Lunchtime is winding down at Nostrana; only a few tables are still seated. The kitchen staff gathers at the long table closest to the restaurant’s open kitchen and gleaming white wood-burning oven.  A waiter serves plates for the staff meal with the same deftness he uses for his customers a few feet away. Cathy Whims, chef and owner of the 3-year-old restaurant on SE 14^th and Morrison, joins the group for a quick bite. She is smiling, her movements relaxed and confident as she moves around the restaurant.

Cathy grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, earning her Bachelor’s degree in Latin from the university there before moving to the West Coast in 1979. Unsure of what to do with her education, she bought a few cookbooks by esteemed chefs Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, and M.F.K. Fisher. In the year before moving to Portland from San Francisco, Whims decided to give herself a thorough education in French cooking beyond what she’d picked up in her mother’s kitchen. She chose Fisher’s volume on provincial French cuisine and cooked through the whole thing. Once in Portland, Cathy fixed her ambitions on Genoa. “I’d always had an affection for anything Italian — like Latin — and Genoa was my dream job,” she says of her desire to cook for what was then considered the city’s preeminent Italian restaurant, “but I never thought I’d get to work there because I hadn’t gone to culinary school.” Whims knew someone who knew someone, however, and her career at Genoa, which culminated in co-ownership, lasted more than two decades.

At Nostrana, The Oregonian’s 2006 Restaurant of the Year, Whims cooks the “ingredient-driven” dishes that your Italian mama would make, should you be lucky enough to have an Italian mama. Her attitude toward cooking is as straightforward as Nostrana’s menu. “Less is more,” she explains. “The quality of the ingredients is super important. Because of the [cuisine’s] simplicity, nothing can be hidden.”

The food at Nostrana, just like the restaurant itself, may be simple; but it’s by no means plain. Cathy makes vanilla gelato with just three ingredients –– whole milk yogurt, powdered sugar, and half of a vanilla bean –– and it’s as delicious and creamy as any I’ve had. The pistachio gelato, served alongside a crunchy almond meringue cookie, tastes more like toasted pistachio nuts than an actual toasted pistachio nut. On the night of my meal there, the din of a full house is softened by Nostrana’s cork floor as half a dozen servers make loops around the dining room to pour wine, take orders, and carry beautiful plates of food. In the open kitchen, as many cooks seem relaxed in their steady work, smiling and chatting while Cathy visits with her guests in the dining room.

For Whims, creating a great meal begins with the farmers who grow, say, the arugula that’s going into your Insalata Invernale. If you were doing your shopping at a market in Italy, a tag next to the arugula would read “nostrana,” meaning ours; from right here. In Italian markets, these locally grown items are especially prized. They’re valued for their freshness, having traveled a short distance from field to market; and their purchase supports the local food web.

To find the best meat and produce for her restaurant, Cathy has built strong, reciprocal relationships with local producers, many of whom grow crops –– like hard-to-find bitter Italian greens –– specifically for Nostrana. The chef is committed to supporting her farmers, even when what they have to sell isn’t exactly what she is looking for.  Sometimes a grower has abundance of, for example, green cabbage. Instead of getting her produce elsewhere until a different crop is harvested, Cathy says she’ll make use of the cabbage. “I can’t possibly let it go to waste,” she explains, “because I know the farmer. I know how hard he works; I know the soil that he grew it in –– I believe in this cabbage.”

Getting Portlanders revved up about eating seasonally and locally isn’t very difficult. Cathy credits the city’s fantastic local markets. There’s an understanding among her customers, she says, that the food on her menu reflects the very best, freshest, and most flavorful ingredients available from local growers on any given week.

A few times a year, Cathy leaves Nostrana’s kitchen to teach cooking classes at In Good Taste in Portland and Cook’s Pots and Tabletops in Eugene. As an instructor, she not only provides entertainment and a really great meal for her students, but also imparts skills and recipes that they can really make use of in their home kitchens. “I get excited if I know that people are actually going to go home and make that recipe,” she says. She talks about students coming back to relay stories of successful meals after taking one of her classes. “There’s so much that you learn from cooking for yourself and your family and friends,” Cathy says of why she believes it’s important to teach; “people’s lives are enriched.”

Whims’ interest in education extends beyond teaching the occasional cooking class. In late October, Cathy and five other Portland chefs attended the third meeting of the Terra Madre Network, held in Torino, Italy, and hosted by Slow Food International. The event brought together cooks, academics, growers, and youth delegates for a four-day conference on small-scale, traditional, and sustainable food production. With over 1,600 energetic delegates under the age of thirty at Terra Madre ’08, Cathy says the atmosphere was particularly vibrant.

With her recent trip in mind, Cathy is already planning her next teaching project — inviting school children to the restaurant once a month for a meal and a conversation about the restaurant’s practices and values. “If we don’t teach the next generation about the best environmental practices and fair treatment of the people who grow our food,” Whims says, looking out into the large dining room, no doubt imagining it full of kids “how can we expect the movement to go forward?”

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Dear Diary,

A bowl of strawberries, some of the first I’ve seen this year from central California, near where I grew up. Rinsed, sliced, and sugared, they are waiting for challah french toast tomorrow morning. I have been thinking about this since Thursday when the challah came home and I declared, to everyone’s confusion, that we were not allowed to eat it.

The weather has been kind of confusing, so recently we’ve had slow-cooker beef stew and fish tacos and both seem seasonally appropriate. I want the sun. I want to grill four nights a week and eat outside without a sweater and take walks after supper for ice cream. I am dreaming; it’s okay to dream.

We have been sick, all three of us. Colds and stomach flus, fevers, sleeplessness and one truly stunning rash. A new tamal-vendor has started coming around on Friday afternoons — five for five dollars, still warm. The pork come in Taco Bell bags, the chicken come in THANK YOU bags. I eat them for lunch on days my stomach is up for company. There’s a stockpile in the freezer, too.

And lentil soup came in bulk from Nicholas, one day when it was the only thing I could bear to even think about eating. When the latest issue of Cook’s Illustrated came, I vowed to try their naan recipe, eat it with what’s left of the soup, and cackle at my good fortune for loving soup and bread. The soup is stashed in the freezer, suspended and waiting. Soup is patient.

Finch’s appetite is coming back and I’m grateful. When she turned down a piece of chocolate last week, I damn near took her to the Emergency Room, fearing the fever or the rash or some unseen pathogen had wrecked the pleasure centers of her brain. For a few days all she ate were Multigrain Cheerios and these disappointing chocolate-and-peanut butter cookie’s I’d made. Tonight she gobbled down her plate of salmon and then had snap peas for her bedtime snack. She asked for a refill of peas twice. My kid is coming back. Exhale.

I’ve got such big plans, Diary, for whenever life evens out again. B and I promised today and help each other try new recipes to shake up our culinary repertoires. We figure if we can be accountable to someone, we can stay motivated, so we’ve decided to be accountable to each other. Weeknight cookery has been feeling stale lately, and definitely uninspired on my part. When my loftiest goal is to not be hungry anymore and just make it to bedtime, the red flags — all of them — rise. I hope this experiment yields some new dishes for my kit. My family deserves to eat interesting, thoughtfully-constructed food. That they like.

I want to bake our bread. The Excalibur food dehydrator is here and definitely big enough to proof a loaf. All I need are some good recipes to start. Bread baking will come back to me, I’m sure of it. It’s what my hands remember (that was so very long ago, wasn’t it?). I have piles of recipes, gorgeous cookbooks — yet I only ever bake the same loaf of bread at home, a honey wheat. It’s nearly perfect. Let it never be said I am comittment-phobic.

Along those lines, I made yogurt two weeks ago, but I sort of freaked me out and I tossed it after only trying it once. I have an uneasy relationship with yogurt as it is, maybe I don’t have to make everything at home, even if I can.

So tomorrow, the challah and the strawberries. And we’re having Finch’s first Easter Egg  Hunt a week late because that’s just sort of how it’s been going around here. And then a new week. The only thing I know for sure is we’ll get another batch of tamales on Friday. The rest will just have to be surprise.

A copy of The Pigeon Loves Things That Go! rests between rows of wine bottles and mason jars of housemade preserves on cubby-like shelves at the far end of the restaurant. A plush version of Mo Willems’ charmingly egomaniacal pigeon character, star of his award-winning series of picture books, is nearby. I bought the very same toy for my one-year-old godson last week, so I happen to know that when the pigeon is squeezed it cries out emphatically, “Let me drive the bus!” On the other side of the restaurant’s small, open kitchen hangs an award from Food and Wine magazine—2007 Best New Chef. Amid mismatched chairs, large communal tables, and modest but classy bistro decor, none of these things—the wide-eyed blue pigeon doll or mason jars of preserved lemons, the paper valentine with a chainsaw drawn on it, or the chef himself with his hot pink iPhone—seem particularly out of place.

Rucker hadn’t spent much time in professional kitchens when he followed a guidance counselor’s recommendation to take a career training course and, as young people are disposed to do, let his finger drop over the pages of the course catalog, where it serendipitously landed on a cooking class.

Soon after, Rucker moved to Portland, sight unseen, with two friends from his hometown of Napa, California. “I wanted to move to San Francisco but I couldn’t afford it,” he remembers of the decision to move North. “And my friends said Portland was cool.” Lucky for us; and fortuitous for Rucker. At 25, Gabriel, who had been working at Paley’s Place, Nostrana, and Gotham Building Tavern, was offered the challenge of taking over what was then Colleen’s Bistro on lower East Burnside. He was given just two months to straighten out the struggling restaurant, re-christened Le Pigeon. It was an ideal environment for his French-inspired cuisine, Gabriel says of launching Le Pigeon in his charge. “It just felt right—people sitting here, eating pigs’ feet.” In only a few months the critics noticed how right it was, too, and then Le Pigeon really took off.

While Rucker is known for putting some of the animal kingdom’s less-glamorous cuts his menu, he insists there’s no secret plan to get Portlanders eating more heart, liver, or tripe. “I just cook the food I want to cook,” he explains when pressed about his philosophy as a successful chef. “If it’s something that I would want to eat, then I get excited about it and I put it on the menu.”

Gabriel credits his maturity as a chef for his considered approach to the work.  Rather than trying to craft a “show stopper” dish, busy with overwhelming flavors, the chef says he’d rather let the food speak for itself, so he tries to simplify an idea instead of allowing it to become overworked and cluttered. The difference may be subtle, but that’s what the dishes at Le Pigeon are about. Rucker likes to center on one flavor, layering it throughout the plate. Doing so, he says, creates a real depth in his cooking, something that’s new since opening Le Pigeon.

Rucker crafts dishes that are at once careful and playful, such as the pigeon chowder he has in mind for later in the week. It’s a whole roasted squab stuffed with a creamy chowder studded with duck bacon, roasted potatoes, and corn. When the diner cuts into it, the chowder runs over the meat and sauces it. The dish sounds delicious—and mad enough to be brilliant. When I am back at home, I count the contents of my change jar, dreaming of dinner at his restaurant.

Despite his youth and his lighthearted creations, it’s easy to see that Rucker is a pragmatist, and his honesty is flattering. He uses in-season, local, and organic produce when it’s sensible to do so, and doesn’t sweat it otherwise. “I am a chef and my job is to make delicious food,” he tells me squarely, as if my questions asked in the hope of uncovering some revelatory philosophy are a little naïve. As if I had forgotten that when the food is good—as good as it is at Le Pigeon—the rest can feel superfluous.

Clearly, he’s got the right attitude. Food and Wine called him a “wunderkind” when they endorsed him in 2007. Earlier this year he was nominated for the James Beard Foundation’s Rising Star Chef of the Year Award.

The recent nomination has singled Rucker out as a promising young chef, one likely to have a significant impact on the industry in the years to come, and I want to know how he expects he’ll steer the culinary ship, so to speak. He looks to the upper left corner of the ceiling behind my head and takes a long pull on his milky coffee before answering. His reply, I believe, is emblematic of his outlook: “Hopefully there’s not just one ship.” Touché. His answer is refreshing, though not surprising. Equally important are his cravings for the four-dollar burritos at Tacos Moreno in Santa Cruz and for the fare at Bistro Jeanty. The latter is in Yountville, near Napa, a homey French bistro and one of Rucker’s favorites that provided a lot of inspiration for Le Pigeon.

By now, however, Le Pigeon is its own place and Gabriel Rucker, his own chef, surrounded by neat rows of preserves, pigeon dolls, and hungry diners, eager to get a taste of his favorite foods.

“If it looks good, tastes good, eat it,” he shrugs as he delivers a summation of his career, “and hopefully I made it for you.”

A food mill is basically a strainer with a paddle attached, that pushes material through the strainer, making a purée of varying granularity, depending on which strainer-plate you fit it with. It’s a human-powered tool, which I like, and it does one very useful thing that blenders, mashers, and food processors cannot: it separates skins, stems, and seeds from the finished product.

So now I am on an applesauce kick, right in time for, uh, spring. I like mine unsweetened and unflavored, so all there is to do is cook apples and then turn them into sauce. Rather than peeling and coring, I just hacked them into rough chunks and cooked them on the stove in my dutch oven until tender. Once cool enough to be safe, I poured the apples into the food mill and let Finch have at turning the crank. Easiest. Snack. Ever.

Here’s what went in:

And here’s what came out:

This applesauce is slightly darker in color than one made from peeled and cored apples, and, to be honest, there are some teeny-tiny flecks of skin that managed to sneak through. But for an investment of maybe six minutes total work time, and perhaps thirty minutes start to finish, it’s a pretty good deal.

In addition to saucing tomatoes and apples, I also like my food mill for “mashing” or ricing potatoes. Some people send soup through food mills, too, though I have yet to try that at home. Do you use a food mill at home? What does it do best for you?

Mark’s side yard is a certified Multnomah County Animal Facility and, as such, may house up to ten hens, a pig, and a goat. Mark has thus far resisted hoofed animals, but keeps both laying hens and meat birds.

Down This Path Lays Madness: Mark Neimann-Ross on Urban Chicken-Keeping

I am hereditarily disposed to talking to animals. My mom talks to pine trees and my sister is an Animal Communicator in Los Angeles; she makes a considerable living. She says chickens are very immediate. When you step into their environment they think about you, but as soon as you walk out, they are back to scratching at the dirt. She says they are kind of dumb, that they don’t have very good conversations. But I’ve asked her to talk to the chickens, and she’s found out what their names are and what their opinions are about certain things. They are very chicken-y opinions. They spend a lot of time thinking about their social order. It’s very important to them, apparently. You want them to be nice to each other and you want your side yard to be full of harmony, but instead they are chasing each other and pulling out feathers.

I had a Buff Orpington who ate feathers a lot, damn bird. It was Augusta Mae. My sister named it. Yeah, Augusta Mae. And she was an “Augusta Mae.” She was the kind of bird that you see in kids’ books with the apron on. She was at the bottom of the pecking order but she had this passive-aggressive streak. She would sneak up behind the other chickens and pull feathers out of their butts. They would be rolling in the dirt and Augusta Mae would sneak up behind them and pull feathers off, for as long as she could do it. I kept wondering why these chickens had bare butts, but not her.

We all know they’re animals and they don’t come in the house; they don’t watch television with me. I do put them on my shoulder and people will laugh. I come out and talk to them and they come talk to me. And I let them know what’s going on and I understand they are chickens, but we have our conversations and they know who I am and what I’m up to. But, really, their job is to run around and scratch dirt and they do it very well. You can explain a lot about chickens when you know that every synapse ends in food.

Chickens are omnivores. They eat everything and they eat a lot of it. So I am constantly looking—I find myself…I’m starting… I am resisting this. But I am starting to dumpster-dive outside of grocery stores. You know,  ‘cause there’s this beautiful head of lettuce in there. It’s kind of wilted, but I’m thinking Oh, these chickens would love that, and how hard it is not to just reach in there and just grab it—Oh, god. Down this path lays madness.

I have lost chickens to raccoons. I hear this chicken screaming one night and I come running downstairs, in my underwear of course, and I lean over the porch here. This raccoon has the Pearl Araucana by the wing. He has his arm in the coop and this chicken is raising bloody hell. Feathers are starting to fly. So I lean over and go Hey! and this raccoon just looks up at me, like, What? This is my chicken. I have a bow and arrow. Seriously. I launch an arrow down into the yard and I tell him—see? animal communication—The next one’s for you. I wait about five minutes and here he comes back again. He actually looked up at me and was like, Oh, busted. So I started throwing apples and I’ve stopped with the arrow thing. It was an escalation issue. I thought, if I am really going to be shooting raccoons, I should be using hunting tips. They have three razor blades attached to the tip so that when they go through a deer they slice arteries and veins. It’s intended to bleed out an animal. So the problem is if you start launching hunting tips—these are designed to go through deer, and they’ll easily go through a house. I decided that—gosh—Ally’s not going to like it if she gets up one morning to find an arrow through the drywall of her house.

I have a raccoon trap. They are way too smart to get caught in a raccoon trap, but it raises the question of what do you do with the raccoon. I called up Animal Control to ask them, If I do catch a raccoon, what do I do with it? So the guy says, Well, you’ve got three options. Number one, you can get a permit and relocate it. So I am picturing a screaming raccoon—they are really irritable—so I’m thinking I am going to pick up a trap, full of screaming raccoon and then I am going to put it in my car and drive thirty miles with this thing screaming and peeing in the back of my car, possibly getting out. And I have to get a permit for this, but they are not giving permits. So it’s an option, but it’s not an option.

Option number two is to release it back on to your property. So if I trap it, I can give it a stern talking to or have my sister communicate with it and let it know it’s not welcome.

Or number three, euthanize it. I can call up an animal control facility or I can do it.

He says that the easiest way to do it is just a garbage can full of water. Yeah, OK, so imagine that you have done this. Now you have a garbage can, fifty-five gallons of water, and a dead, floating raccoon. So I boosted up security: an electric fence.

We have chicken dinner every once in a while, obviously. And I boil it down to get chicken broth, and then what’s left, the chicken bones and the meat…Oh, man, there’s nothing better. My kids freaked out. The first time they go in the backyard and I’m out there with this plate of chicken bits and the chickens are like, Whoo hoo! Oh yeah, they love it. Turkey? Nothing better.

We don’t name the meat birds because they, you know. So some of the neighborhood girls discovered that I had six new chickens—Paco, Kay, and Bee, plus three white birds that didn’t have names. So I come out one day and they tell me, Oh, we decided to name your white birds! Snowball and Fluffy! And I said, Do you guys know that we are going to eat these birds? And they all just got these big eyes, you know these big eight-year-old eyes. They had no idea that Fluffy and Snowball were going to be chicken cacciatore. So that’s the only problem, when the eight-year-olds realize we’re going to be eating Fluffy. They were kind of surprised. They never realized that chicken comes from chicken. All they know is that we are having chicken tonight.

Deb calls it “Everyday Chocolate Cake,” which is, as far as I am concerned, the perfect descriptive name for this cake. First, it is simple and unglamorous. This isn’t some fancypants cake, needing buttercream roses and the like. It’s elegant in its simplicity, though. It’s uncomplicated and adult. Second, the recipe doesn’t call for anything you’re unlikely to have in your pantry, not even cake flour. It wants cocoa powder instead of melted chocolate (though you’d never know by the richness of the product). And if you don’t have any buttermilk on hand, just sour some milk with lemon juice or vinegar. Third, this cake is so good, you may be tempted to make one every day. It’s happened, and I’m not proud, but there it is.

Sometimes I bake one off in a loaf pan, like Deb does. It also fits cleanly into eight mini-loafs, or twelve cupcakes, depending on how you want to use them. It’s more dense than the sort of sponge suitable for a layer cake, so don’t plan on any elaborate contractions with fillings, icing, or decoration. That’s not what this cake is about.

I like it with fresh or sauced berries or stone fruits in the summer. Once I bisected it and made a chocolate-cake-and-peanut-butter-mousse sandwich, which was pretty badass. Mostly, though, I enjoy a slice in the afternoon, when I’m feeling a little uncertain about how Finch and I are going to make it all the way to Papa’s return home, or slightly warmed with a small scoop of vanilla ice cream in the evenings, after the little bird has gone to bed.

Anyhow. This is a really freaking great recipe, and you should check it out @ smitten kitchen.

She flaps her arms and rocks her body, drawing us nearer to the pantry door, where most of her non-perishable snacks are kept. “Snack! Snack!” she whines, although when she says the word it sounds more like “snnnnat,” which is much less pleasing to the ears.

I offer breakfast options instead, two or three that she’s eaten and seemed to enjoy in the recent past, all of which I can stand to feed her. Cheddar bunnies are never on this list, much to her great disappointment. Once we negotiate a meal plan and I somehow manage to prepare it while keeping her from falling off the slick granite counter, away from the cheese grater that I still haven’t moved from the drawer she can reach — and after having to pause for up to ten minutes while cajoling her to pick up the big box of farm animals, magnetic letters, or Heritage Os she just threw all over the kitchen then kicked under the refrigerator — once we do all of that, then there is the not inconsequential matter of getting my darling, strong-willed, spirited daughter to actually eat something.

Meal times are like this, usually. Some times, as if by magic, she sits relatively calmly in her chair and eats her food without trickery. But more often than not, while she does acrobatics out of her chair, I sit across from her place and beg, in one form or another.

Finch likes to be read to while she eats, so for breakfast and lunch I often read a book aloud in between bites of my own food, our deal being that I will read so long as she keeps eating. Other times, I employ reason: “You liked this so much the last time we had it,” I’ll say, knowing even as my lips form the words that they are meaningless to my toddler. I take bites from her plate to try to make the food look more appealing, or scarce, as if I might eat it all and leave her none.

At suppertime, especially, she tires of sitting at the table after a few minutes and starts some kind of play, returning to the table for bites of the choicest morsels on a proffered fork held at mouth-height. When she need only chew and swallow, we do better.

I was myself a picking eater as a kid, although I don’t know how early it started. I remember being afraid of unfamiliar food, wanting to avoid an unpleasant taste as if I expected it to be physically painful. This memory is proof to me that children are illogical — what did I think would happen, that I would never, ever, be able to rid my mouth of the taste of cauliflower soup, if it happened to taste awful?

So Finch’s finicky nature when it comes to food feels just, at least. Perhaps I earned it, putting my own mother through this hassle of trying to feed me for so many years.

I hear that other children Finch’s age eat things like scrambled eggs, kale hummus, and cheese, and I so envy their parents, who surely must have fewer anxieties about their children’s nutritional wellbeing than I do.

Some days it is clear that Finch uses food as a way to exercise control over her environment. What goes into her body is, after all, one of the few things over which she has a great deal of control. It’s hard to blame her — having spent her whole life at the mercy of us big people, as she finds her own voice to express these urgent, two-year-old opinions it is only natural (and healthy, and exciting) that she should want to assert herself.

Even knowing this in my mother-bones, it is always a source of frustration. My darling girl, I said to her today, I just want to put this very best things into your precious little body. I want you to be able to build yourself as big and as brilliant as you can.

Being two, however, this is the lamest, least convincing argument I could have offered her. Much more effective, I’m sure, would have been If you eat this all of this broccoli, Dear, you may have a cookie afterwards… which is what I’ll try at dinner time.

What about you, Mamas, Papas, and Friends of the pre-preschool set? What do yours eat and how do you make peace with it?

Sometimes it’s hard to see this for the plain and forceful truth that it is, especially when cookies are up against war and foie gras and heart disease and air pollution and really cute panda bears. So just trust me, if you must. I’m sure you’ll come around.

The trouble is, I think, that there are so many crap chocolate chip cookies out there in the world. It’s confusing. This classic is so abused, so taken for granted, that it’s hard to even remember sometimes what they are supposed to be. For me, the chocolate chip cookie is a staple. Not that I need to have them around all the time, just that they need to be within reach at about thirty minutes’ notice. I stockpile unsalted butter, dark chocolate chips, nuts. Just in case.

Now, I am sure that you have your own opinions about the way a chocolate chip cookie should be, so I’ll hesitate to call mine “perfect” out of respect for the diversity of opinions we’re likely to encounter among the gastronomically-savvy frequenters of food blogs on the Interwebs. But the cookies I’ve made here are pretty. darn. good. and they sure push my buttons just fine. They are big — about four inches in diameter and half an inch  high. They are soft in the very center but not chewy. Their golden edges are crispy. They hold up well to dunking in both hot and cold beverages. They make fine ice cream sandwiches. They are rich in both chocolate and nuts, but not overwhelmingly so. I dialed back the goodies from the original recipe (thank you, Cook’s Illustrated) for two reasons: the cookie dough itself is really yummy and I think the goodies should be a treat within the cookie, not the whole show.  PLUS they’re over half-whole wheat, which may ameliorate some of the guilt of eating two or three over the course of a day.