we could certainly step our gardening effort up a bit. So, inspired by our friend's abundantly green thumb, we decided that if we were going to resort to containers again, we should at least endeavor to plant our own seeds. This is probably the first time since lima beans on the classroom window-sill that either of us have grown something from seed. So, on an unseasonably hot Sunday afternoon, here is what we laid out:

slow-bolt cilantro
valentine mesclun
loma lettuce & alaska early pea
blue borage
helios radish
cherry jewel nasturtium
french chervil
lemon basil
garlic chives

We consulted a few gardening books, but I'll be damned if I could definitively say that we treated any of these things properly. How do you even plant something at an eighth to a sixteenth of an inch deep? Do you cover the seed with a single grain of dirt? Well, I suppose seed depth is a moot point if we wash them all away with our over-eager watering. And if anything even sprouts, then we'll no doubt be faced with a ruthless amount of thinning; our security measure was to plant dozens of seeds in each pot.

Luckily, I happen to really like the tidy look of bare dirt in our just-planted containers. So, if nothing sprouts, at least it will always look like we've just begun.

unplanned city

2009-04-17T22:12:00.000-07:00

This clip is a few years old, but I've always gotten a kick out of it:

It's goofy, but it's also such a simple conceit for an ad - just use the damn shoes, right? No celebrity needed. And yet, I think what really makes the ad so cool is that it is totally unexpected to see this guy vaulting himself over and across the urban spaces that are designed to move people in very different and proscribed routes. Cities dictate model for their own "ideal" usage, while individuals will invariably personalize and flaunt those impositions.

In Portland, as much as we pride ourselves on a DIY ethos, we also tend to *heart* our progressive city government. This means we often end up relying on a top-down sort of urban development. I think it's a good thing that our city can build lasting, meaningful infrastructure, but it also spares us (for better or for worse) the birthing pains of coming up with creative solutions on our own. I'm thrilled by every new bike lane the city stripes, even if they're handed out like candy, but sometimes the trade-off of this fast-track urban development means cluster-f**ks like the Rose Quarter re-development.

So what happens in other cities where citizens have to go it alone to create a livable environment? The Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal is holding an exhibit through this weekend called Actions: What you can do with the city, and I just came across their awesome Tools for Actions site, which shares all 99 projects from the show. The centre (er?) gathered both proposals and completed designs from around the world, all of which co-opt existing city structures to create the building blocks for new urban interactions.

Rather than treating existing city plans as obstacles, the groups featured in Actions employ them as unintended stages for talking about community and sustenance. The exhibit offers so many cool, new ideas based on everyday actions like mapping, walking, recycling, and biking, that you could easily spend hours reading the briefs and then tracking down more info on the firms and artists involved. I know I can be pretty food-focused, so it's no surprise that projects like urban foraging, plastic bag gardens, and a city-wide picnic caught my attention. Spend some time looking at all of the actions, some of which might inspire you to change your city on your own. A little guerrilla gardening, anyone?

I wish I was in Montreal to see this stuff live. And I wish Portland had museums that could actually draw these sorts of exhibits. Maybe that's a potential "action" itself.

back in the saddle

2009-04-06T19:32:00.000-07:00

You can call us fair-weather cyclists if you want, but the weather today was too good not to ride. So we oiled our chains and pumped-up our deflated tires for our first bike commute of the year. I'm home now and taking stock of how Day 1 went. My breath is heaving, thighs are burning, I'm soaked in sweat, and I swallowed a swarm of gnats. Still, it didn't take long before I fell back into my "competitive commuter" routine and frantically worked to pass everyone I came upon. That's the point, isn't it? To get home first?

I'm so stoked on cycling and the weather right now that I not only want to sit on our back steps drinking gin & tonics, I want to sit on my bike drinking gin & tonics. It'll be good balance practice for staying on my pedals at stop lights.

But as good as it was to be riding again, I have to say that I felt out-of-the-loop without a fanny pack and the latest bike fashions. I guess that it's time to start customizing our bikes. I'm thinking new grip tape for me, maybe handlebar streamers and spoke beads for A?

Then we'll be stylish for Day 2.

(For more Stumptown bike-love, the New York Times just ran a travel piece on biking Portland. The best part was that the article focused on how cycling is a practical way to get around, rather than just recommending that tourists rent a beach cruiser for the waterfront.)

sons & daughters

2009-04-03T16:06:00.000-07:00

The last time we visited New York, we had wanted to stop into a small cafe and grocer called Marlow & Sons, but never made it. I guess it proved more difficult than we thought to squeeze in five or six meals each day. Now that we're headed back at the end of May, it's at the top of our list. Scrappy, bearded, and a little old-fashioned, this place totally embodies the great things happening right now in the Brooklyn food scene (just recently written up in the New York Times).

I was just talking with a friend who used to live in Brooklyn and her opinion was that the food producers were the only thing keeping Williamsburg honest. I think that's probably a pretty fair call - the brewers and picklers and chocolate makers are all crafting something really genuine, right in the middle of a lot of artificiality and gentrification. And they're forging a community that feels different from anywhere else I can think of.

With all of the farm-love and artisan processes, you could have replaced "Brooklyn" with "Portland" and left the rest of the New York Times article pretty much the same (sometimes it feels like we live in the 6th Borough). Still, I can't help but feel like Portland, for all of its raw ingredients, could really use to step up its game. And Marlow & Sons is a perfect example of how strong our food shops could be.

I first came across the restaurant through the snarky, foul-mouthed blog run by their butcher, Tom Mylan. Marlow & Sons is connected to two other places - Diner and Bonita - which realized that, together, they could get better-quality, farm-direct meat and have more control over cuts by breaking their animals down in-house. So Mylan apprenticed himself to some upstate butchers and learned the trade. That was enough to get me interested in what they were doing.

From there, I found out about Mylan's role in the UnFancy Food Show, which acts as an antidote to the bloated annual Fancy Food trade show. Instead of featuring high-dollar booths hawking goji berry power bars, the UnFancy party invited a slew of local artisans to share their handmade foods. Among the participants was The Diner Journal, a food lit-mag published by the Marlow & Sons owners. Sort of like a low-budget Gastronomica, the Journal approaches food from a very different direction than your standard 15-minute-meals-and-travel-porn food magazine. In the last issue, one of their editors painstakingly detailed every step and utensil involved in one of Elizabeth David's famously terse recipes. A ten-page essay written on a single paragraph of instructions - the sort of writing that gets you thinking about food.

As for the restaurant itself, Saveur just featured Marlow & Sons in their latest issue, with some great pictures of the oyster-bar/grocery store. Based on our experience this week with the chocolate caramel tart recipe, there is no way we'll miss them this trip. But when we finally visit, we'll also have to make a detour up the street to visit their newest venture.

After beginning a butchering program, it was only a matter of time until the owners would go and start up an old-school meat shop. Now open for business, Marlow & Daughters was just featured in a nice little video from Coolhunting. And that video is what kicked off this post, making this the most circuitous lead-in ever to a 3-minute clip. Watching it made me want to carve a steer, but then I remembered the remaining 1/4 hog we have in our chest freezer and thought better of it.

(Coolhunting regularly posts fantastic video profiles - just take a look at this feature on another "UnFancy" Brooklyn-based kitchen business: knives from Cut Brooklyn)

musical interlude

2009-03-30T21:02:00.000-07:00

When I get overwhelmed with too many projects, I tend to go silent. I don't mean that I stop talking (as I'm sure A can attest), but rather that I'll start to forget about listening to music. When my mind is racing with ideas, music just adds one more level of buzzing noise to my thoughts. This is pretty much the opposite from A, who can go through life listening to one song while singing another out loud (she probably has two or three more tunes running through her head at the same time). But this never lasts very long - inevitably, I'll end up stumbling on some track or music video and soon I've spent an entire afternoon scanning Myspace and Youtube for new songs. Here's what got me out of my last funk:

Great percussion from The Dodos.

Get ecstatic with Ponytail.

And keep the trip going with Animal Collective.

Marcel Dzama drawings come to life for Department of Eagles.

More animation from Neko Case.

Then finish up real cute with Thao with the Get Down Stay Down

cue the waterworks

2009-03-26T09:15:00.001-07:00

I cried when I watched this trailer, I'm crying as I write this post, and when I finally see this movie, I will bawl the whole fucking time.

growing on me

2009-03-17T21:02:00.000-07:00

Head out on any Sunday morning, into any neighborhood in Portland, and tell me what you notice. I can guarantee you three things:

1. Bikes
2. Lines
3. Breakfast

That's all you'll see, and it paints a pretty clear picture of the town I live in. Portlanders ride their bikes to places where they can stand in ridiculously-long lines and wait for a brunch table to open up. And then they write about, as shown by the recent features in Portland Monthly and MIX magazine, which penned big, sloppy-kiss, love letters to the first meal of the day. Breakfast is everywhere, and not just on the weekends. We have two friends who both work in morning spots who tell us that the crowds show up all week long. Call it a hangover cure, call it a ritual, call it a social scene, but one thing is clear: Portland *hearts* breakfast.

Now, as for A and me? Not so much.

Anyone who's known us long enough has probably held witness to our breakfast rant. Blah to scrambles, blah to hash, blah to french toast and pancakes and waffles. Basically, I feel like when I go out for breakfast, I get a mediocre, under-flavored dish with a high mark-up and some burned coffee. And there's always too much food, which I inevitably eat every bite of. Plus, I'm a sucker for a lame special and brunch menus are rife with featured dishes. So when I want sweet, I'll fall for savory, and when I hunger for something savory, I'll be tricked into ordering a sweet dish. This means that I almost always end up ordering some tarted-up, whipped cream-covered french toast and giving myself a bellyache. Yeah, you could probably say a lot of my breakfast issues are probably of my own creation.

So breakfast just never really did it for me. But a few months ago, I was totally surprised by an issue of Saveur devoted to breakfasts around the world. Here were some meals I could get behind. A Singaporean vegetable curry. Sheep's milk cheese with honey and olives from the Mediterranean. Miso and quick, cabbage pickles in Japan. A beer and pretzel mid-morning snack from Germany. By the time I'd finished reading the issue, I was ready for a second breakfast.

Since that issue, A and I have found ourselves going out to more and more breakfasts, and we've gradually been inviting our friends out for brunch more often, too. In a way, I feel like we've started to become - dare I say it - brunch connoisseurs. So, as recent converts, you can take our advice for what it's worth, but we thought we'd share a few of the places we've recently been digging, and a few we're soon to try...

Broder
This Swedish place has a routine close to what we'd eat at home on an ideal morning, making it our favorite breakfast in town. Their bords bring together a poached egg, granola, cheese, cured meat and fish, jam and toast for a simple, attractive meal. But that doesn't mean you should overlook the delicious aebleskiver pancakes and the smoked trout pytt i panna (hash). Plus, the space is so effortlessly chic and Scandinavian that you leave determined to redecorate your home kitchen.

Little Red Bike Cafe
Run by a young couple who used to man a farmer's market stand, the adorableness of this tiny cafe is only rivaled by their cute-as-punch (if sometimes a little sappy) blog. With good, bike-delivered coffee, a list of egg sandwiches named for biking lingo, and a bike-thru service window, it's pretty damn Portland. Their house-made ice creams aren't to be missed - the last time we ordered a salted caramel milkshake I awkwardly told the owners how delicious it was three or four times.

Tastebud
Whether we're just grabbing some of his wood-fired, Montreal-style bagels at the farmer's market, or we're sitting down in his Southeast cafe, we really love Mark Doxstader's approach to the morning. His formula's simple: things taste good from a wood oven. Things like baked beans, bagel sandwiches, and roasted potatoes, that is.

Screen Door
This place falls at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from the other breakfast spots we've been enjoying. It's probably the most traditional brunch-style place of the lot, and the portions are definitely anything but modest (it is Southern, after all). Still, anywhere that has breakfast corndogs on their menu wins a place in my heart (and a return visit to order some). If you're going to do waffles and benedicts and other breakfast chestnuts, this place does them right.

NEXT ON THE LIST

HA & VL
Jellied pork blood, spicy tripe, soothing chicken pho, and hot, Vietnamese coffee. Early in the morning, you ask? Well, when they sell out of the favorites by 9:30 am, you better believe it.

Navarre
With their rustic and farm-fresh European small plates, this is one of our hands-down favorite restaurants in town. We just found out they do a late brunch on weekends, and I don't even think they change their menu for the mornings. Sounds perfect.

Pambiche
Cuban sweet breads, plantains, empanadas and beans prove that other countries really understand how to begin the day. No need for Mrs. Butterworth when you can douse everything in banana ketchup.

Beast
Prix-fixe four-course brunch menu? It feels so decadent. And it probably will be, given chef Naomi Pomeroy's magic way with pork. I'm imaging bacon pastries, poached eggs, and a cream-laden dessert. I'm also imagining myself making reservations very soon.

With only two mornings each weekend, we've got a lot of eating to do. But this list doesn't even mention Simpatica, Pine State, Moxie, Flavourspot, Wong's King, Little T Bakery, or cold, leftover pizza from Dove Vivi. I guess that A and I need to fess up to the fact they we may just happen to enjoy breakfast.

you might think twice before eating that vegetable

2009-03-10T20:24:00.000-07:00

Blueberry Danish, 2006

While googling DIY scratch-and-sniff (it's a long story), I came across a series of completely enthralling photos by Kathryn Parker Almanas. Among the hospital photos and the pictures from her trip to the Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence (I've been, and it's awesome), she's done a lot of work staging medical dissections and "studies" of everyday foods.

Anatomia di Pane VIII, 2008

Even though I'm a fairly squeamish person, I am totally enamored of taxidermy. Whether it is a hunter's trophy or a natural history diorama, it is all about theatrics. For every codified taxonomy of species, there is a kitten tea party; it's equal parts science and fiction, and I love it. I even just enjoy the basic aesthetic of taxidermy, with it's wooden plaques, glass display cases and pseudo-scientific instruments.

Breakfast I, 2006

So while I covet all of the beakers and trays in Almanas' photos, what I really latch onto about the images are her compositions. She does a fantastic job of quoting 17th century Dutch still lives, with their low, slanting light and that same entwined artifice of sterility and decay. Or that famous Rembrandt painting of the anatomy lesson. The photos are partially reserved and objective in the prim manner of early medical science, but there's also a real fetish made of out of the repulsive and gratuitous. The way she lingers over the graphic details gives her photos a violent, forensic quality, like the evidence of a hastily cleaned-up attack. Her site has a few truly grotesque pictures of berry-stained bread dough, or dark fruits in a stainless steel sink, but this one really got me when I first saw it:

Swiss Chard, 2006

When I noticed the red-juice stains on the asceptic trays, my stomach did a turn. They look so animal.
And they're just vegetables.

putt putt putt

2009-02-26T20:00:00.000-08:00

Tuesday night, A and I rounded up some friends for a little "tee time" at the 4th Annual Holocene Minigolf Art Invitational. Each year, the organizers enlist a roster of artists, designers, galleries, and stores to build out their dream putt-putt holes. In past years, there have been 3-D fun houses, giant labyrinths, life-size atari games, and a whale with an air-jet blowhole that ejected your golf ball. People get seriously ambitious - it almost puts the Adult Soapbox Derby to shame.

This year, I'd say the course was even stronger and the holes were definitely more playable. One green was populated with fey garden creatures and over-sized, candy-colored radish flowers. Another was a modeled critique of our crazy car-culture and freeway system. Free pancakes (and self-esteem boosts) were served for every hole-in-one. And overtop of it all, they projected Caddyshack on the walls and hosted club-circuit regulars to DJ the festivities. It's that classic love-it or hate-it Portland event. You either embrace the self-aware, irony-laden quirkiness or end up muttering bitter things about the "creative class."

But if you're too busy wandering around sulking over hipsters, you might get nailed by a vicious windmill with its fast-moving ceiling fan blades!

And wouldn't that just be a horrible way to go? Getting a concussion from a salvaged-wood cabin covered in dream catchers and garden gnomes. Ha!

Even though most of my photos were drunkenly blurry (the tournament is held at a bar, afterall), I did manage to find one of my favorite holes online:

Everyone else was really into the mustachioed bunny, but I would have taken home that little Indian headdress bird in a heartbeat. He's like a lazy-eyed neo-hippie. Priceless!

You can see more (re: less blurry) photos on the Portland Mercury's website.

pok pok express, now servicing new stops

2009-02-19T21:04:00.000-08:00

I think people are generally surprised at our answer when they ask A and me to name our favorite restaurant in Portland. The quizzical looks on their faces always betray that they were expecting a refined, European-inflected restaurant or a rustic, farm-to-table bistro in the vein of Chez Panisse. Sure, there are plenty of both in our top 10 list, but no, our favorite is a Thai place. Granted, this certain Thai place happens to be Pok Pok, so anybody who's surprised at out choice must never have been there.

I'm not quite sure how to write about Pok Pok without embarrassing myself (or A). Whenever I tell people about this place, I tend to get a little worked up, mixing up my words and talking a bit too loudly. But seriously, the food is un-damn-believable. Unless you've been to Thailand, it's probably completely unlike anything you've ever tasted; Pad thai is absent, as are all other Americanized dishes. In their place, Pok Pok serves Southeast Asian drinking food with a nose for authentic (and esoteric) flavors. Fiery hot barbecued boar collar with iced mustard greens, turmeric-hued catfish stew, salads with sawtooth and betel leaf, and addictive fish-sauce wings. Every dish is mouth-wateringly spicy and alluringly aromatic. As proven by this review, owner Andy Ricker is devoted to his ingredients. This is a man to be trusted when it comes to Asian food.

When we moved into our current apartment, it only took one ride on our nearest bus line to realize that, if we took it all the way through downtown and back over the river into Southeast, that it would be deliver us on Pok Pok's front lawn. We christened it the "Pok Pok Express." Since we moved in, we've been 2 (3?) times and still haven't used the bus to get there. But each day, as we commute to and from work, it's a struggle not to just keep on riding in the direction of Pok Pok's heavenly khao soi. Now, the temptation has become even worse.

For months, Portland food writers have been frantically swapping gossip about Pok Pok's rumored expansion into Chinatown. Now, Ping has finally opened. And it is right at our downtown bus stop. As a partnership between Ricker and John C. Jay of Wieden + Kennedy, this place has quite the pedigree of cooking chops and hip branding. The future is bright.

Now, you can chalk it up to being a superfan, but as soon as their placeholder website went live, I'd already signed up for their mailing list. As one of the overeager first, A and I were invited to a preview night for the restaurant last Saturday. The look on A's face was priceless - it was like getting asked to head backstage with her favorite band. Sometimes, there's a payoff for being obsessive.

Right when you step inside, it's got that same kind of cool as Clyde Common, another favorite of ours. The kind of cool where you feel hipper for being there, instead of thinking you're not up to par with the other patrons. Let's call it "inclusive cool." But even more than being hip, it feels established, like an old and weathered noodle house. From the wall of antique radios to the vintage tin advertisements, every detail is carefully considered and well-placed. It's how I imagine I'd style a restaurant were I to open up shop.

I can already tell Ping is going to enter our "heavy rotation," mainly because nothing on the menu would have seemed out-of-step at Pok Pok. Even though Ping expands the scope to include dishes from Japan, Korea, China, Macau, Singapore, Malaysia and India, everything is prepared with the same attention to native detail and eye-opening flavor. What I can confidently report from our representative "smattering" of their dishes is that the food is Good and Unique. So what did we try? Chicken heart skewers, fish balls, kopitiam toast (coconut egg jam), steamed gai lan, salted duck egg salad, ju pa bao (Macanese pork bun), and pet pha lo (aromatic duck leg stew). Every one a winner.

The chicken hearts had a rich, irony, and essential flavor, while the grilled kopitiam toast made for an unusually sweet and nice starter. We ordered the gai lan (Chinese broccoli) half-accidentally, but ended up pleasantly surprised by how light and flavorful this dim sum staple was prepared. Ping's pork bun was the end-all-be-all of literal interpretation: a whole pork-fried pork chop nestled into a halved, sweet, brioche bun. Pork + bun. Very satisfying. Of everything we tasted, I think the pet pha lo stood out the most. Rich with star anise, the brothy stew played really well off of the pickled mustard greens and chili vinegar accompaniments. My mouth is watering just to write about it.

Well, A and I can safely add Ping to that growing list of crave-worthy Asian restaurants we daydream about. If it weren't for a prior commitment on Tuesday night, we might have already headed back for their official opening, and a for a bowl of the ramen we missed. It may just be that I'm starting to feel a bit of Euro-pub burnout, but 2009 is shaping up to be a year of Asian food. Welcome to the 21st century, right? Still, I'm starting to worry that it might be a tad geeky to get this excited about Asian food. We'll see what my co-workers say when I start bringing in kimchi for lunch...

infographics

2009-02-09T19:50:00.000-08:00

Recently, I read my first book by Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations. Brilliant! Tufte's obsession is with improving how we share and use ideas and, to that end, he's written a series of books examining and critiquing the information design of charts, graphs, tables and diagrams. This may sound like I'm starting off a really dry post here, but his book was unbelievably fasciating and really beautiful. Since he couldn't find a publisher who would produce the books to his standards (and that means full-color photos, annotations and moving flaps), Tufte has committed himself to self-publishing. The results are like pop-up books for designers! Just look at this page from the book that explains the importance of scale:

The Lichtenstein mural looks small as it's printed on the left
(until you see the artist standing next to it). It's all relative.

I first picked the book up a few years ago after thumbing through a copy and seeing all of the great art history references peppering the book; Malevich, Giacometti, Lichtenstein, Bragdon, Tansey, and Rousseau all make appearances to help demonstrate how meaning is visually constructed. What's interesting about Tufte's method is how he throws these artistic examples in with NASA data, old maps, magic trick diagrams, music notation, warning labels and mug shots all to prove his point.

Basically, Tufte shows that the same rules apply to visual information design no matter the subject and, at the base of all of these examples, everything is subjective. Just by omitting certain details or changing the color-coding or scale, Tufte points out how the same data can be used to reach drastically different conclusions. I never thought I'd be particularly interested in the the first epidemiological study of a cholera outbreak, but with the right design, I was enthralled.

Ever since reading Tufte's book, I feel like I've been on the patrol for well-designed charts and diagrams. If you spend enough hours on the internets, you're bound to find something worthwhile.

GOOD magazine has, across the board, pretty exceptional design. I guess that it's what happens when a bunch of design-savvy, future-obsessed progressives found a magazine. Good stuff. As part of their work, they produce really engaging videos for their Transparency series that detail hidden costs and overlooked facts about the world we live in. Just take a look at this sharp clip about water resources:

Hot. Last year, they also launched a brief series of broadsheet-style charts that gave a sort of "state of the union" in the months surrounding the election. Their GOOD sheets applied beautiful design to explaining historically slim election margins, immigration rules in the US, the "first 100 days" of a Presidency, and holiday-season shopping.

While the graphs and charts that GOOD produces tend towards the macro, a new website, called Daytum, gives a stylish way to track the highly idiosyncratic details of your personal life. In early December, I set up my own tracking and have been trying to diligently record some of the mundane things I think and do. In my mind, this is what Twitter and Facebook and all of those social networking sites should have been - just the facts, well-designed, and slightly comical. The holidays lent themselves perfectly to quantification - now I know exactly how frequently I hummed "Little Drummer Boy" to myself (9):

I have to say that after two months of following a few statistics, it can be tricky to keep it spontaneous. When I log in to record one change, it's hard not to end up thinking, "Do I have anything to change on these other charts?" Then it becomes an issue of influencing the results of the "study." Did something actually change, or am I making up a reason to adjust the numbers to keep things interesting? I should ask my sociologist wife about this.

Given the slick design and tip-top usability, it shouldn't be surprising that Daytum is the brainchild of Nicholas Felton, a shockingly obsessive and talented designer who's best known for his Annual Reports. No, not like "really well-done reports for major companies" - more like "really hyper-detailed reports for the minutae of his daily life." Just look at this spread from the 2008 report:

If that seems detailed, you should know that the maps included in the printed version of this year's report can be assembled into an icosahedron globe of his movement patterns. I absolutely love this guy and I'm amazed by how his brain works.

But Felton's definitely not alone in his rigorous self-observation. He was invited by PRINT magazine, along with a few other diligent data recorders, to follow a single week using a medium of their choice. The results, captured in photos, drawings and charts, show everything they consumed. While I found this project clever, the neurotic tracking of certain others can begin to give me the jeeblies. The Quantified Self is a new movement for greater understanding of our lives, beginning with more detailed recording. As you can read in this article from GOOD, its adherents chart their pains, sleep cycles, sex, calories and mood. As much as this stuff fascinates me, I have no interest in weighing my food and counting my breaths. For now, you'll just have to put up with my tracking the foods I wish I were eating. Not that you probably want to know any more than that.

Sorry if this is falling into a bit of rambling, but there is really just so much of this stuff out there to enjoy. If you want - no - if you need more charts, Visual Complexity provides a clearinghouse for visual data mapping. Some of them are just pretty to look at.

There is also this taxonomy of heavy metal band names.

In a long string of web-recorded personal geekery, let's just look at this post as keeping up with tradition.

six more weeks...

2009-02-02T19:30:00.000-08:00

Facts and thoughts on Groundhog Day:

Yes, we made cookies.
Yes, that is my very own groundhog-shaped cookie cutter and top-hatted rodent. I also have a mug.

Growing up, my family celebrated Groundhog Day each year as diligently as any church holiday and I could never figure out why my peers didn't mark the day with cookies and cards like we did at home. I'm not sure if any of us can remember how the festivities began, but they certainly haven't let up over the years. Maybe it had something do with my dad being a librarian; after all, Punxsutawney Phil spends the other 364 days of his year in the Groundhog Zoo at the Punxsutaweny Memorial Library.

Yes, I've proudly visited him there. (We always did a lot of library tourism on our vacations.)

For those of you who don't mark rodent-centric holidays on your calendar (February 2 - remember it for next year!), here's a little run-down: based on German superstition, if a groundhog sees his shadow on Candlemas, then it bodes 6 more weeks of winter. Sure, Spring is technically in about 6 weeks anyway, but this holiday gives the folks of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania an excuse for lots of top-hats, braggadocio and some pretty epic mustaches. A lot of other cities (all with equally baffling names) boast their own groundhogs and their predictions can vary wildly. I would recommend that they all band together to form some sort of unionized weather service, except that I know the rest of them are impostors. Shubenacadie Sam? Staten Island Chuck? Bah.

If (for some reason) you didn't get up at daybreak to watch Phil's prediction live this year, you can still see it on groundhog.org. The fact that Phil snagged that URL is enough for me to legitimize his prognosticating primacy.

My favorite part of this year's holiday coverage was that GOOD magazine compared him to a soused gambler:

"Phil has a motley track record. At 30% accuracy, he doesn’t even beat the flip of coin; he’s more like a drunk at a poker table: You could make money simply by betting against him."

And yes, that was part of an article using the movie, Groundhog Day, to illustrate complex ideas in economics, physics and theology. Who could blame theorists for trying? That film is fantastic. Last week, I came across an artist online who was illustrating a book of famous Bills and Williams in mock masonic garb called the Billuminati.
Yes, the Bill Murray spread was the best.

And yes, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this morning, predicting six more weeks of winter.

year of living awesomely

2009-01-27T19:45:00.000-08:00

I can not think of a year in recent memory that has begun with such a glum national mood as 2009. It was as if everyone collectively decided that the end of 2008 was so disheartening (I'm looking at you, economy) that we might as well resign ourselves to this year being even worse. Time to hunker down, hole up, and stick it out. Let's call it the "Year of the Fallout Shelter."

Now, what surprised me was that a lot of writers didn't necessarily take the same tack. While there have certainly been a fair amount of dire predictions for restaurants and shops closing in the coming year, a lot of critics seem like they took it upon themselves to argue against their own apocalyptic visions and implore readers to think about the impact of their dollars.

Portland Mercury's Not Invited Back 2009 list featured a rant against "status dressing" that offered this positive upswing:

Taking its cue from a time when purchases were made bearing the long term in mind, and quality took precedence over mass-marketing and instant gratification, even the fashion world is adopting a more serious approach. And with manufacturing jobs in your country, and your city, directly affecting the quality of your own life, you might find yourself more inclined, when you do spend, to put your money back into the hands of your neighbors.

That same issue interviewed local designers on their advice for the new year, to which Moth Love owner Gretchen Jones responded that 2009 should focus on:

Simplicity in design/function/production. Inflated outsourcing of overly available goods versus handmade, independent, and SLOW (made-to-order) fashion. Approach design uniquely. Be savvy in your selections and who you support. Yours is mine, is ours, is mine. This is the time to refine.

There it was - another plea for carefully-considered shopping. Over the next few days, I caught notice of similar sentiments in a lot of New Year's articles and not just on fashion. Food critics implored their readers to patronize local restaurants more in the coming year and Carrie Brownstein, over on Monitor Mix, resolved to better her concert-going, paying more money for worthwhile bands and avoiding free shows.

But of all the articles and ideas I've collected, the one that keeps resonating for me comes from last November, though it perfectly primed me for everything I later read. Bruce Sterling, on the Worldchanging blog, called for a dramatically redefined relationship with our stuff. (To really get into it, read past some of his first thoughts on global living to the second-half, when he starts talking about the "hairshirt green" mentality.) Sure, there is some geeky multi-tool evangelism in there, but these ideas are really rich:

You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space.

Do not "economize." Please. That is not the point. The economy is clearly insane. Even its champions are terrified by it now. It's melting the North Pole. So "economization" is not your friend. Cheapness can be value-less. Voluntary simplicity is, furthermore, boring. Less can become too much work.

Read the whole damn thing. Seriously. It's simple and encouraging advice:
-Only own things that improve your life in some way (you can set those terms).
-Buy fewer, nicer items from which you'll get more use.
-Live better.

Even though his general idea is familiar, Sterling brings to it a new emphasis on quality of life. Women's magazines have been preaching a similar ethos for years (how to style one dress for five looks), but always with the focus being on frugality. The "voluntary simplicity" movement has also argued a related concept, but all too often, as Sterling points out, it's quickly been pushed to the extremes of "buy nothing" day, which doesn't work towards any improvement of a system, just its refutation. Where, then, is the room for deliberate, positive action?

So, before this post becomes a bibliography of all of the things that have been bouncing around my brain recently, I'm going to (try to) lay out my own little synthesis of all of these New Year's predictions and exhortations: the P & A economic stimulus plan!

It comes down to this: take Sterling's idea, but extend the quality of life concept to your community. Make your purchases from businesses that make good neighbors. Choose products that contribute to a better world. Easy.

Really, this shouldn't be difficult to adapt to this idea. You already make these decisions about the kind of world you want to live in all the time when you make purchases. For example - do you want to live in the kind of world where you don't stink? Then you buy deodorant. See how simple this will be?

First off, this is going to mean some serious spring (February?) cleaning and editing. We'll clear out the things we never use and put them under the scrutiny of a 17-year old at Buffalo Exchange to see if we can make a few bucks back on them. Anything we can't sell is going to Goodwill.

Now I'm not advocating for going on a shopping spree to single-handedly kick-start the economy, but I am saying that purchases are inevitable and they need to be considered. For us, this might mean that when we replace our computer, we do it at a local shop. If we're needing new threads? We'll make fewer, smarter purchases from better boutiques and stop wasting our time with places that sell serialized fashion. And when we're hungry (which we'll inevitably and frequently be), we'll make sure we're eating at restaurants we love and continuing our farmer's market boosterism. Skip IKEA. Forget Target. Go vintage and handmade and locally-owned. The trouble will surely come with the basics - how many small office supply stores are in business any longer; is there even a place to buy socks and underwear that isn't in a mall? It will be a year of searching these places out.

2008 shaped up to be the "year of doing it for ourselves" - preserving, baking, stitching, cooking, and making of all sorts. Now, those practices have become so ingrained in our routine that it's difficult to remember how we passed our time before them. They certainly won't be going anywhere, but for 2009, let's get over the worn-out idea of a "year of living simply" and make this fun: a year of living awesomely.

feel those tingles?

2009-01-21T08:00:00.000-08:00

If that photo doesn't make you well up with tears of pride, then take a look at the newly polished Whitehouse.gov and this video:

It's official.
Welcome to the "Goosebumps Presidency."

the alaska of the tropics, part two (big island)

2009-01-20T21:41:00.000-08:00

P:

So, Alaska. I mean, Hawaii. I mean ... We (inevitably) got a little long-winded in our post about the first island we visited, which meant that I didn't get to explaining the title. Well, guess what? The title only gains more clarity on the Big Island.

As we drove along the edge of Kailua on our last day on Oahu, I suddenly had an insight (!) that Hawaii was a lot like somewhere I'd been before: Alaska. Maybe it's their isolation from the continental 48. Maybe it's that both states tendered prominent political candidates this year. Maybe it's their similar climates. Wait, scratch that - it's actually hard to put my finger on what exactly gave me that idea. But there are some similarities between the two states that are worth pointing out:

-a disenfranchised native population that's a tourist-draw (totem poles and luaus)
-incredible natural beauty
-rich and hearty local cuisine (moose? plate lunch?)
-senior citizens on tour buses (and cruise ships)
-blue tarps (seven out of ten homes in both states have a plastic tarp covering some sort of junk in the front yard - it's an empirical fact)

Granted, a place like Waikiki is a far cry from "The Last Frontier" to the North, but we did an admirable job of avoiding the touristy resorts and sticking to a little more of an off-the-beaten-path trip, making my comparison a bit more understandable. In the end, Alaska and Hawaii boast their own quirky cultures, where people lead lives unique from anywhere else in the states. I mean, where else would A have run off first thing in the morning in her pajamas to pick giant, tropical fruit from the top of a fence off of a neighbor's tree? Yeah, it probably wouldn't have been Alaska, but my point remains: Alaska = Hawaii.

A:

We had papaya trees in our front yard. Having arrived at our rental in the middle of the night, I first glimpsed the trees when I awoke the next morning. I picked the first papaya right off of our back lanai, but it was a small, under-ripe specimen and I knew it must be only the beginning. Thus, I set off to explore the rest of our acreage, and came back with two enormous, deliciously ripe papaya.

I don't know what came over me, really - it was as if my true, animal nature came bursting out of me and I had to hunt and gather. So, I hunted the best papayas (which just so happened to be right beyond our fence on neighboring land)...and once I found them, I gathered. Below, you will see the fruits of my labor.

Papaya is particularly good eaten cold, but we were so excited to try the fresh-picked fruit that we sliced one right open. The perfume was intoxicating, almost overwhelming.
Perfectly ripe and seductively sweet, I can safely say that I have never in my life tasted a better papaya. We devoured the fruit in a matter of minutes, and I was hungry for more.

As we drove into Kona later that morning, I noticed a sign for the South Kona Fruit Stand and immediately requested a detour. Though the smoothie bar and cafe were closed, the stand had plenty of exotic fruits for sale, most grown organically next door. Struck with the idea that I probably would not return to a tropical island in the forseeable future, I loaded up on everything in sight - local Ka'u oranges, Rangpur limes, butter pear avocados, mangos, organic estate-grown coffee, abiu, and haupia/lilikoi (coconut pudding with passionfruit). The pudding was a nice, mid-morning snack, as all of the fruit was a day or two from ripeness. The abiu - small, yellow fruit with a translucent flesh that has the texture of lychee and the sweet, rich flavor of vanilla pudding - were the most unlike any other fruit I've tried. Our bags bulging with treats, we trekked off to find snorkeling gear for P's introduction to the sport.

P:

As the storm clouds gathered closer to shore, we suited up for my inaugural foray out snorkeling. Even though it may make me a weenie, I'm not a big fan of swimming in lakes - the feeling of plants and fish brushing past me in the murky waters just gives me the jeeblies. So, to put it mildly, I was withholding judgment on snorkeling. It remained to be seen whether I'd be better with non-pool swimming if I could see with whom I was sharing the waters, or if it was best left to my imagination.

We'd been steered towards a sheltered bay that boasted a lava rock shoreline and a historic park: Pu'uhonua o Honaunau. The waves slapped me against rocks as I fumbled with my flippers, before I made an ungainly plunge out into the waters. Holy. Crap. That is one strange, claustrophobic feeling to be breathing underwater, through a tube, with your eyes wide open. But wow, did I see some cool fish: puffer fish, trumpetfish and too many butterfly fish to count. At about the same time as I reached my limit for swimming with the fishes, a torrential thunderstorm broke over the coast. I'd just climbed out of the waters, but A (a true lover of the sort of quiet time that snorkeling affords) was drifting further and further out, oblivious to the weather. She did eventually look up from her aquatic reverie to realize we were calling her back to shore.

In October, we read a feature in Gourmet magazine about 20 great American restaurants from when the magazine was founded that are still going strong. Among them was the Manago Hotel, in Captain Cook, Hawaii, not far from where we'd been snorkeling. We'd called ahead that day to make a reservation, since the place still operates on plantation hours, meaning you need to be in by 7:30 pm to be served. The hotel dining room was not nearly as stately as that phrase makes it sound, but it was awesomely kitschy and probably hasn't changed since the day it opened. On the wood-paneled walls, a felt letter board menu listed the entrees and while almost everyone at the table ordered some local fish, I took the article advice and ordered the house special: a gravy-drenched pork chop.

Everyone at a table shared the family-style side sides, which came out with a pot of genmaicha tea before the rest of the meal. Sugary-sweet black-eyed peas, pasta salad, steamed vegetables and lots of white rice - island food circa 1950. With liberal dosings of soy sauce, we devoured most of the plates before our main courses even arrived. My pork chop was pretty delicious, covered as it was with a brown gravy and pan-seared on the bone, but A's choice of opelu, a less-fishy mackerel, caught all of our notice as the best-tasting fish at the table.

On our way back to our house that evening, we made a short detour to the southernmost bar in the US, Shaka Restaurant in Na'alehu. I don't mean to be a spoil sport, but they are resting on a tenuous claim - they're at least a few miles from the very southern tip of Hawaii. If someone wanted to be a huge jerk, that crown is there for the taking. Other than that, there's not much else to say on that front other than that my beer did taste very southern.

A:

Our third and final day on the Big Island was volcano day. After a breakfast of cold papaya, linguisa, and toast with jaboticaba jam (grapes that grow out of the trunks of trees - my brother's find at the fruit stand), we set out for a black sand beach. Punalu'u beach is known for the presence of endangered sea turtles, that often drift onto dry land to sunbathe on the warm sand. We were lucky enough to see three while we were there - surrounded, of course, by tourists trying to get there picture taken with the turtles. It always astounds me when people blatantly ignore both posted rules and common sense, standing within inches rather than the suggested fifteen feet from the basking animals. I'll admit that I am particularly attentive to rules - perhaps I should be an officer of the law when I grow up? - but, seriously, regardless of regulations, is it that difficult to understand that standing nearly on top of living creatures might distress them in some way? And that maybe if you distress these turtles too much, you might not have a turtle to take your picture with next time around?

Off of my soapbox, and onto lunch. On our way into Volcano National Park, we stopped to grab food in a small town that was rumored to have outstanding malasadas. Unfortunately, the donuts were only available on the weekends, but the rest of the food at the unassuming cafe was surprisingly tasty. I briefly contemplated a hamburger made with local, grass fed beef, but eventually settled on the loco moco with fish. Traditionally consisting of white rice topped with a hamburger patty, a fried egg and brown gravy, ours replaced the patty with a cut of fish. Looking back, I wish I'd gotten the patty, but the meal was still a satisfying way to prepare for a hike through a lava crater.

Kilauae Ika erupted in 1959 and formed a lava pool at the base of the crater. The cooled lava now provides a short, scenic hike that begins and ends in rainforest and allows you to trek across the floor of the crater. We had lots of fun muttering from above about stupid tourists getting too close to the steam vents in the crater, only to head straight for them once we reached the floor. We even took a family photo next to one of them. It's always particularly touching when a family risks severe burns while posing for next year's Christmas photo.

As late afternoon wore on, we drove out to the edge of the park where you could watch eruption meet ocean. Before dusk, the site is impressive enough - as you drive up through the lava fields and hike over cooled lava coils toward the viewing area, a HUGE, billowing steam cloud looms ahead. Every so often, a spray of rocks shoots into the air and the crowd collectively "ooohs". As dusk settles and the sun sets, however, the real show begins. The base of the steam cloud begins to glow red, and the shooting rocks become red sparks that burst into the sky. These were far and away the best New Year's fireworks I have yet to see.

P: That night, with the spoils of a surprisingly good local grocery store and farmer's market, we made up a hodge-podge dinner to celebrate New Year's Eve. Thai fish curry to take advantage of the local produce; hoppin' john for some New Year's fortune. After a long day of volcano hikes, everyone began to crash by 10:30, but not before A could run outside with a coconut, a dull machete and a few glasses of wine in her. Looking back, I can not believe I let her tippsily hack at coconut in the dark, but then again, I was distracted by the sparklers. Between her efforts and her mom's even-more-nerve-wracking chopping, they split the outer husk and set to work boring out a hole for the juice. With the help of a lava rock, they split the fruit for everyone to taste and I remembered that I don't really like fresh coconut all that much. Thanks for your hard work, sweetie! It probably wouldn't have been a good end to the trip to lose her finger in Hawaii.

the alaska of the tropics, part one (oahu)

2009-01-08T21:35:00.000-08:00

A -
P was not thrilled that we were headed to Hawaii. From everything he'd heard, people who went to Hawaii spent half their time tanning (as many of you know, we don't really "tan") and the other half golfing (golf? we prefer croquet). Besides, Hawaii over the winter holidays? Isn't it all so very cliche?

All of his skepticism changed when our Hawaiian airlines flight attendants began slipping local words into their presentations, and P realized that words like "mahalo" and "wiki wiki" were incredibly fun to repeat. Even (especially) when they made no sense.

A: Would you like to rent a personal entertainment device for the long flight?
P: mele kalikimaka
A: You don't even know what you're saying
P: mahalo

At least it kept him entertained for the flight.

P -
I'll admit it: I was embarrassed to be headed to Hawaii for the holidays. It felt like the polar (tropical?) opposite of our standard vacations - no grimy city streets; no crumby weather; no urban culture; no long, meandering walks through questionable neighborhoods to find a food cart. I'm not really a "sit-on-the-beach-and-relax" kind of guy. It makes me tense. And seriously, what would we eat? Teriyaki bento?

So, I was surprised at how quickly I embraced the warmth that met us when we got off the plane. It probably had something to do with the sub-arctic weather Portland had gotten over the holidays. Immediately upon landing, I knew Hawaii was completely different from anywhere I'd ever been. The airport corridors were open to the outside weather. Alien-looking plants grew over everything. Vibrant-green, serrated cliffs rose up from the coastal shores. I started to feel as though I could manage a Hawaiian vacation. And we found lunch, which greatly put me at ease.

A month ago, I'd read an article about how Hawaiians were skeptical of their native son, Obama, until they witnessed him tuck into a big plate lunch at a local drive-in. To prove that a skinny, pale Oregonian was ready for the islands, I knew I'd need to try some. Conveniently, L & L Drive Inn was just a few blocks away from our first rental in Kailua. Essentially fast food with a local flavor, L & L offers the building blocks of a standard "plate lunch": protein, two scoops of white rice, and one scoop of macaroni salad. Within seconds of walking in the door, everyone in our entire group had clumsily decided to order the same thing. When our seven cartons of the "Hawaiian Special" were ready, we opened them up and dug in to the lau lau (pork steamed in a taro leaf) and a bastardized version of the luau-favorite kalua pork. Sure, it was probably seasoned with liquid smoke, but I'm not going to lie and tell you I didn't enjoy every mashed-together bite of the macaroni, pork and rice. On our way out, I noticed Spam musubi on the menu, but A held me back from stuffing myself with what is essentially processed meat sushi.

A-
Not that we didn't have Spam later during our trip. To be honest, putting this stuff in writing is making me feel a little ill and more than a little ashamed. But, we were just trying to get closer to our soon-to-be president.

Oddly enough, we were very close to the Obamas during our stay. My father was born in Kailua and the first part of our trip was a family reunion - a homecoming for my grandparents and their children. I had heard, as I'm sure everyone had (come on, who didn't see that picture of our shirtless president elect?) that the Obamas were staying in Kailua. Oahu being an island, and Kailua a small piece of the island, our rental was well under a mile from the Obamas' vacation getaway. I won't pretend that we saw them, but we did see some friendly looking secret service in Hawaiian shirts at one end of the beach we frequented. I wanted to scream, "Obama!!! Shriek!!" but P restrained me. Probably for the best - I would bet the secret service agents were still fairly nimble in flip-flops.

The morning after our arrival, plate lunch still heavy in our bellies, we were greeted with the sweet, slightly greasy smell of malasadas. The malasada is a Portuguese confection - a custardy, craggy donut covered with sugar that is a bit like a dense beignet. You may remember that neither P nor I have a strong love for donuts. These donuts, like those from Donut Plant in NYC, are the exception to the rule. Actually, I think I've come to the realization that I do like donuts - I just don't like crap.

Lest you think we ate only junk food in Hawaii, we did manage to enjoy two very traditional dishes, courtesy of my Hawaiian cousins. Alongside the pizza that had been ordered for our family reunion lunch, one of my cousins had contributed a few tubs of poke - marinated cubes of raw fish, like nigiri doused in tasty sauce - and a few bags of poi, or taro root paste. As a rule, my mainland relatives are not particularly adventurous eaters, but a few of us hovered expectantly over the tubs until they were graciously opened for our tasting pleasure. After running through the line of tubs - poke squid, wasabi tuna, and tuna with limu seaweed - and then trying each once again, it was onto the poi. Having never been to Hawaii, P was a poi neophyte. I have a bit of a soft spot for the slightly sour, purple concoction, but many are put off by its paste-like consistency. P certainly did not turn up his nose, but he admits that it is not something he would run back to try it again. I am holding out for a taste of poi with sugar and cream, as my cousins described. Seriously, how few foods are not better for the addition of those two ingredients?

P-
Despite how we're recounting our trip, it actually didn't revolve around food nearly so much as our typical vacation. Hawaii has a very funny food culture that sort of mashes-up Asian food with American fast food grub. There is a lot of gravy, pork, and rice. Not that any of that is bad, but it didn't give us much to go on. Still, we tried our damnedest to strong arm A's family into indulging our every hunger. For the most part, they gladly went along.

As we left Kailua, we detoured to Island Snow for a cone of shave ice at the Obamas' go-to shop. For a sense of how Obama-crazed the islands are, Island Snow, which doubles as a surf shop, had already reprinted their t-shirts with the 'O' in their name replaced by Obama's election logo.
More patbingsoo than sno-cone, Hawaiian shave ice can come with a scoop of ice cream, adzuki bean topping (sweetened beans found in Asian pastries) and a "sno-cap" drizzle of sweetened condensed-milk. I split mine half-and-half between coconut and lilikoi (passionfruit) and opted for the beans and sno-cap, creating a sugary, brain-freeze of a snack. So good.

After a brief hike up to a lighthouse on the Eastern-most point of O'ahu, we piled back into rental cars with A's family and drove to Honolulu to catch our flight to the big island. Before departing, we took a side trip for a late-afternoon lunch at a Filipino restaurant named Elena's. This place was much more in sync with our usual traveling style: a no-decor, florescent-lit storefront in the light-industrial/strip-mall fringes of the city. Their bathroom policy was stated as, "RESTROOMS IN NEARBY BUS TERMINAL." Classy. But really good. We don't have much experience with Filipino food, but we recently read an article about the cuisine that described it as "the comfort food of Asia," which made it sound worth trying. Owing to a wide range of European influences, Filipino food isn't nearly so spicy or pungent as that of its neighbors and much more reliant on stews and braises.

Enraptured by all of the unfamiliar dishes, we overloaded our table with a little of everything: pinakbet, pork adobo, crispy pork chicharon, banana lumpia, arroz caldo, and a house-special soup called sari-sari. The lumpia, which were little more than apple bananas wrapped in a deep-fried, egg roll wrapper, caused A and I to reconsider our aversion to the fruit. Especially when we dipped them in the ubiquitous seasoned vinegar that accompanied our meals. Even though the arroz caldo I ordered came out too hot to eat (not that I didn't try), I'd wager that it was one of the standouts of the table. A rice porridge of chicken, scallions, and loads of ginger, it was utterly satisfying. I've heard that it's a bad idea to eat mounds of food, particularly greasy food, right before a flight. Fiddlesticks. It worked for us. After all, leftover rice porridge wouldn't have fit in a 3 oz. container for our flight to the Big Island.

nothing to do but bake

2008-12-20T16:00:00.000-08:00

It's snowing here. Small, constant flakes that are building up into light, fluffy mounds of snow. This is very unusual for Portland; our typical winter snowstorms consist of wet, sticky snowflakes that melt as soon as they touch the surface and inevitably turn into rain by afternoon. Another casualty of global warming, I suppose - but I can't complain.

Though we tend to ignore Portland's famously unreliable weather predictions, we nevertheless had planned for a full day of indoor activities; we're finishing up our Christmas gifts, and had hoped to attend two holiday cocktail parties this evening, to which we'd promised to bring cookies. One (large) batch of ginger pillows became two, with the leftover egg whites being turned into pink meringues, and with panettone on the menu as well, we had a packed day of baking ahead of us.

We took a brief walk in the morning to feel the snow on our faces and the soft muted thud under our shoes, and chuckled to ourselves as inexperienced winter drivers slowly skated away from the center of the road. At the market a few blocks away, we jostled past other brave souls to grab the much needed sugar for our afternoon pursuits, then trudged back to our home. At the time, the ground cover was going on an inch of snow, which is probably the most I've seen since moving here. Now, as the blizzard continues out our windows and the mounds outside become hefty drifts to our snow-virgin (or just largely abstinent?) eyes, it's becoming less and less likely that we will be able to make it out this evening.

Though I'm a little disappointed to be missing two of the only holiday parties we would have been able to attend this season, there is something undeniably romantic about watching the snow spin past our windows, as the oven warms the kitchen and the smell of baking panettone begins to waft throughout the rest of our apartment. I am looking forward to a lazy afternoon of baking and catching up on movies we've been meaning to see, spiked with a cookie or two and, perhaps, a steamy cup of hot-buttered rum. All of the ingredients necessary for a cozy winter day.

holiday tipples

2008-12-17T18:50:00.000-08:00

After last weekend, I think I've realized why politicians repealed Prohibition in December; can you imagine the holidays without drinks?

FRIDAY 8:00 pm

Hot buttered rum and a movie.

Hot Buttered Rum Batter adapted from Lance Mayhew
1 stick butter, room temp
¾ c brown sugar
¼ cup agave nectar
½ tsp cinnamon
pinch salt
1/8 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp allspice
1/8 tsp clove

Cream the butter in a stand mixer and, with the mixer running, add all additional ingredients and beat at a medium speed until incorporated. Scoop the butter out onto parchment or wax paper and roll into a well-wrapped log. Put it back in the refrigerator to chill until needed.

To make a hot buttered rum, simply slice a good dollop off of the batter, add to a mug with 2 oz of good, aged rum (Mayhew likes Bacardi 8), fill with hot water, stir to incorporate, and enjoy.

SATURDAY 1:30 pm

House Spirits Annual Holiday Booze Bazaar, with tastings of Marteau Absinthe, Ransom Grappas and Old Tom Gin, Sub Rosa Tarragon and Saffron Vodkas, and House's own Aviation gin, Krogstad Aquavit, Medoyeff Vodka and Apothecary Ouzo. A yearly excuse to eat an ungodly amount of free cheese and chocolates while sipping some the best artisan booze in the city.

SATURDAY 4:00 pm

Anchor 2008 Christmas Ale at the Bye & Bye. The beer and the company was better than our friend's unwittingly vegan grilled-cheese.

SATURDAY 7:30 pm

Table-side Spanish coffees at Huber's - Portland's oldest restaurant, specializing in "turkey-based meals." We'd never been and friends of ours thought it'd be fun for the holidays. I wanted to ask the bartender so many silly questions. Do you ever spill? Do you ever burn yourself? Is this why you guys have a carpeted floor? How do you light that match with one hand? Did you have to shave your head for this job?

SUNDAY 10:00 am

House-made eggnog from Moxie Rx. Gathered from around-the-corner in a snow storm, doctored at home with Buffalo Trace.

WEDNESDAY 8:30 pm

Looking at the forecast, tonight feels like a hot toddy evening

why an English mansion would be better than Portland in a blizzard

2008-12-17T12:24:00.000-08:00

As the snow whips past the windows outside, we're just thankful for the internet. As long as the power holds out, we'll still have entertainment:

Seriously, though - who dreamed this collaboration up?

Thanks to Monitor Mix.

double-edged sword

2008-12-15T19:00:00.000-08:00

All Songs Considered just ran their staff picks for best-of-the-year music. Good banter, a few great picks, and a couple really mediocre selections. Such is the life of a "Best Of" list.

Variations on these lists pop up every month (Best Cheap Eats, Best New Bands, Best Scarves You've Never Heard Of), but they only really come into their own at the year-end. The New York Times Book Review has put forth their top ten books of the year. Too many magazines to count have already compiled their '08 music picks and Pitchfork will post theirs this week.

For editors, I think lists can become addictive - a crutch to rely on for a space-filling fall-back article. Just look at the glossies on grocery store checkout lines. "42 Resolutions for a New You." "9 Wonder Foods to Eat Now." "73 Worst Confessions." You'd think the staff for these places had forgotten how to write headlines that don't include numbers.

I'll provide an exception for year-end lists. "Best-ofs" and "top-tens" are a definite guilty pleasure. I have to admit that I completely understand the love of categorizing things and making lists - I think it fills a human impulse to collect and organize. There is something in declaring "bests" and "favorites" that gives you a sense of ownership over your preferences. With this act, what were simply a group of books or albums become your books or your albums, because you gave them status.

But this also opens you up to deflation. Usually, these sorts of lists are written up by critics and taste-makers, or else by people with too much time on their hands; in short, a group of people with pompous confidence in their own opinions. Consider them a sort of annual, territorial pissing-match, when geeks can assert their dominance by criticizing what others think is cool. Epicurious.com recently declared their ten choices for food trends in '09, which the Portland Mercury readily mocked. And seriously, it's demanding all of my self-control to hold myself back from weighing in on those stupid predictions. Portland, Maine will be the new Portland, Oregon?! Who came up with that gem?

So with the perils in mind, we're going to run the whole gamut of '08 awesomeness and declare our best of everything from the year.

BEST OF AUGHT-EIGHT!
Dove Vivi pizza
Bon Iver
Homemade pickles and jams!
Hot Chip
Cabinet magazine
Doughnut Plant in NYC
The Magnetic Fields in Seattle
Infinite Regress Collective Mix Tape
Discovering Ayer's Creek Farm at the Hillsdale Market
Slow Food Nation
Lykke Li at the Doug Fir
The Chef Studio
O
Mike Daisey
North Portland
Chest freezer (A's choice)
Bike commuting
Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum

repeal day

2008-12-03T16:58:00.000-08:00

Last night, I realized that it's been a few months since A and I have made a good drink. For my birthday last year, she took me to a cocktail workshop at Mint/820, which set us off on a heavy-drinking phase that meant lots of sugar syrups and sticky counters and cracked ice. I'm not saying that our heavy-drinking phase ended, just that we got lazier about it. While there's a lot to recommend a chilled cocktail on a hot summer day, a cold beer or a glass of rose wine can be just as refreshing, without all of the fruit-squeezing, measuring and shaking. Not to mention that our liquor cabinet was getting really out of hand.

Frankly, cocktails can be a boozy rabbit hole to fall down; once you get started, the ingredients and demands grow more and more esoteric. You start out learning how to make a simple, slightly embarrassing drink-or-two, like a cosmopolitan or a lemon drop, and soon you're mixing gin flips and scouring your liquor store for batavia arrack to make a 19th-century punch. It didn't take long before I was trying to mist an orange peel through a lit match to burn the citrus esters that would land atop my drink.

With most drinks, I've gotten over this baroque tendency, realizing that Portland has enough good ol' booze experts that it's worth leaving the mixing to more capable hands, with their libraries of tinctures and tonics and obscure liqueurs. But whether A and I go out for a drink or we try to pour one at home, none of this geekery would be possible had time stood still in 1933 and Prohibition remained.

Which is why it is our duty to celebrate Repeal Day on December 5. Maybe it just seems like something that was dreamed up by the Dewar's marketing department, but a lot of good holidays were originally just corporate sales ploys; at least this one provides a better-than-average excuse for a drink. The true beauty of Repeal Day is that while we may recognize it on the 5th of December, it can't be bound by a specific "day" or a "historic moment" - it is a holiday that resides deep inside each of us. In fact, I'll be celebrating Repeal tonight with a manhattan and tomorrow night at the Holiday Ale Fest. I may even celebrate Repeal Day after Friday with a few drinks over the weekend. You see? Repeal Day is only as much of a holiday as we make it.

So nowadays, if I reach for something besides beer or wine, it's normally just a good spirit, neat or on the rocks. But Repeal Day seems to call for something fittingly classy and old-school. Maybe it's time to dust off the cocktail shaker and bust out those brandied cherries we put up this summer. Tis the season.

the raw and the cooked

2008-11-24T15:49:00.000-08:00

If two years ago you asked me for a run-down of my favorite foods, sushi would definitely have made the cut. That rich flavor and unctuous texture of the raw fish was enough to make me drool. Like I'm doing right now thinking about it. You can call me a hypocrite for mocking "living" fudge or raw bread, but some things are meant to be cooked and some aren't. Fish demands a gentle hand at the stove, making it an excellent candidate for being served raw. Bread, on the other hand, should be baked; not dehydrated.

But I'm getting off-topic - the point is just how much A and I used to love sushi. Today? That's a different story. It sure sucks to get a conscience. Maybe you can chalk it up to to reading too much when daily reminders of doom-and-gloom, social and environmental collapse leave you morally paralyzed. The more and more we read and heard, the worse we felt about eating seafood. For a sense of the kind of laugh parade that is modern seafood writing, read Mark Bittman's excellent New York Times editorial on the future of fish.

Recently, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch group released a new sushi-centric version of their great sustainable seafood guide (download PDF). Helpfully, it lists all of the Japanese names for the best fish choices. Unhelpfully, you've probably never seen any of the best choices in a sushi restaurant. On top of that, the few choices you have heard of get pretty specific about fishing practices. I'd wager that if you ask most sushi chefs in America if their tuna is US troll/pole caught rather than longline, you'll get a blank stare. Here in Portland, almost all sushi passes through a bizarrely infamous international cult. Hey, maybe they're a sustainable cult, but with only one supplier for most restaurants, there isn't a lot of choice in terms of fish sourcing.

Meet Bamboo Sushi. Brainchild of a former owner of the indie-chic Masu, it couples hip design with focused sustainability. Not only do they espouse green principles and focus on responsible sourcing, they are actually the first Marine Stewardship Council certified restaurant in the US. I think A and I almost wept when we ate there on Wednesday evening - for the first time in over a year, we went out for sushi. Everything was incredibly fresh and their preparations were really inventive. We swooned over each bite of the rolls and awkwardly sawed our nigiri selections in half with our chopsticks to make sure we all got a taste of everything.

To tide us over between visits to Bamboo, maybe we'll have to branch out into other Japanese foods (it's either that or we make miniature gunkan maki rolls with bay shrimp). Luckily for us, Bamboo offers some inspiration - one of their best offerings is a tsukemono plate of pickled eggplant, cabbage, daikon, onion, ginger, peppers, and squash. Over the weekend, we tried out a Japanese-style quick cabbage pickle, piecing together our own recipe from a mix of different books and websites. The results were great, but pickled cabbage just isn't the same as sushi. At least Bamboo has a happy hour, but is "low priced sushi" really a valid excuse to cut out of work early? It should be.
__________

Simple Cabbage Tsukemono
Adapted from Justhungy.com and Dorothy Lesem's Preserving in Today's Kitchen

1 head of napa cabbage
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon chile flakes
zest of one lemon
1 teaspoon rice vinegar
1 teaspoon fish sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil

Clean and core the cabbage, chopping the leaves into 1-to-2 inch pieces. Place the cabbage in a large glass bowl and toss with the salt, chile flakes and lemon zest. Cover with a weighted plate that fits inside the bowl and leave to sit in the refrigerator for about an hour. A lot of moisture will be drawn out of the cabbage - drain off the liquid and toss the remaining cabbage with the vinegar, fish sauce and sesame oil. Serve with rice and broth simmered-tofu.

chef crush

2008-11-14T19:30:00.000-08:00

I love Dan Barber and I don't care who knows it. Maybe I identify with something about his geeky demeanor, but I swear, the guy could put dirt on a plate and I'd probably think it was clever cooking. A, loving wife that she is, is indulgent (and I have a hunch she finds him pretty cool, too). I think it probably all started with this story about a girl he once dated:

Or maybe it began with seeing him at Slow Food Nation when he recounted his visit to a Spanish farmer who raises "natural" foie gras geese without the use of gauvage (watch this video of the same speech at a different conference).

Then again, my fascination could have stemmed from this review of a dinner at his restaurant, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, which claimed the breathtakingly fresh courses made it the "most important Restaurant in America."

Actually, it could just be his dedication to forging a new relationship between farmers and chefs. As the Creative Director for the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Barber helps guide the educational efforts on the working farm that supplies the majority of produce to his two restaurants. Not only that, but one of his restaurants is directly on the farm, allowing his chefs to pick their own greens and work directly with the animal husbands. The Blue Hill website features video profiles of some of their providers and the story of Barber's efforts to restore his family's farm.

And he's an keen thinker and polished writer, to boot.

Cooking is just about the most macho thing I do. In spite of being a pretty slight, geeky guy, I'm still drawn to the knives and heat and swagger of the kitchen. That's not to say I'm running six flame burners at home every night, just that kitchen manliness is one of the few places I'll throw down and jump at the chance to consult on grilling or carve something with a big knife. (Truth be told, I've got some chef crushes on the ladies, too.)

Still, I'm probably not kidding anyone with my kitchen posturing. And I think that is what attracts me to Barber's cooking - there is an intellect behind his efforts and something very gentle about what he's doing with food. At the Stone Barns Restaurant, there are two menu choices: five-course or more courses. In place of a list of dishes, they offer a chart of what is in season, from which the chefs will create the nightly meals. The results, from what I've seen and read, are really stunning, like this salad of a hazelnut-crusted poached egg with matsutake mushrooms, pistachios and garden gazpacho:

For a sense of the kinds of simple, clear flavors Barber coaxes out of his ingredients, just have a look at this fennel soup from New York Magazine. Now we only need to figure out how to get up the Hudson Valley the next time we visit New York...

historically awesome

2008-11-05T10:30:00.000-08:00

HELL YES.

catchy.

2008-10-31T08:20:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-29T20:34:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-15T21:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-02T22:20:00.000-07:00

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.

walk to eat, eat to walk (bloated memories of san francisco)

2008-09-24T19:30:00.000-07:00

When we weren't tied up with Slow Food events, A and I busied ourselves with our own food events. Our first night in town, following a long afternoon of panels, we pursued a tip for a local pub run by Dave McLean, the brewer who oversaw the beer component of Slow Food Nation. Magnolia looks like the product of an old Dead Head who unwittingly became editor for McSweeney's. Their menus are a slick mash-up of Victorian hierarchy typography with hidden Grateful Dead lyrics and wacked-out contemporary watercolors printed on an LSD blotter grid. Along with some existential cartoons about a man explaining the reality of a bone to his dog, the website gives a pretty good sense of what I'm talking about. Top this design-conscious psychedelia with a rehabbed vintage bar and some great farm-to-table food, and you've got a solid restaurant. We had wild board head cheese, Louisiana boudin sausage with garlicky grilled eggplant and an amazing goat cheese praline cake. And the beer wasn't bad, either. I went for an "Out with the Old Ale," a beer aged in bourbon barrels with a strong, sweet kick that knocked me out. After one or two those, it was hard to find the bus out of the Haight.

Not to be discouraged by a busy day of events on Saturday, we rounded up a few of our friends from the Portland Slow Food chapter and marched them down to the Mission in search of Tartine. It was a classic P & A vacation activity - walking an unspecified (long) distance to taste something, then turning in the other direction and walking elsewhere to eat some more. From a block away, we recognized the bakery by the line out the door. Luckily, once we tasted their offerings, the walk and the wait were all worthwhile. Theirs was the single most custardy bread pudding I've ever tasted - bathed in a tangy sauce of raspberries and peaches. The standout, though, was the orange-scented and caramelly morning bun. While standing in line, we spied back into the kitchen, getting a sense of what makes these pastries so damn good. Hint: it might have something to do with the cubic feet of butter stacked on the counters.

After a round of mid-day Slow Food activities (visits to the garden, market, and street food bazaars), we took a walk down to the water through Chinatown and North Beach. Along the way, A fell prey to the shrewdest lemonade stand racket I've ever seen - those kids set up shop halfway up the steep incline to Coit Tower!

That evening, after a ~~predictably~~ bleak (though really strong) Slow Food film festival, we met back up with two of our friends to try Farmer Brown, a farm-to-table soul food that focuses on sourcing their ingredients from black farmers around the Bay Area. A and I shared some crispy catfish with candied yams and a tangy bean salad. The table favorite, though, was anything that we could douse with the addictive jalapeno-honey sauce - particularly their sweet little cornbread muffins.

Early Sunday morning, we left our hotel to check out Liguria Bakery in North Beach, on a tip from the owners of Pastaworks. We'd scoped it out the day before and noticed their hours: from 8 until they run out product, never later than 2 pm. Now what baked good could inspire such morning devotion to sell out each day? Focaccia. Amazing focaccia. That's right: they make one product and they do it well. The women running the shop were cranky, deliberate, and totally impatient with us trying to decide between the six flavors they offered. The scene was so very Italian. We took a slab of the plain and a slab of the garlic out to the nearby park for a simple breakfast. While A was pretty taken by the elderly Chinese women doing calisthenics in the park, I was pretty taken by the incredibly chewy loaf with its wonderfully sweet garlic topping. A little focaccia, a little coffee and I was ready to check out the Taste pavilions at Slow Food Nation.

On Sunday evening, after we leveled out from the caffeine and booze-induced stupor of Taste, we felt like it was time for one last meal in town. Where better to go after a weekend of Slow Food than Zuni Cafe? We are huge fans of chef Judy Rodgers' cookbook - I can't think of many other chefs who write so eloquently as to sound as though they are in the kitchen alongside you. It is filled with wonderful insights into method and preparation - every time I open the book, I feel like I learn a new, eminently practical technique. The dishes featured in the book make up a cuisine of brilliant, simple flavors that are coaxed to reach their height. The restaurant is even more impressive.

The food at Zuni is always an incredibly simple demonstration of the tastes of a few ingredients. We had two simple starters: a mix of grilled peppers with ripe cherry tomatoes and a fritto misto of onion, lemon and agretti. A and I then shared a bowl of corn soup that perfectly captured that late-season sweetness; there are few better things you can do with corn than a simple soup. Our friends shared a bowl of polenta with mascarpone, an incredibly basic dish that is cooked so well that it becomes decadently smooth and savory. I think I'm going to need to brush up on Judy Rodger's explanation of polenta cookery. Out of the main courses, I think that my squab may have captured the most attention for its beautiful juxtaposition of tastes - zante grapes, grilled polenta, and fennel gave a nice balance to the roasted bird. To finish, A and I ordered a Sicilian sweet bun stuffed with almond and sour cherry granitas and fresh nectarines. It was a perfectly refreshing end to a full weekend of over-eating.

walk to eat, eat to walk (fond memories of slow food nation)

2008-09-22T18:30:00.000-07:00

That pithy little axiom has definitely become our vacation M.O. If we were to start a travel agency, it'd likely be emblazoned on our brochures. Then again, if A and I were to start a travel agency, I don't think we'd find too many customers eager for a grueling schedule of zig-zagging back-and-forth across a city in search of something to eat. Maybe we need a different business plan.

Still, it suits us just fine (even if it runs a little contrary to most people's idea of "relaxation") and for our recent trip to San Francisco, we found a few kindred spirits (or at least good sports) to drag along with us. We'd gone down to the Bay Area to document Slow Food Nation, the first national celebration of American food culture, but managed to fit in a few side ~~meals~~ explorations as well.

I won't delve too much into the details of Slow Food Nation here - for that, you can see A's post on the Slow Food Portland blog - but I will mention a few of our favorite moments from the event:

As soon as we got into the city, we dove right into the fracas. We checked out a panel on "re-localizing" food, which was a bit of a let-down, given how familiar all the discussion was. I did come away with a great story about sustainable foie-gras, which I'm planning on writing about later. The second panel definitely upped the ante with a staggering raft of stories about brutal American farm labor conditions. A did a really good job of capturing that panel on the Slow Food Portland site.

The weekend was packed with Slow Food events - a congress for leaders, a networking day for activists, a marketplace, a victory garden, a tasting hall, and a street food bazaar. Most of it centered on the front lawn of City Hall, where we explored the large farmer's market of growers who were showcasing just one item. Everyone was over-the-top generous with their products, and we took full advantage of that. We tasted handfuls of heirloom apples, blenheim apricot jam, and some really amazing goat's milk caramel. One stand was selling pawpaw, one of the oldest native fruits in America. It tasted very tropical, somewhere between a guava and an avocado with huge, glossy black seeds. I don't think it fairly deserves the name "Ozark banana."

This seriously was the weekend of a hundred hams: domestic prosciutto, salame picante, mortadella, Kentucky country ham, Tennesee country ham, country ham with sweet corn relish, country ham with lard biscuits and raspberry jam. People are seriously obsessive about their country ham, but I suppose it makes sense to be so irrational over such a buttery, salty delight. We did manage to taste some non-pork foods as well; from the street food vendors, we tried doha papdi chaat (yogurt, chickpeas, tamarind and fried crisps), huaraches con chorizo (admittedly pig-inflected), and A got her free-range, grass fed hot dog, which may have been her weekend highlight.

On Sunday, we had tickets to Taste, a pier filled with themed food pavilions serving samples of artisanal American foods from around the country. It was delicious, but horrible for my poor buffet etiquette. When I end up in a scenario that involves both food and "lines," I get a cruel, game-day mentality of win-at-all-costs. It is no longer about enjoyment, only quantity. We ate a god-awful amount of food and certainly got our tickets-worth, but ended up with a weirdly-queasy buzz because of my neuroses-driven choices.

The whole experience was based on a system of points for tastes - you received 20 upon entry that you could trade for food samples, ranging in cost from 1 to 3 points. I was panicked. "We won't be able to try everything!" I pleaded to A. Then I noticed that the two pavilions that should have had the strictest limits, in fact had the least: coffee and spirits. The sustainable coffee booth was all-you-can-drink, so we quickly had a three-coffee cupping, followed by four half-shot macchiatos from different US baristas. Smart. The spirits pavilion, too, was a low-ticket, all-you-can-drink booth. I made sure that A and I got our fill. We sipped on estate tequila, a Bloody Mary that reversed my hatred of tomato juice, a few gin cocktails, and a taster of absinthe. We were well on our way. You can imagine what a great base all of that caffeine and booze made for the rest of the samples.

In truth, we got to try an unbelievable amount of products. From the pickles pavilion, we had some sublime sweet-corn relish on top of, you guessed it, country ham. We also tried green-tomato chutney, four types of classic cucumber pickles and had our pictures taken in a pickle barrel. The honey and preserves pavilion was similarly great, with some amazing bites like an apricot and green almond preserve and lavender-honey cupcakes. Oregon producers (like our beloved Ayer's Creek) were featured front-and-center, alongside delicious-sounding recipes, including one for Sweet Potato and Sour Cherry butter that I need to make next year.

It was particularly cool that a lot of the booths showcased the process of making their featured foods - in the chocolate pavilion, we tried four single-origin dark chocolates, but we also had a tasting of four phases of the chocolate refining process. Luckily, we could head back to the spirits pavilion to wash the flavor of those middle steps of chocolate-making out of our mouth. From the ice cream booth, we had six types of ice cream (including sorbets, gelato, and yogurts), but the fig ice stands out the most for how pure the flavor of the fruit was. We had stuffed Indian naan from the bread pavilion, mortadella ham with sauerkraut from the charcuterie vendors, and five kinds of aged, raw milk cheeses. But lest you think we didn't get our fill, we also had three cured hams, four sustainable seafood dishes and a buffalo and red-bean chili. All this, and we didn't even finish using up our points! Chalk that one up to efficient and liberal use of the spirits pavilion.

As much as we did attend, we didn't spend our entire weekend in Slow Food events. After all, we were in San Francisco, which has some pretty good food of its own. Next post up, I'll share some of the other (still food-related) things we did in town...

kitchen nightmares

2008-09-07T11:46:00.000-07:00

Lately, our kitchen was feeling like a bad slapstick comedy. With all of the bounty that summer brings, we'd been spending 90% of our free hours in the galley-style space - jostling and bumping like doddering fools. It didn't help that with all the steam from the jam jars processing on our stove, we'd been wanting to leave our back door open to let some air in. You see, in our old kitchen the back door sat between the largest counter and bread board (where we want to chop the food) and our stove (where we want to put the chopped food). This meant that cooking with the door open involved an elaborate dance. Often, I would sit behind the door stirring whatever was bubbling on the stove top, while P chopped behind the door. When he wanted to get into a drawer, or if I wanted to open the oven, he had to first move away from the door, we had to close the door, and then we could proceed. Needless to say, we're not always the most coordinated and this dance often resulted in one of two disasters: something would spill (requiring an even more elaborate dance to clean it up), or one us would get hurt.

Being the more hurried (and perhaps the more careless) of the two of us, I was often the one who got hurt. There was the time that I stepped back into the hot cast iron skillet P was carrying to the sink; the time I burned my hand on the oven door trying to open it enough to check something without closing the door and/or squishing P; or the time(s) that I opened a drawer into my shins, again because I was too impatient to ask P to move, close the door, etc.

My co-workers were beginning to notice and I was getting tired of watching their faces take on expressions of horror when I casually replied, "Oh, that's just where P hit me with the molten cast iron skillet the other night," to their inquiries about my scar. It was clear - something had to change.

Conveniently enough, our patience with our kitchen finally ran out at a time when I was obsessively searching craigslist to find a new place. My craigslist strategy follows: I open the PDX craigslist rental site in my browser and search under specific criteria (by neighborhood, price range, and a pet policy that accepts cats), then I leave this tab open and refresh it, oh, every five seconds or so. You haven't tried this? Maybe it seems a little neurotic to you? Well, my special strategy landed us with an absolutely, positively, fantastic new place. So there. I found it two and a half weeks ago and here we are, moved in. In addition to its many attributes (more space, more light, a basement where P can keep his letterpress so that we don't have to perform a different, but equally elaborate, dance whenever he wants to print something), I am convinced that the one, shining feature that sold us on the place was the kitchen.

It is, quite simply, amazing. Where the old space was cramped, this kitchen is open and liberating. Where our old kitchen was dank and tended to hold in moisture (we constantly battled mold, even on our appliances), the new kitchen is dry, airy and filled with light. P and I can stand in the new kitchen preparing food and talk to friends at the same time, without having to bring those poor souls into the already cramped space in order to hear them. Seriously: among its other benefits, this kitchen may improve my social life. It is a kitchen in which one might prepare half of a pig and not break a sweat (or break up a marriage). If only we had half a pig. Which brings me to the second best feature of our new apartment: a chest freezer will fit quite nicely in one of the upstairs storage rooms. Now perhaps I can have my pig and cook it too.

time off (hardly)

2008-08-27T19:30:00.000-07:00

That's right: P & A are hitting the road for a weekend of food-addled wanderlust. Is this a photo of how we pack for a trip? No, it's just one shot of the overwhelming mess that is our recent move. You heard that correctly - we just finished a rapid-fire move across town and we are already leaving the place. Why? Because we're crazy. Crazy for food.

We're setting off on a pseudo-vacation for Labor Day weekend to attend Slow Food Nation. For the past couple of months, we've been managing the blog for the Portland chapter of Slow Food USA, so we will be traveling to San Francisco to listen to speakers on sustainable foodways and to taste as much as we possibly can (all strictly on assignment, of course). We'll be visiting the Victory Gardens, sampling street foods, exploring the market vendors, and participating in guided tastings of the best American artisanal foods. Plus, when we're not at the festival, we'll be eating in San Francisco.

And, immediately after we return, we'll launch ourselves headlong into the Time-Based Art festival. P will be blogging their events for the third year at Urbanhonking.com. The shows at TBA are always challenging, always exciting, and always surprising. This year, there will be more free performances and visual arts than ever before and the line-up for the late night program (THE WORKS) looks awesome.

We're still pouring over the program and making our plans, but as of now, here's who we're stoked about:
Reggie Watts (who'll blow your mind)
Antony and the Johnsons
Jerome Bel explaining contemporary French performance art to traditional Thai dancer Pichet Klunchun
Zidane
Fritz Haeg

So it may be a little quiet around here for a few weeks, but you can always follow along on the Slow Food PDX blog or the PICA TBA blog. Maybe once it is all over, we might actually have the time to see friends again. Or, you know, finish moving in.

freezer dreams

2008-08-21T19:00:00.000-07:00

A and I both love seafood, and happen to live around the corner from an exceptional fishmonger. Still, we always end up worried about declining fish populations and balk at the high prices of sustainable choices. Then we end up with a quarter-cup of sustainably-miniature Oregon bay shrimp or four runty sardines. Not exactly dinner.

So when the Iliamna Fish Co. set up an agreement with our CSA farm, Viridian, to offer a salmon share, we signed up before thinking what we'd do with all that fish.

Even after splitting our share with my parents, we still have seven two-foot long planks of frozen fish, bundled in twine. I guess it is time to start thinking up some creative uses for salmon. According to A, our problems did not stem from ordering 25 pounds of frozen salmon, they came from not having a chest freezer. This has been a common refrain around our house for the last few months, as we've packed our freezer more and more full of berries, stock, chickens and freezer jam.

This, I imagine, is what A sees when she sleeps:

Actually, that isn't entirely true; there may be frozen berries and sides of pork leaping over it, as well.

It certainly hasn't helped that some of our friends recently purchased a chest freezer, which they placed in their office, just off of their kitchen. "If they can live with one inside their home," pleads A, "why can't we just fit our own freezer in here?" pointing to where our couch currently resides. I have heard recommendations for placement everywhere from "in the corner" to "in the closet" to, my favorite, "in the bathroom." I think that everywhere A looks in our apartment, she sees a custom-shaped chest freezer ready to be plugged in. I need to stay strong, because our lack of a chest freezer is the only thing keeping A from ordering 65 pounds of slaughtered hog. Not that I'd be entirely opposed to it.

So, how was the salmon? Well, for our inaugural meal, we tried out a recipe from Saveur for
broiled salmon with tarragon, tomatoes, and onions to use up a bunch of our summer ingredients. It was dead simple and incredibly flavorful. The cooling anise flavor of the tarragon and pastis balance perfectly with the tang of the roasted tomatoes. And the salmon (oh!) was firm and deeply-colored and buttery-tasting.

Right now, as I admit what an amazing deal it was to buy all of this salmon, A is probably claiming her first victory. That, and comparing dimensions of chest freezers online with the width of our doorway.

special delivery (from korea).

2008-08-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

A's parents just returned from Korea and left this on our table:

Instructions? What am I supposed to do with these?

Mmmmm. It tasted like a cross between marzipan, yellow cake and mochi. Maybe with a hint of burnt toast. Mystery solved.

i love the south

2008-08-06T19:42:00.000-07:00

Seriously. In the rose-colored romanticized way, because I don't think I'd actually love it if I lived there. Know why? Humidity.

But A and I both have Southern family (and a few transplant friends), so we've had reason to visit a few times, always enjoying it. Southerners are just some truly charming people, right down to the way A's grandma always used to ask for glasses of "wah-uh." I know there are quite a few un-charming Southerners, but that is the beauty of only living in the South of my imagination; I can have a very selective love affair.

At least when it comes to cuisine, I don't need to be too selective. Biscuits, sweet tea, gumbo, crayfish, mint juleps, fried chicken, red beans & rice, catfish, okra (yes), and some damn fine barbecue. I really can't think of a bad meal I've had in the South - I've even come across some of the best Vietnamese food in my life in New Orleans.

Two segments on a recent episode of Good Food nicely reinforced my Southernphilia

The first is a chat about classic sweet tea with Martha Hall Foose, author of a recent Southern cookbook. Now I love sweet tea, but what really caught my attention was the "mailbox" cocktail that she mentioned. When standing around her rural mailbox waiting for yesterday's newspaper to be delivered, she shares a strong drink and some conversation with her neighbors. There's one word to describe this: "genteel." If there's a second, it's "practical."

(It may take a moment to load. Check here if you can't hear it.)

The second is an interview with Shirley Corriher about White Lily brand flour and the quest for the perfect, pillowy biscuit. I love this conversation - everything from her unyielding devotion to an eccentric name-brand product, to the classic one-upsmanship of who boasts the best biscuits:

(Same goes for this one. Check here.)

I could just about die every time she makes that slurping sound to explain the absorbency of the flour.

So when I got a hankering for some Southern classics (red beans & rice and stewed greens), I turned to the Lee Bros. recipe for skillet cornbread that we've mentioned before. This recipe can not be stopped. I used three kinds of cornmeal we had laying around (including two great heirloom varieties from Ayers Creek), and subbed in soymilk & yogurt since we didn't have any buttermilk on hand. Results? Still delicious. It is easy, versatile, and the perfect foil for some smoky-ham Southern flavors. Plus, if you are wilting greens on the stove and tending a big pot of stew, this tasty bread just goes right in the oven.

_____________

Skillet Cornbread (Adapted from Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook and necessity)

1 T lard or unsalted butter
1 1/2 c stone-ground cornmeal
1 t baking powder
1 t baking soda
1/2 t salt
1 t sugar
1 large egg
1 1/2 c. whole or lowfat buttermilk (preferably whole) [or 1 c. soy milk and 1/2 c. yogurt if you're scrounging the cupboards like we were]
2 T unsalted butter

1. Preheat the oven to 450. Grease a 12-inch skillet with the lard (or butter), leaving any excess in the pan, and place it in the oven.

2. In a large bowl, sift the dry ingredients together. In a medium bowl, whisk the egg until frothy and then whisk in the buttermilk. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ones and mix thoroughly. Melt the butter in a small skillet over low heat, and whisk the butter into the batter.

3. When the fat in the large skillet is smoking, carefully remove the skillet from the oven and swirl the fat around to coat the bottom and sides evenly. Pour the batter into the skillet; it should sizzle alluringly. Bake for 15 minutes, or until the top of the bread is golden brown and the edge has pulled away from the sides of the skillet. Remove from the oven

4. Cut the corn bread into wedges in the skillet and serve hot.

and sometimes there's just pie.

2008-07-21T18:00:00.000-07:00

Two of our best friends are getting ready to leave Portland to move to New York, which has set me thinking a lot about our city over the last few days. Maybe this is dorky to admit (not that we're exactly charting new territories of cool with this blog), but I am a huge Portland booster. I follow a slew of local arts-and-culture blogs, I excitedly track the future plans for our city, and sometimes I get goosebumps when I read the editor's intros to local dining guides or the Willamette Week Finder. Together with A, I keep a running list of recommendations for out-of-town visitors - so many that we probably turn most guests off of Portland permanently.

I understand that Portland is no utopia. We can be insular, myopic, overly self-congratulatory, quick-to-settle, and insecure. We still don't have decent public transit on most of the Eastside, a lot of our neighborhoods seem hell-bent on making themselves into themed malls, and there appears to be no end in sight to the bland condo development. In spite of these failings (and more), there is a lot of energy in this town that gets channeled into some really exciting projects; projects that make it feel alright to stay in Portland, even when I sometimes long for a change.

Time for a little PDX boosterism.

MTV News came to Portland recently and they didn't eff-up the coverage! They even picked decent bands to interview. Experimentation, collaboration, positive vibes. Watching this kind of stuff just makes me swell up with pride. If you don't already have plans - check out the PDX Pop Now! festival next weekend.

As for other festivals, PICA just recently posted their Time-Based Art 2008 Festival preview video. I've mentioned TBA before, so I'll keep this short: it is one of the best parts of my year. I've gone into every year excited about a few events, skeptical of a lot more. Each time, I'm blown away by how engaging and entertaining the whole festival is. Sure, there was that terrifying Japanese noise music last year, but riding my bike between events and late-night happenings, I just end up feeling totally in love with the city. Somewhere in the video around Mark Russel saying, "Portland is the only place where this happens in the US...," I still start to choke up.

So while the PDX future is brimming with music and arts, what about A and my real love? Last year, the New York Times proclaimed that Portland was in a "golden age of dining," so doesn't it follow that food would be the best indicator of Portland's zeitgeist? Artist Tricia Martin is in the process of reviewing submissions for her Pietopia contest, using baked goods as a cultural barometer. This isn't about cliched Portland aphorisms - this is chance for highly personal readings of the city. According to Martin's original call, participants are to submit pie recipes that reflect their current perspective on life, describing how the technique, ingredients, or style of the pie represents their experience. Taken together, these pies will portray how people are living in Portland. [Note: It is taking all of my self-restraint to avoid bad pie-centric puns.]

Unfortunately, the submission date came and went, but I'm looking forward to the unveiling of the pies on August 20. I think this project has so much potential - it doesn't just get people thinking about Portland, it begins to unpack the myriad things that food can represent and communicate. If the Portland food-scene is to grow, it certainly needs more intelligent and creative approaches to the culture surrounding eating.

I feel like there are good things happening in Portland and, for the time being, I like it here.

Then again, I suppose New York has some pretty decent music, arts, and food, too.

garden update

2008-07-11T09:39:00.000-07:00

While our enthusiasm for vegetables is boundless, neither myself nor A have particularly green thumbs. I grew up with bountiful gardens that my parents tended, though I never evinced any real interest in them as a teenager. A's family gardened back when she lived in New Mexico, but gave in to the weeds once they moved to the Northwest, maintaining only some strawberries in an old toilet bowl.

As for houseplants, I retain a windowsill of sad cacti that our cat repeatedly walks across in his attempt to see out the window. Time and time again, I diligently re-pot them, hoping the cat finally tires of tormenting their spiny limbs.

Clearly, neither of us have very much successful growing experience.

However, our bellies often tell us what to do, and it was our veggie-hunger that led us to try our luck at container gardening as soon as we had moved into a place with a patio. Last year, we started out small and blindly. We planted two tomatoes in too-small containers; a handful of herbs crammed into shared, shallow pots; and a habanero pepper that longed for warmer climes. We ended up with a bumper crop of resilient herbs, some chiles that ripened in color only, and a few runty tomatoes. We resolved to do better this year.

Nationwide, there has been a surge of activity this year from non-profits and artists in reviving the idea of victory gardens. We've actively followed the many projects, but I have to admit that it didn't exactly translate into bountiful rows of veggies in our yard. Blame it on apartment living. We did make some big improvements over last season, though - we got proper-sized containers, we increased the number of tomatoes we planted, and we tried a few new varieties. So far, so good. As small as our patio container garden is, I've really come to enjoy tending it. It's nice to walk out on our back stoop and water the plants in the evening, pinch back the buds on the basil, and obsessively check the growth of our tomatoes.

There is a lot we still have to figure out. We didn't fertilize. We didn't really pay much attention to sun/water needs. We still don't quite understand pruning. We certainly didn't start anything from seed. I can only imagine that gardening in the actual ground is even trickier. Still, we have picked up a few new tricks and our plants are doing worlds better than they were last year.

Easily the best advice I've received this year is that harvesting herbs requires care, not just willy-nilly plucking. Maybe this strikes everyone else as obvious, but it never occurred to me that you just don't head out to the garden and pick leaves. Mint should be snipped between leaf pairs, basil should be plucked so as to leave the delicate shoots below the developed leaves, and umbelliferae like parsley and cilantro should be harvested from the outside of the plant in, because new growth begins in the center. I get a real kick out of these kinds of details, sort of like, "Wow, there's a reason you do it this way, huh?" While I'm on the subject of herbs, flat-leaf, Italian parsley has been the real standout star this year - its flavor is much bolder than store-bought, with strong anise notes. Next year, we'll be planting much more of that.

And in my imagination, we'll also be planting artichokes, brussels sprouts, tomatillos, chicories, climbing peas, pole beans, lovage, fenugreek, winter squash, potatoes, cavolo nero. It's fine to dream, but once I start planning out make-believe succession schedules and looking at plans for cold-frames and greenhouses, it might be time to remind myself that I'm a real greenhorn at this.

farm fresh

2008-06-23T21:30:00.000-07:00

Every Thursday morning between now and October, I will awake with a giddy sense of anticipation. I will check my email before I head into the office, hoping for a hint of what is to come. I will walk to work inhaling the morning air, which seems to have just a hint of something vegetal in its scent. I will struggle to focus on tasks for most of the morning, but will find myself daydreaming about mixing, frying, simmering.

You see, Thursday is when my CSA arrives.

Last August, I walked by a co-worker's desk to find an overflowing flat of the plumpest, most delicious-looking blueberries I had ever seen. When I asked her where they had come from, she told me she had recently joined a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) with Viridian Farms. When I pressed for more information, she explained that membership had closed for the year, but (BUT!) she knew someone who had signed up for a share and no longer wanted it. What I did next probably violated the CSA code of ethics, but I'm thankful every day for this transgression: I impulsively emailed one of the farmers and let her know that a friend of mine had signed up for a share and would not be taking it - could I please, PLEASE (waitlist be damned) take her place?

The following week, P and I picked up our first box: peaches, blueberries, a simply enormous bag of tomatillos, asian pears, fava beans, pimentos de padron, and, and, and... We were floored. And thrilled. And most of all, grateful. A) This was some of the best, freshest produce we'd had, even from the farmers market and B) it was far more produce than we felt we had paid for.

Oftentimes when you pay in advance, you save money and a CSA is no exception. When you reserve a share you are committing to support the farmers upfront, during the time of year when they most need the money (spring can a be very difficult for farmers) and they're likely to thank you for it. Granted, CSA's vary in terms of the variety and quantity of produce you might receive, but in general when you buy directly from farmers and, in particular, when you pay in advance for a season of produce it means getting better products at better prices. Your savings probably won't compare with those you can get at a discount grocery, but for the security of knowing where your food comes from (salmonella scares, anyone?) and knowing that it's produced in a manner that is fair and sustainable, these prices can't be beat.

After our first week of gastronomic delights, the ten that followed (which, incidentally, were the same ten that led up to our wedding), were filled to the brim with incredible local, seasonal meals that were completely inspired by and utterly indebted to our CSA. Largely, P and I credit Viridian Farms with launching us whole-heartedly into home-cooking. We have always enjoyed cooking, but before Viridian was a part of our lives, weeks were structured around many nights of dried pasta with sauce and tacos, interspersed with more elaborate meals (mostly on weekend nightS). Being given an assortment of the freshest seasonal produce each week forced us to be creative with our cooking in a way that was utterly painless and infinitely exciting. This enthusiasm carried over to the remainder of the year, when we no longer had our CSA box coming but were so used to experimenting and cooking with whatever was freshest that we scoped out the best grocery stores and dedicated ourselves to market shopping in a way that we never had before.

Being a part of a CSA meant that last year we were able to visit the farm and pick flats of blueberries for $10 (in addition to the flat we got for free). It means that I know, intimately, where my food is coming from and that I have come to know and love the people who grow it. It means that I begin to know the history of the place in which my food is grown -
farmer Leslie's family has been farming for three generations and there is a rosebush on her property that used to be designated for corsages and now provides petals for rose butter and other delicacies. It means that I am becoming accustomed to the rhythms of this place. Our small apartment and tiny yard don't leave much room for the garden we wish for, but I feel in touch with the growing season through my CSA. When we've had a cold spring, like this one, I know that summer produce has been delayed, that summer squash and early summer beans are still a few weeks out. I know that during spring and early summer I will be receiving a slightly smaller box each week that will be offset by the full bounty of produce that will come later in the summer.

Given my eager countdown of the days until this summer's CSA start date (beginning from the last date of last year's share) and the excited conversations that P and I have, almost weekly, about our CSA, you may wonder why we've never written about this before. I wonder that myself quite a bit. Maybe it's because we were too busy writing about our wedding and by the time that whole (epic, beautiful) mess was over, so was our CSA. Or, because it became so much a part of our lives, that it seemed like our version of the grocery store (and who wants to hear about a trip to the grocery store?). Maybe we have come to love our CSA and our farmers so much, that we are a little afraid to write about it. We're too close to the subject.

Whatever the reason, here we are entering into another summer and our CSA is back, this time for 20 glorious weeks. Already, we have discovered new favorites like peach leaf ice cream (with an amazing, subtle almond flavor), rose petal and black pepper shortbread, and Puntarelle alla Romana (see cicoria catalogna puntarella a foglia stretta), and have relished in standard comforts like sage grilled cheese and fried egg sandwiches.

Have I convinced you yet? Perhaps you might like to share in the bounty? Visit the Local Harvest website and find CSAs in your region. Peruse their offerings and try one out for a season. If you're worried about the amount of produce you might be given (sizes can vary and many are more suitable for families of four or more), find a friend to share the harvest. In the meantime, scope out your local farmers markets for tasty, seasonal produce from small family farmers. Then, throw yourself into cooking, because what else is so essential, so human, and yet so exciting? And finally, please, feel free to invite me over for dinner.

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Fried egg and sage grilled cheese sandwiches (serves 2)
(We made these sandwiches the night of our first box of the year. We were too tired to cook an elaborate meal and had received a huge container of sage, so this twist on the classic grilled cheese sandwich fit the bill)

2 eggs (preferably farm fresh - during this time of year, there are usually plenty of vendors selling eggs at your local farmers market)

Handful of fresh sage

Small block of cheddar (we used Beecher's Flagship, but any will do)

4 slices of bread

Butter

Fry the sage leaves in a nob of butter until they start to turn brown and crispy and give off a pleasant, nutty aroma. Remove from heat and reserve. Butter the undersides of the bread, then place a layer of cheese on the unbuttered side, make a sandwich and put this into a pan to cook over medium heat. Fry on one side until the bread is golden brown and the cheese has begun to melt, then flip and repeat. While the sandwich is grilling, fry one egg (you can keep the yolk, but it might get extra messy - we like to smash ours). When both sides are browned and the cheese is nice and melty, remove from the pan, open the sandwich and place the egg on top of the cheese. Then place a layer of the crispy sage, top off the sandwich and enjoy!

black & tan & black & tan & ...

2008-06-10T20:30:00.000-07:00

Listen, Deschutes: it didn't have to be this way. You could have had all the glory for yourself. But you had to go and get all "technical" with me when I asked for a black & tan. Yeah, your brewmasters might have their hang-ups about liquid densities and the feasibility of layering a Mirror Pond Pale and an Obsidian Stout, but I just wanted a beer; not a science lesson. That means that you drove me to this. You made me take this folly on at home where it became even more likely that I'd make a mess out of trying to layer your booze in a pint glass. I still wanted a black & tan better than some old Guinness & Harp; I wanted a domestic black & tan to be proud of.

So, Deschutes, last weekend I pitted the black & tan you wouldn't make for me up against two other West coast breweries in a battle royale of mixed beers. I dragged A along to Belmont Station to select the contenders (though, I suppose it isn't so much dragging when she could easily spend as much time browsing their British food as I could their bomber selection) . I already had Deschutes in the first slot and figured that two other breweries would be enough for comparison without laying us both out in the process. The second brewery was an easy choice as well: Anderson Valley, which has to be one of my favorite breweries in the country, happens to make both an excellent stout and a great amber. That left the third glass empty. When we asked one of the staff if he had any ideas, he scoffed at the idea of a black & tan and said that if we were mixing beers, we'd be better off going for interesting flavors. That led us to North Coast Brewing, from which we selected two high-ABV beers bound to create a strange brew.

How it went down:

First of all, pouring a black & tan is a lot harder than it seems. You fill your pint glass halfway with an ale, then slowly pour the stout over the back of a spoon so that it doesn't break the surface, but just lies on top as a distinct layer. Ha. So maybe Deschutes was correct and the densities of American beers are just too hard to layer. Or maybe it has something to do with the American spirit that blends diversity into a cohesive whole or some b.s. like that. In any case, I ended up with some dark, blended pints instead of pretty pousse-cafe beers.

Round One: I kicked things off with the Deschutes, giving them the benefit of starting off on a fresh palate. On its own, the Mirror Pond Pale Ale is medium-bodied and very wheat-y. It has a taste of untoasted bread and a big, hoppy punch for a pale. When you take a whiff of the Obsidian Stout, you get a really strong coffee aroma, but the flavor is all roasted nuts and seeds. The Obsidian, too, was fairly hoppy for its class, which just cements my belief that Portland breweries love making hop-bombs.
Mirror Pond + Obsidian = The M.O.
When I blended the two Deschutes' brews, I have to say it kind of improved on the harsher aspects of both beers. The coffee tones of the Obsidian were bumped way up and sharpened with the Mirror Pond's acidity, to give it the character of an African coffee.

Round Two: These might be two of my favorite beers on their own. While I love the Portland hop-addiction, Anderson Valley makes really well-balanced, smooth beers that belie their complexity. The Boont Amber Ale is very malty and has a much rounder flavor than the Mirror Pond. As for the Oatmeal Stout, it leans much more towards the chocolate end of the stout spectrum, reminding me of Hershey's syrup with a caramelly richness.
Amber Ale + Oatmeal Stout = Amber Waves of Grain
Blending these two didn't noticeably improve upon either of the beers, perhaps because they were so good to begin with. Taken together, it was a very full bodied drink and nicely balanced. In a lot of ways, it had a bourbon-like flavor.

Round Three: At this point, A and I were both pretty glad that I'd gone for the 12 oz. bottles, rather than the 22 oz. bombers I'd wanted to get. Judging was certainly getting more difficult and well, you can just forget about my "layering" craft. Our choices from North Coast weren't going to make this any easier - we'd selected two strange, strong beers. For our "light" beer, we chose the Pranqster Belgian-style ale, a yeasty, heavy, ripe-tasting brew. To balance it, we went for an equally imposing stout, the Old Rasputin Russian Imperial. On its own, this stout has a funky sweetness like burnt sugar, and an alcoholic edge with a lightly smokey flavor.
Pranqster + Old Rasputin = Old Russian Joke
This was the wild-card blend of the night. It ended up tasting a lot like a barleywine - it had that classic sweetness with a hot, alcoholic kick. Our last black & tan ended up being the weirdest of the bunch, but it had its own, heady appeal.

Lessons learned? I'm still not going to listen to the pros, but I may need to practice pouring a black & tan sometime when I'm not drinking a black & tan. The two do not mix well, but the beers certainly do.

the city that never sleeps is always eating, the last meals

2008-05-25T17:00:00.000-07:00

It's been many days since we last spoke of New York. But that's because our last day was so good that we had to build up to it a little. Get your pants on, 'cause here we go again...

While we were disappointed that we had missed out on Barney Greengrass ("The Sturgeon King"), we more than made up for it with our visit to the "Queens of Lake Sturgeon," Russ and Daughters. Located in the Lower East Side, Russ & Daughters is a holdout in what used to be a largely Jewish neighborhood. This is the kind of shop that we definitely don't have in Portland. Sure, Kenny & Zukes opened last year to our immense delight and sure, their Jewish deli fare is top notch, but it just doesn't have quite the same feel as a New York institution like Russ & Daughters. From the decor to the product to the staff, Russ & Daughters operates on a different level than anything we've ever experienced. The cases are crammed with smoked and pickled fish, with easily ten types of salmon alone, and watching over it all is a line of portraits of Russ and his daughters. Ordering felt a little like being in another country; we were crowded in by a set of regulars shouting their orders to the bustling staff behind the counter. It all sounded so foreign to our smoked-fish deprived ears.

We managed to get our order in and retreated from the store with our booty. After grabbing some fresh-squeezed orange-mango juice from a cart across the street, we settled down on a park bench to try the smoked sable and sturgeon we'd selected. The sable was very fishy and ocean-y sweet. It was quite good on its cream cheese-slathered bagel, but we must say that it was no better than the sable we'd had from Kenny & Zukes. But the sturgeon, oh, the sturgeon, was a different story altogether. Incredibly tender, but equally meaty, almost like tuna, it really tasted sublime. Perhaps we'll never know how it stands up to Barney's kingly offerings, but in this case we're inclined to say that Russ' sturgeon is a Queen to be reckoned with.

On our way out of Russ', we impulsively grabbed a chocolate-covered halvah bar. Yes, it was only breakfast, but we had a feeling we'd need a snack later. It just happened that "later" meant "after breakfast." The purchase turned out to be serendipitous; when we popped into a nearby exhibit of the traveling NY Food Museum, we discovered it was focused entirely on the history of the Joyva Candy Company, the maker of our halvah. See, candy for breakfast can be educational.

From there, we hopped on the train to midtown to visit what may be the holy grail of import shops, Kalustyans. The store's small square footage belies its unbelievable selection - the place feels like an endless labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling shelves packed tightly with an array of spices, herbs, beans, pulses, grains, fruits, nuts, oils, sauces, and snacks. After we recovered from our awe, we set about stuffing our shopping basket with oddities for which we had no specific plans. If we hadn't been concerned about carry-on liquid restrictions from the airline, we most certainly would have weighed down our bags with:
1. ghee
2. argan oil
3. elderflower cordial
4. any other pastes and syrups we could stuff in

Instead, we contented ourselves with:
1. Four kinds of exotic rice
2. An assortment of spices including black cardamom, mahleb cherry pits, and dried limes
3. Dried, stuffed Indian peppers and birdseye chiles
4. Indian palm sugar
5. Chestnut paste (we figured we'd mail it home if necessary)

Shopping at Kalustyans revived our appetites, so we headed over to our lunch destination, a Japanese noodle bar in the East Village named Rai Rai Ken. Neither of us have been to Japan, so while we'd like to say the place was authentic, we can't really be sure - except that the cramped noodle bar looked almost exactly like the one in Tampopo, which should count for something, right? Most of the restaurant was taken up with a long narrow counter, behind which three chefs - a grill man, a broth man, and a noodle man - served up all of the dishes the restaurant had to offer.

While everything on the menu looked tasty, we had come for noodles and noodles we would eat. What you need to understand is that A dreams of noodles and insists on trying them whenever she has the opportunity. In truth, what she dreams of is Hamura's Saimin in Kaua'i, about which she could rave for hours. So far, nothing else has matched up, but A did affirm that the noodles we ordered at Rai Rai Ken came close. P got the shio ramen, a subtle seafood-based broth, while A went for the standard shoyu ramen, which is soy based and savory. Both had top-notch, fresh, toothy noodles; a hard-boiled egg; a slab of cooked pork; and those alien-looking pink-swirled fish cakes. The soup was soothing and incredibly filling, but A could have ordered another bowl if P hadn't restrained her. After all, P was still holding out for some dumplings in the afternoon.

While walking around the Lower East Side to work off our lunch, we stumbled upon Economy Candy, a wonderland of chocolate nostalgia. As both of us tend to horde our candy (we're still working on our Easter candy and only recently tossed out the remaining Christmas chocolates), the sheer amount of sugar in this store could have lasted us twenty lifetimes. P recognized candies from his childhood on the East coast that are difficult to find on the west side. We were attracted by the retro wrapper of the Valomilk, so we picked one up to compare to P's childhood favorite, the Mallo Cup. With our choices in hand, we quickly paid and left before we got a second-hand sugar rush.

Given how beautiful the weather was, we decided to stop into S chiller's Liquor bar for a lazy, afternoon drink. Schiller's has absolutely fabulous design with a custom typeface that looks like casually imperfect handwriting and an interior that looks like a unkempt Parisian cafe. As we sat in the breeze from the open doors, P enjoyed a crisp and refreshing Pimm's Cup while A had a glass of a dry rosé. Still longing for those nearby dumplings, we politely declined any food (even after spying a basket of frites passing our table). It may sound like an odd recommendation, but if you ever get there, make sure to check out the bathrooms, which have great old tile work and amazing, restored, antique fixtures.

We passed Vanessa's three times before checking the address and realizing it was the former #1 Dumpling House, for which we had been searching. Really, though, the crowds of people should have tipped us off. Inside, there were easily two dozen women steadily working to prepare the dumplings - one team assembled the raw ingredients in a back production room while another team manned the fryers and steaming pots. We ordered 4 pork & chive dumplings and 8 steamed veggie ones. Total bill? $4! We had been snacking pretty steadily all day, so 12 dumplings was really more than we needed, but we still were bummed when we saw other patrons leaving with giant sesame pancake sandwiches (only $2!) in hand. However, we were consoled by the fact that both varieties of dumplings were so delicious. The pork and chive were clearly the stand-outs, bursting with flavor and so juicy that we barely kept our chins clean.

We were planning on cooking dinner for P's uncles that night, so we had still had some shopping to do. As we headed up to the greenmarket at Union Square, we walked through the ever-expanding Chinatown, past the remaining block of little Italy, and ducked into the Soho Dean & Deluca, just to take a peek. When we passed by, their cheesemonger was raving about a Willamette Valley Cheese named Perrydale. We'll say it one last time: NYC *hearts* PDX (and greater Or-y-gone).

One of the difficulties of our style of traveling is that we tend to treat grocery stores, butchers and markets as tourist attractions, leaving us disappointed that we can't purchase food from them as though we were locals. So we were excited for the chance to patronize some of the farm stands at the greenmarket that we had browsed through earlier in the week. The warm weather we'd had all week had brought out the first of the spring greens; raab, mustard, and kale were piled high beside the bundled asparagus spears. We reminded ourselves that we only needed fixings for one meal and limited our purchases to some beautifully-flowered broccoli raab and nice, thin asparagus. If we hadn't been avoiding liquids for our flight home, we'd easily have splurged on:
1. local maple syrup
2. artisan honey
3. Rick's Picks pickled beets and okra

Even though we love first-of-the-season-asparagus all on its own, we needed a few more things for our meal. We returned to Murray's Cheese to round out the makings for our dinner, enticed by a product we'd spied earlier in the week. Amongst their dried pasta offerings, they had a bin of toasted orecchiette. Quite recently, we had tried our hand at making our own orecchiette and, even more recently, read about the old Italian practice of lightly toasting flour before using it in a recipe. We were intrigued. So, we picked up a hefty bag of this Puglian specialty and began building a meal around it; our just-bought asparagus, a little prosciutto and some wood-smoked, fresh mozzarella from New York's Joe's Dairy.
As P picked up the ingredients, A scanned the shelves for Ronnybrook's yogurt, nearly squealing with delight when she spied the coconut flavor. She made sure to snag one for breakfast in the morning (or maybe for a late-night snack).

On the train back to P's uncles' home, we listed off the places we hadn't had a chance to see; we knew that we'd need to plan another trip to New York to taste everything we'd missed. Four weeks should be about enough time to try it all, right?
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Toasted Orecchiette with Asparagus, Smoked Mozzarella, and Prosciutto

1 lb. dried toasted orecchiette (a Puglian specialty made with lightly baked flour)
1 lb. fresh asparagus spears
1/2 lb. freshly smoked mozzarella
1/4 lb. thinly sliced prosciutto (go for domestic, which is cheaper, as you'll be cooking it)
olive oil
flat-leaf parsley
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Bring a large pot of heavily salted water to a boil. As the water is heating for the pasta, snap off the woody ends of the asparagus and slice the soft green stems on the bias into 1 inch segments. When the water begins to boil, toss the asparagus into the pot and blanch for 30 seconds to 1 minute, testing to make sure they are cooked, but not soft. Remove the asparagus from the water with a slotted spoon and run under cold water to arrest the cooking.

Add the orecchiette to the boiling water from which you've just removed the asparagus. Cook for 11 to 12 minutes, until al dente.

Roughly tear the mozzarella into 1/2 inch pieces and the prosciutto into thin ribbons.

Before draining the orecchiette, reserve a 1/2 cup of the cooking liquid from the pot. Drain the cooked pasta in a colander and add a few good glugs of olive oil to the pot. Return it to the stove over medium heat, and add the prosciutto, cooking lightly for less than a minute. Add the asparagus and toss with some salt and pepper to taste. Throw the orecchiette back in the pot with the asparagus and prosciutto and toss to coat pasta, adding a little of the reserved water if it seems dry. Add the mozzarella and, working quickly (it will start melt!), stir the cheese into the dressed pasta. Transfer to deep pasta bowls and sprinkle with finely chopped flat-leaf parsley.
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Russ & Daughters - 179 E. Houston St; F,V @ Lower East Side/Second Ave; J,M,Z @ Essex
Kalustyans - 123 Lexington Ave; 6 @ 28th St
Rai Rai Ken - 214 E. 10th St; 6 @ Astor Pl; L @ First Ave
Schiller's Liquor Bar - 131 Rivington St; J,M,Z @ Essex; F @ Delancey
Economy Candy - 108 Rivington St; F @ Delancey
Vanessa's Dumpling House - 220 E. 14th St; L @ Third Ave; 4,5,6,L,N,Q,R,W @ 14th St/Union Square
Union Square Greenmarket - Union Square between 14th and 17th Streets
Murray's Cheese - 254 Bleecker Street; 1 @ Christopher St/Sheridan Square; A,B,C,D,E,F,V @ W. 4th St. Washington Square

the city that never sleeps is always eating, pt. 4

2008-05-13T22:24:00.000-07:00

Now that we had tasted breakfast in the city, our appetite for morning snacks was insatiable. We've mentioned before that we want to like doughnuts more than we do. Our recent trip to Top Pot in Seattle had seemed promising, but was a little disappointing. We still hadn't found our gateway doughnut. Doughnut Plant caught our eye when we first read about their seasonal flavors like strawberry and toasted chestnut and the high-quality, organic ingredients. We thought we might as well give it a chance.

Before we had even set foot inside the doorway, the counterman had our number. He laughed, "I saw you two from a block away and knew you were coming here, smiling like that. I was going to tell you, 'Oh, sorry man, we're closed today." He then proceeded to ask us where we came from and when we mentioned Portland, he didn't miss a beat before saying, "Oh, Voodoo Doughnuts, right?" See? New York *hearts* Portland. We ordered a bag with a chocolate-glazed, a square coconut cream, and something called a "Blackout" before heading over to a Chinatown soccer field to see what we'd gotten ourselves into.

The regular chocolate-glazed doughnut had an amazing, yeasty crumb. It was fluffy and not-too-sweet (the chocolate was Valrhona). Right off the bat, it was the best doughnut either of us had ever tasted. In fact, we hesitate to call these doughnuts, given how far they were from our previous conceptions of the food. We'd mainly gotten the coconut cream one because it was square, and we're suckers for gimmicks, but it was a real knock-out. It had the same airy, yeasty taste and was filled with a perfectly light and sweet cream. Even though we both avoid cake doughnuts, we got a "blackout" because it was the house specialty. It turned out to be an unbelievable surprise. This doughnut was far more like a dense, moist cupcake than the dry cake dougnnuts we were used to. Plus, the fudge swirl and chocolate crumbs only made the entire thing all the more decadent. These doughnuts were like having a peak-of-the-season tomato and realizing, "This is what it is supposed to taste like; this is what people are talking about." We are not exaggerating when we say we'd consider moving to New York for Doughnut Plant alone.

Having thus expanded our minds (and bellies) we decided to spend some time away from food. The Brooklyn Museum, which at one time was almost the largest museum in the world, is now relatively under-appreciated, given all of the local competition. The museum itself is beautiful and even though much of it was under renovation as part of a hip re-design, there was still plenty on display to see. It also draws some real heavy-hitting exhibits, like the Takashi Murakami show, ©MURAKAMI, which had brought us there. Murakami is a very clever contemporary artist, who blends anime, otaku culture, manga, sex, urban vinyl, classical scroll painting, and a heaping dose of commercialism. We spent the first twenty minutes watching a stream of videos - everything from Kaikai & Kiki cartoons to Kanye West's recent music video. If you take a look at that cartoon link, it captures most of the exhibit's content (apart from the sexually explicit life-size action figures). Murakami is actually a very proficient painter and fills his hyperkinetic, color-saturated canvas with allusions to Japanese culture like two massive paintings of pop-art daruma figures. Throughout his career, Murakami has always been quick to capitalize on the touchy relationship between art and commerce, editioning miniatures of his sculpture and merchandising all of his characters. It all blends so thoroughly that when you see the lines of people queuing up to buy plush cartoon flowers, it's difficult to tell whether Murakami is making a statement or just a buck. Still, if you'd like a more exclusive souvenir, there was a full, working Vuitton store selling Murakami-branded purses in the middle of the exhibit.

After a large helping of pop-culture and consumerism, it is only fitting that we immersed ourselves in feminist art and politics. Judy Chicago's sculpture, The Dinner Party, is often regarded as the defining work of the 1970s' feminist art movement, but was kept in storage until the Brooklyn Museum dedicated a wing to it in 2007. Just another example of the marginalization and trivialization of women's production, but we'll save that for another time. It was incredibly refreshing to see a museum gallery full of vulvas, when most of the history of art is peppered with phalluses. The Dinner Party is a very commanding piece and it was cool to see groups of school children engaging with the symbolism, while docents gingerly prodded the kids in the right direction. A was thoroughly inspired.

So many vulvas, not enough wieners. So we went to Willie's Dawg's, the New York source for "Let's be frank" hot dogs (a provider founded by the former Chez Panisse "meat forager"). Now, if we may talk about ourselves in the third person for a moment, P&A love hot dogs, but worry about their sustainability. Niman ranch grass-fed beef solves that. Why can't all hot dogs be so tasty and morally sound? To make matters even better, Willie's supports the Humane Society and crowds the walls with pictures of rescue dogs. Adorable. P chose the "Mutto de Mayo," which was topped with chipotle mayo, onions, tomatoes, chiles, and "tortilla dust." Meanwhile, A's "Murray" dog tasted like a seven-layer casserole, with avocado, beans, sour cream, tomato...and now we've lost count. We are, however, counting the days until we can order online.

Afterwards, we rode up north and walked down through Greenpoint to Williamsburg. Greenpoint is a large Polish neighborhood bustling with activity and Eastern European food. It stuck P as being close to what Scranton would have been like back in its hey-day. We wished we could have spent more time there and we very much wished we could have tried the pirogies at Lomzynianka. If you live in New York and are reading this, it is your duty to try them on our behalf. We lingered outside staring at the menu for ten minutes before we conquered our desire in favor of our health and well-being.

If we couldn't let ourselves eat for a little while, we might as well exercise our sense of smell. So we went to check out CB I hate perfume, an inventive and irreverent perfumer. A while back, P had bought A a perfume from them that smelled like smoky tea, musty shelves and leather book bindings called "Russian Caravan Tea." Believe us - it smells amazing. A has never liked perfume, but CB's memory-based approach to scent appealed to her, particularly their hyper-accurate food scents. Pimm's Cup. California roll. French Bread. Imagine the possibilities... We probably sounded like fools as we kept inhaling aromas and exclaiming, "Whoa, it smells exactly like what the label says!" That might be the point. Hopefully we made up for our remedial scent identification with A's purchase, "To See a Flower," a scent that changes from the dirt and chlorophyll of just-cut stems to a light floral petal aroma. We're sorry our blog isn't scratch n' sniff.

We wandered around Williamsburg a little longer, as we still had over an hour before we were meeting our friend Hannah at our dinner destination. It was 4:00. 5:15 may seem a ridiculous time to meet for dinner (and it was, a little), but we were a bit nervous about getting into Una Pizza Napoletana. They are only open four days a week, and only then from five until they run out of dough. Any talk of food "running out" gets us panicked, so we arrived at 5:15, waited until Hannah showed up at 5:45 and easily sat down in a half-full restaurant. Better safe than sorry.

The pizza was well worth our embarrassing eagerness. Namely because this pizza would be worth any sort of tribulation. Anthony Mangieri, the pizzaiolo (with a great name), makes only four pizzas. He has no takeout menu (why would you need one with four options?), but rather a manifesto outlining his technique and his chosen ingredients. For a sense of his attitude, he was recently featured in a CHOW video series called, "Obsessives."

Each pizza is incredibly simple, essentially a variation on the same handful of ingredients. Between the three of us, we split a margherita (tomato sauce, buffalo mozzarella, basil), a filletti (fresh tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, basil), and a special fifth (!) pizza of argula, parmiggiano, and buffalo mozarella. All three pies were drizzled with high-quality olive oil and a sprinkling of sea salt crystals, a combination that heightened the other flavors. They really were unlike any pizza we'd ever had. The crust was charred, but retained its lightness and was incredibly flavorful (it's naturally leavened and takes 36 hours to make); every bite was a burst of concentrated tastes. With pizza like this it's hard to pick a favorite, but the margherita definitely topped the list, the arugula pie close behind. You might scoff when Mangieri claims, "Nothing... purer or [more] honestly wholesome can be bought at any price," but if you've had his pizza, his cockiness is well-warranted.

In the last few years, there has been a huge surge in speakeasy style bars - places that focus on classic cocktails in "hidden" locations. PDT is hidden inside a hot dog joint; to be precise, it is through the phone booth of Crif Dogs. A dialed the phone to the restaurant and we managed to sneak in through the false wall just before the rush of reservations began. Swankily appointed with wooden panels, leather banquettes and taxidermied animals, the bar looked like the Doug Fir had crossed with a Rat-Pack-era lounge. Their drink menu was full of unique combinations such as P's choice: an old-fashioned with bacon-infused bourbon and maple syrup. It wasn't just breakfast in a glass; it was much more balanced and complex than you'd expect and had some of the qualities of a scotch. A ordered a concoction of port, cab franc, egg, cherry, lillet and who knows what else. It was rich, frothy and delicious. We only had time for one drink before our seats were promised to someone with reservations, so P couldn't order the bar-special hot dog, a deep-fried, bacon-and-kimchi-wrapped frank invented by David Chang of Momofuku fame. It was a great disappointment for P and posed yet another in a string of reasons to move to New York.

From here, the drinks got less classy and the food disappeared. Hannah showed us Beauty Bar, a rehabbed salon that offered discount cocktails with manicures during happy hour. Luckily, it ended up being much more punk than P had expected. We drank some Brooklyn lagers under the beehive hairdryers and took enough flash-photos that we are surprised we weren't kicked out. After that, all we can remember is that we ended up in a Ukranian bar in the East Village called the Sly Fox, drinking bombers of Obolon beer while suited mob-types paced in the back hall. All and all, a successful Thursday.

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Doughnut Plant - 379 Grand St, New York; J,M,Z @ Essex; F @ Delancey
Brooklyn Museum - 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn; 2,3 @ Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
Willie's Dawgs - 351 Fifth Ave, Brooklyn; F,M,R @ Fourth Ave/9th St.
CB I Hate Perfume - 93 Wythe Ave, Brooklyn; L @ Bedford
Una Pizza Napoletana - 349 E. 12th St, New York; L @ First Ave; 6 @ Astor Pl.
PDT - Inside Crif Dogs at 113 St. Marks Pl, New York; 6 @ Astor Pl.; L @ First Ave
Beauty Bar - 231 E. 14th St, New York; 4, 5, 6, L, N, Q, R, W @ 14th St.-Union Sq.; L @ Third Ave

the city that never sleeps is always eating, pt. 3

2008-05-11T20:50:00.000-07:00

Tuesday night, we had a revelation. Why eat breakfast at P's uncles' in New Jersey when we could go straight into the city for this most important of meals, thereby fitting in one extra restaurant each day? If we were going to start having city breakfasts, we decided we might as well start big. And surly. We decided to start at Shopsin's.

Ever since P read a Calvin Trillin article on the cafe, it had become a must-eat attraction for our New York trip. Each time he talked about it, A became more and more terrified of the inevitable experience. You see, Shopsin's is not your ordinary, touchy-feely, mom's home cooking kind of cafe; there are rules at Shopsin's. No parties of five. No copying your neighbor's order. There was even a proscription against writing about Shopsin's (which we believe has *hopefully* been lifted). And, as rumor had it, those who broke the rules in Shopsin's original location could be banned for life. A did not want to be banned from any food establishment for life.

After a tumultuous upheaval from their original location, Shopsin's set down roots in a new location inside the Essex Street Market, a wonderful working market full of everyday grocers and a handful of slightly-more-gourmet vendors (we wish we could have seen more of it, but we were on a tight schedule). When we came in the door of the market, we nearly passed the restaurant, wedged as it is in a cramped corner behind an adorable cheesemonger. Essentially, the place is three two-tops hidden under high shelves of ingredients, with the rest of the tables spilling out into the entryway. From a chair in the center of the cluster, Kenny Shopsin presides over it all, like the foreman of a 19th century factory. When it was time to order, he merely turned and took our requests from where he sat, yelling them out to the cook.

Now, A had worked herself up into a tizzy over the prospect of ordering, because Shopsin's menu is arcane and genre-defying. There are a few hundred options and everything is made-to-order. So A planned ahead and had a print-out of the menu from their website, from which she picked a few choices. When the time approached, she didn't choke, but rather admirably ordered the "Diego," while P ordered some pancakes. What was the Diego? Oh, just a mammoth bowl of poutine with poached eggs - perfect fries, brown gravy and egg yolk. Pancakes sounds awfully dull for such a storied place, eh? Not when they are made of mac & cheese suspended in a fluffy, sweet batter and served with hot sauce and maple syrup. Based on our best estimate, there were about ten of them, and we ate 'em all (and neither of us like pancakes! [as you roll your eyes]). The salty tang of the cheddar cheese went really well with the sweetness of the pancake and we both agree that they were best with just the syrup. Nothing could have prepared us for Shopsin's - what we'd read about it sounded gimmicky and sure, the cook did tell some women next to us to "stop fucking saying thank you," but there are few restaurants we've been to that have been more comfortable. Maybe it was the tattooed couple sitting at the counter whose wedding photo was tacked to the back of the kitchen door, but in a strange way, we felt like we were part of a dysfunctional and charming family for the hour.

We headed uptown for a lunch before going to the natural history museum. When our plans fell through for Barney Greengrass ("The Stugeon King"), which was closed recovering from Passover, we thought we'd try Bouchon Bakery. Run by Thomas Keller, this lunchtime bakery is probably the closest we'll get to his French Laundry until we renew our vows in a few years and "register" for a meal there. We ordered at the counter and took our meal outside to eat in Central Park, along with the rest of New York. While people watching in the park, we unpacked our lunch and got to work. We'd heard that Bouchon's tuna salad sandwich, a twist on a salade nicoise, was something of a marvel. As a friend of ours makes what is arguably the best tuna sandwich in the world, we thought we'd be pretty good judges. How did Bouchon's sandwich stack up? It was pretty decent for what it was - a tuna sandwich - but it didn't approach our friend Molly's creation, which transcends tuna sandwich-dom (her mix is a secret, but we know there is a little salmon thrown in for extra richness).

So, we went to a famous chef's casual cafe and we ordered a tuna sandwich. Boorrrinnggg. Our other choices were perhaps a little more inspired. Even though the guy at the counter looked at us like we were crazy when we ordered it to go, we were sure we wanted to try the asparagus soup. Topped with citrus creme fraiche and hazlenuts, the bright green soup was the essence of spring and was a perfect complement to the beautiful weather. For dessert, we couldn't decide between the pistachio cherry brioche and the brown butter macaroon, so we got them both. They were each great, but the macaroon consisted of such pillowy and delightfully chewy cookies that the brioche was almost eclipsed.

From the moment we entered the American Museum of Natural History and saw the first dinosaur, A had to steady P to keep him from having a major stoke. (!) Oh, but there was much more than dinosaurs here - we also saw dinosaurs, animals, meteorites and dinosaurs. Look, people: there's nothing wrong with liking dinosaurs. Or wishing they were your friends so that you can talk to them.

To be perfectly honest (and serious), we were both enthralled and could have spent two days there, rather than the three hours we had allotted for the museum. There was so much to see that we practically had to run through the exhibits, though we did catch a few highlights:

1. One wing boasts a nice new exhibit design that charts evolution based on common bone structures of diverse species. Cool.

2. The underwater room was truly spectacular and the famous blue whale looked even larger in life.

3. Dinosaurs. We felt this point needed emphasis.

4. We saw a 200 ton meteorite. Fun fact!: It is so heavy that its support pylons extend all the way into the bedrock below the museum.

5. A found 3 manatees and this made her happy. One in the subway tiles, one skeleton and one underwater diorama.

6. In the "African peoples" exhibit, we noticed that one of the mannequins had jeans and sneakers. The odd clothing made it seem like a live person was beneath the costume. Unfortunately, this felt less like a scene out of a slapstick Peter Sellers film than like something from a horror movie. It only cemented our shared belief that museums (or all places of learning, for that matter) are creepy.

Before heading back to P's uncles' house for dinner, we took a stroll through Central Park, making sure to first grab an overpriced coconut popsicle in case we got lost. We didn't, but the popsicle still came in handy.

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Essex Street Market - 120 Essex Street (at Delancey Street); J,M,Z @ Essex; F,V @ Delancey
Bouchon Bakery - Time Warner Center, 10 Columbus Center, 3rd Floor;
American Museum of Natural History - 79th St. at Central Park West; B,C @ 81st; 1 @ Broadway & W. 79th

the city that never sleeps is always eating, pt. 2

2008-05-04T22:03:00.000-07:00

Glad to be back in New York, we set out for our day biting off more than we could chew. Given how beautiful the weather was Tuesday morning, we started out with a walk across the Brooklyn bridge. It was only after we had gotten halfway over the span that we realized we had chosen the "wrong" direction; rather than walking towards a beautiful view of Manhattan, we were headed to a cluster of Jehovah's Witness "Watchtower" office buildings in downtown Brooklyn. This mistake made it pretty difficult to remain inconspicuous as tourists (something we always - probably naively - strive for when traveling), seeing as we kept turning around to take photos. Then again, how many locals really keep stopping by scenic views for the classic stretched-out-arm self-portrait?

On the Brooklyn side of the bridge, we ventured down into DUMBO in a futile search for coffee and for the Slow Food USA headquarters. We're not sure what we would have done if we'd found their offices, but that is just kind of the way we travel. We think that we located the building, even if the offices were ten stories above us, but we never found that coffee. On the subway over to the Brooklyn museum, we saw an ad that the museum was closed on Tuesdays (thank you, subway sign) and promptly switched lines to return back to the Manhattan. This may make us sound like bumpkins, but it was par-for-the-course for the first few days; a lot of going one direction, realizing our mistake, and turning around.

That the museum was closed was a disappointment, but it meant we could get started eating even sooner. We headed to the East Village to grab some lunch at Momofuku Ssam Bar, where chef David Chang has gotten a lot of accolades (he's a recent James Beard award nominee) for his pork-saturated, witty Korean mash-ups. For being the middle of a lunch hour, the chic, wooden space was surprisingly empty, though we'd later realize that the lunch menu is just a tamed-down version of the food that draws culinary adventurers in the evenings. Because P loves cha siu bao, we had to order the famous pork buns. When they came to the table, they were practically de-constructed - simple, pillowy buns folded over slow-cooked pork belly with scallions and a sweet glaze. Top that with a bit of chili paste and man, they were succulent.

Since we'd heard tales of Korean burritos (ssam means "wrapped"), we went for the lemongrass pork sausage ssam. We were presented with a plate of condiments and savory sausage, which we wrapped up in lettuce leaves into little bites. Unfortunately, Momofuku had recently abandoned their practice of rolling all of the ingredients up in a rice pancake and wrapping it in aluminum foil like a mission burrito so, while still delicious, the ssam ended up being like many dishes we'd tried at other Asian restaurants. Luckily for us, the sandwich and our sides delivered much bolder flavors. Remember A's obsession with bahn mi? Well couple that with P's obsession with French offal and you'll understand why we got the "three-terrine" bahn-mi, which was recently selected as one of Esquire magazine's best sandwiches in America. We recalled something about veal face, but couldn't guess what the other two terrines could be. It was squeaky, fatty, crunchy, and fish sauce-y; everything bahn-mi should be. Pair that sandwich with a selection of seasonal pickles (sweet cucumbers; sharp, tangy radish; salty mushrooms) and a generous bowl of "kewpie slaw" for some pure, MSG gold, and we had a very rich, tasty meal.

Waddling away from Ssam bar, we took a train over to the C helsea Market, a Disney-fied concept of an urban market concourse. While there are some very cool vendors, the building has been rehabbed in such a way as to look really "raw" and "edgy," which ends up giving it a fake quality. In the middle of the shops, we stumbled upon a coffee shop that was boasting about their new, exclusive product: Stumptown coffee. This was only the first instance of what would become a very common theme throughout the week - NYC has a big crush on PDX.

The reason we went to Chelsea Market was to visit Ronnybrook Milk Bar, an upstate dairy that has opened a hip soda fountain to sling its farm-fresh milks, yogurts, ice creams. Ronnybrook has an incredibly cool interior - the walls are built out of re-purposed, vintage milk crates that can be pulled out to make extra seating/tables. As great as the decor is, the emphasis is really (clearly) on the dairy products. P ordered a birch beer float with some smooth vanilla ice cream. If you've never had birch beer, it is has a sharper bite than root beer and paired just perfectly with the ice cream. A got a "milk and honey," which was really just that. The milk was thick and rich and it tasted like a precursor to the milkshake. A was so thrilled with Ronnybrook's milk that she spent the rest of the trip pining for their coconut yogurt that she noticed as we were leaving their shop.

Afterwards, we walked through Chelsea down to Greenwich Village (ask us about our amazing celebrity sighting sometime), enjoying the charming brownstones and little boutiques. A few days before our trip, a friend at P's work had told us about a cupcake bakery that was the stuff of legend (the story involved someone eating two cupcakes in spite of a stomach flu). We knew it was near a Marc Jacobs, but had otherwise failed to get the address. As we passed a playground, P noticed a Marc Jacobs store and pointed it out, upon which, A demanded, "Where are the cupcakes?!" Right beyond the line of people waiting to get into Magnolia Bakery, that's where. This was definitely the first bakery either of us had ever seen with a bouncer. A couldn't believe it and, in the end, got denied for trying to sneak in. We eventually jostled for position inside and brought out two mighty-fine looking cupcakes - red velvet and chocolate-chocolate. Both of us love red velvet (remember our wedding cake?), but we have to admit, Magnolia's was disappointing - where was the cream cheese frosting!? The frosting was a too-sweet sugar frosting, though we'll admit that it was a very moist, delicious cake. We liked the chocolate cupcake much more, which had a great, rich cocoa frosting; one of the best chocolate frostings we'd ever had.

Seeing how sticky we were with icing, it seemed like a good time to thumb through some antique books. Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks is a real treasure trove, matched only by its charming owner. Filled with great history, first editions, and lots of ephemera, we easily could have spent all day there. In the end, we came away with American Taste by James Villas, Jeanne Lesem's book on preserving, and a first edition Beard on Pasta. If we had allowed ourselves a few more hours, we probably would have emerged with one book from every shelf the shop.

We caught a train to Brooklyn to meet up with two of A's older brother's friends for dinner. Having gone to a real institution for pizza in Scranton (Revello's), we went to a slew of up-start, pizza throne usurpers in New York. Franny's is a hip, sustainably-focused pizza place that reminded us a lot of Ken's back in Portland. They had a great bar with Italian-inflected drinks (we tried a prosecco and lovage (wild celery) syrup mix, and the Twice Bitter - fernet branca, Sanbitter soda, lime, and mint). Never mind the drinks, though; the pizza was solid. A ordered a tomato, olive and garlic pie, which was tangy and crisp with a nice, light hand on the sauce. P got the clam, parsley and pepper flake pizza, a pie we'd read about that caused us to seek out Franny's. It was superlatively good - creamy, salty, briny, rich and graced with the same pour of olive oil that enriched each of the pizzas leaving the oven. Even though we'd each gotten our own pizza, we saved room for dessert: a citrus and cinnamon-inflected canolo and a chocolate gelato that tasted like frozen brownie batter.

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Momofuku Ssam Bar - 207 Second Ave; L @ First St or Third St
Ronnybrook Dairy Bar - inside Chelsea Market, 75 Ninth Ave; A,C,E @ 14th St; L @ Eight Ave
Magnolia Bakery - 401 Bleecker St; 1,2,3,F,V @ 14th St; L @ Sixth Ave
Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks - 163 W. 10th Street; 1 @ Christopher St.-Sheridan Sq.; A,B,C,D,E,F,V @ W. 4th St.-Washington Sq.
Franny's - 295 Flatbush Ave, Brooklyn; B,Q @ Seventh Ave.; 2,3 @ Bergen St.

weekend in scranton

2008-04-30T21:51:00.000-07:00

Listen: we're not going to sugar-coat this for you. You deserve better than that.

Scranton did have a culinary heritage that P was actually looking forward to seeing again. And it burned down days before our visit. That meant our first meal in town was not a chili-covered hot-dog lovingly prepared on an old, Greek man's arm, but rather a bland lunch from Perkins. And man was it packed at lunch time. This is the sad thing about Scranton; it still has a handful of family-run places hanging on in the crumbling city, but most of the population flocks to the clusters of chain restaurants and malls that have sprung up around it's perimeter.

Scranton was once a booming city with beautiful downtown buildings (funded by the local coal industry) and earned its nickname as the "Electric City" for having the first electrified streetcar in the nation. The city still has one of the largest St. Patrick's Day parades in the country, but today its main claim to fame is its association with the American version of The Office. Mind you, the show is only set in Scranton; it's not filmed there. We did however see a nicely painted diorama celebrating the show's characters in the mall. We didn't see much else.

Things picked up on Sunday night when we went to one of P's childhood favorites, a seafood restaurant shaped, yes, shaped, like a pirate ship. P did not always have gourmet tastes, but he knew an awesome concept when he saw one. Cooper's Seafood has sadly covered over most of the ship-shape with a new "lighthouse" bar & gift shop, but you can still glimpse the tentacles of a giant octopus strangling a sailor just behind. The restaurant is filled with Hollywood bric-a-brac and a lot of local memorabilia and city history - where better for A to be introduced to Scranton's glorified days of yore? We didn't get to sit in the room with the model train that runs around the ceiling (P was crushed), but we did sit in a room that looked an awful lot like the Museum of Natural History. Since the atmosphere was the real draw at Cooper's, we won't get into too much detail with the food. A did sup on a surprisingly delicious crab bisque; though this may be less than surprising given how much cream and butter was likely in the soup.

The gustatory pleasures of the next day were considerably greater than the first. In the morning, P's grandmother offered us some church fundraiser Welsh cookies, perhaps one of the better culinary contributions of Wales. Resembling tiny currant-studded pancakes, they tasted more like raw cookie dough. As eating cookie dough together is one our great marital joys, this felt like a second honeymoon.

After trips to visit two of P's grandparents at the cemetery and a few more car-loops around the city, we ended up at one of the remaining family restaurants: Sibio's. The service left something to be desired, but the food was remarkably tasty Italian-American fare. A ordered the stuffed eggplant - mounds of creamy ricotta rolled in thin strips of eggplant. What would you expect to be on the side? Mashed potatoes and broccoli, of course. P's plate of rigatoni swimming in garlicky olive oil and peppered with spicy sausage, raab, and white beans was equally delicious. On the way out, we heard our waitress threaten to kick one of cooks in the face, so we were glad to escape, having eaten our fill.

Even though the hot dog counter had burned down and a lighthouse obscured the former pirate-ship seafood house, the penultimate Scranton meal remained. Old Forge pizza, from the so-called (by its inhabitants) "Pizza Capitol of the World," almost defies description and nowhere does it better than Revello's. The crust is like a dried-out foccaccia, the sauce is neon red and slightly tangy, and the cheese (oh, the cheese) is a sticky mess that clings to your front teeth with every bite. Needless to say, it's more than the sum of it's parts. This pizza is wildly addictive and, even as we write this, we long to return to Scranton if only for one more slice. We both feel determined to recreate this delicacy, but the cheese remains elusive. Our best guess is that it's mostly white, processed American.

As we boarded the Greyhound that evening, P's grandmother climbed on board to make sure we took the one remaining, greasy pizza slice, sandwiched between two paper plates. Though we couldn't bring ourselves to eat it (after a tray-and-a-half at Revello's), the smell comforted us all the way back to the New York.
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Cooper's Seafood House - 701 N. Washington Ave, Scranton, PA
Sibio's - 1099 Quincy Ave, Scranton, PA
Revello's Pizza - 502 S. Main Street, Old Forge, PA
And, for when it reopens: Coney Island Texas Lunch - 100 Cedar Avenue, Scranton, PA 18503

The city that never sleeps is always eating.

2008-04-29T21:50:00.000-07:00

For the privilege of eating our fill in New York, we paid with the clothes off our backs. Literally. That's thanks to Northwest Airlines (aka. "The Devil of the Skies"), who turned our hour-and-a-half layover in Minnesota into a fifteen minute mad dash to catch our connection. Needless to say, our bags couldn't run that fast. So if we happen to look a little haggard in our first few days of photos, you know why.

When we'd left Portland, the forecast for the weekend predicted some unseasonably-late snow, so we were pretty pleased to wake up Saturday at P's uncles' house in New Jersey to find 75 degree weather. If left to our own travel plans, we probably would have blown off the touristy sites in favor of more food, but P's uncle Warren swept us out of the house and into the city for a walking tour of Midtown. In the span of two hours, Warren gave us an in-depth architectural history of more sites than we would see for the rest of the week. Empire State Building. Check. Chysler Building. Check. Central Library. Check. Grand Central Station and a nearby Earth Day festival. Double check.

Not to worry - the rest of the day was spent tracking down food. After a pleasant outdoor lunch on Bryant Park, we rendezvoused with A's friend Hannah at her Brooklyn apartment. Still thinking of New York in terms of Portland-scale (a hang-up we'd have for most of the trip), we decided to take a "quick" jaunt down to Red Hook to find some key lime pies we'd heard about. Hannah, the most seasoned of the three of us, knew the trip would take over an hour, but she was easy-going and we were determined, so we ventured out undeterred. After a long subway ride, we were treated to an even longer walk across a warehouse-district of chop-shops and housing projects. Safe? Maybe not. Classic P & A trip? Most definitely. Still, Brooklyn is a funny place; where else would you emerge from a half-mile of identical project complexes to find a full organic farm and an IKEA?

At long, sweaty last, we reached our destination - Steve's Authentic Key Lime Pies. This was a very good thing, because at this point Hannah was beginning to doubt not only our navigational skills, but the very existence of key lime pie in Red Hook. But there it was, hidden inside a tropical-oasis garden center on the end of a pier. The name of Steve's place is accurate because they serve nothing other than key lime pie, doing most of their business with grocers and special pie orders. So did we really venture to the furthest tip of Brooklyn to eat a whole pie? No - we came for the Swingle. This delicious confection consists of a miniature key lime pie, frozen, dipped in chocolate, and on a stick. It is cool, tart, creamy and refreshing. Simply put, it blows other stick-foods out of the water. The corn dog, the popsicle, the kebab - none of these delicacies compare to the glory of the Swingle. A is already planning home-spun Swingle tributes to enjoy over the Portland summer.

Thus revived, we decided to get dinner. Back up in Williamsburg, we headed to Fette Sau, a Brooklyn barbecue joint that is essentially a well-decorated alley. At the counter, we selected from assorted piles of meat and paid by the pound. At the bar, we ordered local microbrews by the half- or full gallon. This was bulk eating we could get behind. Our baking sheet full of food included pulled pork shoulder, spicy sausage, pork ribs, burnt-end beans, half-sour pickles, and yeasty rolls. The ribs were underwhelming, but everything else more than whelmed us. The pulled pork was sweet and tender and brightened by the vinegar sauce served on the side. We devoured the smoky-sweet beans and loved the half-sours (see the parallels between deli pastrami and bbq?). Still, it was the spicy sausage that stood out above the rest, especially when accompanied by the sweet Georgia BBQ sauce and sopped up with a bit of fluffy roll. They tasted like spicy kielbasa and P swears they were braised in Coca-Cola. Despite being washed down with some Black Wheat beer from Sixpoint Brewery, all of that salty food put us in the mood for some dessert.

You all know that we have a special place in our hearts for carts, so it should come as no surprise that we got our dessert from a truck. Not just any truck, but a truck with fine dining credentials. Started by a former Le Cirque pastry chef and his friend, Dessert Truck has been serving $5 gourmet desserts for the last year from a corner near NYU. These are gourmet desserts for the people. A and Hannah both opted for the obligatory peanut butter and chocolate concoction: a chocolate mousse with a creamy peanut butter center and caramel popcorn on top. It was delicious, playful, and reminiscent of childhood treats - an upscale Reese's peanut butter cup, if you will. It must be said, however, that P's choice took the cake (or, rather, the bread pudding). The decadent chocolate bread pudding (almost like an ultra-rich mousse) was topped with a creme anglaise and, not having had enough pork for one evening, P opted for the special bacon infused cream. Oink, oink.

This may seem like a bout of frantic eating (all of the food above was consumed in the span of four hours), but in all fairness, we were on deadline. The next morning we would be leaving the city for two days to visit P's grandparents in Scranton, PA, a place not known for its rich culinary legacy...

or is it?

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Steve's Key Lime Pies - Pier 41, 204 Van Dyke St, Brooklyn; good luck figuring out a close subway
Fette Sau - 354 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn; L @ Bedford
Dessert Truck - University Pl. nr. 8th St.; 6 @ Astor Place; N, R, W @ NYU/8th

from the dept. of mobile dining

2008-04-16T22:35:00.000-07:00

When the weather is as unseasonably beautiful as it was last week, what better to do than to bike out (mobile) and sample some N. Mississippi food carts (also mobile)? Of course you can't think of an answer to that question; that's what makes it rhetorical. And we couldn't think of a suitable response either (even though we had plenty of other errands to take care of), so off we went on our new bikes to seek out some early spring bites.

After huffing and puffing our way over to North Portland (hey, it's been a while since we've ridden across town - rainy-old-Portland's a tough place to bike half the year!), we pulled up to Moxie Rx. Take all of the Americana kitsch of a roadside dinner and cram it into a sunny little turquoise-and-red trailer and you've got a sense of what Moxie looks like. Sitting on their lot makes you feel like you're somewhere in the South, maybe Texas. The food, though, is 100% Portland, focusing on "elixirs" and "tonics" (juice blends) and comforting breakfast sandwiches and pastries that would probably fill the prescription just as well for a hangover cure as for a bright-eyed early riser. We'd gotten there around noon, so many of their breakfast options were sadly sold out. We decided to share a homemade cheddar biscuit with an herbed egg and smoked salmon, along with a grapefruit fizz (fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice, basil, soda water) to cool us off from the hot ride over. The biscuit was cute-as-a-button and very tasty; its cheese just beginning to melt from the heat of the egg. Our freshly-blended soda was just the refreshing sip that we needed and it made us anxious for summer weather. But we were still hungry (surprise!), so we climbed back on our bikes and pedaled a little ways up the street.

Junior Ambassador's looks more like a Home Depot storage shed than something on wheels, but that doesn't slow its emissary down from sharing his Mostlandian home cuisine with Portlanders. Springing out of the diplomatic successes of their early ice cream deliveries, Rudy (the T. in the M.O.S.T), started a food cart featuring panwiches (savory pancake-sandwiches) and fresh, unusual ice creams. We shared a Turkey Ruby panwich (turkey and red cabbage sauerkraut on rye pancake), which was toothsome and delicious. The pancake was much denser than a breakfast flapjake, probably yeasted, and more like a muffin or sponge-y blin. Before we'd even finished our panwich though, we already had our ice cream requests in: one strawberry chipotle and one maple "strip tease." The strawberry could have had more of the smokiness from the chipotle peppers, but it did have a nice, very subtle spiciness. The maple flavor, however, was a perfect 10 with just the right amount of sweetness. As for the "strip tease?" That would be a bacon strip, the crispy, salty bits of which perk up every single bite.

Now, rather than only regaling you with tales of what we already ate, this post has a participation portion! This Saturday, if you are in Portland, Willamette Week and foodcartsportland.com are hosting a food cart confab called Eat Mobile, featuring Altengartz Bratwurst, Asian Station Cafe, Biggs Bros Wings, Micro-Mercantes (homemade Tamales), India Chaat House, Junior Ambassador, Julia’s Mobile Cafe (Russian Food), Moxie RX, NW Hotdogs (Mercy Corps vendor), Tabor (czech food), Tita’s Pista. We can't tell you about a lot of these places, but we can definitely speak to the awesomeness of Jr. A's, Moxie and Chaat House. Since we'll be out of town (eating from New York carts, no doubt), the duty falls upon you all to go as our representatives and eat like you imagine we would.

It's only five dollars.
There will be one-dollar Bridgeport beers.
All of the money goes to help MercyCorps NW's awesome small-business programs (which help out a lot of local restaurants).

See the Willamette Week site for details/directions.

things that make me feel smart, part 2

2008-04-15T20:35:00.000-07:00

Psycho-geography.
Future ruins.
Experimental landscapes.
Urban spelunking.
Spatial theoretics.
Sonic architecture.

If UNIVERSE had enough indie cred to prevent me from seeming like a total geek, then this list of topics surely bursts that bubble. Well, I'm fine with that, because they're damn fascinating. So, while I know that we'll probably be seeing more food than architecture, it still seems appropriate that on the eve of our trip to New York I'd introduce you to one of my favorite urban spaces/architecture sites, BLDGBLOG.

Written by Geoff Manaugh, a Senior Editor at Dwell magazine (hey, that makes this sort of hip, right?), BLDGBLOG presents consistently thought-provoking ideas about the built environment and what if... scenarios for the future. When you start following the items and jaw-dropping photography (like this image of drainage spelunking in Canada) that Manaugh covers, you begin to realize that architecture is a lot weirder than you ever imagined.

Take for instance this story from the Guardian about a plan to construct a warehouse for unwanted books. To continue preserving books that no one is using, British libraries are constructing vast, windowless buildings in the industrial outskirts of London. Not for access, mind you, just for archival.

Or how about this urban design proposal that has been circulating for a few years now: What should Philadelphia do with it's overgrown, abandoned urban lots? Put them into production growing the city's food, of course. Enter Farmadelphia, a plan to revisit the agrarian past of Philly. But this project didn't just imagine a network of run-of-the-mill community garden plots; the designer's renderings proposed a full-scale agriculture of grazing livestock, rotational crops and wheat fields!

So, for a good sense of just how weird our constructed landscape is, take a look at:
- One of the posts that got me hooked on this site: San Francisco's foundations are built on abandoned, scuttled ships
- The construction of ultra-luxe zoos and their promises for future suburban development
- The role of environmental toxins in aging
- Olympic security in Beijing, CCTV, and the future of reality film-making
- The calls of city songbirds are actually changing their cadence and pitch
- First the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, and now Dubai has purchased the rights to recreate and the city of Lyons

You might be able to speculate on it, but you just can't make this stuff up.