blood’s a rover

Somewhere over New York State, 5 a.m., 7.5.08

This weekend while hanging out and grilling anything that used to move, you may want to consider whipping up a batch of delicious, refreshing mojitos- my personal, inexact recipe is found below:

You will need:

A bunch of limes (at least 6)
A bunch of mint
White Rum
1 Liter of soda water
Sugar (about 1 cup)
Water
Ice

Mix an equal amount of sugar and water in a small pot over low heat, until the liquid is clear. Remove from heat. This is called “Simple Syrup”, and is used in lots of other drink recipes.

Squeeze all the limes into a deep bowl. You will probably have about a cup of juice. Then add lots of mint leaves. Lots. Then muddle the mint in the lime juice with a wooden spoon. This releases the mint oil from the leaves. Toss all that into a pitcher, then add all of the soda water, lots of rum and enough simple syrup to camouflage it. Stir it all together and add ice. Garnish with a slice of lime and/or mint leaf. Drink.

Now wasn’t this a good idea?

…was a great idea.

The Stepping Stone Cafe, 7.4.08

At three o’clock this morning I was awakened by the loudest and distinctive thunderstorm that I’ve ever heard.

It sounded like a granite piano crashing down a flight of stairs. 

It sounded like a lead firecracker.

It sounded like god eating a mountain.

It sounded like wooden ships running aground on the darkened sky.

It sounded like all of that, and all happening directly over my bed.

While laying there I realized, with my guts still quivering with the sound of wild electricity, that there’s maybe nothing better than feeling perfectly safe while beholding such incredible power.

The soft rain that followed soon after seemed to whisper, “O.K., show’s over, everyone go back to sleep.”

So that’s what I did.

“One Week Of…” is a new series of posts in which I eat the same dish from six different places for six straight days and then prepare my ultimate version (based on what I liked and didn’t like about all of the versions I tried) on the seventh day.

It’s a way for me to simultanously review lots of restaurants, eat lots of food, and have a reason to prepare a good meal for friends on as many weekends as possible. This won’t be a weekly challenge- my diet and budget can’t afford that- but if you have a good idea for a future “One Week Of…” please let me know.

***

If there’s one type of restaurant that Portland boasts a seemingly endless number, it’s Thai. According to Portland Citysearch, within five miles of downtown there are almost 80 different Thai restaurants. And in the last five years, I would estimate that I’ve visited about a third of them.

Some, like Thai Orchid, are extremely consistent but lack the complex balance and challenging heat that great Thai cooking always has. Others, like Baan Thai, are my go-to places when I want something that tastes homemade. And then there’s Pok-Pok, which goes above and beyond them all by eschewing standard Thai restaurant fare (like Pad Thai and Red Curry) for truly regional dishes that no one else even tries. Pok Pok is where I go when I want to celebrate something. But celebratory dining is not the point of this series. Quick, cheap, and tasty dining is.

Last week, I decided to visit two of my favorite sit-down restaurants and four lunch carts. The dish I chose for comparison was Pad Kee Mao, with chicken, and extra spicy- it typically contains wide rice noodles in a brownish, smoky sauce mixed with onions and peppers and whatever other veggies the chef decides to toss in. As you will see, there is great variation in both price and presentation for such a simple dish.

DAY ONE

Thai Basil SW 2nd and Oak

I haven’t been going to Thai Basil for very long, but it’s the only Thai cart I’ve found that gives Veli Thai (Day Four) any competition in terms of quality. And as for value, it cannot be beat. $5 gets you a typical portion dish, a drink (Thai iced tea is seen below), and a salad roll with peanut sauce.

Thai Basil’s Pad Kee Mao was good starting point, though I would have liked it to be a little bit saucier and contain more vegetables. It was pretty much exactly what you should expect.

DAY TWO

Khun Bic’s Bahn Thai 3429 SE Belmont St

The food from Khun Bic is of consistently great quality, bu there a couple of reasons I rarely go there: the service is incredibly slow, they only take cash and checks, it’s expensive, and I always forget it’s there (on the street I live off of, no less) because it’s hidden behind a wall of trees. The outside seating under a canopy of leaves is pretty nice, though. Just schedule an extra hour for dinner and stop by the bank before you go, and it’s fine.

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Piano tree, play
in the dark concert halls
of my uncle,
twenty-six years old, dead
and homeward bound
on a ship from Sitka,
his coffin travels
like the fingers
of Beethoven
over a glass
of wine.

Piano tree, play
in the dark concert halls
of my uncle,
a legend of my childhood, dead,
they send him back
to Tacoma.
At night his coffin
travels like the birds
that fly beneath the sea,
never touching the sky.

Piano tree, play
in the dark concert halls
of my uncle,
take his heart
for a lover
and take his death
for a bed,
and send him homeward bound
on a ship from Sitka
to bury him
where I was born.

-Richard Brautigan

While touring around France last June, Brianne and I took a break from writing about our travels so that we could focus on really experiencing things without distraction. In some ways, this was a good decision, even though it meant not sharing some of the best moments of the trip with our friends and family.

We ended up bringing home at least one bottle of wine from each region that we visited, and we’ve slowly been working our way through them. These bottles are special to us for a number of reasons, but most of all because their contents are bound so tightly to our memories that tasting again is like being transported back to the places and people who produced them.

Last week, to celebrate Brianne’s return from working her first New Zealand vintage, we opened one of those precious bottles to go with our meal. It was a 2000 Domaine Foret Secret d’Origen, a Chardonnay and Savagnin (NOT Sauvignon) blend from the village of Arbois, which is in the heart of Jura- a little known wine region located about 30 miles from the French-Swiss border.

Sockeye salmon with garlic spears. Yes.

The Secret d’Origen has an extremely unique flavor- slightly nutty due to its age, it was warm and round like a Chardonnay but also sour and fragrant like Gewürztraminer, to which Savagnin is a cousin. A whole year had passed since the last time we’d tasted it, but in an instant we were back in Arbois with nothing to do but taste wine and cheese and feel the sun on our arms as we drove, windows down, from one beautiful place to the next.

I had been meaning to catch up on those France posts for some time, but tasting that wine again provided the motivation I’d been lacking. I began writing this post a few days ago, and today, for the first time ever, guess who wrote us an email? Céline Foret, the wife of Secret d’Origen creator Freddy Foret! She was writing to ask where the post about our day in Arbois could be found on 1000wines, because she couldn’t seem to find it. If she’s reading this, now she knows why- it’s because I never wrote about that day until now.

Despite my skepticism regarding things that cannot be seen, described, or measured in some way, I have experienced too many peculiar incidents involving important people in my life to dismiss them all as mere coincidences. For Brianne and I to share a particular bottle of wine from a tiny corner of the world and then have a person involved in making it contact us a few days later… I can’t explain it, but still find it wonderful and strange.

I believe that things like love and friendship are real, albeit intangible, phenomena, and perhaps they exhibit certain qualities that are not limited by time or space. As Shunryu Suzuki said, “The world is its own magic.” Basically, I’m just glad that there are still mysteries to ponder, but that’s a whole different story.

The point is that we loved the time we spent in France and Jura, and the hospitality shown to us by the Foret family will never be forgotten. The story below is my attempt to explain why.

To Freddy, Céline, Max, Flora and Michel- meilleurs vœux et merci beaucoup!

***

“Sitting there, alone in a foreign country, far from my job and everyone I knew, a feeling came over me. It was like remembering something I’d never known before or had always been waiting for, but I didn’t know what. Maybe it was something I’d forgotten or something I’ve been missing all my life. All I can say is that I felt, at the same time, joy and sadness. But not too much sadness, because I felt alive.”

-Alexander Payne, 14th arrondissement

The road that led us to Arbois began in Paris, at the organic wine shop La Cave de l’Insolite. The shop was located around the corner from where we were staying, and its owner, Michel Moulherat, was an affable and generous host.

After explaining the purpose of our trip and our goals for our time in France, Michel suggested (in perfect, British-accented English) a book listing organic and biodynamic French winemakers, in which he marked his favorites as well as the names and contact information of winemaker friends who were not listed in the book. “Ninety percent of French wine is shit,” he told us, “but if you stick to these you’ll be alright.” He also invited us to a winetasting at a different wine shop later that day.

La Cave de l’Insolite

Armed with that slim orange book and a grey Citroën rental car, we set out the next day to explore the wines of France. We began in Champagne, where the tasting room employees dress like flight attendants and the most fundamental part of wine production, grape farming, seemed carefully kept out of sight, like an extremely ugly rug or something.

The blonde hobo of Epernay

Then we moved on to Alsace, a region bordering France and Germany that is famous for its stunning white wines (and underappreciated Pinot Noir, in our humble opinions). In Alsace we met with Bruno, one of Michel’s opinionated winemaker friends (”Oregon wine… it’s fine. But it doesn’t change from one hour to the next. It isn’t alive.”), and also ate charcroute and foie gras and escargots and a bunch of other delicious French food and wine.

On our way from Alsace to Burgundy, we noticed that if we made a turn off towards Arbois we could visit another one of Michel’s friends as well as taste some wines from Jura, a region that we were completely unfamiliar with. It was a beautiful day and we had all the time in the world, so that’s what we did.

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Just a few minutes walk from my house is Pine State Biscuits, a breakfast/lunch joint that is home to the “Reggie Deluxe”- a buttermilk biscuit bun containing a fried chicken breast, a fried egg, and bacon, all topped with creamy sausage gravy. Every morning that I pass Pine State there is literally a line out the door.

But I haven’t actually been there to eat yet because, frankly, the “Reggie Deluxe” intimidates me. I almost feel that eating one myself couldn’t make me any happier than the fact that someone invented such a rediculous sandwich. In any case, I was walking by Pine Street Biscuits yesterday afternoon and discovered a large paper bag full of biscuits and a take-away box filled with bacon, fried chicken, and a hamburger patty sitting on a bench, presumably left there by the owners.

This looks great, doesn’t it?

While I don’t make a habit of eating food found on the street, I’ve almost certainly consumed meals of shadier origin, so I decided to make an exception in this case. I grabbed a biscuit and a strip of chicken, and continued walking down Belmont.

As the setting sun warmed my back, I polished off the chicken and then began nibbling on the flaky edges of the biscuit. Its sweet, savory flavor made me moan a little tune in appreciation. Then I threw the remainder to a forlorn looking springer spaniel that was tied up outside of Walgreens- he sniffed it cautiously for a moment and then ate it in two big bites. When he looked up again, I’m pretty sure he was smiling.

a softer world is a webcomic I discovered recently. It’s not really a comic, though. It’s more like photos and text that are alternately funny, poignant, or both simultaneously. Why not check it out?