cake tasting

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

sproutpocalypse

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


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

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

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

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

extraordinarily ordinary

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

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

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

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

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

planting blind

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

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.)

sons & daughters

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)