food

how I went to Portland and ate

girl3 Comments

I just got back from my first trip to Portland, OR, courtesy of friends from college. I have to say that the dominant feature of the trip was not the mountains or the coast or Powell’s or the gazillion bridges. It was eating.

The day I traveled out, Thursday, I ate five meals. They were all time-zone appropriate—breakfast (6:30am EST), breakfast (9:30am CST), lunch (12pm MST), lunch (2pm PST), and dinner (7pm PST)—but still, holy many meals in one day, batman!

The meals before I got to Portland weren’t notable, but once there we went to the Blue Moose Cafe for lunch, and I had my first hummus sandwich with vegetarian chili meal of the trip. I haven’t had a hummus sandwich in a couple of years (I used to get them at the Maryland Food Collective when I was still teaching) and I have to say it was pretty darn good. Mostly, it was nice to be in a place where the avocado was ripe and included as a fixin’s option. We couldn’t resist dessert, and shared two, both of which were excellent: the shop’s ‘moose bar’ (a peanut butter puffed rice bar covered in chocolate, with rice syrup rather than marshmallows) and apple crisp.

For dinner, we went to Caprial’s Bistro, which is (I learned from a display on the way out) associated with a cooking show. We were treated very well by the staff, as my host goes there relatively frequently, and we had a fun evening catching up. I was happy to sample an Oregon pinot noir, and a Willamette Valley Riesling, and catch up with friends. And let’s not forget a delicious apple galette that included almonds and raisins (yum!).

The next day, Friday, I had another excellent deli lunch at Vepadoes: my favorite sandwich (pepper turkey with avocado) and a Kombucha Wonder Drink. This was my first KWD, and I am totally hooked. I loved it, and the fact that it tasted a little weird just made it better, in the vein of Cel-Ray soda (now owned by Pepsi, much to my regret). While there, I enjoyed checking out the pottery they had for sale, by a local guy who apparently is the neighbor of the owner of the shop (they have a display for food bartering system of some kind, I imagine). My own work is nowhere near that level, but I liked imagining that I might one day be making large vases or display bowls.

That night for dinner, I met a friend and we tried to go to the Kennedy School, but decided to pass on the wait (it wasn’t too long, but we were getting kind of hungry). We walked around and admired the interior, and then headed over to the Concordia Ale House, where we had really excellent pub food. She had the fish and chips (beer-batter dipped, but not the thick nasty buttermilk kind of batter) and I had a turkey reuben on marbled rye (what I know as a ‘Rachel,’ but that’s not a consistent designation). I actually didn’t/don’t drink much beer, but I tried a glass of a local red, which a high school friend conveniently showed up in time to finish. I find it kind of amusing that the bar is relatively new, and replaced a dive that sounds much more the style of my friends 10 years ago, but that I wouldn’t have enjoyed nearly as much now.

The next day, Saturday, my good friend from college took me to the Tin Shed, where we had an excellent breakfast. I was put in mind of some of my favorite Ann Arbor breakfast options, as the place had the feeling of the Northside Grill (with complimentary unlimited coffee and tea while you wait) and scrambles in the style of the hippie hash at the Fleetwood (except with gourmet type combos of veggies and cheese). Passing on the dairy meant I had my scramble (the salmon one) cheeseless, potato pancakes (instead of the cheese grits), and toast (sourdough) instead of the buttermilk biscuit. But it was still great.

For the other meal of the day, we went to Hedge House, where I had my second hummus sandwich and veggie chili meal of the trip. The sandwich was great, and the chili was good, too, but not as good as the Blue Moose version. Again, I didn’t have a beer so I can’t report on the legendary brewmeisters of Portland, but the food was good and it was empty in the late afternoon, so we got a booth and were able to hang out and talk. Those following along at home may have noticed the predominance of places in NE Portland (where I was staying); we went to this one in SE Portland because it was right around the corner from my other friend’s house.

The next day, Sunday, we didn’t eat out in Portland at all. At lunchtime, we were at the coast, and ate lunch while warming up at Brewin’ in the Wind, in Oceanside, an establishment that has the winter business for that stretch of the shore pretty much locked up. The food was basic, but hot and pretty tasty, if overpriced for what we had (the prerogative of the one place open in town). In the evening, we ate at home, a lovely meal cooked by one of my hosts: pasta in garlic and oil, blackened green beans, and pear tarte tatin. This was accompanied by a white table wine from the region, that was pleasantly dry and flavorful.

My last day in town, Monday, developed an Asian theme later in the day. Breakfast was a home-cooked frittata, with potatoes and onions, prepared for us by my host. It was delicious and filling, especially with the tasty campagnolo bread from Grand Central and blackberry jam. For lunch, we ate at the Daily Cafe in Rejuvenation. The sandwich was nothing special, but the macaroon I got was excellent! Besides the chocolate drizzle on the top, it turned out to contain chopped pecans, chopped dried apricots, and little tiny dark chocolate chips. I think I can say that the only thing that could have possibly made it better would be coconut rum. They were so good that I bought several to take back with me on my flight home.

After lunch, we visited the Portland Classical Chinese Gardens, and warmed up afterwards in their tea house. The tea house serves Tao of Tea products only (which I hadn’t realized was also a local Portland company), and we each only had tea. I tried the red clover, and my friend had the black peony. They were both lovely, and we whiled away the time drinking many small cups of tea.

For dinner that night, my final meal in Portland was at Mio Sushi (I’m not sure which location, but not the one in NW Portland), selected for the head-clearing properties of wasabi and the tonic quality of miso soup. We ate a selection of tuna and salmon rolls, with a couple of veggie ones thrown in for variety, all of which were quite flavorful. This also presented an unlooked-for opportunity to demonstrate my mediocre chopstick technique; I have been told that a vacation to China or Japan will quickly remedy that for me. At any rate, it was sushi west coast style, and that was good enough for me.

Finally, as if all of these great restaurants and home-cooked meals weren’t enough food excitement for one trip, I finally sampled a tangelo, beloved fruit of one of my favorite people. The one I had was organic, from New Seasons market, and (as advertised) totally juicy and delicious.

So there you have it.

how I went to Portland and ate

2nd cookie date — toffee nut squares

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Last night was our second weekly cookie date (it being the second week of the year), and we chose to make toffee nut squares (p. 221). This cookie was another one cookie difficulty rating; the rating for most difficult is three cookies, and there aren’t many of these in the book (two examples are filled kurabia cookies and checkerboards).

This week we decided to divide up the labor according to the skills we each needed to work on, which meant I was on electric mixer duty and he chopped the walnuts by hand (I rejected the proposal that we use the food processor for the walnuts; it was starting to seem like we would have to allocate all credit for the result to the machines). I am probably going to exclaim over this every week, but it required basically no baking skill to assemble the dough using the machine. It does, I must admit, require some technological skill, but I’m assured that every other person in their 30s who has ever even thought about baking a cookie, besides me, knows how to use an electric mixer. If you were in our kitchen, you would have heard a running commentary from me something along the lines of ‘Does everyone really bake like this? This requires no skill. Does this mean I should be giving far fewer accolades to people for producing tasty baked goods? This must be why people become obsessed with recipe variations, because there’s pretty much nothing else to focus on.’ To be fair to our baking skills, they were required to spread the dough evenly into the corners of the jelly roll pan, something we discovered I actually knew the technique for, despite rarely (never?) making bar cookies.

In the interest of being able to evaluate the recipe itself, we again followed the recommended approach for keeping them firm and chewy, and let the cookies cool in the pan overnight. Which is a good thing, because they were very tasty and very sugary, and if we had cut them last night, we likely would have eaten most of them and then stayed up half the night before slipping into a sugar coma. They weren’t the best cookie I’ve ever had, but they were certainly good and more rewarding than last week’s selection in terms of trying something new (i.e. we had never made toffee bars before, and these tasted like toffee bars). Plus, having them come out like we imagined they would be made us feel accomplished.

overall ratings:
ease of preparation: 3.5
match to expectations: 3.5
‘the cookie itself’: 4

2nd cookie date — toffee nut squares

weekly greens

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This fall we are participating in a farm share for the first time, with Even Star Organic Farm, which uses a modified CSA model (and was featured in a Washington Post article this past November). With our winter subscription, we get a box of food each week from November through May (with six weeks off that are allocated throughout that time period, in relation to holidays or low harvest). Unlike the traditional CSA model, the subscription requires less involvement on our part; we don’t need to volunteer, and we don’t bear the risk of poor harvest to the same degree (i.e. we are guaranteed roughly the same volume of food each week).

I have to admit that we’ve been challenged to prepare and eat all of the food we’ve gotten. This is partly an issue of volume—the share is geared more toward a family of four than two—and partly an issue of organization. Many of the greens are things we haven’t eaten regularly before, and I’m also not used to having fresh herbs in such quantity. At several points through the fall, a particular bag of greens went bad by the time I figured out what to do with it. I’ve heard from other people with farm subscriptions that this is typical of the first year, especially with the winter share that includes less common greens and a huge number of turnips. The turnips have been lovely, though: sweet, tender, and flavorful. The challenge has truly been the mustard greens; they don’t cook up as much to my tastes as the varieties of kale, and there’s only so many you can pile onto a sandwich.

Which is what we’re learning we need to do in order to use all the greens: eat them in salads and sandwiches every day for lunch, and cook them up into hot meals every night for dinner. Not, for example, leave them in the fridge until Sunday (we pick them up on Thursday) and only then start figuring out what we have and what do do with them. So far this week, we’ve done ok. Last night, I made Queer Vegan Beans & Greens (named thusly because the recipe came to me via a string of queer vegans): greens sautéed in olive oil with minced garlic, broth, a can of white beans, and red pepper sauce. Today, we had salads for dinner. Tomorrow we’ll likely have more greens sauteed with garlic, in some manner or another.

Of course, we have five more months of greens coming to us, so more creative recipes are welcome!

weekly greens

1st cookie date — chocolate chip peanut butter cookies

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My main holiday gift to my partner this year was a cookbook, Great Cookies. It is, as the title leads one to believe, a cookbook entirely consisting of cookie recipes, over 300 of them. The author does include in the ‘cookie’ moniker some types of bars (i.e. Florentines), balls (i.e. peanut butter ones), and culturally specific confections (i.e. Palmiers) that others might call sweets or pastries. I’m just sayin’.

While I’m sure we could have happily just read cookie recipes all year long, the gift also included a weekly date to make cookies together. He will get to pick the recipe each week (because it’s his gift) and I will make sure we have the ingredients and show him how to, for example, beat egg whites and things like that. I imagine we’ll max out my technical expertise somewhere in, let’s say, April, at which point we’ll either make simpler recipes or learn together.

I hope that all of this will be facilitated by the new electric hand mixer and non-slip counter pad I recently acquired, with my birthday gift certificate from his mother. I’ve never owned an electric mixer before, much to the surprise and consternation of our friend who got tagged to mix the buttercream frosting for our holiday cookies last month. I witnessed many puzzled looks of pain and concentration on his face as he creamed the butter with a wooden spoon and then resorted to the potato masher (an implement only purchased this past year as well; I used to just use a fork) to meet his electric mixer frosting standards. In the end, the frosting was great, completely uniform in texture and color, which nudged me—along with our collective sore shoulders—to look into an electric mixer.

In the end, I’m glad I did, because Great Cookies presumes you have one and doesn’t use instructions like ‘cream’ but instead ‘mix on medium speed for 2 minutes.’ Am I alone in believing that you don’t need an electric mixer to bake, just a strong arm? I didn’t realize that they had become so much the norm.

At any rate, tonight was our first cookie date, making it also the first time we used the mixer. We made chocolate chip peanut butter cookies (p. 36). The recipe was more labor intensive than the ones we’re used to (my pfeffernusse recipe with a gazillion ingredients comes closest), but we followed the instructions and used the food processor for the sugars and the mixer for the butter. I had a little trouble with keeping the mixer steady while creaming the butter, but I expect it will get easier as I get more used to handling it. Later steps went more smoothly, and our shoulders certainly aren’t as sore as they might have been in the past with all this mixing.

The cookies themselves are tasty, and they look nice and even, with uniform consistency. We were both expecting a cookie that was more ‘peanut butter cookie with chocolate chips’ and we got ‘chocolate chip cookie with peanut flavor.’ Given that, we probably won’t make this cookie again; it’s a lot of steps for a chocolate chip cookie. And, while it tastes nice, I put it in the ‘I’d eat it if I wanted a cookie, but I wouldn’t get in any fistfights over it’ category.

overall ratings:
ease of preparation: 3.5
match to expectations: 2.5
‘the cookie itself’: 3

1st cookie date — chocolate chip peanut butter cookies