the very best

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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REQUIRED VIEWING: The Projectors on Jimmy Fallon.



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

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

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ON THE PLAYER:

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

ps

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

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

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

Publication Studio Makes A Book from Mike Merrill on Vimeo.

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

foragers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

big ups

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.

unplanned city

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

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.)

growing on me

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.

putt putt putt

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

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...

nothing to do but bake

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

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

the raw and the cooked

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.
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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.

catching up

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

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

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



View Full-Size Map

festival weekend

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

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


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


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


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

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

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


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

and sometimes there's just pie.

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.

from the dept. of mobile dining

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.

And now for something a little lighter.

I know my voice has been absent from this blog lately. I know that you have missed my cheerful wit and sharp insight. I have not followed through with my New Year's resolution to "post every two weeks" and I am sorry for it. But, I have good reason.

My mouth was too full.

The combination of weekly baking, a food-focused trip to Seattle, the river of chocolate that always seems to flow from Halloween through Memorial Day, and Easter weekend itself - which consisted mostly of eating chocolate, making sweet dough, eating resulting Easter bread and topping things off with yet more chocolate - has been a recipe for a stomachache. Driving home after Easter at my parents' house, with one hand on the wheel and the other buried in a bag of chocolate, I was all too happy to second P's motion that we eat lightly in the coming week. When he brought to the table what is, in my opinion, the ultimate sandwich, I began to look forward to our ritual cleansing.

Despite what one might think, after such gluttony, the P & A detox diet is never a tasteless or particularly spare affair. When I reach my breaking point, I want something simple and relatively light, but with plenty of flavor...just flavor that isn't quite so rich. Often, we turn to our repertoire of basic meals: homemade tomato sauce, braised chard with tofu (do not be fooled - this dish is neither flat, nor flavorless), bibimbop, or, perhaps my very favorite, bánh mì.

Bánh mì sprung out of French colonialism in Indochina and marries traditionally French ingredients like baguette, pâté and mayonnaise with elements from southeast Asian cooking, like cilantro and fish sauce. This combination produces what may be the perfect sandwich - the rich, salty flavors of meat and fish sauce are cut by the tangy brightness of the cilantro and pickled carrots and all is enveloped by soft, chewy, crusty baguette.

My first taste of bánh mì came a few years ago, when P and I ventured out to the small, nondescript, strip mall PDX eatery that is Cali Sandwiches. Cali Sandwiches had been recommended in the Willamette Week Cheap Eats Guide as offering tangy, rich and delicious sandwiches for under three dollars. As we were then poor college students with appetites far larger than our wallets would allow, this sounded like a pretty good deal. I cannot remember which bánh mì I ordered (common options are the aforementioned pate, chicken, pork and egg), but I do know that this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

If you need another reason to try bánh mì (but, really?? you need another?), I give you this: it is incredibly easy to make. We like to make a pseudo-vegetarian version (vegetarian in all but the fish sauce...), with tofu instead of meat, but you can do as you choose - it is the condiments that make this sandwich. Normally, we marinate the tofu and then broil it, but this last week we fried the tofu instead and it was better than ever. What's that? Anything fried should not count as part of a detox diet, you say? Well, it's a good thing I am too stalwart to be swayed by my peers.

____________________________________________

P & A Bánh Mì Chay
(has a certain ring to it, no?)

I feel a little ridiculous posting a recipe for this, because, well, it's a sandwich. There isn't much to it. But, since I haven't written in awhile, I thought I should probably add something to fill out my post.

Last time, we added a bit of carrot and beet salad (recipe from Chocolate and Zucchini), which gave the sandwich an earthy layer (from the beets), a tangy garlic zing, and messy drops of beet juice. Delicious.

1/3 cup peanut or vegetable oil (for frying)
1 pound tofu, cut into rectangles 1/2 inch thickness
1 baguette
1 bunch cilantro
1 small container pickled carrots and jalapenos (we tend to go for the small Herdez cans of carrots and jalapenos, but you can try any brand of pickled vegetables you like, or make your own!)
fish sauce mayonnaise (below) or plain mayonnaise
sweet chile sauce

Fish Sauce Mayonnaise
Combine four parts mayonnaise with one part fish sauce. (This proportion is pretty loose and is based largely on our love of fish sauce. Add the fish sauce to taste and, if you really can't stand the stuff, leave it out. P would probably say otherwise.)

Fry the tofu in the oil until browned on all sides, then remove the tofu and set aside (setting these on paper towel helps drain away excess oil). Layer the ingredients on the baguette, beginning with mayonnaise and finishing with a dollop of the sweet chile sauce (See? I told you this sandwich was all about the condiments).

[If you're looking to make an entirely vegetarian version, omit the fish sauce and maybe try frying the tofu in coconut oil or adding a splash or two of chili oil as the tofu fries. If you're looking for something a little less wholesome, look no further than the bánh mì at Momofuku Ssam Bar in New York for a little inspiration. And yes, we plan to go there when we visit the city in a few weeks.]

Here we go, a-waffling

Lately, the weather has been gorgeous in Portland. Not only that, but the weather has been gorgeous ON THE WEEKEND. Wonder of wonders. It's been the kind of weather that makes you forget its only February and spring is still over a month away: sunny, clear, and warm (in comparison with the usual winter weather, of course). We've been so excited to closet our rain gear and winter coats that we haven't much felt like spending time inside, which has necessitated more eating out than usual.

A few weeks ago we had one such beautiful Saturday and, though we were overflowing a bit in the leftovers department, we decided to have lunch out at a food cart we've been meaning to try. Despite my normal aversion to all things fast food, I am a sucker for the food cart. There is something very jolly about a little van or trailer packed with people and food (admittedly this is probably jollier for me than for those who are packed), serving tasty and often unusual treats. I also like the fact that I'm buying the food from the person who cooks it, enabling me to properly thank my chef for a satisfying meal. And, yes, it's fast...and sometimes that's fun.

Mississippi Avenue in North Portland has become a kind of haven for food carts. The neighborhood is one of our favorites and every time P and I stroll the streets I seek out the carts with my eagle eye, looking for any that I haven't seen before and reminding myself of the ones I am aching to try (ridiculously, up until a few weeks ago we had tried not-a-one). Here is the range I've noticed: Baked goods/juice , Filipino, Mostlandian, good old fashioned BBQ and a recent addition, a waffle cart.

The waffle cart, Flavourspot, used to have just one location, on North Lombard - a bit of a trek, which partly explains why we had yet to try it. However, they recently opened a second location on Mississippi, from which they now serve their sweet and savory waffle sandwiches - tasty waffles wrapped around an assortment of ingredients from lemon curd and whipped cream to sausage and maple spread.

I don't know if the world is divided into pancake people and waffle people in the same way that it is divided between those who listen to the Beatles and those who prefer the Rolling Stones (I like both, but then, I'm a bit of an anomaly); if it is, I fall decidedly on the side of the waffle. You may try to convince me otherwise, but in the great battle between waffle and pancake, I know where my loyalties will always lie. Where the waffle's texture is perfectly balanced between a buttery crisp exterior and a light fluffy interior, the pancake's is uniformly flat and spongy. Where the waffle delightfully stands up to the maple or other syrup you drizzle o'er its surface (and into its dimples), the pancake quickly becomes soggy and unappetizing. Try as you might to dress up a pancake, I will always see it for what it is: a poor substitute for a waffle.

Flavourspot offers some damn fine waffles. The exterior is perfectly crisp and buttery (but not overly greasy) and the inside is airy, but still chewy. The fillings range from traditional - butter and powdered sugar; to savory - a waffle take on a croque monsieur; to decadent - a waffle wrapped around an ice cream bar (seriously). I decided on the Sweet Cream with Jam (whipped cream cheese and Strawberry Jam) and P went with the (Veggie) Sausage and Maple. Both were fantastic and we devoured them quickly on the lawn chairs next to the cart. While immensely satisfied, we weren't yet sick, so we decided to share a third waffle: chunky peanut butter and nutella. I was plenty sick after that, but oh, the glory of the waffle...

I was so inspired by the success of our waffle cart outing, that I decided to make my own. Waffles are one of those foods for which mixes abound, and yet they are incredibly easy (and far superior) if you make them yourself. The key is the butter, which contributes to the pleasant crispness and lightness and also aids the release from the waffle iron. I modified a recipe from the Joy of Cooking to make my Poppyseed buttermilk waffles, topped with mascarpone and blueberry-lemon syrup. I've included the basic waffle recipe below, as well as the modified version.

I discovered the pleasures of waffles for dinner while studying in Norwich, England. A favorite restaurant of mine was The Waffle House, which served everything waffle, sweet and savory concoctions alike; the fresh spinach, potato and chickpea curry was my favorite for dinner. (Portland, too, boasts a waffle restaurant, but I have yet to try it.) You can use the basic recipe below to make savory waffles, just omit the sugar in the recipe. Serve them with sundried tomatoes, goat cheese and arugula, or with a rich mushroom sauce. I strongly abide by the traditional adage, "a waffle a day keeps the devil at bay."
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Basic Waffles
from Joy of Cooking

[You can vary the amount of butter in this recipe. Joy offers three options: 4 tablespoons for reduced fat, 8 tablespoons (1 stick) for light and fluffy, 1/2 pound (2 sticks) for extra crunchy and rich. I happen to adore butter, but I went with the middle option and was perfectly satisfied with the richness of the waffle. Any more butter and I fear the waffle may have melted on my plate]

Preheat a waffle iron. Whisk together in a large bowl:

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt

Thoroughly blend in another bowl:

3 eggs
1/4 cup to 1 cup (1/2 to 2 sticks) butter, melted
1 1/2 cups milk

Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the wet ingredients. Combine with a few swift strokes of the whisk. Spoon about a half cup of the mixture into your pre-heated waffle iron and cook until steam has stopped emerging from the cracks in the iron and the waffle releases easily when the lid is opened.


Poppyseed buttermilk waffles
with mascarpone and blueberry-lemon syrup
Adapted from Joy of Cooking

To make the waffles:

Prepare the waffles as above, but decrease the baking powder to 2 teaspoons and add 1/4 teaspoon baking soda and a 1/3 of a cup of poppyseeds to the dry ingredients. Substitute buttermilk for the milk.

To make the sauce:

Put about a cup of berries into a pan with the juice of a small lemon and 1-2 tablespoons of agave syrup (substitute sugar if you don't have the syrup on hand). Cook, stirring, on medium heat until the syrup thickens.

Enjoy the waffles with a drizzle of blueberry-lemon syrup and a dollop of mascarpone.

[These would be delicious on a brunch menu if you're cooking for friends. The waffles keep well in a 200 degree oven. Or, you could do as we did and go it alone (together). That way, you can freeze the leftovers in plastic and enjoy them throughout the week, for a wholesome (read: decadent) start to your day!]