Cured pork and Cocktails

I didn't think it could happen. Not to me. Maybe to other people, people with lesser stomachs and a poorly defined palate. Or to health nuts who weren't used to, you know, food. But not to me, not with my voracious appetite, my love of all kinds of food, my desire to eat the best possible food all the time. Surely I simply could not get tired of eating good, interesting, carefully prepared, rich food. And yet, here in Portland, even I hit a wall on Thursday. Not another charcuterie plate, cried my palate. Please, let's not split a number of fascinating smaller plates composed of surprising juxtapositions and unusual ingredients. I want someone to put a plate of simple food in front of me and let me eat it in peace. Or, even better, I want to cook a meal of something simple and good, and just eat that.

Of course, getting to this point has been a wonderful journey, and I'll do my best to recreate it step by wonderful step. We've been to a number -- a large number -- of really good places and eaten really good meals, not to mention gotten back in touch with friends we haven't seen in ages. Turns out the road to satiety is paved with cured pork and cocktails.

After our missed first step with Blue Hour, Jeremy and I journeyed out to Bar Mingo, the newer and more casual sibling of Caffe Mingo on NW 23rd. It's Italian, and most of the plates are small and shareable. They pride themselves on their homemade pasta, and it is a testimony to the greatness of the meal that the house made ravioli, delicious as it was, was the baseline of the meal, the stand up bass against which the rest of the dishes played and sang. We started with a brilliant braised squid bruschetta, cooked with red wine and butter. There was a grilled shrimp wrapped in pancetta on a citrus salad that, unlike most dishes, became more interesting the more one ate of it. The ravioli -- which I don't mean to damn with faint praise -- was creamy, herby, and with just the right amount of chewiness in the pasta. And finally, there were the lamb meatballs with mint and rosemary, meatballs so delicate that they seemed to transform into the essence of lamb in your mouth, meatballs so  light you wondered how they maintained ball shape through the cooking process. Man, those were good meatballs.

We went to our beloved Clyde Commons for a light, late meal, and they continue to be consistent and not to disappoint. I had a lovely ravioli stuffed with farmer's cheese and greens, served in a brown butter sauce and a delightful bowl of fresh, local vegetables lightly sauteed and dressed with just the right hint of acid. Jeremy had a lamb shank. There has been so much good food since then that neither one of us can remember anything about that lamb beyond "it was good," and "it made me slightly regret my ravioli." I returned to Clyde Commons a few days latter for their happy hour with my grad student, Kari, who was in town from Davis for her birthday. I had a fantastic bourbon drink, "bourbon renewal," and we split their small, happy hour charcuterie board -- just some salami, a boiled egg, some cornishons. Still, not a bad deal for five bucks. I like that place a lot.

Last Friday, we went to the rave reviewed Laurelhurst Market with Jeremy's first roommate in San Francisco, Tracy, who moved to Portland two years ago. The bartender there, a brilliant man named Evan, is a high school friend of hers, and made me a classic drink called an "airmail." It's a rum drink, and I never order rum drinks, but I am so very happy I put myself in Evan's hands. Rum, citrus, champagne, light, refreshing, yum. I have to say dinner, while good, was not spectacular. We had good torchon of foie gras, wholly underflavored steak tartare, and great french fries to start. I had a delicately refined salmon dish which kept the salmon the star (and did not over cook it). Tracy had harissa coated short ribs that were the hit of the table. Jeremy had pork ribs that were just okay -- a little dry -- but that came with a house-made hot link sausage that was redemptive. In Spokane, it would have been a great meal. Here, nothing special.

On Monday, we met up with my old friend Amy from my PSU days. She was always brilliantly sharp and funny, and we have had strangely parallel lives: our houses are the same style and era, our lives until recently revolved around ancient and beloved cats, and we both knit. And, we both love food, so we went to Gruner (as you can see, there is supposed to be an umlaut in there), which describes itself as serving "alpine cuisine." A good charcuterie board there, an endive and apple salad I found mostly tasteless, and then some spectacular entries. I had the lamb, which came with perfectly cooked chops and the most complex, house-made lamb sausage I have ever tasted. Jeremy had a duck schnitzel with, of all things, a rhubarb sauce (don't tell him -- I don't think he knew what the fruit was), and Amy had chicken and morel spaetzle (is there another missing umlaut? I'm not sure). She and I had opposite reactions to the spaetzle: she liked it more and more as she ate it. By my third taste (she nicely traded for some sausage), I was getting buttered out.

On Wednesday, we went to Ned Ludd with my longest running continuous friend, Christopher, and his boyfriend Rob. By this time, Jeremy's college roommate James had joined us (he and Jeremy are working on a computer project together). Of course, first we needed to stop by a local bar and have some cocktails. We ended up at Tear Drop, where the decor is an uncomfortable melange of down-homey wine bar, modern apothocary, and a little zen rock garden thrown in. But, the drinks were fine, especially my airmail (although not as good as Evan's) and Christopher's Tanqueray and tonic with housemade tonic. Then, on to the restaurant. The schtick at Ned Ludd, and I'm not sure how much of a shtick it is, is that they cook everything that is cooked on their wood stove. Great were the charcuterie plate (pictured at the top of this post), especially the porchetta and the rabbit liver pate, the shaved asparagus salad, and roasted new potatoes with basil aioli. Good was the pork belly and beans -- they managed to get a terrificly crispy crust on it without drying out the tender meat -- but I don't know how anyone could have eaten more than two bites without exploding. Also good was the porchetta, arugula and lentil salad, although the lentils added nothing to the plate. Problematic, at least for some of us, was the rabbit loin. The breading was on the soggy side, the salad was overdressed by far, and the rabbit had considerable chew -- maybe some untrimmed silver skin on the loin? And, I don't know. Rabbit. Fuzzy hopping bunnies. Since they still taste like weird chickens to me, do we really have to ruin their lives by turning them into food animals?

And that is how it happened. Faced with the question what to do for dinner with Tracy and James on Friday, I announced I wanted to eat in. And I made a meal with absolutely no pork at all. Really, I don't know what the world is coming too for me. But, I haven't even looked at a charcuterie board in four days, so hopefully I am on the mend.

A few of my favorite things

I remember a trip to the grocery store, the only Piggly Wiggly on the west coast, when I was a college student in Tacoma. Why was there a Piggly Wiggly in Tacoma? I have no idea, but there was. I went with friends, and on the way, we talked about what we were going to get. After a few minutes, one of more politically-minded friends pointed out, with a good deal of hostility, that I talked only in brand names. I remember I had said I wanted Tim's Potato chips and some Henry's (that would be Henry Weinhardt's Ale -- remember, this was the eighties, and hence before the micro-brew explosion in the Northwest). I'm sure I had dropped some other brand names along the way as well. Her implication was that I was a slave to marketing, a total consumer zombie, a capitalist running dog, and I was mortified. I carefully expunged all brand names from my vocabulary, although I still made sure I got Tim's and Henry's.

In hindsight, however, I'm not sure her implication was correct. Yes, capitalism convinces consumers to pay more for certain names with little respect to quality or design: Gucci, Prada, etc. But there is a difference between brand loyalty and label porn, isn't there? I go to a store here in Portland called Radish Underground and pay a premium because I know the brands carried there are by small designers, made by hand and using sustainable fabrics. That feels like being a responsible, educated consumer. Yes, there is a certain arrogance and pretentiousness (what, me, pretentious?) about name dropping, and I suspect that is what really irked my college associate, but I also think there is a difference between Tim's potato chips and Lays. I want Tim's, for a whole number of reasons, and I'll stick to that.

All of which is a long preamble to a list of the specific stores, foods, and products that have been making my days here in Portland incredibly satisfying and filled with pleasure. I promise I have no financial relationship with any of these companies, except that they all have a good deal of my money.

Stumptown Coffee. I'm here in Portland partially to finish up my ms, so every weekday morning, I walk to the PSU library and write footnotes. On my way there, I stop by Stumptown coffee either for an Americano to go or a cappuccino for there, depending on who is working the machine. They are slow as molasses, but I have never had better espresso, even when I made it for myself back in the Starbucks days. They roast their own coffee, dark the way I like it but less charred than Starbucks has become. They clearly start with superior beans with lots of body and flavor. And then they take incredibly care with the shots, the milk, the proportions. The result is wonderful, strong, sweet, balanced, with a great mouth feel and a lingering bite on the tongue. Yum.

The People's Pig. Portland has over four hundred food carts in over eleven pods, plus some lone wolves, scattered throughout the city. They tend to specialize on an ethnicity or food niche, from Viking to Vegan, and the quality varies from bad -- I made a bad mistake with the most bland, colorless non-Pad Thai I have ever seen last week -- to outstanding. I'm starting to develop a list of traits to look for in a good food cart: a short, tightly focused menu seems to always be a good sign. A big line to order is also a good sign, although a big crowd waiting for their order can be misleading, as it is also a sign of a disorganized kitchen (hence my Pad Thai blunder).  I have my list of ones I want to try: the Frying Scotsman fish and chips and Mobster Meatballs top it. But the problem is, I would have to bypass The People's Pig for something else, and I just don't see that happening.

The People's Pig makes three types of pork sandwiches a day. There's always a pulled pork, a chef's special (I've seen pork chop and bacon sandwiches, and heard about a cubano), and there is always Porchetta. You may remember my love affair with Porchetta from Italy, but I'm telling you, this Porchetta is better. He sources from local, heirloom pigs, and he doesn't roast them whole. Rather, he rubs a loin with herbs and wraps it in a pork belly, and then roasts the package. Each sandwich has some belly and some loin, some arugula and some lemon on a beautiful ciabatta roll. They are almost too much, almost too rich and fatty, but the peppery freshness of the arugula brings it back from the edge. Barely. I could use a little more crispy, chewy cracklings, but other than that, it may be the world's most perfect sandwich. I wonder if the owner would let me open a franchise in Spokane. Or maybe marry him. Really. It is that good.

Continuing on the pork theme, when I get home from the library, I've been snacking on the amazing pork wattle rillette from Chop, found in the Saturday market, on a slice of one of the beautiful loaves from Pearl Bakery. Chop's pates are equally spectacular -- I have also feasted myself on the chicken liver pate with pistachios with incredible happiness. Jeremy, however, is partial to Olympic Provisions' cacciatore salami. He has good taste, as well. The bread at Pearl Bakery is also nearly perfect, the kind of bread with such a great wheaty, yeasty flavor, such an amazing texture, soft and chewy on the inside, crisp and cracking crust, that you don't need anything to enjoy it. Although butter is never bad. And pork rillette, fatty and chunky with a faint whiff of sweet onions and . . . is that allspice? doesn't do it any harm either.

It's a little sad that in such a short time, surrounded by so much amazing food, I've already fallen into a food rut. On the other hand, each of these things gives me intense pleasure every time I sit down to them, and they make so happy to be alive, to have a life that allows me to eat rich, good, relatively expensive food prepared with care and conscience, to have a day filled with intellectual stimulation, satisfaction, and punctuated by pleasure, love, and friends that I am almost overwhelmed by gratitude. I take it back. It isn't sad at all.

I love Portland. It's no surprise, I suppose. Growing up across the river in Vancouver, Portland was the epicenter of cool. It was where I was first exposed to urban, to sophisticated, to cultures different from the one given to me by my parents. I love and respect my parents, and I have adopted an unusually high percentage of their values, priorities and world-view, but I needed to find my own style -- both life-style and fashion style. Both started to form in Portland in the eighties. Then, I returned to the city in the nineties to get my masters at Portland State. In my mid-twenties, that was the time I was learning how to live as an adult, and when I started to amass a household. I used the dining room table I bought off Hawthorn until just a few years ago, and the beautiful chandelier I first obtained in Portland has graced every dining room I have ever owned. Portland formed me during some important years, so it makes sense that it formed me to love it.

On the other hand, there is a lot to love, symbiotic formation or not. This is a city that takes sustainability incredibly seriously, and values above all books, food, and art. What is not to love? I wonder how much Powell's had to do with the ethos of Portland. I think Portlanders loved Powell's, so they got used to thinking in terms of local business early. Also, Portland is aggressively liberal, so it reacted against the anti-intellectualism of the Bush years. In fact, Portland was the only city to have spontaneous protests over the illegality of the first Bush election. As the country become less interested in facts and reason, Portlanders became more educated and engaged.

As for the weather, it just doesn't bother me. Even when it rains, there is a lot of light, especially compared to Spokane in the winter, and when it rains as much as it does here, you just figure out how to do what you like doing in the rain. As an added bonus: lots of really stylish rain jackets!

Portland Bound

Jeremy and I continue to milk the creamy goodness out of my sabbatical year, this time by heading to Portland for a month. Readers of this blog already know of my deep love of Portland, its food, its shopping, its vibe. Jeremy shares this love, and so here we are, ensconced in a very hipster loft in the heart of the Pearl District. It's supposed to have a spectacular view of Mt. Hood, but it is Portland, so we have yet to see any sign of the mountain.

We drove in yesterday, and after a long day in the car eating nothing but Cheeto Puffs (which we only eat on road trips, I swear), we decided to have a nice meal out. We chose the nearby and well respected Blue Hour, and I have to say I was slightly underwhelmed, or perhaps it was just that, atypically,Jeremy did a better job of ordering. Jeremy's beet salad with watercress and mascapone was delightful -- the cheese added a beautiful creaminess, the beets were earthy and had the perfect amount of chew left in them, and the pepperiness of the watercress added just the right amount of bite. The only problem was that it was under-seasoned; even Jeremy added salt, and he never ever adds salt to things. For our entries, Jeremy ordered roast chicken and mashed potatoes, and they were really good. The chicken was moist, the jus it came with was powerful, and the mashed potatoes held a wonderful cheesy surprise. This is the second really good chicken dish Jeremy has ordered in Portland recently (the other was at Le Pigeon in March), causing me to question my long standing rule never to order chicken in a good restaurant because it is a protein chefs don't respect. I think chefs are starting to show chicken the love it deserves.

I ordered the delightful sounding brown butter gnocchi with vegetable ragu and tempura egg. I'm pretty sure I could make a dish with that description that would slay you, but this . . . eh. First of all, I would like to have a word with the chef about terminology. Gnocchi are akin to pasta, and as such should have some internal structure, a little hint of chew. They should not be miniature mashed potato fritters. My dad used to use up leftover mashed potatoes by coating them in egg and flour and then frying them in butter; they took the place of hash browns in many a breakfast of my childhood. In my memory, they are wonderful, rustic things, crunchy and buttery and creamy. They are not gnocchi, and yet the things that showed up on my plate last night bore more than a passing resemblance. Not bad, just false advertising. Second, ragu refers to a slow cooked meat sauce. A vegetable ragu is already a misnomer, but at the very least it should refer to vegetables that have been combined together with some liquid to form a sauce. It should not refer to dry peas, oven dried tomatoes, and dry sauteed rapini. Notice all of those descriptions involved the word "dry." Their was no sauce. The gnocchi had absorbed any hint of brown butter, and the whole plate was parched.

But, never fear you think, because there is another component: the tempura egg! Surely that will contain lovely, runny, rich yolk that will bring everything together in its loving embrace. It did, for a few bites, but it was just too small and too fried to rescue the entire plate. And they weren't kidding when they said "tempura" -- that term they used with great literalness, and it was just odd. The batter, while crispy and fried and hence good, had nothing to do with the brown butter or the gnocchi. All in all, not, as they would say on Top Chef, a well conceived dish. By the end of the entries, I was exhausted, so we skipped the inviting cheese cart and the desserts and headed home.

Lunch today was another matter entirely. We headed into Chinatown, and a small restaurant that I first spied on a trip several years ago. It has all the markings of a terrible or great Chinese restaurant: absolutely no decor, lots of Chinese and very little English -- the name of the place is actually "Good Taste Restaurant" -- and, best of all, there are lacquered-brown roast ducks and huge hunks of red, glistening char sui hanging in the window. The ducks still have their beaks, poor things! I had the Super Bowl A, which was a punch bowl of rich broth, egg noodles, roast duck, BBQ pork, and pork wontons. I can't believe how close I came to eating every last drop of it. The duck was rich and tender, and the skin was still lightly crispy. The char sui had a surprisingly satisfying sweetness. The wontons were fat and ugly and had a ton of meat in them. Jeremy had char sui over rice, and that too was good. This is the kind of place I dream about finding: small, cheap, filled with people not speaking English but still friendly, and with great food I can't possible make at home or buy in Spokane. Thank you Portland food gods. Oh -- and they sell their duck and pork by the pound to go!

Before we left, our dear friends Heather and Gordon invited us over for dinner, and I offered to bring a salad. Heather accepted, but only on the condition that I didn't buy anything special that I would then have to throw out before we left. Kind, that Heather, and wise. So, I made the salad equivalent of fridge pasta -- you know, the pasta you make by throwing all the odds and ends in your fridge into a pan, the kind that is sometimes good and sometimes really not? As it happened, I had some slightly unusual ingredients to use up, because the night before I had made spring rolls with peanut dipping sauce. That left me with half a bunch of mint and half a can of coconut milk. And so was born Coconut Corn salad, and I have to say, it was good. It was very good. Spicy and fresh and sweet and creamy. Heather asked me for the recipe, so here it is, to the best of my memory:

Coconut Corn Salad

Dressing:
Combine a quarter of a cup of the thick part of a can of coconut milk, half a bunch of mint, a veined and seeded serrano pepper, a pressed garlic clove, a teaspoon of grated fresh ginger, and a tbls of honey into the bowl of a food processor and combine until smooth. Taste for salt and sugar -- mine needed a good pinch of salt. Add the thinner liquid from the coconut milk if it is too thick.

Peel, halve lengthwise, and seed two cucumbers. Slice them thin on a bias (I used a mandolin), toss with a tsp of salt, and set in a strainer over a bowl for half an hour or so. Meanwhile, lightly roast three ears of corn, and slice the kernels off the cob.

When ready to serve, pat the cucumbers dry (no need to rinse them -- the salad needs the salt), toss with the corn and add the dressing to taste. You'll have extra dressing, which I suspect would be great tossed with shrimp, grilled chicken, or any number of things. I would have been sad to throw that elixir away -- thanks Heather for taking the remainder!