I started my “Brewcation” Sunday, July 26th, Portland-bound via Amtrak. My destination? The 22nd Annual Oregon Brewer’s Festival. Before I started “tasting,” I walked around some of the neighborhoods (Pearl District, Yamhill, Old Town/Skidmore) to find something to eat and happened upon the Portland Saturday Market (which is open both Sat and Sun), a mix of art, handmade crafts, and food stalls. The “Taste of Poland” stand looked good so I ordered the spicy hunter’s sausage on a roll. It came with caramelized onions and it was huge! And all for 5 bucks. That hit the spot and I was now ready to drink!
81 beers to choose from at the Brewer’s Festival. Now I had to narrow it down. I paid 20 dollars for 16 or 18 wooden tokens and ended up sampling 11 beers including: Tank 7 Farmhouse Ale from Boulevard Brewing Co, Blonde Bombshell from Cascade Lakes Brewing Co, Hibiscus Ginger Beer from Caldera Brewing Co, and Pomegranate Wheat from Moylan’s Brewing Co. Read the rest of this entry »
July 28th, 2009 | No Comments »
I came across this post by Leslie Kelly on Amazon’s Al Dente blog. Leslie attended a day of our Tom Douglas Summer Camp, and she happened to win, among the selection of prizes on offer for campers, a jar of Jackie Cross’ sensational brandied cherries. Read Leslie’s post to the end and you’ll get Jackie’s recipe! (Note: Jackie’s recipe calls for 4 pounds cherries, which should yield 9 cups of pitted cherries. For best results, use the cups measurement for the recipe.)
I was lucky enough to snag a jar of these babies myself, and I like to day dream about what I’ll serve them with when the occasion is special enough for opening my little treasure. Garrett’s olive oil cake? The goat cheese cheesecake in Tom Douglas’ Seattle Kitchen? Just a scoop of vanilla ice cream, or maybe that nice goat cheese ice cream I found at Whole Foods? Hmmm………..
July 28th, 2009 | 6 Comments »
Such a great weekend in Walla Walla. First off it was 15 degrees cooler than the 105 it was supposed to be, and I had the most wonderful local lunch at àMaurice Winery: Monteillet Larzac and Perail cheese, Stones Throw carrots, beets, onions, lettuce, and sage-roasted chicken. Throw in some Viognier, Malbec, and Syrah for a balance of flavor, and a 3 hour lunch was enjoyed by all. Thanks to the Schafers for showing some Walla Walla hospitality.
July 28th, 2009 | No Comments »
Here’s a shot of our mini campers getting ready to cook pasta. This event, co-promoted with Premara Blue Cross, has been a lot of fun and is an important first step in our quest towards nutritional education.
July 27th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
On a recent trip to New York City, I spent my last day looking for delectable bakeries and chocolatiers. I noticed a little storefront across from Rockefeller Center that made me cross the street and peer in the window at the fabulous creations beyond the glass. There were sweet red bean paste sandwiches made with sweet mini pancakes, and white peaches coated with Japanese jellies that were rich with fruit juice, and something so beautiful and simple: a single fresh cherry suspended in a jelly of fruit juices and popped from an octagonal chocolate mold! (Photo top) Wow, that is the most creative Japanese Bakery I’ve ever been to! So, on your next trip to New York, be sure to stop by Minamoto Kitchoan and indulge in one of their rare and special treats!
July 27th, 2009 | No Comments »
An article in yesterday’s Seattle Times called “Parking Strip Gardens Crop Up” details the way the Seattle City Council’s nonbinding “local food initiative” has produced some results in the goal of “increasing the availability of locally grown food, especially for those least able to afford it.” One example: a permit is no longer required for parking strip vegetable gardens. (You still need a permit for hardscaping in the parking strip, but that’s supposed to now be easy to get and free of charge). City and County officials are also looking at ways to improve the quality of healthy food in the schools, including the creation of “learning gardens” for school kids, and they’re also creating incentives for preserving county farmland, among other issues. Also, Seattle will recieve a $300,000 grant this year from the USDA which will be used “for a variety of projects amined at increasing urban agriculture and improving access to healthy food in low-income communities.” It’s so nice to read something encouraging in the newspaper now and then! Read the whole article here.
July 26th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Located in the Piazza della Passera, across the River Arno and a conveniently short walk from the Stazione Centrale (train station) where the bus let us off each day, Trattoria Quattro Leone is a charming, reliable place to stop for lunch while pursuing the many sights (L’academia! Uffizi! Duomo!…) of Florence. The pleasant outdoor patio is lively with the clatter and chatter of both locals and tourists (many tourists due to the convenient location) yet we managed to snag a table each of the couple of times we stopped by. One of the best things we ate here was a plateful of perfectly fried artichokes (photo bottom)- what a treat! While fried food is not ubiquitous in Florence, it does have a presence. (In fact, believe it or not, there is a traditional Florentine version of fried chicken which you sometimes find on restaurant menus.) Other good things we ate here: fiocchetti (photo right), or pasta purses with a filling of pear, tallegio cheese, and asparagus (a surprisingly delicious filling combo!) sauced with cream. We also enjoyed a nice plate of bresaola (Italilan air-dried beef) and bundles of asparagus wrapped in prosciutto (photo top). (Keep in mind that my trip, in early June, was still asparagus season). Skip the espresso after your meal, though. This is one of the few places in Tuscany where we were served a mediocre cup of coffee.
July 24th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
One of the tastes we made for the Foodportunity Networking event last night at Palace Ballroom.
July 23rd, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Our final day of Summer Camp featured this Dynamic Duo: Nancy Oakes, chef-owner of San Francisco’s marvelous restaurant, Boulevard, and Bruce Aidells, celebrity chef, cookbook writer, and master of all things meat. They each did their own cooking demos, but worked as a (somewhat feisty and delightfully argumentative) team through both demos. Nancy demo’d Hawaiian hearts of palm carbonara and Southern fried buttermilk game hens with cream biscuits and slaw.
Over the course of a couple decades of restaurant work, I have made big batches of biscuits many times, and I’m pretty good at it. I especially like cream biscuits, and my go-to recipe has always been the James Beard version from Beard on Bread. However, Nancy made the best, fluffiest, lightest, high-rise biscuits ever, and I learned at least 2 things from her technique:
1. Nancy uses self-rising flour (which is flour that has baking flour and salt already added). I never understood the need for buying this product, but now that I’ve tasted Nancy’s biscuits I’m a convert.
2. When Nancy was adding the cream to the dry ingredients, she said: “See how the dough looks a little bit too dry, with just a couple of dry pieces flaking off the outside of the ball of dough. This is where you think you want to add more cream, but this is where you should stop.” She then proceeded to pat the dough into a nice thick square. She cut the dough into square biscuits and dipped each biscuit’s top in melted butter, then baked the biscuits in a hot oven. As I said, this resulted in the lightest, flakiest, and best biscuits ever. I know that if I had been making that batch of dough, I absolutely would have added a few more tablespoons of cream at the point she stopped. So, from now on, I’m making biscuits Nancy’s way. Here’s her recipe: Read the rest of this entry »
July 22nd, 2009 | 1 Comment »
There’s an interesting memoir in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, called “I Was a Baby Bulimic,” written by Frank Bruni. Bruni, restaurant critic for the NYT, describes a lifelong struggle with appetite, weight, and body image, starting in earliest childhood. Bruni says he “struggled for decades to figure out how to answer my appetite without being undone by it … as I traced an unlikely route to the most implausible of destinations: professional eating.” Read the whole fascinating story here.
July 20th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
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