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.

Still, I've been thinking about this place... see?

NB: This is just an assignment for a book design class. I don't really have a book, and Wiley's not really publishing it. I don't know Mort Rosenbaum, Tony Bourdain, or Ruth Reichl. If I did, I doubt they'd have such nice things to say about me. But it'd be pretty cool, wouldn't it?

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.

When I am halfway through the door, he asks me if I am the stage (nearly rhymes with "podge"). A little flicker of recognition tickles my brain – I know that word. I knew that word when I was working for the Brilliant French Baker, but I cannot recall quickly enough what it means. The stage, the stage...I realize I am waiting too long to speak and by now he must have figured out that I am not the stage, else I am a very poor stage, unaware of what or who I even am. Then I worry if maybe I am the stage, even though by now I think I remember that a stage is some kind of kitchen intern.

So I say, "I might be. What's a stage?" I had decided yesterday that I was not going to try to affect coolness this morning as I usually find such endeavors rather futile and exhausting. Besides, by now I am sort of amused by our scene and I imagine that whenever the real stage arrives – probably heavily tattooed nineteen-year-old who has been working in kitchens since before he was born – we will all have a good chuckle.

"A person who works for free," he tells me. I pause and then reply, "That sounds familiar, but today I'm a writer," which I see immediately does not illuminate for him why I am knocking at Le Pigeon's door at ten in the morning.

What is it about cooking and eating outside that makes food taste better?

Simple salad with greens and nasturtium from my garden.

Chicken legs, yellow corn, and asparagus grilled in the backyard fire pit.

Thanks to the Squeeze for the rockin' photographs.

In Defense of Food is on sale at Powell's Books.
Hear and Read the rundown on the book according to NPR's Talk of the Nation.

And if you're interested in this title, I also recommend the following:

• The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, Peter Singer and Jim Mason
• The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Michael Pollan
• Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm, David Mas Masumoto
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver
• Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, Joel Schlosser

- - -
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.

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I have been to a river.

Annually, my family meets somewhere between Eugene and Portland - my folks take a few days to drive and my brother tucks away his projects in Brooklyn and arrives by plane. We end up in two suites at a certain bed and breakfast on the McKenzie River in Vida, Oregon. This particular B&B - one of a handful we have stayed at over the years - is preferred because there is a place along the bank in front of our rooms where trout can be caught conveniently. The other places we have stayed have sub-par fishing holes.

My father is a fisherman. He can tell stories about specific casts when he was twelve with an enthusiasm that still carries an twinge of giddy urgency. You can close your eyes and almost see him, two and a half feet shorter and all those years peeled off his face, standing in a kitchen telling his mother about that one huge bass in the lake. Or I can, anyway. I remember family road trips, having to stop at roadside ditches for just a couple of casts because he was convinced that fish were hiding in the rushes. I have heard the story about my mother's 1997 Steelhead more often and in greater detail than the story of my birth. It's nice to see him giddy. It's like the way I feel about jam or figs or lobster tacos. So we go every year because he loves it and the rest of the family enjoys it well enough. Fly fishing really is pretty fun when the fish are biting, when the day is warm but not hot, when there is just enough of a breeze running up the river to cool your face in between casts. It's downright enjoyable when you are landing more strikes than you miss, when you don't snag the trees, when you see the osprey and the ducklings and the beavers on the river too.

The first fishing trip I can mostly clearly recall is our Epic Journey to Idaho in 1992 or '93. We drove two eight-hour days. I remember thinking that the exotic land of Stanley, Idaho - our rendezvous point - was almost certainly a lifetime away. My brother and I made up a song about a town called Winnemucca that began Oh, I'm going to Winnemucca with two cows and a ducka. I remember a new kind of sticky heat and staying in a motel with the kidney-shaped pool and eating at a Basque restaurant where they sat us with strangers: there was no menu and we all ate family-style together and long tables with benches for seats.

The Idaho trip was run by the same company that we meet up with every year on the McKenzie. In my memory, it was some kind of magical, traveling show - 18 guides, a cook, a swamper, 9 boats, a barge and one big blue raft with enormous yellow oars. Our gear went ahead of us on the barge. Tents were pitched by the time we arrived at camp from our daily float. Our meals were prepared for us thrice daily. I remember bacon for breakfast - the only bacon I have ever happily eaten. I remember bread in dutch ovens and pork chops in massive fry pans and impossibly fresh salads. The wives and mothers and kids rode in the raft that almost never tipped over while husbands and brothers and sons wet- and dry-fly fished out of driftboats adroitly piloted by sinewy cowboy-types who knew the river like a hometown. The Middle Fork of the Salmon River, of which we floated about a hundred miles - is wilderness. We released every fish we caught with specially-designed unhooking tools that allowed us to keep with fish in the river during their entire ordeal. For dinner one night they flew in flash-frozen trout. We took nothing, and theoretically left nothing. That week was pure fish fever though, and - I think - some of the prettiest wilderness I have ever seen.

As a young person, I was not expected to fish, only float. One afternoon on our seven-day trip I rode in one of the drift boats instead of the raft. That was the day the raft tipped over in the rapids and we all had a nice reminder to wear our lifejackets . That was also the day we came upon The Flying Bee - a house in the middle of all of that wilderness with a huge blue trampoline underneath the rotating sprinkler in the fenced-in front yard. We went ashore and bought fudgsicles, as evidently the house doubled as a store - - or, at least, a place to get a a girl a chocolatey frozen treat. That could have been the the day I got heatstroke. I'll ask my dad, but I am almost positive that the Flying Bee is real.

Every time we meet on the McKenzie to fish, we talk about Idaho. Our favorite guide runs eight trips each year up there and Dad likes to hear about which guides from the company - many of whom we've fished with over the years - are going. I am interested in the ever-tightening regulations on the outfit going into the Wilderness. I learned a few days ago, for example, that they can no longer use nine volt batteries - and not because they might leave them there as trash, but because, it was explained to me, nine volts make it too easy and it is not supposed to be easy in the country.

Our McKenzie trips are not wild. We haul out or burn our trash, yes, and only take our limit of fish per the Oregon State Fish and Wildlife authority, but it is impossible to pretend that we are "roughing it" (even Idaho didn't feel like roughing it, though - there was a cook, for heaven's sake!) with multi-million dollar homes lining the banks of the lovely river. It is impossible to pretend that we are having an authentically rustic experience after having a three course breakfast at the B&B before meeting our guide at the turnout next to Ike's Pizza. It is impossible to think you are communing with nature while carrying a tiny bottle of hand sanitizer in your pocket in case your hands start to feel icky.

But we do not go to the McKenzie River to commune with Nature, or to demonstrate our survival skills. We go to the McKenzie to kill trout.

In recent years I have, predictably, begun to feel very uncomfortable with fishing for its own sake. It is fun, yes, and satisfying and exciting (especially while sporting polarized sunglasses, with which you can see the fish come up to the fly while they are still under the water) - but I think it is also a kind of cruelty if all one is after is hooking, hauling, and release. Luckily, the McKenzie River is stocked with "planter" trout - a scheme to protect the native species by giving we anglers something to pull out of the river - and the planters are just as tasty as the natives.

As a Lover of Food and an aspiring Back-To-Basics-ist, I rather enjoy the experience of catching and killing my own food. First revision: I rather enjoy the experience of catching my own food, then forcing myself to look on as someone else whacks it over the head and puts it in an icebox. Second revision: I rather enjoy catching my own fish... Fish are so unrelatable. So long as we are catching for lunch or for takin' home, I am all about throwing my hook in the water and waiting for those poor suckers to take a nibble. As soon as we catch our limits, however, the activity loses all appeal.

Our lunch on the McKenzie is the same every year. We work for it. Sometimes we have a slow morning, and worry loudly if we will catch lunch at all (there must be sandwiches in that cooler - how could there not be a contingency plan?). Then, at some predetermined spot that is not someone's front yard, the guides pull the boats onto shore. Folding chairs are produced. A camp table happens, usually while I am catching poison oak in the bushes. Grapes, chips, and salsa are often offered while lunch is prepared. A long mornin' of fish-killing makes a girl hungry, but the grapes, salsa and chips must be resisted.

A fire is lit with wood and charcoal. While the guides dress the trout in the river, leaving the heads, skins and entrails for the birds who will come to clean our lunch site, the woodfire lights the charcoal until sets it all glowy-gray. The charcoal is transfered to the dutch oven in which our buttermilk biscuits are baked. The ridiculously fresh fish are dredged in flour or cornmeal and then pan-fried in butter over the open fire. Someone's wife always sends along homemade jam. A simple salad - lettuce, cucumber, tomato, mushroom - rounds out our meal.

This is, I am afraid to admit, what keeps me happily returning each year. I might advocate for another activity - one that does not involve itchy rashes or animal cruelty - were it not for the good eatin' that follows our day on the McKenzie.

A couple of days ago I came back to the city in a rush. I had to be at work; I missed the cats, the Squeeze. I had my day of catered ease and fresh air and wild birds and I was ready to get back to real life that, lately, has been moving too fast. Relaxation was not easy to come by. A couple of days ago when I returned to the city I brought the River with me. It came in my camera and in my icebox. At work on Saturday, my boss was generous enough to let me brine and smoke what remained of our catch in the bakery's kitchen. I've sampled smoked trout a handful of times but was never impressed by it. My family, colleagues, and fishing guide were all more excited at the prospect than I, but smoking seemed more sensible than freezing, so smoking is what I did. (Actually, I merely brined the fish - a pre-smoking treatment. The chef at work smoked them, for which I am grateful.) This smoked trout is notably tastier than any other. It is better because my skill- or dumb luck - landed those poor things in the boat in the first place, because it is fresher than anything you can find in the grocery store, because people I know helped me prepare it.

I think I will always prefer the garden and the U-pick farms for "getting in touch" with my food. I think if I had to kill all of the meat I consume that I would eat far less meat, if any. Maybe it is all of that fresh air they have up down there on the McKenzie in Vida, even if it is wedged in between those big houses. Maybe it is the adventure of it all, making like I am a fisherwoman and not some mostly-helpless little girl who could never hook a critter without assistance from her daddy or the guide. Maybe it is seeing my food from start to finish - river to pan to plate and back again to the river.