Bar Avignon, which opened last October, occupies the space at SE 22nd and Division that housed a Mother’s Cookies factory in the 1930s, the Flying Saucer Café and, most recently, the Red and Black Café. It’s a classy, casual, inclusive place where Goodman hopes his customers feel equally comfortable ordering a “killer” bottle of expensive champagne or a dollar-fifty glass of Miller High Life. Miller might be surprising coming from a guy so serious about wine, but Goodman insists that sometimes, like after a long bike ride, it’s the perfect thirst-quencher. Enjoyment is key and absent, completely, is the feared snobbery often associated with high-end wine bars. He chuckles, “I’m not going to yell at you for holding your wine glass wrong.”

…read the full piece in Indulge magazine. It begins on page twenty-six.

Now picture a world in which there are more than one thousand J9s, all givin’ it to you straight about the good (and disastrous) eats in San Francisco, New York, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and 859 other cities in forty five countries all over this little Earth-ball. That world, clever reader, is called Foodbuzz. And while there aren’t really more than a thousand of me there, there are more than a thousand other food bloggers. It’s quite a site. Er, sight.

Today, San Francisco-based Foodbuzz, Inc. announced the official launch of their Global Foodbuzz Blogger Community. In an internet glutted with food sites, Foodbuzz is distinct (according to their press release) as “the only online community with content created exclusively by food bloggers and rated by foodies … serving up more than 20,000 pieces of new food and dining content weekly.”

In September, Foodbuzz held their first 24 Meals, 24 Hours, 24 Blogs event in which 24 partner bloggers created, ate, and then wrote about their “ultimate meal” on the very same day, all over the world. According to Ryan Stern, Director of the Foodbuzz Publisher Community, the event illustrated “exactly what the future of food publishing is all about — real food, experienced by real people, shared real-time.”

So head over there and check the place out. Be sure to wave hello to me, too. If you’re having trouble picking me out, look for the girl holding a spatula that’s dripping with peanut sauce.

- – -
My mom drives to Monterey to Sea Harvest or Wharf Number Two and buys cooked, cracked, whole crabs. The dismembered Dungeness beasts are dumped out into the utility sink, washed, and returned to the fridge until dinner. When I set the dinner table around four-thirty, I place a nutcracker and a pick along the top of the place setting, centered between the spoons on the right and the forks on the left. The crab is served cold in big earthenware casserole dishes. Mom’s whole wheat crescent rolls arrive at the table warmed and nestled between cloth napkins in a woven basket. We heap salad onto our plates and use the pick to tease crabmeat out onto the bed of lettuce and veggies.

Until my mid-twenties, I was too repulsed by my abstract, untested notion of crab to eat any myself, though the entire table moaned at its lusciousness. Some other runner-up meal was prepared for me and any other non-crab eaters present, but instead of jumping right in and finishing before everyone else, I moved around the table, helping crack and pick crab for the rest of the family. There was great disappointment when I finally clued in that Dungeness crab is one of the most delicious things a gal can have for dinner.

- – -

At the end of the meal, we were well sated declined the offer of a dessert menu. Our server, in kind, careful English, offered that the house dessert was included in the meal and asked if we would like to try it. Reasoning that it would be rude to refuse, we assented. We didn’t know what the dessert was – I had only understood, or thought I had understood, “water chestnut,” and when it arrived, the dish was a bit of a surprise.

The dessert was a soup, I guess, in a small bowl – the same that held the white rice during our supper – with a saucer. It’s a clear liquid, slightly sweet and hot, in which floats a crinkly matter, not unlike rice noodles but firmer and in short, koosh-ball-esque shapes. And three lychee nuts. Or, they’re berries, right? The lychees were pitted, but still sheathed their rough red skins.

I took up the large ceramic spoon, awkward to my american table habits, and slurped, first the liquid, then with the crinkly bits. I discovered the water chestnut – if that is really what it was – a few bites in, cut up small and sunk to the bottom of the tiny bowl.

The lychee was delicious, and I especially enjoyed breaking the tension of the skin with my teeth to release the soft, sweet flesh inside. The physical sensation of its mastication was as enjoyable, if not more so, than its flavor.

My dining companion looked on in mock – or true – horror. She slurped a little of the liquid, might have tried the crinkly things, broke apart one of the lychees with er spoon, and then set her bowl aside to watch me.

I suggested she try a lychee, making a show of enjoying mine in the exact manner that my father used with trying to convince Baby J9 to eat steamed zucchini slices. Mmmm, just like candy, he’d say. This tactic never worked on me; I don’t know why I was surprised that it didn’t get the lychees eaten either.

When I finished and pushed the bowl away, she made a joke, likening our dessert to gorilla testicle soup.
“I am sure gorillas have much larger testicles than a lychee nut,” I volleyed, determined not to let an allusion to primate genitalia affect my digestion.
“Well, I would have said ‘monkey,’ but I didn’t want to be culturally insensitive.”

- – -

Three years ago I was at the Portland Nursery with my friend Julia. We had gone on a specific errand, but as often happens, we allowed ourselves a stroll through the greenhouses and were unable to resist one or two particularly beautiful, or interesting, or just plain green plants. I spotted a cluster of coffea arabica: coffee. I let out a small, quick noise that betrayed my delighted surprise. Coffee? I asked, for Julia is one of my favorite resources for all matters relating to both fauna and flora. She responded in the affirmative. Yes, that really is coffee and yes, it can grow in the Pacific Northwest. Like citrus, coffee is potted instead of planted so that it can be brought inside in the winter. It took no more assurance or encouragement: I took home eight three-inch tall coffee trees.

The little trees are now three years old and have lived with me in four different houses. Each summer when the temperature is reliably above 60º most of the time, I take them outside and try to tuck them in shady, warm corners of my yard. Coffee plants prefer to live in the shade. Too much sun and their leaves will burn, making photosynthesis impossible. Too few months later when the temperature drops back down, I bring the pots back inside, trying to find places they may be protected from the cats.

Julia’s house is always stuffed with plants and living things, sometimes so much so that it resembles a nursery more than a place where one might settle down in the evening with a book. When she housesits for me in the winter, she brings some of her houseplants with her, hanging the orchids from the baker’s rack in my kitchen and setting pots down on the floor of my living room. When she leaves, my place looks a little empty and I wonder how I survive with so few houseplants.

- – -

Sometimes a girl can walk by a restaurant and just *know* that it’s a winner. I’d like to tell you that I can always pick the great ones, that I am a human dowsing rod for good eats, and I’d like that to be an accurate assessment of my divination prowess. But the truth is, I’ve picked some real losers in this town, and often I don’t see the gems coming until the meal arrives in front of me.

Last week, however, I called it – called it good. A friend of mine has just moved to town and, having neither a proper job nor a full course load to monopolize the hours of my day, I have taken to exploring the City with her. It’s nice to see good ol’ Portland through fresher eyes. We had enjoyed a lunch at the Bridgeport Ale House and were walking up SE Hawthorne Boulevard just to walk up it. Construction compelled us to cross the street six blocks above 39th Avenue, routing our stroll by the Hawthorne Fish House. A sandwich board sign on the sidewalk forced us to walk single-file past the modest-looking door, just outside of which was mounted a translucent plastic menu caddy. As I moved past I reached for one, saying “Gosh, I bet this place is good,” while folding the menu into my bag. I don’t remember why I thought so, or if I could have justified the assessment at the time. Back home, the menu lay folded on my desk for days before I bothered to look at it again.

The Hawthorne Fish House (henceforth, HFH) menu is nearly perfect. Though they do offer one or two items to appease the non-pescaphile (a burger, chicken strips), the majority of their food is fish, fish, or fish. Or clams.

It is, I believe, a profoundly wise restauranteur who can resist needless innovation and clutter on her menu. So it is at the HFH. Make no mistake, I am not herein supporting the hum-drum or the uninspired. No, I am not. I am, however, saying just this: When you figure out how to make what are very possibly the best fish’n'chips this gal has ever had the rapturous pleasure to chew and swallow, it’s best for everyone if you don’t screw with them too much.

- – -

The last time I watched and enjoyed a cooking show was during my grammar school years. I would have been home with a flu or something, watching Jeff Smith and Martin Yan on KQED between episodes of the Woodwright Shop and This Old House.

Cooking shows were different then. Jeff Smith opened his show with a stroll through an outdoor market. Martin Yan made vocal sound effects while chopping vegetables with his imposing, well-honed clever. These guys could cook, too. They didn’t need a pretense – no friends were on their way over expecting an array of munchies to to enjoy while watching the Big Game. Meals didn’t have to be prepared in under thirty minutes, or in only five steps, or with some obscure ingredient that nobody’d want to eat anyway. Jeff and Martin cooked because they were good at it, and I watched them because they were clever are rarely obnoxious. These days the Food Channel makes me cringe, as I do when someone asks if I’ve seen the newest Nigella Lawson cookbook, and when celebrity “chefs” appear on my darned cracker box. Leave my crackers alone, or bring back the Frugal Gourmet.

Delicious Food. Beautiful Photography. Created, rated and improved by you and fellow food-lovers from all over the world.
Open Source Food is your gastronomic hub where every visit will bring inspiration and a rumbling belly…

     It’s an uncluttered place: people create profiles, upload recipes, and chat back and forth about them. You can see one of mine below:

Click the image above to be transported to the site.

My journey to hooch-in-the-linen closet began many months ago, when a good friend discovered – by what means I can’t recall – The Joy of Home Winemaking. Being the type of woman inclined to make her own wine (just as she cooks, bakes, gardens, and makes her own jams), she set to work at all kinds of home brews – dandelion, grapefruit, berry – which, reportedly, not only did not kill anyone, but were also very tasty.

On August 18th of last year, I publicly vowed that I, too, would make my own wine someday. I promptly ordered the book. I even read most of it. And then I put the winemaking project aside in favor of other things. Finishing my Bachelor’s degree, for instance. I imagined that home winemaking could rapidly become an expensive and time-consuming hobby. My kitchen and craft room already spilling over with baking bread, sewing projects, knitting lopsided baby blankets, jam-making, card-designing, writing (in theory anyway) and more, I told myself that I would have to get one or two other projects well in hand (like the degree, see?) before I could embark on another pastime that would only make me giggly and my kitchen sticky.

Last March I could wait no longer. I consulted my guidebook once again, visited my local home brewing supply store and plunged forward.

I made the Easy Apple Wine from Garey’s book. It’s what she recommends for beginners. I also picked up a book at Steinbart’s that had a very similar recipe for apple wine – similar in that both called for apple juice and only one fermentation, instead of “fermenting on the fruit” and then straining out solids, which seemed overwhelming at the time. I made that one too, so that in a few more months when I work up the courage to taste the stuff I can do some scientific-like comparisons. Or something.

When I racked my wine three weeks ago – that’s siphoning off the liquid from the yeastysediment or “must” that falls to the bottom once the initial fermentation takes place – I splashed a bit into my mouth, just to confirm or deny the presence of alcohol where once there had been none. When I splashed the wine into my mouth I also splashed it all over the kitchen.

It smelled a bit like a recycling center in here for a few days. Alcohol? Check.

The book said that it should, at the racking stage, taste a “little raw,” and that the longer I wait before bottling and/or consumption, the more the flavor will balance and smooth, so I’m not worrying yet. For now, I am actually rather enjoying the waiting. I did not, in fact, ever experience the urge to barrel ahead as I was worried I might. Perhaps this apple wine is teaching me patience. Or perhaps I am afraid that it’s been bungled somehow and I’ll be disappointed after all of this blasted patience and restraint.

I just uploaded the images that you see here on my post. I hadn’t looked at them side by side before. See in my closet, the one on the right? That’s the very same that’s above, being prepared back in April. The color difference is really quite striking. Maybe there is some hope yet.

In March, an old friend came to visit me. I picked him up at the airport at nine thirty p.m. By ten ten, we were at Denny’s, recapping time lost over seasoned fries and the Meat Lover’s breakfast special. My friend – a man whom I have known for ten years, my former boss and one-time culinary mentor – is the pastry chef at 40 Sardines* in Overlook Park, Kansas (which is very close to Kansas City, Missouri). Though Bump and I have known each other for the better part of my adult life – and seen each other through surgeries, break-ups, fashion disasters, workplace dramas, weevils and more – the prospect of seeing him after having been physically apart for almost three years made me nervous. What’s worse than having someone travel 1,493 miles, approximately, and then discover than you can’t so much stand to be in the same room together? Or that there’s nothing to talk about?

Fortunately for the two of us – and we got along just famously, thank you very much – we have one very important shared passion: food, particularly sweet food. Unlike other past house guests, Bump was mostly interested in lounging and eating. Lounging and eating are two of my most favorite activities, so we were ahead before we even began. To exhaustively detail the full three-and-a-half-day FoodFest would be overkill, I feel. So I shall give you only the highlight, and suggest that you treat yourself to an hour or an afternoon there as well.

On SW 13th Avenue in Downtown Portland, between Burnside and Washington, in the vicinity of Powell’s, Masu, and Whole Foods Market, there is a small shop called Cacao. When they are open, there is a chocolate-colored sandwich board on the sidewalk in front of their modest entrance.

Cacao, I am sure you can guess, is all about chocolate. The shop – less a “store” or “café,” though it is also both of these things – is so beautifully decorated; it looks and feels exactly like the Chocolate Shop in your head. They have nailed the paradigm without slipping into cliché or dry predictability. It is gorgeous, and everything about it is rich and sweet and bold. Time passes more slowly inside Cacao than it does on the sidewalk just outside. When you get there, you can either walk right up to the counter and order yourself some chocolate, liquid or solid, with or without spices, nuts, or coffee, and sit down at one of the small tables or stools to enjoy your purchase (I do not recommend getting your chocolate to go, unless you are taking it back home to bed or breakfast nook); or you can make slow laps around the rest of the shop, admiring the gorgeously packaged, simply and effectively displayed chocolate bars for sale. They are arranged clustered by producer. I particularly liked the Michel Cluizel, Theo – single origin (especially the 75% Ivory Coast) and the 3400 Phinney product line (you must try the Bread and Chocolate bar. Must.) – and Dolfin Chocolat. There are “serious” chocolates – like the single origin bars that are marketed by production region and percent cocoa (like 75% Ivory Coast, get it?) – and frou-frou chocolates – like Dolfin’s Chai bar (very good) and 3400′s Coconut Curry bar (very bad). There are chocolate sauces and books and posters. There are confections – truffles, mostly – elegantly displayed in the glass case at the counter.

I was very impressed by the owners and employees at Cacao. They were unobtrusively friendly, very, very eager to answer our questions and – miracle of miracles – provide samples of any chocolate bar in the store. If you are going to pay six or eight or twelve dollars for a not-too-huge bar of chocolate, wouldn’t you like to be sure it is just exactly the one you want? I would have purchased the Szechwan pepper bar, not the pink pepper bar. I thought it would be a no-brainer (because aren’t pink peppercorns kind of silly?), until I tasted them. The Szechwan bar was too gritty, too assertive. But the noir au poivre rose maintained that lovely smoothness we so love in good chocolate. The pepper was bright and flavorful without being too overwhelming. I never would would have chosen it over the other, based on my feelings of Szechwan versus Pink pepper, so I was particularly grateful for the taste.

Not only were the staff friendly, but unexpectedly, delightfully knowledgeable as well. This makes perfect sense in retrospect: one who owns or works at a specialty shop should know everything about the three types of items one sells. I was initially surprised, however, at the ease with which one fellow (he must have been Aubrey or Jesse, who are the owners, as far as I can tell) rattled off tidbits about cacao-growing regions and related bean acidity. This may sound very pretentious and overdone, but I assure you, the atmosphere is palatable. There is no snobbery, at least not on the day Bump and I were there reveling in our shared food-geekiness, only informed passion, an uncommon generosity, and a clear desire to share both with the customer.

By the time we left the shop, I was more than sated. We sampled all three varieties of drinking chocolate (order the 2 oz., for heaven’s sake, not the 4 oz. size), and half a dozen of the bars available for sale. Bump got the name and contact information of a supplier who might be able to ship his favorite El Rey couverture to Kansas City for use in 40 Sardines. I tasted two chai-flavored bars, two pepper-flavored bars, and three, I think, single origin varieties. On my way out, all I wanted was a glass of water. A whole beautiful chocolate shop at my very fingertips and all I wanted to was water. That’s success for Aubrey and Jesse, I’d say.
*If you happen to go to the website, and then download the dessert menu, I want you to know that inspiration for the Cajeta Torte occurred in the just down the street from my house. So I’m kind of famous, just so you know.

Exhibit A: page 134, Gyo’s Chilled Noodles with Dipping Sauce and Embellishments. There’s a story, the recipe for the dipping sauce, suggestions about what to serve it all with. and if you don’t like enoki<, for heaven's sake, don't use it. How refreshing.

       The spirit of the book: here are the basics, and here are some suggestions regarding how you might want to fiddle with it. The real fun in the kitchen, for me anyway, is getting away with breaking the rules. It is not a perfectly executed Roast Chicken a la Julia, rather it is running a recipe through my own filters of style, flavor, nutrition and availability and creating something that is my own. On these pages – the contents of which cover allthe bases (from the nuances among sour cream varieties to vegetables by cooking method to a whole chapter on “flavor catalysts” and a delightfully comprehensive discussion on grains) – Sally offers herself as a partner instead of a dictator. She is pro-flavor and anti-excessive fat. Her recipes are classics and neo-classics, borrowing from a whole world of culinary traditions. This is the kind of book that makes me want to devote my year to cooking through its pages, though that kind of thing has already been done, and I’d hate to seem like a bandwagoner.

       My comments on cookbooks always come up short, I think. The trouble is that I get so overwhelmed, so excited at the possibilities flopped open on the table before me that I can’t make myself think straight. My hands start to feel twitchy and I can begin to feel out the meal I will make. To have such a visceral reaction to a cookbook is, I feel, a good sign. The James Beard Foundation and the IACP both thought enough of Sally to honor this book; so if my ineloquence is unconvincing, maybe you can trust them instead.

Anyhow, yesterday Sally and I stayed in and made this:

focaccia, winter squash sauce and stuff

I used Sally’s Pizza Dough recipe (p 355), and folded pinenuts and minced fresh rosemary into the dough during its second rise.
The sauce is butternut squash, shallot, garlic and ginger, simmered until tender and pureed to a satisfyingly velvet texture.

Over the sauce went thin slices of more butternut, yellow onion, fresh rosemary, yellow crookneck squash, leftover green beans, garlic cloves, olive oil, freshly ground black pepper, and milled sea salt – oh! and a couple of very thin slices of fresh lemon. You might not think that’s OK, but, damn, give it a shot anyway.

Oven @ 450º F., baked on a stone until browned along the edges, about 20 minutes.