Why I really visited Portland...

(July 6th, 2012) Portland, Day 2.  By now, some of you may be wondering why I went out of my way to visit Portland, accumulating all sorts of bills along the way.  Some of you may think that it was to pay homage to the land of the Brothertons, others might say that I just wanted to check out a new city for my next job search.  Well, patience my friends, the answer will become self-evident shortly.

My second day in Portland opened to a run through the botanical gardens/arboretum along the Wildwood trail.  Oh trees, how I miss thee!  The serenity that I found while cruising through redwood forests amongst other varieties, I felt a sense of relaxation that has eluded me this summer while running in sunny New Mexico.  Shade, new trails, easy hills (by my mountainous standards), gorgeous trees, quaint neighborhoods...this run almost had it all.

Once getting cleaned up, I headed out to Pok Pok.  Even though I arrived ten minutes before they opened, there were a good 20 people in line ahead of me.  Good sign.  In contrast to the Heathman from the night before, Pok Pok got it.  Every taste, every dish that I had, just played off each other so well.  It was a gastronomical symphony.  Yet superbly simple.  To drink, a lychee flavored drinking vinegar.  That's right, vinegar.  Imagine an old fashioned soda mixed with a vinegary tartness, and you're halfway there.  To eat, I enjoyed the Pok Pok special, half of a roasted game hen, with two sauces (one savory, one slightly sweet), sticky rice, and a papaya salad.  The sweet and savory flavors of the hen and sauces (not to mention the papaya salad), just melded perfectly with the drinking vinegar.  And the way the fizziness of the vinegar accentuated the spiciness of the food...No beer or cocktail could possibly have paired with this meal better.  The Pok Pok special definitely earned the right to it's name as Pok Pok's feature dish.

Lychee flavored drinking vinegar

The Pok Pok special.

I'm not done yet.  For dessert, a Vietnamese version of affogato.  Vietnamese coffee, with a ball of ice cream in the middle, complete with fried dough to dip.  Soft ice cream, crispy bread.  Bitter coffee, sweet ice cream.  The contrasts and the compliments were out in force with this dish.  Superb and highly recommended if you ever find yourself in Portland.  Most places I visit have so many restaurants that I don't feel like I'm able to visit one twice, but in Portland I feel obligated to revisit Pok Pok on my text trip to the city.  (And there're a lot of restaurants left on my list of places to visit in Portland!)

Vietnamese Affogato

As good as Pok Pok was, though, that's not why I went to Portland.  The primary motivator was a small store in a Northern suburb called The Meadow.  Ever since my sister gave me the manifesto "Salted" for Christmas a few years back, I've developed a small addiction to trying different varieties of salt.  The author of Salted, Mark Bitterman, just happens to have a boutique shop in Portland, featuring chocolates, wine, flowers, and, of course, salt.  Lot's of salt.  Say, over a hundred types of salt.  And I tried almost all of them.  You are reading correctly dear friends.  For the first time in months, my sodium craving was sated, albeit momentarily.  I spent approximately two hours in a store that couldn't have been any larger than 400 square feet.  You may think to yourself, how different can salt be?  Well, my friend, I can't do the descriptions justice, but the variety of salt can rival that of wine or beer.  From the deep sea salts with the unique mineral compositions, to the smoked salts and flavor infused varieties (vanilla, ghost chili extract, lavendar, etc.), to the naturally formed/mined oddities such as Prussian blue or the Djibouti cuties (naturally forming salt balls up to the size of a golf ball!).

Some of the salt at The Meadow

Salt blocks and wine

And chocolates, oh my!

I won't say how much money I spent there, but my cupboard is now well stocked with salt.  I keep finding myself making up new dishes purely for a good reason to try different types of salt.  I've already decided that I need to do a salt tasting, where a pinch of salt is presented with each dish that uses that specific type of salt.  Just need to find the time, somehow...

Stay tuned folks for more dining decadence and sight-seeing in Seattle!

Portland late night

(July 5th, 2012) When we last left our hero, he had finished gorging himself at The Heathman Restaurant in downtown Portland.  The night was young, and he was ready to enjoy the town.  What trouble will he find?  What people will he meet?  And, most importantly, what will he ingest and imbibe?  These questions and more will be answered in this episode of...Where in the world...Don't worry, I'm nowhere near as much of a tease as Soap...

The first stop in my evening of decadence was Bailey's Taproom.  It was here that I first appreciated that this was the motherland of the Brothertons. As I stepped into the taproom, I was greeted by a giant computer screen with up-to-date information on each keg.  How long ago it had been tapped, what it contained, how much was left, etc.  In my mind's eye, I could definitely see Chris sitting at the bar exchanging notes with the owners.

Bailey's Taproom.  Note the big beer screen above the 20 taps.

After leaving Bailey's Taproom, I ended up giving my sister a call as Elizabeth had just returned to the states.  By some serendipitous chance, she happened to know the brother of the owner of the bar that I was headed to next.  Small world.  So, I found myself seated at the Teardrop Lounge, enjoying a sazerac in honor of the owner's brother (who lives in New Orleans), and a pina colada (the special recommended by the bartender helping me).  Much like at the Heathman, the Teardrop Lounge was dedicated to using nothing but the best local, seasonal ingredients.  The pina colada, which I would normally shy away from, was made from freshly grated coconuts, topped with fresh, local berries.  After hearing how much effort the bartender put into grating the coconut and after seeing how delicious the berries looked, how could I pass it up?

Here's a Sazerac for you, New Orleans.

Freshly made pina colada...delicious.

Last up for the evening (it was starting to get well past midnight at this point), was Voodoo Doughnuts.  Where to begin?  "Good things come in pink boxes", "The magic is in the hole", or just simply listing the names of the doughnuts themselves...actually, on second thought, an incomplete list as I'd like to keep this blog G or PG rated...Bacon Maple, Dirty Old Bastard, Triple Chocolate Penetration, etc. etc.  Coincidentally, those are the doughnuts that I ended up getting to go...  Even though I found myself in line at 1 in the morning, I still had to wait over an hour with about fifty people in front of me.  By the time I got out, the line had grown even longer...and it still would have been worth the wait.  So decadent, yet so good...

Two dirty old bastards (chocolate and peanut butter), a triple chocolate penetration (coco puffs atop chocolate icing and a chocolate doughnut), and a bacon maple.

Stay tuned for Portland day 2 (the best is yet to come!).  Travel is starting up again for me, so maybe I'll have some time to sit down and update this blog...

Why didn't I watch Portlandia first?

(July 5th, 2012) Portland.  PDX.  The place with great food and an even better salt store (more on that later of course).  By whatever name you choose to call it, Portland on a sunny day is a transcendental experience.  I suppose I had the insane luck of not seeing a significant cloud at all during my west coast trip (July 5th-9th), though by New Mexican standards, it was beautifully overcast.

When I heard that Kim needed to go out to Seattle (in a few more posts...patience please!), I jumped at the opportunity to finally kick off the west coast road trip that I'd been contemplating for months.  First stop, as you can guess from the top of the post, Portland.

Now as has become the trend when I travel, everything was planned around reservations at James Beard award winning restaurant and other food musts.  Yeah, sure, there's culture and people to see and meet, but I'm far too much of a pretentious foodie to even give the illusion that I'm going on these trips for some other reason (okay, maybe I do have one other really good reason why I've been going on some of these trips, but we'll leave that out of these posts as I try to do).

Portland...it's the land of the 90s, and if you're not getting any of these Portlandia references, march yourself straight to Netflix and start watching.  Just the first episode will suffice as it tends to be a bit banal and repetitive if you watch the entire series in one sitting (hey, I was too sick to do anything else that day, okay?!?!), though still worth watching and enjoyable.

But, anyways, I digress as usual.  First stop: The Heathman Restaurant.  My trend of alternating hits and misses continued with this stop.  Let me clarify though...the food at the Heathman was quite pleasant.  Very nice, fresh, local, but not James Beard award winning.  That being said, I still thoroughly enjoyed it.  As you can guess, first up, since I was on the west coast again, oysters.  At times I regret that my love for oysters came so late in life.  I remember growing up, and even in my early twenties, how fond my father was of oysters.  Ah, if only I had known better at the time...just think of the experiences we could have had?  But, in lieu of that, I shall endeavor to enjoy them for him as well as myself.

Oysters, so good...all a local Oregonian type.

After a dish from the sea, I next brought my culinary experience back to land.  Apparently, this was the perfect season for fresh, local berries, and my waitress was raving about the fresh berry salad.  Her raves were well justified...I can still envision those berries in my mind...crisp, juicy, and just the right blend of sweet and tart.

Mixed fresh, local berry salad with goat cheese.

The dish that was a slight let down had to be the main course...fresh salmon served over succotash with a sweet corn fondue sauce.  I have no fact checker to verify the sauce (luckily I do have the internet to double check with), but it was good.  Unlike at the Fat Canary, this sauce was thick enough to hold together, and the succotash was filled with pacetta.  You all know my weaknesses by now...I just couldn't resist once I heard that.

Fresh salmon, succotash, sweet corn fondue sauce, and pickled red onions.

What really made this dish, though, was the pickled red onion.  I actually had to ask for a bowl filled with them since I loved how the crunchiness of the onions contrasted with the smoothness of the salmon, and how the vinergary taste complimented the smoothness of the fondue.  Those simple little onions actually inspired a lot of thought on my part about what makes food good.  I came to a startingly simple conclusion:   good food is characterized by the presence of complimenting and contrasting tastes, textures, and colors.  That one simple conclusion has helped me re-imagine the first chapter of my cook book...an excerpt of what's in my head:

Consider the following progression of food. 

• Cheese - on it's own, it can be nice, even good, but never something to write home about.  Okay, every so often there will be a cheese so fantastic that you have a moment of pure ecstasy as you consume it, but the average cheese is just one color, one texture, and one taste. 

• Cheese on crackers or bread.  On the surface, it's virtually the same, but now we've introduced a contrast in texture.  This still isn't going to be something to write home about normally, but it's a more enjoyable experience than gorging on cheese and nothing but cheese.  

• Caprese salad.  Here's where the fun starts.  Mozzarella, tomato, basil, and some balsamic vinegar.  Red, white, green, and balsamic...okay, you've got the complimenting and contrasting colors.  The balsamic also provides a bit of flavor contrast in itself, but it pairs well with both the mozzarella and tomato, and the basil does the same thing.  The textures, though...everything, unless the tomato is perfect, is going to be somewhat similar - soft... 

• Bruschetta.  Now that can be interesting.  Cheese, presumably mozzarella, toasted bread, a slice of tomato, and a sprig of basil topped with some balsamic vinegar.  All of the same visual queues and taste sensations, but now you've added that last dimension of texture.  The trick to make this a fantastic dish, though, is to pair the ingredients just right.  The failing of most bruschettas is that too much of something is used, or that the ingredients aren't fresh enough/crisp enough.  These small details are important.  Alternatively, you could do a spinach salad with crisp onions or croutons, grape tomatoes, goat cheese, etc. 

Good food doesn't happen by accident.  Okay, sometimes it might, like when a caveman left out some water and flour, and natural yeast started fermenting to lead to the precursor of the sour dough bread that we know and love today.  But more often than not it requires attention to these details of how everything pairs together.  Taste, Texture, Appearance.

But, I digress, back to the Heathman for the all important last course, dessert - berry trifle.  The same deliciously fresh, local berries as before were featured.  Pure bliss.  I need to start acquiring trifle dishes so that I can make this at home too...

Berry trifle.  Much like how the sauce is dripping down the side, I'm drooling as I think about this dessert.

It's a shame that I'm not being paid by the word, because that's just the start of the weekend...I'll continue the rest of Portland in the next post.  Stay tuned kiddos!

Nature's Fireworks

(July 3rd-4th, 2012) So, it's been a while...lots of trips keeping me busy, but I shall endeavor to get them all up here.  I hope you like looking at pictures of food, because after this post, the next several will be, shall we say, inundated with them.  But not this post.  This post is about how I spent the third and fourth of July - not enjoying fireworks, but enjoying the marvels of nature.

On the third, I found myself heading out of town again with Kim and her dog Soju to the Jemez.  The last trip to San Gregorio reservoir and Clear Creek with Mark turned out so well that I thought I should visit the area again.  Once again, even though it was a holiday, I was amazed at how few people we encountered.  After we got past the reservoir and all of the day hikers, we didn't see a single person until we returned to the reservoir trail on our way out.

Clear Creek, North of San Gregorio Reservoir.

Soju on his first camping trip, ever!

Maybe the lack of people was induced partly by the monsoon season.  Every year, New Mexico receives the majority of it's rainfall (read: 8 of the 11 inches we get a year when we're not experiencing a drought like we have been lately) over a few weeks during the summer.  Like clockwork, every afternoon the heavens open up and inundate us with a flash flood, which ends just as quickly as it started.  For some reason, the monsoon season came a month early this year. 

So, I know what you're thinking...camping in the rain doesn't sound pleasant, right?  Well, this is New Mexico...rain is to us as snow is to Floridians.  So, who cares if we get a little wet, right?  One added advantage of the monsoon is that we ended up with a private fireworks show put on by nature - all through the night, the sky was punctuated by lightning in the distance.  Just like Teddy Roosevelt's famous quote from his visit to Yellowstone ("It was like lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hand of man."), how could anything man-made compete with that (aside from San Diego's fireworks mishap...).

One other benefit of the monsoon season is the wildflower bonanza.  In the span of just a few days, the semi-lifeless desert explodes with flowers to become thousands of acres of painted meadows...

Know that flower name?  Leave it in the comments for Brake Newsletter points (a very valuable commodity I've been told).

Anyways, cheers!

Come on, you didn't expect me to not have any food in this post, right?  Santa Fe Java Stout in hand.