Slow Food Waltz

2011-08-16T16:34:00.000-07:00

Here be Beer, Monks and Lotsa Sausage
Mt. Angel, Oregon is a must-see!!

Tucked away in farm country east of Salem, Oregon, is an inconspicuous little German town called Mt Angel. It's a place settled by German pioneers in the 1800s, where you can be both "holy" (at the Mt Angel Abbey) and "wholly" devoted to sausage and beer at Mt Angel Sausage Company, the Glockenspiel Restaurant and Pub, at the many local German-themed eateries and at Mt Angel's annual Oktoberfest, coming up next month, on Sept 15th through the 18th. It's Oregon's largest folk festival. Took these photos of the Oktoberfest last year.

FYI: This year, the Glockenspiel plans to sell HOG WINGS at the Oktoberfest (pork on a stick!) Stay tuned!

Here's a few photos that illustrate why Mt Angel, Oregon is a wonderful place to visit!

1) People are happy here! Happy to serve you beer in large quantities and local sausage. Here's Bretny Endicott hamming it up. She's a server at the Glockenspiel.

2) The servers at the Glockenspiel Restaurant and Pub wear lederhosen!

3) If it's German beer you like, you'll be in Heaven here.

4) The locals all know how to do the chicken dance! The lady behind the chicken and stein in this photo is Teresa Godon, supervisor for the Glockenspiel Restaurant and Pub. This restaurant has a magical Glockenspiel clock in front, that plays wonderful tunes and tells the story of the early pioneers who came to Mt. Angel.

And reading German aloud just makes you feel special. Try it!

Also, aren't German knick-knacks just cute!

And how about this sausage truck! Cute, again!

5) On the drive from Salem to Mt Angel, you might drive past this exquisite field of poppies.

6) While there, you are bound to meet a local celebrity. Here's Jim Hoke owner of Mt Angel Sausage Company and his wife Robin; Jim was just featured on the Food Network's episode of Outrageous Food!

7) You might meet another local celeb, Jerry Lauzon, public relations director for the Mt Angel Oktoberfest. Below is a video of Jerry singing a German tune and yodeling with his sweetheart!

8) Order as many delicious hand-stuffed sausages as you want!And you'll love the fries at Mt Angel Sausage Company.

9) Accordian music! This guy and his buddy play bass and accordian on the back patio of Mt Angel Sausage Company... fun summer dining.

After filling up with sausage, beer and fries, head over to the Mt. Angel Abbey, a Benedictine Monastery on a lovely hill overlooking the east side of Mt Angel.

10) You may run into Benedictine monks.

11) The chapel at the Mt Angel Abbey feels so European...if the chapel is empty, go ahead and sing a Gregorian chant there - the acoustics are divine!

12) In the Summer, attend the Abbey Bach Festival, listen to Bach then picnic outside with wine and sandwiches on the grass.

13) See a famous architectural gem: the Abbey Library on the campus was designed by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto.

If possible, take a tour with a monk, so you don't miss the details of the library, like how the bottom of these Aalto-designed chairs have a brand on it: the Abbey historically owned cattle and this symbol was their original brand. The Abbey houses one of the largest collections of Alvar Aalto furniture in North America. The arms and legs of the chair are formed out of a single piece of bent wood, shaped like an upside down U.

Enjoy! Auf Wiedersehen!

2011-06-27T16:19:00.000-07:00

Day 17th- White Cake with Velvet Chocolate Frosting

Sorry Gram, I got a little behind in blogging daily. Truth is, I spend all day at work online and like to unplug when I go home, so I'm trying to play catch-up. But I hear in Heaven you have no concept of time, so I'm sure you won't mind if I blog into July :)

For Father's Day weekend, I joined forces with my sister Cara to make a one of Grandma's cakes! This white cake recipe is simple but delicious. White cake is one of the most easily adulterated cakes out there (lots just buy cake mixes) so when you get a good homemade version, it can be heavenly!

2/3 cup shortening (use oil for a lighter cake)
1 1/2 cups sugar
3 eggs
1 1/2 cups milk
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
3 cups sifter flour (for cake flour, substitute 2 Tblsp. cornstarch for flour in each cup.)
3 1/2 tsp baking powder

Cream shortening and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs and beat thoroughly. Add milk to the bowl. Add dry ingredients and vanilla and mix on slow speed to blend. Turn to medium speed and beat till thoroughly mixed. Pour into 13 X 9 inch greased pan.

Bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes. Recipe perfected for 5,000 feet, adjust for your altitude.

My cute niece helped us cook...

Cara's little family.

Here's the batter! Yum!

Velvet Chocolate Frosting:

6 oz your fav. chocolate chips
1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup sourcream
1 tsp. vanialla
dash of salt
powdered sugar

Melt chocolate and butter over hot (not boiling) water. Remove from heat. Add sour cream, vanilla, and salt and blend in. While beating, add enough powered sugar to make a spreading consistency.

Chocolate chips melted in butter my sister made from her neighbor's cow's milk.

Chocolate frosting

Cara's daughter... the drama queen herself!

2011-06-16T18:39:00.001-07:00

Day 16: Stuffed Pork chops

My cousin Pam Hepworth is at it again, cooking grandma's stuffed porkchops! Enjoy!

4 double-thick chops. Cut a pocket in the fat side.
1/4 c. chopped onion
1 c. chopped celery
1/4 c/. butter
6 slices bread, crumbled
1/3 c. chopped green pepper
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. pepper
1 tsp sage
1/4 tsp poultry seasoning
1/3 cup water

Saute veggies in butter, combine with crumbs and seasonings. Fill each pork chop with 1/4 c stuffing. Add 1/3 c. more water to rest of stuffing and bake in buttered, covered casserole dish. Bake chops, after browning in a skillet, in 350 degree oven for 1 hour. Fasten edges of chops with chopsticks.

CHEF OF THE DAY: Pam Skoy Hepworth

I love pork chops and I love stuffing-- so of course this is a favorite recipe of mine. I haven't made it in years, so I jumped at the chance to make this dish again. It was much easier than I remembered--most likely because I actually took the time to sharpen my knife before slicing into the chops (I'll spare you the horror story of my prior attempts to make the pork pockets with an embarrasingly dull dud of a knife no doubt inherited from my mom before it could be donated to the DI). However, the entire process did take me longer than I recalled. For me the time-takers came in the form of shredding quite a bit of bread (unless your bread is already dry and crumbly), making my own poultry seasoning because I couldn't find the nearly full container I have somewhere in the house, AND the hour of baking after everything is combined, stuffed and browned.

My advice would be to tackle this recipe when you have plenty of time to enjoy the process, or take the recipe in parts and make the stuffing the night before (minus the broth--you can add that just before stuffing the pork).

Green Bean and Mushroom Medley

This combination of vegetables is not only easy peasy to make, but really makes your ordinary, dull can of green beans stand up and act fancy. I didn't have waterchestnuts and didn't use bacon to garnish the top of the beans (since I was serving it with the pork chops), but the dish was yum, even without those items.

My food storage is over-laden with canned green beans, so I chose to use canned over fresh beans. Later this summer, when green beans are in season, I'll make this again with fresh beans, which will, of course, make it even better.

Stuffed pork chops, green bean mushroom medley and some extra stuffing. You could add gravy, but why???

Green beans and mushrooms cook up first; then add the green onions and waterchestnuts to the pan a few minutes before serving. So easy.

A side view (less scary view) of the finished stuffed pork chops.

Cutting the pocket into the chop was actually easier than I thought it would be. Of course I sharpened my knife first.......

Smart phones are so handy in the kitchen when you need to look up the recipe for poultry seasoning.

My bread was pretty fresh and squishy, so I toasted it in the oven until it was slightly browned, hoping to save the stuffing from becoming a dense mass of bread and veggies and maybe adding a toasty flavor dimension to it all. It worked!

Stuffed and browned chops, ready to go in the oven, looking very much like scary, wide-mouthed sea monster grins in mid-chew.

2011-06-10T17:45:00.001-07:00

Day 10- Scalloped Asparagus

Loved this recipe of Grams! Fresh ingredients; simple recipe. Try it!

One large bunch of asparagus- steamed
3 hard-boiled eggs
sourdough bread (crumbed up into pieces)

White Sauce

1/4 cup butter
1/4 flour
2 cups milk
1/2 tps. salt
(my addition) 1/4 cup riesling

1 1/2 cups of cheese (I used drunken goat cheese, but grandma recommends cheddar cheese)

Steam asparagus, make cream sauce.

Layer asparagus, slices of eggs, cream sauce and grate cheese. Create another layer. Cover with torn-up pieces of bread (use good bread... like sourdough) and then drizzled on 1/4 cup melted butter over top and cook!

Cook at 350 till the bread crumbs are brown... about 12 minutes.

2011-06-08T15:45:00.001-07:00

Day 8- Diving into Gram's Chicken Divan - 12 minutes to a delicious dish for hungry, mungry bikers!

My cousin Pam Skoy Hepworth (cutest new newlywed in the Skoy gang) and her husband Kent document their adventures with Grandma's Chicken Divan after a killer bike ride one evening in Salt Lake City.

Recipe:
1-2 and 1/2 lb. chicken
2 c. water
1 tsp. salt

1 bunch broccoli
2 T. butter

3 T. flour
2 c. chicken broth (from the above; add milk to make 2 c. if you have less than 2 c. after cooking the chicken (you will))

salt and pepper

2 T. sherry
Parmesan cheese

Simmer chicken in water and salt until cooked through. Remove meat. Save broth for sauce.

Cook broccoli until tender crisp. Drain and layer in a shallow, buttered baking dish. Slice chicken and lay on top of broccoli.

Melt butter, stir in flour and add broth. Cook and stir sauce until thickened. Add salt, pepper and sherry. Cover chicken and broccoli with sauce. Sprinkle with cheese and bake in 400 degree oven for 12 minutes.

************

Hungry riders – We didn’t take time to make a side dish, we just heaped all that divan on our plates and devoured it! Delicious and perfect for a recovery meal! (Note the cool helmet hairdo--so stylish!)

Jenie's cousin, Pam, here. Last evening my husband Kent and I took a killer ride on our road bikes and before we even finished the ride we both had a huge hunger fit,closely followed by some serious fatigue, both of which can only be satiated by lots and lots of food.

When we finally made it home we immediately headed for the refrigerator and sadly, not much was ready and waiting to be consumed. We had some chicken, so I thought I'd cook that up quick-like. But there was my Grandma's cookbook on the counter, and although I hadn’t planned to cook from her cookbook that night and had already selected several other dishes to cook this month for Jenie's "3o Days of June", I thought maybe I could find something easy that included chicken for a quick supper for two hungry mungry bikers.

I was right! What I found was Chicken Divan. I quickly scanned the recipe and I had the main ingredients: chicken and broccoli. PLUS, the cook time in the oven was only 12 minutes. We could wait 12 minutes! Sold! I yelled to Kent, "grab the camera!" We were going to accomplish two things at once: feeding our hungry selves, and adding to Jenie’s blog.

Admittedly, if we hadn't been trying to photograph the process of this recipe, it would have come together quicker, but it was still quick and easy overall.

Special thanks to Kent, the brilliant food photographer — even in his distracted state of hunger he made it all look Yum!

I guess this post and this meal probably don’t constitute real slow food, but in memory of Grandma and because of Jen’s June campaign, the two chicken breasts in my fridge didn’t end up on the grill (i.e. charred and dry, because sadly, that’s how I grill), instead they turned into something wonderful, flavorful and memorable. A good reminder that slowing down really does make everything better—especially food!

Broccoli - The best part of cooking broccoli is watching it turn this beautiful shade of green. Pretty!

Chicken slices – We only had two chicken breasts, so that’s what went into this dish. There was plenty, even for two famished bikers.

Butter the dish – Note the special buttering placemat. Thanks for making everything look better than reality Babe!

Arranging –

Melting butter - And now for the white sauce. Melt your butter and enjoy the aroma while you’re at it.

Roux – Add the flour.

White sauce – Add broth, salt, pepper and sherry. (Or, as in our case, some white wine because apparently all the sherry in the house is gone, gone, gone.) The wine—and I’m sure the sherry—add a nice flavor to the white sauce and I’m pretty sure I’ll be adding it to all my white sauces from now on. Thanks for the tip Gram!

Divan with sauce -

Add cheese – I didn’t read the recipe very closely, so I didn’t realize we needed Parmesan until about this point. We didn’t have any Parmesan cheese, but fortunately it is my creed that everything is better with cheese, so while we didn’t have Parmesan in the cheese drawer (yes, we have a drawer in the refrigerator dedicated to cheeses of all kinds), we had another lovely hard cheese called Dejong something or other, which is a pungent and flavorful Dutch cheese, and it worked really well too.

Voila – And 12 minutes later here is the finished product. Beautiful!

2011-06-05T20:36:00.001-07:00

Day 5- Oatmeal Coconut Cookies (with Oregon Fireweed Honey)

My grandmother was a bit of a health nut. Her cookbook features several recipes using whole wheat flour and I recall my Dad's tales of all the crazy things she tried to feed him in the name of good health, including hiding egg shells in his food. In this vein, I thought I'd tweak granny's recipe just a bit to make it healthier. I added nuts, replaced 1 cup of sugar with fireweed honey and added dried fruit to these cookies. The combo worked wonderfully!

3/4 c. butter
2 cups brown sugar (I used 1 cup of br sugar and 1 cup of honey- if you use honey, add 1/4 more flour)
2 eggs, well-beaten
2 cups oatmeal
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup coconut
2 cups flour
1 tsp.
1 tsp. soda

(Optional: 1/2 cup of sliced almonds or other nuts... or add dried prunes, date or dried cherries!)

Cream butter and sugar; add eggs and beat well. Mix soda and baking powder into flour and add. Shape into balls and dip into sugar. Palce, sugar-side up, on a cookie sheet- press down with fork.

Bake in 350 degree oven for 12-15 minutes.

I love this recipe especially using 1 cup of honey to replace one of the cups of brown sugar and dried fruit. I love how these cookies fluff up in the over and get crispy and sugary on the edges. For softer cookies, cook them 12 minutes and for browner crispier cookies, cook for more like 14 min.

I used Oregon fireweed honey.

Coconut again... (My grandmother put coconut in about everything conceivable. It was probably her way of bringing something tropical to snowy Idaho!)

Italian prunes... from the PDX Farmer's Market!

2011-06-04T21:22:00.001-07:00

Day 4- Gathering ingredients at the Portland Farmer's Market and Making Music
See tomorrow's post of dried fruit oatmeal/coconut cookies!

Today I bought delicious, dried plums (which tasted nothing like store-bought prunes) at the Portland Farmer's market to use in a cookie recipe tomorrow!

While at the market, I ate a chunk of Fraga Farm's mozzarella cheese, fresh blackberry fruit roll-ups, Italian prunes, a sandwich made with roasted duck, chevre, carmelized onions, pickled beets and dijon mustard (YUM!)

I gobbled up some cookies from Two Tarts Bakery...(hilarious name BTW:)

Snacked on salty SEA BEANS harvested along the central coast of Oregon.

And tapped my foot along with an old-fashioned jug/washboard, banjo picking band. Speaking of which, check out my forthcoming video of one banjo player paying homage to my last boyfriend in a creative on-the-spot composition...

And I sat in the park to rest and get some rare Oregon sunshine~!

2011-06-03T16:29:00.000-07:00

June 3- June's Skillet Spaghetti... gone wrong... or did it?
Or how Gram helped me invent the world's most perfect food for teenagers, by accident!

Day 3 of "30 Days of June" and I'm already tired!

I like this recipe because you cook the noodles with the sauce, which makes the pasta tastier.

Recipe:
1 lb. ground beef
1 c. chopped onion
3-4 garlic cloves (I added a few for good measure)
8 oz. can tomato sauce
6 oz. can tomato paste
1 1/2 c. water
1 pint tomato juice

2 tsp. chili powder
1 1/2 tsp. salt
dashof pepper
1 tsp. sugar
1 tsp. oregano
7-8 oz package of elbow pasta (not spaghetti, like the recipe book says, unless you want a teenage-friendly food that's blob-like... which is what I ended up with)
onion and green pepper rings
Parmesan cheese

In an electric frypan, (or a large pot) combine beef, onion, garlic, tomato sauce, paste and juice; the water, sugar and spices. Cover and bring to a boil. Reduce heat. Simmer 30 minutes. Add elbow pasta, stir to seperate and simmer till pasta is tender. Stir frequently! Add onion and pepper runfs the last 5 minutes. Sprinkle Parmesan cheese to the top!

Guess What!!? I discovered the perfect dish for teens: Grandma's Skillet Spaghetti gone wrong. Here's why. I was trying to make a lovely classic spaghetti dish for a group of four adults and two teens, but what turned out instead was like something out of the movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes Really!

Okay, so maybe Gram was trying to inject a little humor into my latest episode of "Granddaughter Tries to Channel Dead Grandmother's Cooking Prowess," but I tell you, the whole thing was a bit horrifying at moments.

Here's the deal: Her recipe called for SPAGHETTI with the word (ELBOW) in parenthesis. I remember standing in the pasta aisle of the store and thinking... "Surely Gram wouldn't write Spaghetti if she really meant elbow pasta??" So I opted for spaghetti noodles.

It wasn't until I started dumping noodles south in the saucy pot and watching them hang onto each other like frightened skinny people in a tidal wave, that I realized Gram had probably meant Elbow pasta.

My two friends who cheered me on when cooking, who were a bit older, in their 50's, said, "You know they used to call every pasta spaghetti, that's just what they did, they didn't have a 100 varieties like spinach bowtie to choose from, so she probably did mean elbow."

But it was too late, my perfect tasting sauce was filled with half-cooked spaghetti clumping together. And THIS WAS THE MAIN COURSE! The table was set and I was freaking out, thinking, "there's no way I'm serving this stuff!"

Joanne encoarged me and so did a new friend named Catherine, who's a whiz in the kitchen. She said, "Add some more liquid, stir, and just WAIT... it will be okay!"

Cathy, who bakes Huckleberry pies in a single bound. Love her for keeping me sane during the Attack of the Killer Spaghetti Crisis!

She kept telling me to "wait," A lesson that I have a hard time with. I'm soo impatient!

So I waited, waited and waited, adding more tomato sauce. What we wound up with was spaghetti on steroids: a muscular mass of noodles and sauce which didn't look so pretty, but actually tasted yummy like gourmet Chef Boyaredee and which the teenagers and men lapped up like hungry dogs.

Here's the cute little family, the Schultices, who I cooked spaghetti.... er, pasta for.

2011-06-02T20:43:00.000-07:00

JUNE 2- June's Angel Thumbprint Cookies

Today, my sister Cara June Raymond (named after Grandma) uses coconut once again to whip up Gram's cookies - I'm starting to think June had a thing for coconut!

Recipe:
1 c. butter
1 1/2 c. brown sugar
4 eggs
1 cup milk
2 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp almond flavoring
4 c. flour
slightly beaten egg whites

Cream butter and sugar. Add egg yolks and beat well. Add milk, flour, flavorings, Chill 15 minutes.Divide dough into pieces the size of walnuts. Roll into a ball, dip into egg white and then roll in coconut. Dent in the center of each cookie after placing on a cookie sheet. Put 1 tsp. jelly in each center. Bake at 375 for 25 minutes.

CHEF OF THE DAY: Cara Skoy Raymond and kids. (Can I just say my sister's fresh ingredients put me to shame! Look at that jug of fresh Jersey cow milk!)

As told by Cara Raymond:

If there is one thing I remember about Grandma June's cooking is that she paid attention to the details, she looked at cooking as an art, and at a gathering for a special occasion, every detail from the table settings to the temperature of the food was considered, and timed to perfection!

It always tasted soo good, even as a little girl I wanted to cook just like her when I grew up because she had a love of food, and the people she made it for where kings when they sat at her table.

In keeping with grandma's detail-oriented cooking, I made sure the ingredients I used were fresh, and of the finest quality.

The flour I used is from a local mill, that prides itself with the quality.

The butter-rich milk was freshly milked yesterday from my neighbor's jersey cow.

The butter in the recipe was home spun from the Jersey's cream. And the jam is homemade cherry I canned last year after I picked and pitted cherries with my kids.

My children liked the process it took to separate the yolks from the whites. They had fun rolling the dough and dipping it in the whites and then in the coconut

Then pressing a hole in the cookies for the jam.

Their favorite part was licking the beaters.

It was fun sharing Grandma June's recipe with the kids and talking about how much she loved cooking! But the best part was eating the cookies!

2011-06-01T19:15:00.001-07:00

30 days of JUNE!
...or my family's way of inviting our Grandma La June into our kitchens, through cooking her dishes!

DAY ONE: LA JUNE'S TROPICAL WALDORF SALAD

This is recipe #1 in a series of recipes this month from my Grandmother La June's cookbook, Plain and Fancy Cooking.

Recipe:
1/2 cup of coconut
1/2 cup of nuts (I used toasted almond pieces)
1/3 cup mayo
1/2 cup whipped cream (whipped with a bit of almond extract (that was my addition) and a few pinches of sugar)
1 cup celery
1 red apple
1 yellow apple
2 banannas
1 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp lemon juice (I would used fresh)

Cut up the apples and celery, add the nuts and coconut.

Mix the (fluffy) whipped cream, the mayo, the sugar and the lemon juice.
Add it to the salad. Add sliced bananas right before you serve it!

I love this cool combo- mayo and whipped cream:

The simplicity of two apples:

Yum! Delicious Waldorf Salad!

2011-05-31T16:17:00.000-07:00

30 DAYS OF JUNE!

La June is my grandmother and this month, my family and I plan to cook as many of her dishes from her well-loved cookbook as possible! Here's my story:

A few month back, while weathering one of Oregon's most sunless winters and with a severe case of post-break-up blues, I was moving some boxes I'd been storing in a friend's garage when something tumbled from the box and BAM! hit the concrete floor of the garage. Glass shattered, then something unexpected happened. The heady smell of summer roses floated up, permeating the garage. I knew immediately what I'd broken: an old-fashioned glass bottle of rose water that once belonged to my Grandmother La June. I'd been saving it for a rainy day --- just hadn't realized I would use it up in one BIG WAY on one February afternoon.

Being the somewhat superstitious girl I am, I immediately thought: "Ahhhh, grandma's here... and she's trying to send me a message." Now before you go thinking I'm looney, let me add that I'm a Mormon-- a faith that believes Heaven is always close (in fact right here on earth, just in another dimension...), and that loved ones come back on occassion to help us make it through this crazy life.

Here's a photo of my Gram when she was young.

I knew my Grandmother La June, with her flair for drama, would be especially audacious in her attempts to reach her posterity to and let them know she was watching over them. So I caught myself telling a friend, "I think grandma is here!"

But this is how I remember her!

When alive, it was grandma who always set an extra plate at the table in case an angel wanted to join us. Her communication with the "other side" is well-documented in my family, and though some of my relatives viewed it as bizarre, I counted it as one of her spiritual gifts.

But the day in the garage, her message seemed obvious; here it was: "It's okay, Jenie dear, things break, but life is still full of sweetness! Don't fret!"

In life, gramma was a bit of a mystery to me. A strong and angular Norweigian woman with impeccable taste and an endless supply of talent. I'm the tom-boy grandaughter, more comfortable wearing sneakers, casting around a fishing rod or digging in the dirt, but gramma was the embodiment of feminity (though she did love to garden!) What I inherit was her talent for music, writing and an incurable love of cooking. What got lost somewhere in that passage of DNA was gram's sense of order and her meticulousness in the kitchen. I'm a disaster when I cook!

I'd watched grandmother cook several times. She was not one of those affable grannies who will praise all your attempts at cooking, she had been a professonal chef and knew how things "ought" to be cooked. One time, my job, simple as it sounded, to mash potatoes, had not been up to snuff. I remember her pointing out that I needed to remove those stray potato skins I had left floating brown in that sea of beautiful white spuds.

Well, onto the intent of this blog post.... using the moment of breaking a bottle of rose water as an impetus, I've chosen to invite my gram into my life and kitchen (and the lives of my relatives) this month by opening up her cookbook "Plain and Simple Cooking by La June" and cooking some of her favorite recipes!

2011-02-18T09:59:00.000-08:00

Grand Moments at the Oregon Truffle Festival
By Jenie Skoy

A few weeks ago, I feasted on Oregon truffles at the Oregon Truffle Festival in the Willamette Valley: the damp, ferny, mossy region in Oregon famous for sweet, rosy pinot noir and mysterious truffles!

Willamette Valley Vineyards hosted a "truffle dog training seminar" (the only event of its kind in North America, say the organizers!) and 18 truffle hunters and their canines spent a weekend in truffle training in forests where truffles lay.

Here's a video of Martha and her Dog Saylor!

Dog owners were able to observe the handling and training of skilled truffle dogs, and to introduce their dog to the scent of both Oregon and French black truffles. This two-day event began in the classroom, with lectures on canine scent detection and fundamentals of scent training then ended in a forest seeded with truffle spores!

I wonder how, after these dogs have gotten a whiff (and taste) of truffles, they'll ever be satisfied with dog bones again!!

Compared with Europe, Oregon's truffle industry is young and undiscovered.

"Secrecy pervades the world of truffles and is a part of their mystique, but it has not served Oregon’s truffles well, as secrecy precludes development of the knowledge necessary to bring the real potential of the Oregon truffles to market. Simple details like how to choose and handle a truffle to tease out its grandeur are known to only a few harvesters and chefs." says the Oregon Truffle Festival Website

Above is loveable Finn, a Lagatto Romagnola, the breed with sharp senses known for their truffle hunting acumen. His owner, Holly, adopted him from the Dordogna region in France famous for wine, truffles and truffle hunting. Finn dug up the truffles, but had a problem giving them up. "His biggest problem is that he eats the truffles!" said Holly.

Digging up Oregon's White Gold! Willamette Valley Vineyard's winemaker Don Crank was in the forest to help truffle hunters.

These Oregon white truffles were dug up by a cute cocker spaniel puppy at Willamette Valley Vineyards.

This cute German Shepard dog, Sahalie, or "Holly" for short, or what her owner called her: "Turd Bird," was one of the best truffle hunters in the forest that day, in part because her owner runs a obedience school in Oregon City and she was so well-behaved.

Saylor , above, takes a moment to pause between truffle hunting. At this point, she was more interested in the roasted chicken in her owner's pocket!

This scene felt a little Red Riding Hood-ish with the wolf-like dog and young girl in a magical forest filled with truffles!

After the truffle hunting, we met in the dining room at Willamette Valley Vineyards for a truffle-infused lunch cooked up by executive chef at Timberline Lodge, Jason Stoller Smith.

Sinclair Philips, owner of Sooke Harbour House on Vancouver Island has a childlike fascination with truffles. Look at how his eyes light up!

Sinclair is a Slow Food Convivium leader in the Northwest. His soup will just have to wait until he's finished photographing a handful of black truffles.

Here's Sinclair talking up Willamette Valley Vineyard's wine at the dinner!

A few hundred dollars worth of these addictive fungi!

Artist, photographer and truffle sniffer, Douglas Gayeton, was in our neighborhood to research ideas for his book Lexicon of Sustainability

The perfect Oregon dish! Jason Stoller Smith, executive chef at Timberline Lodge cooked up this delicious Oregon lamb with black truffle stuffed lamb breast, black truffle parsnip puree with rootbeer and truffle gelees and chervil and grape gremolata.

Imagine our joy when they passed around whole truffles and grater!

FYI: Next week, Rex Pickett, the author of “Sideways,” the book that helped fuel the popularity of pinot noir wines will be in Portland to talk about his new book, “Vertical" in which characters Miles and Jack head to Oregon to taste some wines at vineyards like Van Duzer. Here's a link to Sideways

Stay tuned for PART TWO of my Oregon Truffle adventure, plus videos of the truffle dog training!

Cheryl Crumbley, marketing director of Lane County's United Way smells bing cherries in her glass of Willamette Valley Vineyard's pinot noir at the Grand Truffle Dinner in Eugene last month.

2011-01-07T16:08:00.000-08:00

Cascade Baking Company is rolling in the green-- and yellow!

One bakery in Salem Oregon is feeling the love for the Oregon Ducks today and making bank with green and yellow bread to celebrate today's BCS Championship game in Arizona. Cascade Baking Company say's they'll make 100 loaves for U of O fans today. GO DUCKS!

Here's a video of some of the bakers cooking up their special bread for the game!

Cascade Baking Company makes non-alien like looking bread too (unlike the green and yellow bread in the photos above.) They make some wonderful artisan breads. One loaf is made with wheat grown in the Willamette Valley grown at Stalford Seed Farmers in Tangent.

It's an oddity that the wet Willamette Valley is able to grow wheat for bread flour, Stalford Seed Farms in one of the first farms to grow this special bread wheat able to withstand the wet. It's been boon for bakers who want to bypass commodity wheat and keep the "LOCAL" label on their bread.

The wheat is milled in Brownsville, Oregon and is courser than other wheat.

2010-11-19T15:17:00.001-08:00

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Pie

Today, November 19th, marks the anniversary of the premier of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest film by brilliant director Milos Forman.

I just moved to Salem, Oregon, a few hours away from Ken Kesey's hometown of Springfield, Oregon. Salem is also home to the Oregon State Mental Hospital where they filmed the classic flick back in the 70'.

Interestingly, Salem just unveiled the new Oregon State Mental hospital to replace the 127-year old hospital where the film was set. It's a far cry from how the film portrays the hospital. It's a state-of-the-art space where patients will receive some of the best treatment available.

One night after watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I decided to bake a pie in honor of the movie.. and what did I use as main ingredients?... duh, nuts and banannas!

Here's my rough recipe:

I heated up sugar, carmelizing it, then added butter, chocolate chips, a bit of cinnamon and cardamom and poured the mixture over whole walnuts, which gave them a toffee-like flavor.

I chopped up the toffee-coated walnuts and put them on the bottom of a pie crust and then added ripe banannas.

I made a quick custard with eggs, sugar, butter, vanilla and milk and poured it over the top of the pie then sprinkled cinnamon over the top.

When I make this pie again, I plan to use milk from the Springfield Creamery, the creamery that produces Nancy's Yogurts, and is Kesey's original dairy run by Ken Kesey's older brother Chuck, his wife Sue and their son Kit and daughter Sheryl. Read this Seattle Times article Counter Culture about the different lives Ken and Chuck lived and the Springfield Dairy.

Then I cooked the pie until the banannas were soft and pie crust brown.

2010-10-22T17:04:00.000-07:00

Windfall of Apples

This fall, my brother Brig took it upon himself to keep as many Southern Idaho apples from rotting on the ground as is humanly possible. He enlisted his whole family as apple-picking agents and also recruited me to join his special forces!

He and his wife Missy loaded their family in the van, picked up me and mom, and drove through the back roads of Idaho looking for neglected apple trees for apple picking. My brother's neighbor had built an apple cider press and a few families in his neighborhood had planned to get together and press cider.

It's amazing how many apples go to waste. Delicious, wild apples from trees that are neglected. Many people just get busy and don't take the time to pick their apples. Perhaps year after year they just get tired of picking and making oddles of apple products with their harvest, so trees go neglected.

But there's something a little sad to me about seeing rotting apples on the ground when there are people who go hungry and when it costs a few bucks a pound to buy apples in the store.

Here's my sister-in-law, Missy, standing by some waxy looking conventional apples.

So, here was Brig's strategy: 1) FIND a tree that's bulging with apples (with apples littering the ground near the trunk) 2) KNOCK on the door of the closest neighboring home. 3) ASK politely to pick the apples, offering the landowner a bushel.

I'm taking this photo from inside the van where we wait to see if we can descend on this guy's trees like a swarm of hungry locusts. Brig is talking to a friendly farmer who said, "sure, take as many as you want, just leave me a bag on my front porch!"

My brother and mother decided to be the tree climbers. It was pretty great to see my 60-something year old mom high in a tree.

Missy is reaching up to pick a lovely apple!

My nephew Dylan has no fear, he was trying to get as high up in the tree as possible. He's part monkey, like this monkey guy.

We collected about 3 large rectangular tubs full of apples, loaded them in the back, then headed home to where we'd press the apples into cider!

We took off the leaves and washed the apples.

This cute guy is my boyfriend Andrew (the one in the background, not the chicken). When Andrew was not distracted by the novelty of feeding Brig's dancing chickens out of his hand, he was helping turn the wheel that pressed the apples into cider!

Pressing cider is a very manly activity!

My sister Cara is helping the kids throw the apples into a hand-cranked grinder.

So what you do, is throw the apples in a little opening in the press that has a nobbly wheel inside, that turns the apples into pulp.

My favorite part of the press is this wonderfully sweet foam!!

What is left after you press out the juice!

This is Brig holding up fresh beer, er, I mean cider. YUM!

2010-06-18T21:32:00.000-07:00

The Skinny on Real Milk
Oregon dairyman sells cow shares in order to give customers raw milk

Two guys who know cows: Mike Duggan (on the left) raises cattle on 100 percent grass for beef on 200 acres at D&D Ranch in Terrabonne, a beautiful place close to Smith Rock State Park near Bend, Oregon. Beside him stands Bill Sieburg, the dairyman from Central Oregon Jersey Farm in La Pine who sells cow shares in order to offer locals raw, unpasteurized milk.

A cow looks up from grazing on grass near Mike Duggan's farm, with a view of Smith Rock in the background.

(Mike also sells this yummy honey produced by bees on his ranch.)

I spent a week in Bend, Oregon searching for "real" food and discovered what I think is one of the region's food gems: "real" milk. Pasture-fed, unprocessed and full-fat milk produced by purebred jersey cows from Central Oregon Jersey Farm. Billy Sieburg, the dairyman there, sells milk to people who come to the farm in La Pine and delivers the milk to CSA's in Redmond and Bend. I met Billy at the Agricultural Connections CSA created by Andrew Adams (in photo below:)

Andrew, above, sells produces and milk from the Bend CSA he created, that offers Bend locals food from a 100-mile radius from the West, down in the Willamette Valley all the way to Madras in the Northeast.

In Oregon it's illegal to sell raw milk, (the FDA is concerned about the risk of the milk carrying pathogens that cause disease) so the only way you can get it is to buy a cow and drink milk your cow produces. That's why the farmers at Central Oregon Jersey's Farm sells cow shares, enabling consumers to BUY A COW on their farm, allowing them to own a share of the herd.

Most commercial milk comes from breeds of modern holsteins bred so that they can produce three times as much milk as the old-fashioned cows. Basically, we've created a kind of Franken-cow that produces lots more milk to keep up with our consumption. But the milk is lower quality and the cows also tend to get sicker more easily (with mastititis, etc.)

Sieburg says he sells his buttery milk to people who are lactose intolerant. He says he's found that these folks can tolerate raw milk. He's a part of a movement that try to bring "real milk" back to the people. For more info, visit this Website dedicated to education about real milk. Local Bend or La Pine residents can contact Billy Sieburg at (541) 420-9599 or
email hims at cojerseyfarm@live.com
.
If you look closely at Sieberg's milk, you can see that a third of it is CREAM. YUM! Sign me up! One guy at the CSA where it was sold said it tastes like honey has been whipped into it.

There's a debate about the health of pasteurized verses unpasteurized milk, but some studies have linked pasteurized milk with lactose intolerance, allergies, asthma, frequent ear infections, gastro-Intestinal problems, diabetes, auto-Immune disease, attention deficit disorder and constipation, among other problems.

I'm a fan of raw milk. I've been off commercial cow's milk for ten years when I discovered I had a life-long allergy to milk, cheese and dairy products (something I'd suffered from since I was a child). The allergy caused me to feel like I had a constant sinus infection and after eating lots of milk, I'd even get vertigo. I now only eat goat's milk and sheep's milk and cheese or yogurt and feel great! But I have yet to try unpasteurized cow's milk myself. I'll have to try it and report back.

2010-05-31T22:43:00.000-07:00

It's Fennel and High School Prom Season
Go ahead, make their day with a bouquet of fennel... or just make a salad with it :)

Will you be my date for the prom?? Ross Carrick, all dressed up for senior prom, contemplates giving his date a handful of pretty fennel stalks with feathery fronds. Instead Ross gave the fennel back to me and I made an egg salad with it! Fennel season corresponds with high school graduation. For a grad picnic, consider make egg salad using fennel instead of celery.

CELERY IS BORING- TRY FENNEL INSTEAD! I love how fresh fennel is... it imparts a slight licorice taste to things, but is so subtle, you can use it in place of celery.

You can eat every part of the fennel plant from the bulbous bottom, to the stalks to the feathery fronds.

Here's a recipe for fennel egg salad from Epicurious.com. I left out the Dijon mustard... I wanted to taste mostly the fennel.

8 large eggs
1 garlic clove
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/2 fennel bulb, finely chopped (1 cup), plus 1 tablespoon finely chopped fronds

Preparation:
Cover eggs with cold water in a medium saucepan. Cook eggs, uncovered, at a gentle boil 10 minutes. Pour off hot water. Shake pan gently so eggs bump one another (to crack shells). Run cold water into pan to stop cooking. Let eggs stand in cold water 15 minutes, adding more water to keep cold.

Mince and mash garlic to a paste with a pinch of salt. Whisk together with mayonnaise, lemon juice, zest, mustard, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon pepper.

Chop eggs and stir into dressing with fennel and fronds.

2010-05-10T15:12:00.001-07:00

A Sybaris Spring
What Chef Matt Bennett is Cooking up this Spring on 1st Ave in Albany, Oregon

Warm salad of fried razor clams, pickled onion, grilled asparagus and Brindisi cheese stuffed piquillo peppers on spinach and arugula with lemon-chive dressing.

Guy Savoy artichoke soup with Oregon truffles and Vella Dry Jack cheese.

Super smooth chocolate cream pie made with coconut cream and dark artisan chocolate (a favorite for me, since I'm allergic to cow's milk!).

2010-05-02T11:10:00.001-07:00

The Culinary Heart of Albany, Oregon
Operation Sybaris is a family and community affair where locavores can discover the true taste of Willamette Valley

It’s 1 p.m., and Matt Bennett, Chef and co-owner of Sybaris restaurant on 1st street in Albany, has spent all morning meticulously stuffing beef and lamb into casings to make handmade sausage.

When I arrive in the afternoon, he's onto other tasks in the kitchen: pureeing asparagus for crab, asparagus ravioli. A pot of chicken stock and spring artichokes simmers on the stove. The smell of baking focaccia rises from the oven. Matt's caramelizing turbinado sugar in one pan, then adds heavy cream and salt, lowers the temp. and spoons up a glob of hard stringy caramel, which will slowly melt again into a sweet soup of amber cream whose next incarnation will be caramel sorbet. Matt Bennett is a chef that takes his time when cooking; he tends to his food like a doting father would care for a child.

Matt holding his daughter in the kitchen, with Mom, Janel, looking on.

Matt lifts the lid to a pot filled with broth and wedges of artichokes. He fills a pitcher with the broth, reaches into a brown paper bag full of white Oregon truffles, throws a few into the pitcher, then mixes the whole thing in a blender. He then pours it into a sieve and slowly stirs the soft green stuff with a wooden spoon until what remains is artichoke truffle soup as smooth as cream. The smells coming out of this kitchen are enough to make anyone want to stick around all day.

Matt spends all afternoon going back and forth between tasks, mixing here, blending there. His wife Janel shows up with their two daughters.

Someone calls on the phone and Matt laughs, telling me his dishwashers are on their way over-- high school seniors Jacob Garcia and Steven Hartman, who have asked Matt's permission to eat one of the ghost peppers he’s got on hand, one he uses to spice up an entire vat of sauce. But the boys plan to split the chili and down it raw. Why? “because it’s boring in Albany, and there's nothing else to do,” says Steven.

Steven, one of the dishwashers at Sybaris who decided spontaneously to show up and eat a ghost pepper after school one day.

There are many touches of family and community here: you can taste it in Matt's dishes, prepared with local produce from artisans and farmer friends at places like Spring Hill Organic Farm just over the bridge a block away. He’s an innovative chef who offers a completely different menu every month, based on what's in season. Your server might be Matt's wife, co-owner Janel Bennett.

Or you may hear echos of little girl footsteps in the restaurant from when Matt's daughters arrived earlier to visit Dad while he cooked.

Matt's family: Wife Janel and daughters sit together at Sybaris.

A couple share a glass of wine while waiting to be seated.

2010-04-24T10:01:00.000-07:00

TEN WAYS to Eat Your Way Home
For those displaced by job loss, get rooted again with these ideas from wildcrafting to cooking with rhubarb:

One of the fallouts of this economic recession-- I'm discovering first-hand-- is a sense of displacement. Job loss means redefining how an occupation plays into your sense of belonging to a place. Job loss can also mean relocation: going back to a place you came from, or moving where there's better work opportunities.

I long for that rooted sense of belonging I felt as a child in my hometown in Southeastern Idaho. A place I lived for 13 years surrounded by family, the Snake river stocked with rainbow trout and pine forests where morel mushrooms grew wild alongside wildflowers.

This is the creek where I grew up. As kids, we'd put buckets under the bank and stomped on it to catch minnows. We also foraged for wild mint, then mom helped us brew it with local Miller honey.

I've decided to explore my sense of place through food and food rituals that make me feel at home. Food is literally attached to the land. In my hometown of Idaho, the staple potato lives burrowed like a mole in the dark soil. My life was Intertwined with Idaho Potato Vines in a similar way as my folklorist friend Rhonda Walker (who writes about it for Foodlore Library.) Morel mushrooms sprung like Sego lilies from the forest. As a family, my mom took us wild huckleberry foraging--to comb the same bushes the bears had. Here's a good source for wild huckleberries.

My sister has an enormous raspberry patch she turns her kids loose in every year:

My father smoked fish he caught and we'd typically have wild game for dinner from one of his hunting forays. Food is even more attached to the land than we, as people, are. So when we eat locally, I think it helps us feel at home in new places.

For those who are homesick for a sense of home, or in need of grounding, I recommend these things:

1) COLLECT

Find a country road by where you live, or check out where your city zones for chickens and spend some time with feathered friends and take home a dozen eggs.

2) FISH

Pull something slick and silver from a river near where you live. If you can keep it, fry it up with olive oil and lemon. Or, if you don't have time to do justice to the beautiful fish, leave it to Chef Jesse at Sundance's Tree Room. He pan-sears it with olive oil skin-side down, so the skin is crispy, as if cooked around a fire. The Utah trout come with buckwheat cavatelli, vegetable bolognese and celery root puree.

3) CREATE

Make something that reminds you of home. For me, it's this rhubard crunch recipe my mother made in the spring. Here's a recipe and more about her rhubarb crunch.

4) GROW

It doesn't take a grand effort to start a garden. One year, I didn't have a backyard, so I found a whiskey barrel, bought some soil, tomato plants and herbs and created a low-maintenance container garden that was ripe with cherry tomatoes, rosemary, basil and sage all summer. (I used organic compost and a foliar spray with seaweed.)Create your own green revolution by turning up a patch of your well-manicured lawn and "eat your view." Check out Roger Doiron's Kitchen Gardners site or follow his Twitter.

5) PUT OUT GOOD VIBES

Sing to your container garden. Dance barefoot around your plants under a full moon(go ahead and howl too). Throw this little "corn dolly" in with your container of seeds. These metaphysical rituals are part of what's called biodynamics-- an acknowledgement that certain subtle and inexplicable forces (like music, lunar cycles, energy) DO influence your garden. Harry at Sunbow Farms is big on biodynamics. Go ahead, what can it hurt anyway?

6) UNEARTH

7) FORAGE

This is watercress from Moab, Utah. There are many edible plants in the forests. Find out how to identify them and go foraging! Here's a great place in Oregon to learn how to wildcraft.

8) CONNECT (with growers and artisans)

(Here's a beekeeper that lives in Boulder, Utah.)

One of the first things I do when I move to a new place is to get to know the people who grow and produce my food. There's nothing like it to help you feel connected to a place. Find your local farmer's market. Don't just buy the food, ask questions of the farmer or artisan. For the goat cheesemaker (check out Alsea Acres-- amazing cheese!): "what do your goats eat and do they have names?" For the beekeeper, "Where do you place your hives?" For the baker: "Where did you learn this recipe?" For the farmer: "Do you use organic compost?" or "Where do get your seeds?"

9) EAT WITH LOVED ONES

Photo above shows one of my favorite places to eat, around my brother's table. He's got 5 boys and he and his wife set the table and serve dinner- almost without fail- every night. Nothing like eating with loved ones on a regular basis to help you feel grounded.

10) STORE

August and September don't feel the same without being somehow involved in canning food, whether it's combing fruit trees or grape vines, washing produce or bottles, or helping with a pressure cooker. No better way to remember summer than to can the fruits of your garden and eating them all winter long. Find someone who needs help canning, you'll wind up going home with some food storage of your own. Here's a great primer on canning.

2010-02-12T13:11:00.000-08:00

Beet Your Heart Out!!

Happy V' Day! I love beets, they are deep red and round and I found one that was shaped like a heart, so I did a little sculpting with my knife and here's what happened. I wrapped these up in tinfoil, added olive oil and fresh ground sea salt and then popped them in the oven. I'm still deciding which gentleman friend of mine will appreciate such a healthy V' Day treat.

2009-12-20T21:12:00.000-08:00

Foodbuzz 24, 24, 24:

'Tis the Season to be Baking!
Oh Come All Ye Faithful Pie Eaters to My Christmas Pie-baking Marathon

(Yes, I'm wearing a sprig of mistletoe in my hair, enabling me to kiss anyone within close proximity. I'm also wearing my Grandmother La June's apron to channel her baking prowess. Granny was a gourmet cook.)

(Blog photos taken by Casey Cranor, myself, Toni Anderson and Alan Murray)

To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose in the kitchen.... a time to don an apron, a time to mix and a time to separate eggs, a time to cast away that pudding which does not set up and a time to wait for what's in the oven to rise, sweeten and turn toasty brown.

Christmas is my season to bake, and this year, a friend and I met to bake pies for six people we care about. What follows are photos of our pie-baking marathon, spanning the creation of six pies in two kitchens, causing two burns and many splotches of chocolate and squash batter down my apron and on the counter, and the transforming of humble pies into something quite unusual and tasty.

Here's Casey Cranor, who took all the photos in Toni's Kitchen and who was rewarded with a pie and a kiss by Toni.(Disclaimer: No men were harmed in the making of this blog post... in fact two of my ex-boyfriends were kissed by Toni during this pie-baking marathon. It IS mistletoe season afterall, and Casey was asking for it!)

Toni Anderson and I have been culinary conspirators for years.

We have the kind of kitchen rapport that sisters share. The cooking always involves some kind of experimentation and typically winds up with one (usually me) dropping something down my apron and pants and onto the floor and Toni cleaning it up. What a great friend to have!!

After we've turned the kitchen into a disaster, one or both of us invariably bursts into spontaneous dance.

Creaming sugar and butter adding baking soda, flour and eggs, then exotic spices and oils sets off a chain reaction... crazy dance moves!

It helps to put on a little Ray Lamontayne.

WHERE TO BEGIN?
We started by making dough. I'm not an avid pie baker. It's taken me time to get the knack of getting the dough just right. The secret: don't over-handle, careful with the water and flour and feel free to use LARD.

RECIPE:
Pie Crust

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, plus extra for rolling
1/2 cup unsalted butter, very-cold, cut into 1/2 inch cubes and 1/2 cup lard (use all butter if you prefer.)
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
4 to 8 Tbsp ice water (go easy, mixture should be flaky, not doughy)

Couldn't find a pastry blender and this potato masher didn't work so well. I resorted to a fork.

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PIE #1: Taste of Oregon Blackberry and Dark Chocolate Pie FOR: Casey Cranor

When Casey and I first met, he brought me the gift of a French rolling pin. Who does that on a first date? We got to know each other in Oregon while traipsing through prickly brambles cramming fat blackberries into our mouths and wandering along the coast snacking on handfuls of smoked Salmon. I made him this pie to say thanks for your friendship.

Break pieces of your favorite chocolate and scatter them into an uncooked crust. Take 1cup of blackberries, add about 1/4 cup water with 3 T cornstarch mixed in. Add honey or sugar to sweeten to taste. Mash berries and boil till thick.

Take 1 cup of whole berries and mash slightly over top of chocolate.
Pour on the hot blackberry sauce. Cook at 425 degrees till crust browns.

Checking the Pies!

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PIE #2: "Going Bananas Over You" Banana Dream Marshmallow Chocolate Chunk Pie
FOR: Aaron (brother) and his favorite girl, Marlena

Marlena and Aaron, I can't fail to mention, yet again, how great my match-making prowess is. I set these two up a year ago and they have been inseperable every since. They're even planning to wed next year. I used fluffy marshmallows because when you're in love, it can feel like you're floating on a cloud; it's the sweetest feeling.

This pie is super sweet too, kind of like Marlena's nicknames for Aaron: Skoy Toy, A-Ron, Hottie Pants and Babe. This pie has two comfort food flavors: melted marshmallows and some of the first foods you eat as a baby, bananas and milk. How could this pie not make you go "Ga Ga!"

RECIPE:

Adapted from Cooks.com

2 tbsp. unsalted butter
4 tbsp. cornstarch
1 1/2 c milk, scalded
1 c. sugar
4 egg yolks, beaten
4 lg. bananas, sliced
8-12 quartered marshmallows (I'd recommend using less)

You can use a double boiler for this, but I didn't hassle with that... just make sure you stir constantly.
Melt the butter and add cornstarch in water mixture.. Stir in cornstarch. Slowly stir in the hot milk, then add sugar. Cook, stirring frequently for 20 minutes or until thickened.
Stir a small amount of the hot custard into the egg yolks.

Add the 12 quartered marshmallows (again, I'd use less, it's super sweet with 12) to the hot custard. Cook for 2 minutes more. Remove the pan from the heat. Arrange the bananas in the bottom of the pie shell. Pour the hot custard over the bananas. Bake 10 to 15 minutes or until the custard is set. Cool, and chill until serving. Enjoy!

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PIE #3: Don't Squash Peace Pie
FOR: Paul Rawlins, friend, cook, musician, writer, peace pie activist.

Paul admits he's somewhat of a pacifist. Here's his philosophy, "Make pie, not war." Or: "I believe if people cuddled more, they'd kill less."

Paul and I have been friends for at least five years. We've cooked many meals together, followed by hearty singing while he played the guitar and sometimes dancing. Paul's grandma Velma didn't grow pumpkins in her garden, so when Thanksgiving rolled around, she baked pie with whatever squash was on hand over-wintering in the basement. Velma was short, about 5-foot, and so her dutiful and loving husband Owen built the countertops and kitchen sink low so she wouldn't have to strain her back when cooking and cleaning. Owen was a dairy farmer in Cache Valley. For the holidays, Paul recalls eating his granny's squash pie. I wanted to bring him back to those good memories.

RECIPE:
Ingredients:
From Southern Cooking, About.com

1 unbaked and chilled 9-inch pie shell
1 large butternut squash, cooked and pureed, about 1 1/2 cups pureed squash
1 cup light brown sugar, firmly packed
3 large eggs
3/4 cup evaporated milk or half and half
1 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon melted butter
1 teaspoon vanilla

Preparation:

To cook squash:
Cut the squash in half lengthwise; remove stem and scoop out the seeds. Place the squash, cut side down, on a foil-lined oiled baking pan; add about 1/2 cup of water to the pan. Cover loosely with foil and bake at 400° for 45 to 55 minutes, or until the squash is tender and can be easily pierced with a fork. Let cool completely then peel and mash or puree the squash or put it through a food mill. Measure 1 1/2 cups of the squash and set aside.

Cool oven to 350 degrees.

In a mixing bowl with electric mixer, beat the squash with the brown sugar. Add eggs, evaporated milk, spices salt, flour, butter, and vanilla.

This squash pie batter is smiling! And it has a nutmeg beard!!

Beat until well blended. Pour the filling into the chilled pie and place on the center oven rack. Bake for 45 to 55 minutes, or until set. Serve with a dollop of whipped topping.

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PIE #4: Great Outdoors Flaming Shmore Chocolate Pudding Pie
FOR: Wilderness Lover and Mother, Ann Gates Weaver

Ann is completely in her element with blowtorch in hand roasting marshmallows on the top of this pie I made for her to remember the good old days when she could go camping whenever she wanted. Now she has two young children and it's more difficult to get away. Here we are in her parent's front yard, but for a moment, we're transported to the wilderness and forget about the awful inversion hanging over Salt Lake City.

I made this pie to remind her of camping in the wilderness- a place where, like me, she feels most at home.

I used a few dark chocolate bars of Endangered Species chocolate to make this. This is one of my favorite pudding pie recipes, I've made this a dozen times.

I highly recommend using bars of Amano Artisan Chocolate in your pudding pie. For Thanksgiving, I made this recipe with $20 of Amano chocolate from the Ocamare valley in Venezuala. The pie had a reddish brown hue and the taste was fruity, exotic, earthy and what real chocolate was meant to taste like. I dream about this pie.

Be sure to stir constantly or your pudding will get lumpy.

RECIPE:
Black-Bottom Chocolate Pie
Bon Appétit

Filling (chocolate pudding)
2/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup cornstarch
2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
Pinch of salt
6 large egg yolks
2 cups low-fat (1%) milk
6 ounces of favorite bitterweet chocolate ( I used Endangered Species Chocolate. I also recommend AMANO artisan chocolate.)
1 tablespoon dark rum
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For Filling:
Whisk first 4 ingredients in heavy medium saucepan to blend. Whisk in egg yolks to form thick paste. Gradually whisk in milk, then cream. Whisk over medium-high heat until mixture thickens and boils 1 minute. Remove from heat. Add chocolate and whisk until smooth. Whisk in rum and vanilla. Cool 5 minutes, whisking occasionally. Transfer filling to frozen crust. Chill until cold, at least 2 hours and up to 1 day.

Add crushed graham crackers to the top of this chocolate pudding cake, toast them then cover in marshmallows and toast the marshmallows until golden brown.

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PIE #5: Toni's Sista's Sour Cream Blueberry Birthday Cheesecake
FOR: Toni's sister Robyn

Toni made this cheescake for her sister Robyn's birthday. Toni is the youngest of six sisters. Her oldest sis is 14 years her senior. Robyn has a generous spirit and Toni says is the kind of sister who can always be counted on to come to her aid when she's in need. The two love to sing Karaoke together and somedays even stay up till the wee hours of the morning singing their hearts out to their favorite tunes such as Cindy Lauper's Time after Time.

RECIPE:
Adapted from Epicurious.com

Crust
1 3/4 cups graham cracker crumbs (about 12 whole graham crackers)
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted

Filling
2 (8-ounce) packages cream cheese, room temperature
2/3 cup plus 3 tablespoons sugar
2 large eggs
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice juice
1 tablespoon grated lemon peel

1 16-ounce container sour cream

Preparation

For crust:
Preheat oven to 350°F. Wrap 3 layers of foil around outside of 8- to 8 1/2-inch-diameter springform pan with 3-inch-high sides. Butter pan. Stir first 3 ingredients to blend in medium bowl. Mix in butter until moistened. Press crumb mixture evenly onto bottom and 1 1/2 inches up sides of prepared pan. Bake just until set, about 5 minutes. Cool completely. Maintain oven temperature.

For filling:
Place cream cheese, 2/3 cup sugar, eggs, lemon juice, and lemon peel in processor; blend well.

Spoon custard into crust; smooth top. Carefully spoon filling over. Set cheesecake in large baking pan. Add enough hot water to baking pan to come 1 inch up sides of cheesecake pan. Bake until almost set but not puffed and center moves slightly when pan is gently shaken, about 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, stir sour cream and remaining 3 tablespoons sugar in medium bowl to blend.

Carefully spoon sour cream mixture over hot cheesecake; smooth top. Bake until topping sets, about 10 minutes. Cool 10 minutes. Run knife around sides of pan to loosen. Cool cheesecake completely. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Add blueberries or other fruit when the cheesecake is completely cooled.

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PIE #6: Gift of the Magpie Quince Apple Pie
FOR: Amy (My sister), Chuck and her kids

Amy's my older sister, just a year and a month older than me, so we've been through a lot together. Christmas always brings back childhood memories of making snow angels together, wearing matching robin-egg blue down parkas to walk in sub-zero temps to the school bus, and watching Amy pull on 3 pairs of socks and stuff my Dad's old iceskates with tissue paper so she could skate like an Olympic star on the frozen puddle in our yard. I rememeber coming in from the cold to fresh oven cookies, rosettes and cream-filled sandbuckles and then pulling on our matching flannel nighties and watching them make sparks in the dark of our room because we were too poor to buy fabric softner.

I feel like I'm a kid again when I'm around Amy and her beautiful, rambunctious kids.

I love you Amy! I made her this pie because she and her family are moving to Pennsylvania in three days.
"When will you come back?" I asked her today.
"Not until a funeral" she said. My sister is very frugal and so I half-believe her, but hope she's really kidding.
"We'll come back for a funeral only if we have frequent flyer miles," Chimed in her husband with a smile.

When I delivered the pie to Amy and her family, I told the kids a story about the pie. I like to make up stories to tell my nieces and nephews. Here's the story:

THE GIFT OF THE MAGPIE

Once upon a time there was a mother who had lost her husband. She had two young children and no money. She was very poor and very sad because Christmas was coming and she didn't know what she would give to her children. She wanted so much to bake something delicious for them. One night, when her children were fast asleep, she went outside in the front yard because she couldn't sleep. She looked up and saw three beautiful stars shining in a row above her head.

She made a wish on those stars; a wish that she could find a way to give her children something good for Christmas.

The she went back to bed and fell right asleep. When she woke the next morning, she heard an unusual tapping sound outside. Was it someone at her door? She listened again. Who was there? Maybe it was just the bill collector she couldn't pay, she said to herself, and put her head back down on the pillow. She closed her eyes and heard the tapping again, but this time, she realized it was at the window. She jumped out of bed and went to her window, pulling up the blinds. Outside she saw a bird, perched on her windowsill with a piece of fruit in her beak. The bird flew away, leaving the fruit behind. It came again, bringing back another piece.

The bird had given her two pieces of fruit that looked like fat round pears. These fruit were called quince. The mother was so happy. She thought: "Now I can make a pie out of this fruit." Later that day, while she was in the backyard, she looked on the ground and saw three yellow apples that had fallen off the neighbor's tree. She picked them up and put them with the quince.

The she went to the basement, where she had a very meager food storage and found some flour and a large container of dark brown honey that was given to her more than 20 years ago.

The honey had caramelized, but she knew that honey was still good after many years, so she could use it to make her pie. So she stayed up late that night, cooking a pie that her children would never forget.

That Christmas, when her children woke up in the morning, they woke to the smell of apple quince pie: a Gift from the Magpie to their mother. They each happily took a slice of gooey rich pie and gave their mother a kiss. Since that Christmas, though their mother had found a job and could afford gifts, every year they made the same apple quince pie to remember the Gift of the Magpie. THE END.

My nephews and nieces loved it. "Is that a true story?" They asked me with wide-eyes. "Yes," I said. "Now have a slice of pie."

(Photo by Alan Murray)

RECIPE:
Adapted from All Recipes.com

Ingredients

Two quince, peeled, cored and sliced
1/2 cup honey
1 1/2 cups water
1 pinch salt

1 recipe pastry for a 9 inch double crust pie
5 golden delicious apples
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons butter

(I cut the sugar by 1/4 cup, added apples and then didn't put a top crust on it. I might try it with the top crust next time. It looks a little gooey without it.)

Directions

Combine the sliced quince, honey, water, and a pinch of salt in a pan (you should have about nine cups of sliced fruit). Cover the pan and bring it to a boil. Reduce the heat to very low. Simmer, covered, until the fruit is tender, about 8 minutes, stirring carefully once or twice to avoid breaking the fruit.
Put a strainer over a saucepan and pour the cooked quince into a strainer, reserving the cooking liquid. Set the quince aside to cool.

Roll out the pastry and line a 9 inch pie plate. Refrigerate the dough while you prepare the filling.
Combine the white sugar, cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and flour in a small bowl and mix well. Add the sugar mixture and the butter to the reserved quince cooking liquid and bring it to a boil. Reduce the heat and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens, about 1 to 2 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and allow the sauce to cool.

Fill the pastry shell with the 5 apples cut up and peeled. Add the cooked quince then cover with the sauce.

Place a sheet pan on the lowest rack of the oven. Add the top crust, crimping the edge to seal. Cut vents or prick the crust with a fork to allow steam to escape.

Put the pie on the preheated sheet pan and immediately reduce the oven temperature to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C). Bake until the edges of the crust are golden brown, about 25 minutes. Reduce the heat to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C) and bake until the juices are bubbling and the crust is brown, about 45 minutes more.

On my Christmas wish list for 2010: "Chase Me and Kiss Me in a Wild Huckleberry Patch Amano Chocolate Pie Sprinkled with Fresh-picked Island Park Huckleberries"

BAKE A PIE TODAY FOR SOMEBODY YOU LOVE! MERRY CHRISTMAS!!
P.S. Thank you to the movie, Waitress, for inspiring me to give my pies such wacky names.

2009-11-14T12:20:00.000-08:00

Living the Cowboy Way

Do you know where your meat comes from? This summer, I had the opportunity to spend a week on a working cattle ranch with an old high school friend and her family. They manage the 6-C Ranch in Gold Creek, Montana.

Before most cows get to feedlots, some live a pretty idyllic life in beautiful places like this cattle ranch that I write about. And in the case of Kim Summer's cows, they get well taken care of.

Here's a story I wrote about it on my sister food story site called Foodlore Library. Check out Living The Cowboy Way. Most of the photos were taken by one of my best high school buddies, Kim's talented wife, Penny Summers. Enjoy!

2009-10-21T20:45:00.000-07:00

Eating [in] the Desert
Grand moments in Southern Utah baking and hiking

There's nothing to do in this town except two of my favorite things to do: cook and hike. My roommate and I have taken up both with a vengenence.

Here's a video of my roommate trying to make peanut butter pudding, but instead creating an alien species.

WE HIKE IN SEARCH OF INDIGENOUS FOODS

Here's the location of the pricky pears we collected.

Yes, I will pluck this prickly pear, boil it, strain it and make a delicious syrup to pour over ice cream.

Yes, these are prickly pear hair-proof skiing gloves. We wore them after learning the hard way (see below: Shannon tried to get the prickly pear hairs out of her fingers.)

After you boil the prickly pear fruit, you strain it. The green sloppy pepper- colored stuff with seeds is what's left. And then there's the gold... or the pretty prickly pear juice. To get the syrup you boil it down with a cup of sugar, teaspoon of cornstarch and the juice of one lemon.

WE DRIVE AROUND THE DESERT IN THIS CRAZY ORANGE VW BUG

My Roommate and I have nothing to dress-up for, so we dress-up for the lizards. Here's Shannon of Escalante Gables and her kindred spirit Willow.

WE DO ADVANCED YOGA POSES ON ROCK FORMATIONS

WE COOK SOME MORE

Here's Shannon with a berry cobbler and apple pie.

We've started up a bi-weekly dinner group. We've got our own small town version of Top Chef going on.

WE CHARM OUR GUESTS WITH FOOD

Our first dinner was squash and pumpkin soup two ways. I cooked up an acorn and butternut squash and Shannon cooked up a pie pumpkin.

I sauteed a whole onion and garlic in butter and olive oil, along with a few serrano peppers. I added chicken stock and then put it all in a blender till smooth then put it back on the stove and added butter, cream, a little brown sugar, salt and let it simmer.

Mine was smooth like baby food and rich with cream and butter. "like what I'd expect my grandma to make," said Jessie.

Mine was made with chicken fat. Shannon's soup was vegetarian and had more kick, more color and texture. Our guests liked both (smart dinner guests) for different reasons.

For dessert, we made this chocolate pecan pie with dark chocolate, rum, and chopped pecans. Recipe on its way.

Last week, we took the CURRY CHALLENGE, making curry two different ways. I made red curry and she green. Mine had carrots, cashews, potatoes and garlic.

Goodbye!

2009-09-17T23:49:00.000-07:00

Foodlore from the Potato Man from Joseph, Oregon
He says Julia Child recognized his spuds at Higgins in Portland

I took this video this summer at the Farmer's Market in Portland, Oregon.

2009-09-11T15:30:00.001-07:00

Food Adventures
First Stop: Seattle

A few weeks ago, I packed up and headed out to do some traveling after I lost my job. First stop was Seattle, to a street festival in Poulsbo and the Pike Place Market with my friend Christian. It runs along the waterfront and is one of the longest continuously-run farmer's markets in the U.S.

At this market, fishmongers cry their wares in the traditional folksy sing-song style... and throw crustacious creatures like you'd expect a quarterback to throw a football. It works! The place has great fish, but the performance is just as important to business!

My friend Christian, who I hung out with, is a former Yugoslavian rockstar who played drums in a band called Kukuspit . Christian suffered a stroke a few years ago and now uses a cane to help him keep balance.

Here's Christian, back in the day, as the Bad-A prodigal son living the high life in Bratislava and playing in the band.

Christian's got a Frankensteinian scar that runs down the middle of his skull to the base of his neck. The stroke made it difficult for him to use the left side of his body. He says he's almost always dizzy as well. This guy has more tenacity than most people I know. He could have used his disability as an excuse to lounge around on his mother's couch, but Christian quickly got a job to rehabilitate, then less than a year later, chose to leave his family and move across the country without a job, just to have his independence. He landed a job shortly after and now get's along pretty well- except sometimes when he eats soup (read on.)

When I arrived at his apartment by the Navy shipyards in Bremerton, I was terrified by something bizarre I spyed on the ceiling. It felt as though I had landed in a crime scene: the ceiling looked like it was splattered with blood and guts.

"Who did you kill?" I asked him.
"It's soup." he said.

It was gross: little bits of red stuff resembling tiny pieces of mutilated flesh and blood from a murder scene hung dried from his ceiling and the top of his wall.

Like a detective, I inspected further and saw something that looked like celery and was reassured.

Christian's left hand is a little shaky since the stroke. He told me he had sat down to microwave some dried soup and his hand did some little post-stroke trick on him, catapulting the soup out of his bum hand and all over: onto the wall and ceiling. Needless to say, I insisted on helping remove the offending soup by scrubbing his ceiling.

That evening we went driving and stopped at a Norwegian town called Poulsbo. As luck would have it, it was that time of year when the Viking Festival was going on, a Scandinavian street fair. We stopped and wandered around.

There really could be no better way to start my trip than by a neighborhood street fair that sold food reminding me of my Norwegian heritage.

My grandmother used to make rosettes and sandbuckles for Christmas and my family makes Lefse and meatballs to celebrate our heritage during holidays.

We stopped by the Polsbo Bakery, famous for Poulsbo bread. I bought very yummy lefse, which is a flat potato pancake Scandinavians eat. They spread things on it or use it to wrap up meatballs.

Rosettes. They are much better when fresh from the fryer.

Some of the riffraff at the fair.

And look it's the Viking Days Royalty.

When the sun went down, the party just started. We all rocked out in the street with a live band.

2009-09-11T13:43:00.001-07:00

DAY TWO: Downtown Seattle
A pair of firsts: Lychee and cow tongue

The next day we went to Seattle. It was my first time to the city and I highly recommend having the ferry do the introductions. There's something soo delicious about approaching a new city by boat.

It was an untypically sunny day in Seattle and we planned to spend the day at the Pike Place Market and downtown.

Pike Place Market made me giddy. It's a market and street baazar almost a block long. Women selling flowers, rows and rows of fresh produce, just-pulled-from-the ocean fish and lots of artisan foods, art and other wares. If this isn't a foodie's dream come true, I don't know what is. I bought some smoked salmon and Christian and I ate it outside.

I loved this board above the fishmongers case where people had tacked all kind of messages. It looked so seaworthy, it did.

This group of fruit and veggies growers were also really vocal in selling their produce. Here's a guy passing out samples of the most delicious peach!

Here's a guy trying his first lychee, which is a funny-looking fruit with a rough skin. The inside is very slippery and sort of rubbery in the mouth. It had a giant pit inside.

This is what they look like on the outside.

Here's the woman who sold me the lychee and the pomegranate, I like that her hair and shirt were both the same hue as lychees and pomegranates.

How to tell if you've got a good pomegranate? The woman above suggested I choose the one with the dullest looking shell and it would taste the most flavorful.

Before I left Seattle, I tried to catch at least one bite to sastify the gourmand in me. Foodies must be careful in Seattle, you can easily burn through money here on amazing finds. While walking back to my car, I stopped to ask a guy for directions and for recommendations of some places to eat.

As luck would have it, the guy who I asked was the pastry chef at Volterra, a Zagat-rated Italian restaurant in town. His name is Tom (I think the expression on his face is so funny considering what his shirt says. He looks almost guilty.)

He and his chef/server friends who sat outside drinking beer said, "we were just going to eat, why don't you come with us." Little did I know, I would soon eat my first morsel of a cow tongue surrounded by an bawdy group of slightly intoxicated men- or should I say boys :).

We walked up a half a block to a little french diner called Le Pichet.

This is Ben (left) and Josh (right). Josh works as a saute cook at Barrio. Michael sits beside me. All agreed that cow tongue is one of their favorite things to eat. Josh believes it has a cinnamon-like flavor. I'd have to put eating cow tongue on the top of my list of food adventures (you can see the taste buds on the slice of tongue) but these boys, especially Tom, have some stories to tell about edible adventures. One of Tom's most wild adventures was eating sheep brains in Morrocco. He tells me I've got to try a kind of Oyster that comes with a little sandcrab inside. And the boys inform me, "that myth you hear about the cooks having sex with the waitresses, it's not a myth."

"You don't want to know what goes on behind closed doors, it's fowl," one of the boys said. And I don't think he's talking about chicken.

Michael is a server who tells me he had some kind of dream that he was surrounded by people from India and he thinks he needs to travel there.

Their order came: Assiette de charcuterie: a selection of cured and preserved meats. On this plate was liver and cow tongue and the boys were happy to share. I pulled out a wedge of truffle sheep cheese and offered it to them as well.

I ordered the Rillete de lapin et sa confiture aux fruites d'arte: Potted rabbit-pork spread with caper berries and stone fruit jam. The rabbit pork pate had a layer of fat on one end, "the best part," the boys said.

Michael of the guys ordered this and offered me a bite.

Ham and eggs done-up more deliciously than I've ever tried 'em.

Nice guys. Thanks for sharing a plate.

2009-05-18T23:54:00.000-07:00

Comfort Foods for a Melancholy Spring

I must admit, I've had a melancholy spring. The last few weeks I've felt a little like this:

So, I started a new job. Good thing, right? Yes, of course, but the older I get the more I feel a sense of melancholy when there's some kind of change in my life.

Here's a few things that kept me going last month:

1) Kelsey, her new baby and the molasses, black pepper, crystalized ginger cookies she sells at her store, Roots. I love these cookies. I crave them almost everyday.

2) A plate of Calamari from Aqua restaurant in Corvallis. This stuff is amazing!

3) Vegan Cheesecake at Sweet Life in Eugene.This is the first cheesecake I've had in over 10 years. I'm allergic to cheese. It's actually made with tofutti. And it's yummy. Really!

4)The fact that even bakers in Eugene share my political persuasion. These are Obama cookies at Sweet Life. I'm sure some would like to be able to buy Obama for only $3.50.

I think I'll buy one for my Republican brother. What do you think Jim?

5) Feeding this sheepdog everyday for a week kept me going. This dog eats everything (my food scraps rotting in a compost pile, cat liter, moss, a dead varmit's leg over by the barn and last but not least Ruby (my cat's) poop.. yikes. I took care of this dog and add to that, a few dozen chickens and a cat. These were left in my care for a week while my neighbors were out of town.

6) Trips up to Portland kept me going. Specifically to 23rd ave, to this market where this cute cheesemonger works. Look at those bedroom eyes :)

Here's the outside of the Market:

Here's a meal I put together: Spanish sheep cheese, Idaho trout (to remind me of home) some thick crusted bread and some juicy grapes. I ate them on a patio table on a street corner. Yum. This might just be one of my most perfect lunches:

7) The Virgin Mary. I'm not Catholic, but she helped keep me going last month. Here's her on a gas station in Cottage Grove.

8) Honey from my friend Ethan, to help keep the spring allergies at bay. His honey smells like walking through a meadow in the spring.

9) My trip to Portland's farmer's market.

(morel mushrooms remind me of my hometown!)

2009-04-02T22:52:00.001-07:00

Contemplating Wendell Berry while Kickin' up Kelp
Thoughts on Why Nature should come First and Consumption Last

(I love this photo (by John Blodgett) because it captures my love for the ocean and the wildlife I find there. This was taken in Maine.)

Yesterday, a friend and I spent the day in Newport, Oregon along the beach, walking amid kelp and seaweed covered rocks along the shoreline; around giant smelly piles of whip-like sea onions - bulbous on one end and slippery. We walked around patches of broken shells mixed with pieces of sea junk. The air was slightly misting and the ocean's voice was huge against mine as I wandered south along the beach, leaving watery tracks in the sand and exploring sea life (kelp, sensitive-to-the-touch anemones and young barnacles.)

In recent years I've noticed a disturbing increase in sea junk laying stranded along the shore. Some of the worst offenders yesterday were a sky-blue plastic jug covered in sea algae and the remains of a Styrofoam buoy that looked like the discarded chew-toy of a huge dog.

As I walked north, back to my car, I started to pick up junk and put things into my pockets: a plastic bottle here, bits of broken plastic parts there, lips of bottles-- it was my half-hearted attempt to clean-up the beach.

I wondered whether carrying out that chunk of orange and purple buoy (with the numeral 12 still on it) under my arm like a tired football, might someday make a difference in the life of some sea critter. One less piece of plastic or Styrofoam that could get caught in the windpipe of some lovely little seabird? A romantic notion that I can't prove, but at least, I thought, the coast looked cleaner.

Why all the junk? Who really needed it in the first place? And the thirsty soul who bought the plastic bottle I hauled off the beach, did they consider it might wind up as a permanent, ugly exile in one of God's last wild places... to outlast a sea creature?

What Would Wendell Berry Say?

Here I am meeting Wendell Berry in Salt Lake. He's such a down-to-earth guy.

A month ago, I met Wendell Berry in Salt Lake City, Utah. Berry is a farmer/poet and activist who lives and farms in Kentucky. Speaking before a large crowd at the Masonic Lodge near downtown, Berry shared what he called his "draft on a essay on the Economy." He called our current economy an "Anti-economy," and said we need to go back to an "authentic" version, one that puts nature first and consumption LAST. This motto of "consumption first" is specially guarded, as if it were one of the pillars we've build our democracy on; it's mantra:"stimulate, spend and create jobs."

But Berry calls for an economy based on renewable resources, where we return to the law of return: what is taken from the earth is replaced. Where the earth's fertility cycle is maintained (the soil is kept fertile.) He believes our current economy has confused its wants and needs and in the process, so have we.

"Our economy has confused real needs with products or economies that are marketable," said Berry, which he calls a "kind of fraud."

Wendell Berry speaks at the Masonic Lodge in Salt Lake City in March, 2008.

"We give nature a economic value....for its aesthetics, but without the recognition that we NEED nature to eat, drink, and breath. Our industrial systems grant her no recognition, honor or care," said Berry. "When everything has a price, then everything is disconnected and implicitly eligible to be ruined."

"There are some things that should be designated as priceless and that is fertile land, clean water and air and ecological health."

Back in Newport

Here's my friend Jen in downtown Newport, close to the bay.

Later that day, my friend and I wandered down to the pier east of downtown and walked along the docks looking for fish for sale. We stopped at a tugboat with a friendly brown lab dog and a lean old fisherman inside. We asked him whether he was selling fish yet. Lee was his name and he said fishes mainly Lingcod and Black Cod (the Black he sells to Japanese markets because American's don't like the fishy, oily taste.) Lee's been fishing in this bay since 1969 he said. He's seen a lot of changes and laments the losses in fish diversity and the lack of salmon. He didn't seem to resent the environmental restrictions like others may. Our conversation turned to salmon fishing, which has been shut down for years along the Oregon coast, due in part to the dwindling salmon runs from the Sacramento river in California. Last fall, researchers reported that the human sewage dump into the river had been negatively impacting the salmon.

Here's some other fisher folks in Newport... only they are just visiting. These friends of mine, Wendy and Nathan, own a commercial fishing operation in Alaska.

Lee talked about the forests in the hills above the bay: areas he called "commercial forests." He told us he believes some of the practices of the pulp tree industries that grow trees and cut 'em down for a quick profit are impacting the salmon. He's pretty sure that the herbicides they spray on the ground to keep anything else from growing (besides the profitable wood for pulp) has leached into the rivers and destroyed some the spawning ground for the salmon run.

Last year I took a backroad and discovered this commercial forest. Very bleak, felt a little like a secret dystopic society I had stumbled upon. Is this where I live?

I don't know what this black crap is that I found near this clear-cut area, but it was hard and didn't look eco-friendly.

Two weeks prior to our trip to Newport, the community gathered for the "Blessing of the Fleet," a celebration around the end of March to begin the fishing season. It's a tradition the town has has since the 1950's, where they ask for prayers to bless the ships for protection, an abundant fishing season and then dash bottles of champaigne against the ship brows. Around town, several pretty blue ribbons hung from warehouses and shops near the fishing dock. The ribbons each represented a family member of friend of a fisherman that had died in a fishing accident. (This was sponsored by the Newport Fishermen's Wives, a nonprofit org. ) When someone dies in a small town like Newport, everyone feels the ripples. The community has also felt the ripples of the Salmon ban and other regulations meant to protect fish and in the long-run, hopefully protect the beleagured fishing industry in Oregon.

These small communities, who are dependent on fishing economies have been crippled at times by poor environmental choices made by their neighbors (granted choices sometimes made by themselves). Though we're still trying to sort out who's to blaim for the loss in salmon and other sea life diversity that directly impacts the fisherman. It's obvious that in these situations, if WE as human beings had put "nature first" rather than the law of consumption, that we'd be in a much better place.

Back to Berry

Wendell Berry finished off his talk in Salt Lake City by saying he'd been listening to news about the government's plan to buoy our economy and he wishes the plan included people from forestry, farming and ecological fields.

"We live in a service economy that does not know how to serve."

2009-03-21T09:53:00.001-07:00

Victory Garden 2.0 Has Arrived!!
CONGRATS ROGER DOIRON and everyone who helped with the Eat the View Campaign!

The Obama's are breaking ground to plant a garden on the White House Lawn! Due mostly, I believe, to the grassroots efforts of Doiron and his band of like-minded gardeners and activists at Kitchen Gardeners.org Yeah Baby! Read the White House Blog post about it!!

Here's the garden layout of what they plan to plant!!

2009-03-21T09:47:00.000-07:00

TIME for OSU to name their purple tomato...Obamato tomato!! Thanks to the White House for listening to the people and planting a garden on the White House Lawn!!

Dear President Obama, We're All Ears for Ways to Change
This is my neighbor, Dolly the donkey, who I ran this idea past before I posted this. She liked it! So here goes. . .

But we need you to start the change in your own backyard (or front yard)!!
So, here's what I'm proposing -with help from a few people like this guy and help from the people with names on this petition Victory Gardens 2.0

This is Roger Doiron from Maine. He's a normal guy who loves to garden and he has a big idea to persuade you, President Obama, to turn the White House lawn into a garden. It's not a new idea, there have been gardens formerly on the White House lawn. In the 1940's Eleanor Roosevelt inspired millions of people to garden by turning up the soil on the White House lawn.

Why Should You Invest in Victory Garden 2.0??

Look at how the public clamors to look like and emulate presidential folks. Even I recall seeing Michelle in that affordable black and white dress on the
"The View," and then spying the same dress in the window of a shop in my town. I thought, 'I want one of those Michelle Obama dresses,' and I almost ran out and tried it on. According to news reports, I wasn't the only one: "women started pouring into the retail chain's stores, clamoring for the $148 dress designed by Donna Ricco," The WSJ reported. Your example is powerful, even in simple things like clothes...consider how much Research in Motion, the maker of the Blackberry has made in sales due to your plugs about their device. What could you have charged if you were a celebrity and not a public figure? "More than $25 million, marketing experts say, and maybe as much as $50 million," says Top Tech News.

So, no disputing the power of example here.... well, President and Mrs Obama, forget about fashionable clothes and electronic devices, show Americans that you believe in the power of self-reliance, which for many (even for those millions who have been laid off), can come through planting a home garden. Get your hands dirty by helping plant a garden on the White House lawn.

We the people, of the United State of America, are happy to help harvest our own food, instead of wait for handouts...

President Obama, this photo is from a strawberry farm in Oregon. Just think of how empowering it would feel to be able to put a sign like this on the White House lawn!! Telling people where to go... to harvest their own food, that is!

Building Community!

There's nothing better for building community that gardening together, sharing food, harvesting, thinning plants, weeding, digging and getting your hands in the soil!

Here's my neighbor's garden this summer, I spent a lot of time here helping her pull beans, thin beets, dig potatoes, and pick squash blossoms and tomatoes. I also did a lot of harvesting for meals. I developed a close relationship to this piece of land and also to the people who worked in this garden together.

A Hybridized Tomato Named After You!

Here's my friend Todd's daughter, her baby and his research project: the purple tomato!

As part of the deal, if you decide to plant a garden on the White House lawn, we'll get a botanist to breed a special "heirloom" tomato for you, a hybridized tom that could be named Obamato Tomato. Think of how many people would clamor to grow this tomato in their own yards. It could be something like this purple tomato at OSU they are trying to breed with higher levels of anthocyanin- the compound that makes blueberries and purple fruits, well, purple.

White House Compost!

You could ask the White House Kitchen to save all their (non-meat) food scraps and heave them into a big pile for composting.

White House compost, think of the market value on that stuff.... but you wouldn't sell it, you'd turn it into your soil.

Chickens for the Kids to Tend

You could get a cool-looking bunch of chickens and ask Sasha and Malia to help take care of them. The chickens could eat some of the food scraps and then lay beautiful eggs like these (eggs of all colors, not just white.... how inclusive!)

White House Biofuel!

You could even save all the fryer grease from all those White House parties that serve up deep-fried dishes... and turn it into biofuel- this fish shack in Newport does that:

Clean Energy! Bike to Get Around!!
President and Mrs Obama, you could bike around the White House to check on your garden and wear shirts like this while doing it. I can get you a few free shirts just like this: should I have them Fed Ex-ed??

Creation of Useful Government Jobs

You could create a handful of new purposeful government jobs unlike some of the ones now that just require workers to smile nicely while wearing outlandish accessories.

Here's some examples of kinds of jobs you might offer:

1) Secretary of Soil Science
2) Chief of Compost
3) Undersecretary Seed Saver
4) Officer of the Peas

Do it Because Aldo Would Applaud You

In closing, I'd like to quote a hero of mine.. Aldo Leopold.

"There is, as yet, no sense of pride in the husbandry of wild plants and animals, no sense of shame in the proprietorship of a sick landscape. We tilt windmills in belief of conservation in convention halls and editorial offices, but on the back forty we disclaim even owning a lance."

The White House lawn is sick land, please make it wild again with growing plants in an organic garden! You won't regret it!

Sincerely,
Citizen of the United States, resident of small-town Oregon
Jenie Skoy

Poster showing a cartoon from the Chicago Evening Post. . . Feed yourself. Be a soldier of the soil. . . Food will win the war. 1918 (source)

2009-03-17T22:38:00.001-07:00

Mormon Girl Pub Hops in Portland

Yeah, that's me. Check it out on my site Foodlore Library: Sipping Soda and Irish Pub Hopping in Portland.

2009-02-12T20:08:00.001-08:00

"Old World" Community
Sense of Community at Corvallis' Old World Deli

Today I've been missing the Old World Deli in Corvallis, Oregon. I miss the smell of brownies baking in the morning and hops brewing in the afternoon (Oregon Trail brewery is in the back). I miss Harold, my retired friend who rolled by with his walker everyday to meet up with his friends. I miss Ted playing his accordian in the morning, each song different, depending on his mood. The Growing Edge, the magazine where I worked, was located in an office space inside the Deli. Last month, our publisher decided to stop printing the mag and laid off the staff (though Growing Edge is still online, it's now a portal of gardening stories). I even miss my coworkers and their wacky senses of humor and how individual they all were (Mike, Alex, Jimmy). I miss the sense of community at the Deli.

Here's Jimmy, the "art" guy at the Growing Edge, a hilarious and big-hearted guy (unless you get on his bad side and then he'll chuck you out like a bouncer in a club).

Our office was behind the left window facing the Deli

More than a few times a day, I'd wander out of the office to fill-up with hot water for my tea, to say hi to Ted, the owner of the Deli, or Fae, Lisa or Laura.

Ted, Deli owner and Laura

Lisa, one of the "girls" who works at the Deli.

Sometimes I wandered out to flirt with my grey-haired retired friend Harold, who goes to the Deli every morning to meet up a group of his friends. They drink coffee and jabber about all kinds of things. Everyday they bring something in to show the others, it's like an informal show-and-tell.

Here's Harold stopping by my office to say hello!

The Old World Deli is more than a eatery in Corvallis, it's a community. On Wednesday night people convene to watch belly dancers (FYI to the ladies: there's lots of masculine energy at the Deli on Wed eve). After hours, the post officer workers (the post office is next door) hang out in the back still in their delivery suits with Dave from Oregon Trail brewery. On Tues or Wed, don't recall which, there's an artist group that meets with oil and watercolor paintings to critique each other's work. Kudos to Ted for creating a community... despite the recession, the Old World Deli is here to stay, though several other eateries in the area have gone out of business.

The photo below is the parting gift I gave to the Deli when I left....

This creature is a Ken doll sitting inside a wicker duck that had barbie doll legs. It was left by the former editor of Growing Edge, John Baur, who left his editor-ship to move to the caribeean and become a pirate (no kidding.) He's the guy who started Talk Like a Pirate Day. I inherited his job and this creature.

Little did I know that the Deli girls would soon part with my parting gift...

When the Growing Edge office closed, I gave the creature to the ladies at the Deli. Later when my boss, co-worker and I were eating at American Dream, this cute couple (who both work at the Deli) came by with my creature in their hands. I had to laugh!! They even gave it a name
Ken's Ark:

One of my fav. things about the Deli is the brewery in the back. And I don't even drink. But I learned a lot about the art of brewing.

Here's a photo of Wally, who owns sheep in the valley and during brewing time, he comes to pick up the spent barley to feed to his sheep.

Here's Dave, helping Wally load the buckets of spent barley.

Here's Dave holding some fresh hops in his hands. There's a trellace at the back of the Deli with a hops plant on it. They grow their own hops right on site!

2009-02-03T12:57:00.001-08:00

Fan of Hotdogs? Think Twice my Friend

I never eat hotdogs. And this bizarre video showing how they make them is why!

2009-01-16T12:53:00.001-08:00

The Wonderful World of Truffles!

Looks a little like decrepit fruit, but cooking with these delicacies is oh so heavenly! Photo by Ulterior Epicure

It's prime fresh winter truffle season in the Pacific Northwest and the Oregon Truffle Festival is just around the corner, from Jan 30 through Feb 1st in Eugene and Portland, Oregon. And you can attend events for as cheap as $15 a ticket.

Do you remember that adorable talking badger in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe book called Trufflehunter?

For some reason, when I think about truffles, I imagine that cute badger from the Narnia series I first read about as a little girl. There's something magical and other-worldly about Narnian creatures, but there's something equally magical about the peculiar-looking underground mushrooms we call truffles. They reside deep among tree roots in the living soil and are a critical part of one of earth's most mysterious (least understood), but most important life forces: the tenacious web of mycorrhizae- that constant interaction between plants and fungi so critical to life as we know it.

I find the world under our feet -the presence of mycorrhizae in the soil food web- as fascinating as science fiction or fantasy. And truffles are bulbous, edible pieces of that mysterious realm that we can harvest, hold in our hands and incorporate into our daily meals. I only I wish it wasn't so expensive to buy truffle products. I also wish truffle hunting was more accessible and not such a guarded hobby/profession. Though the North American Truffling Society is based just 20 minutes away from where I live and I'm going to try and hook up with the group for a truffle hunt. Stay tuned!!

Truffles are the underground version of mushrooms created by a kind of fungal infection in the roots of some trees including poplar, oak, birch, pine Douglas-fir, oaks, hazel nuts, hickories, birches among others, says the North American Truffling Society newsletter. They have mutually beneficial relationships with the roots. "They are the reproductive bodies of certain species of mycorrhizal fungi which mature in the soil," writers the North American Truffling Society, headquartered in Corvallis, Oregon. Truffles look a little like irregular-shaped small potatoes and are distant relatives to mushrooms. Because they grow underground, they are more protected (from frost, etc.) than other mushrooms and the formation of truffles is dependent on animals to distribute their spores (critters like voles and flying squirrels eat the truffles and carry the spores in their stomachs and spread the spores when they poop.)

Exactly how they grow is still somewhat of a mystery, from what I've gathered (no pun intended), but I believe you can taste that mystery when you taste truffles. Truffle hunting has a storied past and reading about it is almost like reading fantasy!

Did I Hear Someone Say Free Truffles!

Here's a cool place to go to get 1/4 pounds of free black Italian winter truffles: the Truffle Giveaway from Marx Foods. All you have to do is leave a comment on their Website by January 26th at 12PM PST. Feel free to also write about what you would do with your winnings. They'll pick a winner at random and announce it on January 26th.

Here's a woman from the North American Truffling Society giving away a taste of truffle-infused spread on crackers during the Yachats Mushroom Festival this fall in Yachats, Oregon. I didn't just eat one sample!

My introduction to the underground delicacy

Maybe you haven't had a personal introduction to the truffle, like many foodies or others native to regions in Italy or France where truffle hunting has been a tradition for hundreds of years. I vividly recall my first truffle encounter. In my 20's, I worked as an intern for a lifestyle magazine in Salt Lake City, Utah and was invited to dine at a french eatery in Sugarhouse called L'Avenue Bistro. It was my first "media dinner" and a few siblings and I were introduced to a dishy young chef named Franck Piessel, who spent several years cooking in the Alps before he landed in Utah. Franck went on to have his own restaurant named for him, but recently the place folded and he's now a chef at Tuscany restaurant.

I recall ordering Franck's Filet Mignon cooked with mysterious, rich and earthy truffle sauce.... and I instantly fell in love with the taste of truffles.

How does a raw truffle taste?
"Aficionados liken it to a mix of methane gas, garlic, and soil with hints of honey, yeast, and mushrooms," Sean Marky, Alby, Italy, National Geographic News White truffles contain a compound called bismethylthiomethane, also found in wine. The smell is so pungent if you crawl around on all fours near prime truffle hunting ground, you can smell if with your nose. But since humans are more civilized than that, we train pigs and dogs to do the rooting for us (and make mortal enemies and enter into all kinds dangerous and criminal activities to carry on our affair with this lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous Truffle mistress- this mysterious, irresistible, "black or white gold" of the earth as it is called!)

Wanna buy some truffles? Click on this truffle seller to order fresh Oregon white and black truffles and Italian white and black winter truffles.

Truffle lovers give thanks to this little guy. Adopt a Vole Today!
Photo Source

If you love truffles, give thanks for the elusive vole, a little critter than lives in the ground whose job is to spread truffle spores. (I'm not sure the photoed vole looks anything like the Red-backed Vole mentioned below, but I image they are equally cute.) Daniel Wheeler writes here about Chris Maser's research on truffles and the elusive voles, which truffles are dependent on:

In the Pacific Northwest of the United States, the most common dispersal agents for truffles are small rodents called voles. Chris Maser in The Redefined Forest notes voles are the most common animals west of the Cascade Mountains, with potentially over 500 animals per acre of forest. Almost no one has actually seen voles, and in the 1970's, the California Red-backed voles was listed on the Endangered Species Act. By careful research, Chris Maser has shown that not only are these animals not endangered, but are an essential part of the forest health through their dispersal of truffle spores. Maser notes that each vole produces about 300 fecal pellets daily, each of which contains over 100,000 spores. Each spore is capable of inoculating a new tree with several species of MF. Another important dispersal animal for truffles in the Northern Flying squirrel. Studies have shown that during six months of the year, the flying squirrel eats almost nothing but truffles.

Ah, the irony! A story about how to get rid of voles that are getting into your truffles.

Minutiae about Truffles

**This 11-year old boy from Little Bedwyn, Wiltshire has a talent for discovering truffles with his feet.

"I can feel them with my feet through the soles of my trainers," explains Richard . . . But mainly it's just that I can see them better than everyone else, I think it's because I'm shorter so closer to the ground."

**Italian Truffle Hunters are called trifolau.

**The earth giveth and the earth taketh away, in the case of this giant white truffle, it giveth. The hunter who found this beauty made $200,000at an auction last fall. New reports have been talking about how climate change is affecting the truffle industry in Europe. The last few years the dry hot summers in regions of truffle hunting, are keeping truffles from growing like they should.

**In Italy, a truffle dog is taught to retrieve a ball, then Gorgonzola cheese. Then the cheese is hidden and the dog has to sniff it out. It then get's rewarded for doing so. Finally, a small truffle is substituted for the cheese- you get the picture.

2009-01-02T22:09:00.002-08:00

COOKING FROM SCRATCH

After Christmas Dishes in 3 Colors
(yellow) ACORN SQUASH & (purple) BEETS & (green) BRUSSEL SPROUTS

Here's my cure for the "sick-of-eating-lots-of-crap" holiday blues:
ACORN SQUASH ( My friend Dave says this squash looks GROSS, but it tasted good!)

NAKED BEETS

BRUSSEL SPROUTS

I LOVE SIMPLE FOODS LIKE BEETS AND ACORN SQUASH. They are so healthy and delicious. After eating lots of carbs and one too many slabs of sugar-laden treats this year for christmas... cookies, fudge, caramels, date rolls (marvelous creations my mother makes every year) it's great to get my hands on something simple and nutritious! They are also colorful foods, which I find crave, especially in the winter. Colorful foods are good for your bod!! Take the beet, that bleeds purple, it's such a wonderfully vibrant food. Even if you don't like the taste of beets, it's wonderful to cook with them, in the same way it's fun to paint with indigo oil paint....I had a great time soaking the beet skins in water and considering dying a piece of fabric the same color.... but I wasn't that ambitious!

A FEW days after christmas, I found myself famished for these nutrient-rich greens and garden foods, so started a new tradition... so when my family convened for our "after-christmas" dinner,

I served up a few dishes made with with beets and beet greens, brussel sprouts and pasta made from squash to try and tempt my family and to make myself feel better. It worked!

Yum!

The beet greens have lots of potassium, folic acid, and magnesium.

Roasted Beet Salad with Beet Greens and Oranges
Bon Appétit

6 medium beets with beet greens attached
2 large oranges
1 small sweet onion, cut through root end into thin wedges
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 teaspoon grated orange peel

Preheat oven to 400°F. Trim greens from beets. Cut off and discard stems. Coarsely chop leaves and reserve. Wrap each beet in foil. Place beets directly on oven rack and roast until tender when pierced with fork, about 1 hour 30 minutes. Cool. Peel beets, then cut each into 8 wedges. Place beets in medium bowl.

Cook beet greens in large saucepan of boiling water just until tender, about 2 minutes. Drain. Cool. Squeeze greens to remove excess moisture. Add greens to bowl with beets. Cut peel and white pith from oranges. Working over another bowl and using small sharp knife, cut between membranes to release segments. Add orange segments and onion to bowl with beet mixture. Whisk vinegar, oil, garlic, and orange peel in small bowl to blend; add to beet mixture and toss to coat. Season with salt and pepper. Let stand at room temperature 1 hour. Serve.

Unadulterated beets

Another orange and beet salad Beet Orange Salad
Gourmet June 1991

8 pounds beets ( I used 8 beets), trimmed, leaving 3 inches of the stems intact and reserving the leaves for another use
1 teaspoon freshly grated orange zest
1/3 cup fresh orange juice
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup distilled vinegar
1 small bay leaf
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 onion, chopped fine

In a kettle combine the beets with enough cold water to cover them by 2 inches, bring the water to a boil, and simmer the beets removing the small ones as they are done, for 40 to 50 minutes, or until they are tender. Drain the beets and let them cool. The beets may be cooked 1 day in advance and kept covered and chilled. Peel the beets and cut them into 1-inch wedges.

In a small saucepan combine zest, the orange juice, the sugar, the vinegar, and the bay leaf and boil the mixture until it is reduced to about 1/4 cup. Discard the bay leaf and let the mixture cool. In a large bowl whisk together the orange mixture, the oil, and salt and pepper to taste until the dressing is emulsified, add the beets and the onion, and combine the salad well.

This Butternut Squash Gnocchi recipe from Sunset magazine became one of my favorite recipes of last year, because for some strange reason, I have become hopelessly addicted to squash (acorn, butternut, delicata) -all those orange colored sweet fleshed things that grow late in the season and keep in the pantry till Winter.

(simplified recipe!)

Squash Gnocchi

Acorn or Butternut Squash
Equal part flour
salt

Cook squash till soft (turn upside down in shallow pool of water in pan and cook till flesh is soft.) Spoon out and mix up till it squash is smooth. Add just enough flour, to make it easy to roll. Roll into a long rope. Cut into pieces and boil in salted water until the pasta floats on the top. Eat with butter and parmesean cheese!!

2009-01-02T22:09:00.001-08:00

JOURNEYS: Hip Pit Stops through Central Oregon

My "How I Almost Died Getting Home for Christmas" Photo Essay

Other possible headlines:
Why my mother's date roll is so good I'd risk my life on Stinkingwater Summit after the worst storm since Oregon's statehood.

My Christmas Odyssey: Getting home to Utah- 760 miles, 30 miles per hour, 3 days, and a flight out of Boise(yeah, it took me THAT to get home for Christmas!!)

This barren snow scape should be admired in photos and not out the window of a totoya corolla while driving through the remote parts of central Oregon in the middle of a storm.

For those of you who were unaware, this year in the Northwest there was record-breaking snow, which means record-breaking storms right around the Christmas break.

FYI: Don't drive through central Oregon to Utah during the winter, especially after one of the worst snow storms in years!! This trip was one of the longest of my life, it took me twice as long to get half as far. The first day, I went from Lebanon to Bend. The second day from Bend to Crane and the third day I made it to Boise in the evening and caught a flight at 7 o'clock to Salt Lake because the freeway was closed to Utah. I'm actually glad it was closed because I was so exhausted from driving on crappy roads, I didn't want to drive anymore. I made it home just in time for Christmas. There were only 2 other passengers on the Delta flight that evening; I rode home with the mechanics and all the flight attendants.

But when you have a mom this cute to go home to... and all her Christmas treats, it's hard not to want to brave the journey.

And not to mention the cutest nieces and nephews in the WORLD:

I know this may sound a little dramatic, but I'm not a girl who grew up in temperate conditions, I grew up in snow-ville, Idaho, where the snow didn't melt until June and where we actually got snowed in (so we couldn't open the front door and had to dig the dog out of his house!) The roads on this trip crazy at times and I wouldn't have made it without those chains and a lot of prayer, regular calls to my friend John -who reassured me he'd call the local sheriff if I didn't call back- and some help by gas station attendants and random people along the way.

Here's a little recap of my journey:

Before driving to Utah, I had spent a day in panic mode in front of the Internet on the "trip check" road report site, looking at Web cams of snow packed roads and chain advisories and thinking I may not be able to see my fam for Christmas. The Portland airport even closed down for a few days. I planned to drive through the blue mountains, but the road CLOSED along the Columbia Gorge, but being the adventurer that I am (the impractical, risk-my-life on snowy, icy roads girl) I ventured out, after buying new tires and stopping by Les Schab to buy those expensive "do-it-yourself" chains. I plunked down $80 and the Les Schab guy gave me a little lesson on how to strap on the chains (only to discover while laying on the snowy ground with my hands hugging my freezing tire that the lesson the guy gave me included a tire that was suspended in mid-air... how was I to put chain on a tire that was planted on the ground??) Needless to say, I managed to get those things on twice and take them off twice. Something I think everyone should learn how to do!

1 p.m., I've got my chains and I'm headed over Santiam Pass, I plan to drive until I get tired and get a hotel.

The Santiam Pass was my first feat and I pulled over to put on chains with a caravan of about 4 strangers. we helped each other figure things out and I even helped a guy put his chains on! I made it up the pass driving 30 miles per hour the entire way, hanging onto the steering wheel with a death grip and my butt frozen from laying on the snow trying to put my chains on earlier.

What was most eerie about the trip was that at moments, there were so few cars on the road, I was convinced if I went off, they wouldn't find my body until spring.

(It's taken me 5 hours to drive what should have taken 2 1/2 hours!)First stop, almost seduced by the rugged men at the sports bar of Three Creeks cozy restaurant in Sisters, Oregon... after braving the Santiam Pass, I consider staying in Sisters for Christmas

I made it to Sisters by dark, it was freezing and I took the chains off my tires and went inside to warm my hands by the fire and sat at the bar and had "dollar tacos" here. FYI: on Monday night in Sisters, Oregon, men gather to watch football and eat dollar tacos. The men are rugged and cute, it was almost worth the trip over the Santiam Pass (not really.)

Post-traumatic stress about my trek over the Santiam pass... consider turning around, but I don't want to drive over that crazy pass again, so I continued on. (The worst part wasn't driving on snow-packed roads, but merging onto the freeway which felt treacherous

I stayed over night in Bend at a friend of a friend's house, woke up early and headed out again. I started a little later, the sun was out; snow melting off the highway, luckily, but still, not a lot of traffic on the roads.

I stopped to take a breather at little town called Brothers.

Roads are better along this stretch!

This is a super nice lady that helped me look for my wallet, that fell out of my purse while I was thawing at the cafe. If you click on the photo, you can see the advertisement for a COWPOKE BURGER.

Back on the road, next stop: Burns

I almost spent Christmas watching Twilight in Burns and wondering how in the H.E. double hockey sticks a Mormon BYU graduate became a multi-millionaire by writing a love story about a vegetarian vampire. But it wasn't dark yet, so I drove to a town called Buchannan, then diverged a bit to drive to a dinky town called Crane.( I say almost spent Christmas at these random places because I think I timed it just right between storms so I could make it up and down passes to get to Boise.)

Back on the road:

I made it just outside of Burns to a little town called Crane where I almost spent Christmas eating a burger at this place.

But instead, a lady at a little shop called Oards, told me about a hotsprings off the main road, with cabins where I could stay for the night. I wasn't too excited about driving another 3 hours at 30 miles per hour in the dark up to Stinking Water pass, no less.... a place that ran along the river and was very icy. I had a foreboding.... Knowing my flare, I surely was destined to leave this life going over a pass called Stinking Water....

The Crystal Crane hotsprings were amazing and the cabins were toasty warm and really clean. I floated for hours in a hotsprings pond and watched the stars overheard... I felt like I was paddling around in circles through the milky way, it was truly one of the most fantastic experiences.

6 a.m.- snowing, packed snow, enroute to Stinking Water Pass:

The next morning, I woke up early and headed out at 7 a.m. It was snowing and I put my chains on in the dark and headed out into the unknown on packed snow roads. The cows looked really cold, almost frozen and I had bizarre imaginings about running off the road and getting stuck by some remote pasture and having to kill a cow and climb inside the carcass to keep from freezing to death. :) I love my sense of melodrama, it kept me entertained while driving 30 miles per hour ALL DAY.

I was heading up two passes... Stinking Water and Drinkwater. I was a little freaked out actually. It's not that I'm unaccustomed to driving on snowy roads, but it was so early and I was alone with chains on my car. I passed one guy who came motoring down the road in a wimpy looking car. He said he's been driving since 4 that morning from Vail, Oregon and had only seen two other cars on the road, but he didn't have chains, so I figured if he could make it, so could I.

I stopped at a place called Juntura to get biscuits and gravy at the Oasis Cafe.

This is Scott, who's the cook, his fiance owns the place. He insisted I eat the biscuits and gravy while there and not try to eat as I drove (the roads were terrible.) He insisted I take my time driving too- though I was trying to catch a flight. It took me twice as long to get from Juntura to Ontario than it might have, but there roads were terrible, soo much built-up ice in places that I may not have made it had it not been for the chains.

Made it to Ontario, alive and exhausted! Here's a girl at a gas station who's getting into the Christmas spirit.

I made it to Boise and got on a flight, which barely made it up and out of the storm and landed in Salt Lake at 9 p.m. Christmas eve.

Here's the only other paying passengers (besides myself) a couple from Portland who's plane to Salt Lake was cancelled and they had to go later.

The airplane was empty... we had a really short take-off, the pilot had the plane climbing in 5 seconds.

And at last I made it home!!

Mom Sweet Mom!

Home Sweet Home!

2008-12-09T15:21:00.000-08:00

GREEN NEWS

The "Greenest" Market: Sky Vegetables Concept Features Rooftop Gardens

In my other life, I work as the editor of a gardening magazine. Today a guy called asking for some academic resources and tuned me into the idea that started out as an entrepreneurial challenge to students in the business school at the University of Wisconsin.

Source: Growing Edge Blog

Here's a link to an article about the idea for a grocery business with attached rooftop garden. This new venture is looking at creating sustainable urban gardens on top of supermarkets under the name: Sky Vegetables. If you click on that link, it pulls up an illustration of what they are proposing. Along with a big hydroponic greenhouse, the model on their site also has a row of barrels to collect rainwater, which they will use in an aquaponics system to create nutrient from fish waste. The model also features solar panels and a wind turbine on the roof and composting barrels where produce workers can chuck rotting fruit and veggies. So, not only do consumers get the most fresh, most local food possible, but it seems as if produce workers will also get a little recreational therapy while they work (one of the qualifiers for Best Companies to Work For awards). I’m not sure this model allows workers to do a little gardening and composting on the clock, but if so, working in the produce dept of a market just got a little sexier. . . sign me up. What a great idea! Do you think it will catch on?

I wonder what kind of investment markets would have to make. One of the hurdles, I can imagine, to sustainable production, is getting the technical expertise to man the hydroponic and aquaponic systems. Hydroponic farmers are a special breed, they stay in the business by knowing intimately the intricacies of growing. It seems if this model were to work, the market would have to hire an on-site greenhouse manager with lots of technical and hands-on knowledge. Another hurdle might be educating consumers that hydroponic growing can be sustainable. Typically it has gotten a bad rap for issues like synthetic nutrient run-off and high energy consumption from use of grow lights, etc. But don’t forget what Growing Edge’s own Lynette Morgan said about the Myths of Hydroponics “Hydroponic crops can most certainly be grown without “chemical” pesticides and many currently are,” writes Morgan. And though growing in soil in many countries is still considered the cornerstone of the organic growing, “That’s not to say that fully organically-certified soilless or hydroponic growers don’t exist, because in some countries, such as the U.S., they certainly do and many are highly successful with this system. . . We no longer see a separate division between organics and hydroponics which gives rise to a whole host of hybrid systems incorporating the best of both methodologies.”

I also recently found this post on the blog Ethicurean about hydroponics and organic growing and it’s worth a read. The author writes: ”I believe that Hydroponic plant growth can be the closest to organic growth as possible. I’ll explain why. . . for the most part, I use organic methods. I use composted steer manure, et al. I also enjoy seeing and visiting areas of natural plant growth. Living in the Northwest I see the wonders of nature daily; the old-growth forest whose trees sustain themselves through natural moisture and composting. It’s really a perfect example of how little moisture and nutrition it takes to maintain plant growth…”

How would this idea also influence food security issues if markets didn’t have to track down their veggies thousands of miles away to some remote operation in South America, but rather could track the origin of their food by running up the stairs to their greenhouse.

Growing hydroponically doesn’t have to run counter to sustainability. In fact, there are several products and suppliers whose mission it to offer sustainable products. And shouldn’t issues of water usage and the high costs of transporting food play into this equation? Growing food on the roof of a market- it’s a brilliant idea, why didn’t I think of it? Seems I’ve seen a model of this somewhere, perhaps in Australia, I’ll have to get back to you on this!

2008-12-03T21:52:00.000-08:00

FOOD ACTIVISTS

CURE FOR ECONOMIC ILLS? GET YOUR HANDS DIRTY!!

Here are a few carrots a dug out of the ground just a few weeks ago. I LOVE gardening!

Here I am in my neighbors yard in Sept. in Oregon.

Recently I interviewed Roger Doiron, founder of Kitchengardeners.org who reminds all of us of the old-fashioned cure for hard times: grow your own food!

Here's Roger relishing in a 'rip-up-the-yard' well done!

What does food activist and gardener Roger Doiron want you to do with your yard? Eat it! He’s one of a handful of activists organizing a grassroots (or as he calls it, “carrot-roots” movement) to get us to look at the green space in our yards through different lenses. Doiron’s the guy behind the “Eat the View” campaign that seeks to persuade President Obama to resurrect a Victory garden on the White House lawn like former presidential families: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Eleanor Roosevelt among others, in order to send the political message that it’s time to start gardening again. “We look to our leaders to not only say the right thing and do the right thing, but to chew the right thing,” Doiron is fond of saying. “We want a leader than tells people to get their hands in the soil.” Doiron has his own white house — though a much humbler abode — located north of the U.S. Capitol in the clammy fishing town of Scarborough, Maine.

Doiron sets an example of home gardening by showing people how he created his own garden in front of his own white house. He created a clever video that shows him pulling up a square of grass in his front yard, (sort of carpet layer-style) dumping a truck-bed full of fertile soil, creating neat rows and planting veggie seeds — all with the intent of showing viewers just how easy it is to garden.

The 41-year is an optimist. He’s passionate about gardening, food and the kind of activism that encourages people to get outside and take action. In the face of our nation’s troubles: a financial collapse, energy crisis and food shortages, his message is empowering: Create your own security by getting your hands dirty and planting a seed.

And he’s succeeded at getting his neighbors to put their hands in the soil and start raising their own food. He’s build a community of more than 5,000 gardeners strong called Kitchengardeners.org. He also spearheaded the move by three Scarborough elementary schools to develop gardens attached to their kitchens, a feat he maintains was relatively easy (wink, wink- you can do it in your community too) “The good energy, the good intentions, the good will — everything we needed was already there,” he said.

His efforts are not unlike similar campaigns: Oregon’s Food Not Lawns and one out of Northern California called Edible Estates that both seek to redefine the idea of a the “lawn” and transform our “All-American” sterile spreads of golf-course grass, trimmed shrubs and perky flowerbeds into no-nonsense, free-flowering and fruiting garden patches that can be harvested on a daily basis. Let the tearing up of lawns begin!

Roger became intrigued with the idea of starting a grassroots movement around slow food and gardening when he lived in Belgium where he worked for a global environmental group for 10 years called Friends of the Earth. He was charged with helping to influence policy in support of more sustainable ways of life. “These challenges that we are up against are so enormous, it’s easy to be overwhelmed,” he said. He reached a point where he felt like the wheels were getting mired in trying to create change from the “top-down” so he decided he would reverse his approach. “I had an epiphany, I thought, ‘I can continue to butt heads with European members of the parliament, or I can look at small actions I can take – and see if I can get enough people to take—and try to shift policy that way.”

From this decision, Kitchengardeners.org was born. The idea is simple and old-fashioned, but Doiron believes it’s exactly what’s needed during these insecure economic times. He wants people to eat what they grow in their own yards and in the process discover that the journey to great food can be as close as a step outside your front door- the ultimate way of shortening the distance between people and their food. “Kitchen Gardeners has taken ‘local food’ to its logical extreme, saying, ‘you can be a local food producer yourself!’”

What else will gardening do besides reconnect us to our foods? Roger believes it has the power to connect us with community again. “People are looking for community and fellowship and we need to create that sense of community around growing food,” he says.

Gardening is a way of democratizing the Slow Food Movement, which Doiron says is great but has needed a more “hand’s on,” accessible and even affordable, approach. Doiron remembers falling in love with the idea of slow food, but realized he had to change the rules a little so he wouldn’t go broke. “I wasn’t going to keep up with the lawyer and the doctor spending a couple hundred dollars on dinner.”
“We are telling people, now you’ve been won over by the Slow Food Movement, but if you really want to know what good food it, let me hand you this seed packet and tell you about composting.”

While in Belgium, Doiron said he learned about how interconnected gardening is to European culture and how they make the most of every season’s harvest. He fell in love with his mother-in-law’s cooking— a perfect combination of German heartiness with a delicate French side. “I remember those weekends as this seemingly unending blur of one good dish after another.”

Dinner was at least a three-course affair, homemade soup followed by a homemade meal followed by homemade dessert, he said. Thoughts about what she would cook on the weekend when he and his future wife Jacqueline, would visit, kept him going during the week: foods like Belgium endives wrapped in wild boar and cooked in a white sauce tossed with grated cheese.

“One of the things I realized is that good food doesn’t have to be complicated.”

“The garden tells us what’s for dinner,” says Doiron. He and his wife and three boys – ages 8, 11 and 16 – have about a 1/3 acre of land around their house. Of that, they’ve devoted 1200 square feet to a garden that produces a little more than half of the fresh food they eat. Produce like: salad greens, carrots, kale, leeks, chard, sweet and hot peppers, cabbages, lots of fat onions and of course Maine Kennebec potatoes from which the Doirons relive their days in Belgium by making fries (See recipe below). They also harvest grapes, apples, raspberries and do root cellaring- creating a space for carrots and potatoes and other roots where they can access them all winter.

“We are busy people, but the garden plays a central role in our lives.”
============================================
Doiron shares a favorite family recipe, something simple and quick. French fries? Forget about how the French cook ‘em, “Belgium has the best fries in the world,” Doiron says. What’s their secret? They fry them twice.

Recipe for Belgium Fries:

(Doiron uses Maine Kennebec potatoes from his garden)
Cut the fries thick and fry them for 6-7 minutes at 320 degrees
Then fry them again at 375 degrees to crisp them up.
The Belgians eat their fries with Mayo and wash them down with beer.

www.kitchengardeners.org.

2008-11-26T13:23:00.000-08:00

FOODLORE

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Enjoy these food stories from the Library of Congress audio collection of folklore.

Berry pickin and making pies

Tom Turkey

wild turkey gobbling

Shawnie Lettuce

Cushaw pumpkins

SOURCE:

Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia

incorporates 718 excerpts from original sound recordings, 1,256 photographs, and 10 manuscripts from the American Folklife Center's Coal River Folklife Project (1992-99) documenting traditional uses of the mountains in Southern West Virginia's Big Coal River Valley.

2008-11-10T14:32:00.000-08:00

IN THE NEWS
"Even in my Dreams there is no Food"

North Korean Orphans- source

Every month, the Blog Catalog asks bloggers to write about a specific topic; this month they want us to write about refugees. Since I'm a food blogger, I thought the following post would be appropriate.

The news in the U.S. has been filled with stories about the "economic crisis" as the world financial markets have gone haywire. Despite it all I've felt a sense of security living in a part of the world with a long growing season, plenty of rainfall and sunlight, where the soil is still healthy and where I have access to seeds to plant and land to plant it in. Where I can grow food in my backyard and where, if necessary, I'm free to forage, hunt and to find food for myself and those I love.

These same freedoms don't apply to all. What if you lived in a land where the government restricted your movement, keeping you from finding food? What if you were you consigned to a remote plot of land where the soil was infertile and even in some places toxic, where due to drought and political instability and poor agricultural practices, you were unable to raise food and had learned to rely for years on government distributions that increasingly grew leaner and leaner- as imposed by a cruel government. Such is the situation in North Korea where people go hungry daily. Below are stories of people eating grass gruel, boiling their leather belts to make soup and kids dying from stealing potatoes or eating poisonous toads.

A friend posted this story on his blog during a summer trip to China to take intensive language classes. He's passionate about helping bring to light the situation of North Korean refugees who have been suffering from famine for many years.

North Koreans who flee into China in search of food have been tortured and killed. Here's one article about the North Korean refugee atrocities.

For a background about the FOOD CRISIS in North Korea, read this report from Amnesty International

For more than a decade, the people of North Korea - one of the most isolated nations on earth - have suffered from famine and acute food shortages. Hundreds of thousands of people have died and many millions more have suffered from chronic malnutrition. The actions of the North Korean government exacerbated the effects of the famine and the subsequent food crisis, denying the existence of the problem for many years, and imposing ever-tighter controls on the population to hide the true extent of the disaster. North Korea remains dependent on food aid to feed its people, yet government policy still prevents the swift and equitable distribution of this aid, while the population is denied the right to freedom of movement, which would enable people to go and search for food.

These stories are from newsletters by the Good Friends blog

I’m currently in Dandong, on the border between North Korea and China, after visiting some other border towns such as Yanji and Tumen. The situation here has been fascinating. I will post some of the insights I have gained on this trip over the coming days. Some people ask me why I am so interested in North Korea… You only have to know a little bit about what is going on there, and have an iota of heart to realize how much these people need us. A few examples (of many) from the last few triweekly newsletters put out by “Good Friends”, an organization with many ties to “the inside”:

“Even in my dreams, there is no food”

All the students and teachers in Taetan County seem to have lost hope and say that the school is very quiet. Teachers give their students classroom assignments such as reading and other activities, but soon retire to another place to lie down because they are suffering from constant hunger. When recess begins, the teachers leave the classroom. The students barely make any trips to the restrooms and do not run around on the field. Both the children and the teachers sleep on their desks because they feel so hungry. Jung Chul, a 12 year old student, says that he does not have the physical strength for anything other than sleep. He says that he needs to maintain himself with minimal body movements because his hunger makes him feel like he will faint at any moment. He went on to say, “During sleep, I enjoy dreaming about eating. But in the middle of my dream, no food appears, and when it does, somebody takes it away from my mouth. This situation makes me
very sad.”

Serious Body Swelling Due to Grass Poisoning in Taetan County

The farmers at the collective farm in Taetan town, Taetan County, South Hwanghae Province do their work while living on a few potatoes and grass gruel. Despite the burden of weeding all day long on such minimal sustenance, their workload is never reduced. The farmers are complaining about the pain of such hard work. Although there is an assigned portion that has to be accomplished in a day, many farmers fall short, saying that it is impossible for them to do the work. Farmers in Taetan County now survive on grass porridge. Unfortunately, in the current season the grass contains a toxin. As a result, people are suffering from serious swelling in the face and in the body no matter how hard they try to remove the toxin. Due to the fear of grass poison people are now eating fresh water fish, marsh snails, and frogs in the rice field or in the marsh.

Children Killed By Eating Toads

In Sambong District of Daehongdan County, Ryanggang Province, there has been an increase in the number of children being killed by eating toads. Children used to catch and eat frogs that hatched in the marsh regions along the Suhdoosoo River until the number of frogs declined noticeably. Presently, toads are hatching. Old wives tales tell of toad’s poisons being used as medicine in cases of cancer. But toads can also kill if eaten without being treated to get rid of the poison, especially weak children whose immunity have been compromised already by malnutrition. Han Myung-sun (43 yrs old) of Sambong District, Daehongdan County, says, “Frogs that are just hatched don’t have any poison, but they start to develop them just when the tadpoles begin to develop legs and tails. Kids can’t wait till the tadpoles grow into frogs and eat the tadpoles by scooping them up with screens but some died last month through food poisoning. Now we no longer have frogs but have toads. Kids think that they are the same and eat them by roasting them. They ate the toads with potatoes, which also are poisonous when they start to sprout. So 5-6 kids were killed eating toads and potatoes in one night. The whole place was overcome with a sense of foreboding when we had to take care of these little bodies.” Choi Seung-chul (42) also agreed, “Kids thought that they could cook toad meat with corn power into some type of porridge but instead they roasted it and ate, and died.” One class in Sambong Middle School lost over 10 kids in just two months out of a class of 36 to starvation or food poisoning.

Soldiers in Ryanggang Province Eat Cooked Leather Belts

In early June, the commander of a unit stationed in Ryanggang Province was arrested upon inspection. The charge was that he sold army uniforms in the market. The Army had neither rice nor money and the enlisted men cooked their belts to eat. On May 28th, he had witnessed the enlisted men boiling their leather belts in a hope to drink the liquid. He asked them, “What are you doing?” They answered, “We were too hungry.” Shocked and horrified by that answer, he sold the winter uniforms in the market. He bought rice with the money and fed the men once or twice, but caught during the inspection. “Right now the men are dying. I had to sell the uniforms to feed them,” he explained but they did not allow for the extenuating circumstances.
Kim Chul-seung ( 38 ) said all the leather belts distributed to the soldiers last March had disappeared completely in his unit. “(The liquid from the boiled leather belts) I even tried. It fills your stomach and you feel better. Boiled cow skin tastes pretty good. You cannot eat leather by itself but once boiled in the water, the taste of meat soaks out in the liquid and you drink it. The drums, made of pig skin or cow skin, have all gone without a trace. Even in the time of Arduous March, we did not dream of eating leather belts. But, now everything that was made of leather is cooked for food. Some soldiers can’t wait and rush to chew leather from the drums. Now is tougher than it was in the mid 90s.

He begged for anything to eat, saying, “What have we done in our previous lives to suffer like this? How resentful are those soldiers that eat even their leather belts? They were all our children, drafted to the army. They were forced to, knowing that they may die of hunger in weakened physical condition. Please find some food to feed them.”

Kkotjebis (Homeless Children) Suffocated While Trying To Pilfer Potatoes in Storage Caves

Daehongdan County of Ryanggang Province has a reputation for being a place where one can eat potatoes that cover the streets. That’s how well the potato crops do here, although it’s too high in altitude for corn to grow well. The first potato crops come in around August 20th. Right now, June and July are the most difficult time of the year for food. They store the potatoes in large storage cave over the winter. When April rolls around, workers cut off chunks of the potatoes with the bud attached and plant them. The rest of potatoes are given to the farm workers, which amounts to less than half of the original volume of the stored potatoes.

The potatoes are stored in underground chambers that can measure up to 40 meter on each side. The air is filled with the poisonous vapor from potatoes. There is a lid every three meters for ventilation and the potatoes need to be turned over to prevent rotting. It takes one whole day to fully ventilate the storage chamber, and only after that workers get in to remove potatoes that have rotted

This year, there are many kids who die by suffocation as they tried to sneak into these underground chambers and pilfer potatoes. Although there are guards they are inside the post and the kids sneak by and enter down through the lids and close them behind since they don’t want to get caught. In this state, the kids soon gag on the poisonous vapor and die due to lack of oxygen.

Kwon Soon-young (35 yrs old) says, “This past May and June, there are many kids who suffocated to death as soon as they entered these storage sheds. You have to have oxygen tanks, but obviously kids don’t have that. Probably less than one out of ten kids succeed in stealing potatoes. But the hungry kids still try out of desperation.”

Amnesty International reports: (From the Amnesty.org Web site) Signs of serious food shortages became evident to the outside world in 1991, when the North Korean government launched a "let’s eat two meals a day" campaign. In 1992, PDS rations were cut by ten percent, and thereafter distribution became irregular, particularly to the north-east. PDS distributions reportedly stopped nationwide during the summer of 1994, except on two to three national holidays.(24)

During 1994, when food shortages started to affect the functioning of the PDS, the North Korean government reportedly stopped sending food shipments to the remote north-eastern provinces of North and South Hamgyong and Ryangang. These mountainous, traditionally food-deprived provinces were highly dependent on the PDS system and famine appears to have started in these regions in 1994, two years before it hit the rice-growing western provinces.(25) The failure of the already poor domestic agricultural production (see table 1) after severe floods in 1995 and 1996, followed by severe drought, resulted in a drastic reduction to food supplies to the PDS. By 1997 the PDS was reportedly only able to supply 6 percent of the population.(26)

In August 1997, UNICEF expressed concern that the number of children suffering from the effects of food shortages has risen dramatically in recent months, with some 80,000 children severely malnourished and in imminent peril of succumbing to starvation or disease. UNICEF and other UN agencies also estimated that about 38 per cent or 800,000 children under five were suffering from malnutrition to a serious, but lesser degree. The worst suffering was "among children who have lost or have been separated from their parents. Up to half the children in some orphanages are severely malnourished."(27)

The PDS was reportedly unable to supply any food at all in the 1998 ‘lean season’ (April to August) or from March to June 1999 (see table 2). In January 1998 there was an official announcement that individual families were henceforth responsible for feeding themselves rather than relying on the PDS. Between March and September 1998, in order to survive, people were forced to eat alternative foods that had very little nutritional value such as edible roots, cabbage and corn stalks and grasses. Grass finely ground and mixed with some cereal and an enzyme then cooked as noodles or cake was also eaten. The WFP/FAO feared that these alternative foods may, in fact, have exacerbated existing health problems, such as diarrhoea in children.(28)

Reliable figures on North Korea are difficult to obtain, given the lack of access and barriers to information gathering. Estimates of the number of deaths that resulted from the 1990s famine vary widely, ranging from 220,000 to 3.5 million. Some sources claim the famine destroyed between 12 and 15 percent of the total population.(29) Economist Marcus Noland recently estimated that the famine resulted in the deaths of between 600,000 to 1 million people, out of a pre-famine population of approximately 22 million (between 2.7 and 4.5 percent of the total population).(30) However the "social damage was much higher if one considers the fall-off in the fertility curve caused by famine."(31)

2008-10-28T17:18:00.000-07:00

FOOD ADVENTURES

Adventures with Provocative, Dangerous and Edible Woodland Creatures
or... my weekend with fungus at the Yachats Mushroom Festival

Here I am in the wilds of Oregon's damp and mysterious forest. I'm holding a mushroom that's looks like it might be edible, but isn't... so much.

"Where did you find those mushrooms?" I asked the mushroom hunting couple. "Over there in those hills," answered the gentleman.

Last weekend in Yachats, Oregon, folks gathered for the 8th Annual Yachats Mushroom festival. The town "mushroomed" with the fungi curious, expert mushroom hunters, mycologists and mushroom mongers.

DISCLAIMER: Contact the Cascade Mycological Society if you want to learn more about mushroom identification, don't take my word for it, I'm a mushroom hunting rookie and some of the facts in here might be skewed by my rookie ways. DON'T EAT THE MUSHROOMS unless you know the mushrooms.

I met up with some friends from Utah who were in town for the weekend and we headed to downtown Yachats to check out the mushroom fest.

The downtown Village Market sold boxes of several varieties of mushrooms in front of the market. We started downtown where the mushroom festival organizers had converted a section of a building into mushroom exhibits.

Here's one of the most dangerous dudes of the bunch.

My friends stand beside a line-up of mushrooms being taught by a mushroom hunting veteran Joe Spivack

Here's an exhibit that shows you how mushrooms change appearance with age, just like people..

I opted to do the mushroom walk beginning at the Cape Perpetua Visitor's Center with Joe Spivak as our guide.

Joe was a very likeable and knowledgable guy who encouraged us to touch and handle the mushrooms. It's a MYTH he says that you can get sick just from touching a mushroom. (Side note, I picked up one tiny fungi with a tall stem that turned red where I touched it.) It left a slight tingling feeling on my fingers.

Joe chewed a portion of "certain" mushrooms and waiting for the taste to come. "This one is peppery," he said and offered it around. You never want to ingest until you know what you're eating.

We walked up the trail and every 20 yards or so, stopped to identify new mushrooms we found covering tree trunks, branches and the forest floor- among a million other places. I even found a cute mushroom growing out of a pine cone.

A very old mushroom. Not good to eat.

Joe made us all feel special for finding such lovely mushrooms along the route, he especially charmed the young mushroom hunters in the group-- making them feel as if they had found mycological wonders undiscovered until that moment.

I took this photo because this is a mushroom I found that Joe said has a very unusual quality. It looks a little like the morel mushroom, but this mushroom, when cooked, gives off a vapor that's much like rocket fuel- so that those rare people who cook it should be advised not to breath the fumes.

DISCLAIMER: Please don't go edible mushroom hunting by yourself or with a novice... this is not a sport for the faint-hearted. Mushrooms are tricky to identify. I met one guy along the route that told me he'd made it his goal to identify ONE mushroom a year.

The most recognizable edible mushrooms- in my humble opinion

chantrells: Orange with a signature stem and pattern on the back...the underside of the cap tapers to the stem and has deep gills.

oysters: pulls off the tree in clusters.

lobster mushrooms: Are the color of Lobsters

chicken of the forest: Big ugly burgeouning orange things that look something like characters from the Muppet Show.

Most valuable mushroom?
Besides the truffle of course- it's the Matsutake, which are hard to find, you have to really hunt for them.

Here's a photo of a Matsutake on top of some lobster mushrooms:

Jason, the mushroom hunter

At the end of the guided walk, a handful of us thought we'd try our skill at identifying mushrooms- a new-found skill for me (excluding the years spent plucking morel mushrooms from the forest by my home in the Rocky Mountains.) Morels don't really count- they are so easy to identify. Well, I wound up walking around with Jason, this colorful guy who had been subsisting in Yachats by working on an organic farm. He'd been traveling for 6 months- sort of Lost-in-the-Wild style- from Michigan to Missoula to El Waco, Washington and now to Yachats, experiencing life by trying to live off of nothing because he believed the state of affairs in our world will soon require it. At first I thought he had a point, but then again, he told me he dumpster dives sometime and it doesn't seem like the best route to self-reliance. I admired his desire to learn about how he could feed himself on farming and foraging, which most people don't seem to have "time" to do. I mean, shouldn't this be one of the first places we START when considering how to be more self reliant? Gardening and foraging... I love that concept.

But there was something a little too doomsday-ish about his ideas that I admit made me wary. He was convinced our society was on its way out and the financial collapse was due to some convoluted conspiracy that would prove our eventual demise. Before we parted ways, he mentioned something about Yachats being a great place to settle because it has bridges on both sides and if the community of Yachats wanted to keep people from coming in and begging for food, they could just dynamite the bridges. What?? Sound like a sci-fi novel. Yeah, there was something not quite right about that. But in case any of you agree with his assessment, Yachats IS a beautiful coastal town full of ample mushrooms with easy access to sea life to eat in case the world is INDEED coming to an end.

But I shouldn't give him such a bad wrap, Jason did help me identify the beautiful white oyster mushrooms growing on the trunk of a tree (they looked like fairy food or something- so white and dewey.) I can see why people love finding these beauties; it was magical plucking them from the tree trunk and stuffing them into my pockets. And Jason found some great chantrells and a chicken of the forest mushroom too.

When I first met Jason, I had asked him what he was doing traveling and this is what he had to say:

"I'm trying to see how far I can go on my WORD.."

"Your what?" I asked him, unsure of what he has said, I repeated what I thought I heard: "How far you can go on your WIERD?" ....I asked. It was a pretty funny exchange, in retrospect.

Here's Jason posing by an Alice in Wonderland type mushroom (Fly Agaric) that is poisonous.. Jason was considering "trying" this shrume to see how it made him feel.

So our group walked around the damp, quiet woods of mushroomville, Oregon. There's something foolhearted, I must admit, about going wild mushroom hunting with someone who would eat just about anything "just for the experience," someone who talked about making a stew out of nothing but the thick flesh of a bright orange Chicken of the Forest mushroom; someone who looked hungry and what was more believed the world may be about to end.

Jason was on the look-out for the elusive psychedelic mushrooms and anything that might be edible, or slightly edible. He found something like a death cap and carefully plucked it from the ground and as if we were pilgrim naturalists finding new species and capturing them for historic identification. I now chalk up his enthusiasm for the Death Cap as curiosity, but at the time I wondered slightly if collecting this mushroom was his secret stash, his "Romeo's vile of deadly elixir" in case the world DID happen to end.

By the end of my trip, I felt comfy identifying chantrells. And though I had a bag full of chantrells and oysters, I actually didn't eat them because. . . well, hey, I picked them. Was I ready to put the comfort of my intestines into my own hands? NO!

I recognize now that I was pretty paranoid about eating the oyster shrumes even though 3 people (a ranger and mycologist) verified that they were indeed edible mushrooms. Why the fear? I think it was something about being lost in the Oregon backwoods with a goofy, novice mushroom hunter and being overwhelmed by such fascinating and possibly toxic creatures growing out of dying trees. There's something so fecund about mushroom hunting- fecund and potentially dangerous. I loved it!

On the trip, my friends and I cooked up a stash of mushrooms we bought at the store.

Here's Jen eating buttery fried mushrooms with fresh pasta noodles in our beach house south of Yachats.

2008-10-01T21:28:00.000-07:00

FOOD MEMORIES

Confessions of a Spud Harvest Drama Queen

Since my new home in Oregon is farm-ville USA, its been fun to drive home beside tractors and farmers motoring through fields and watch sweet dust rising from the ground, lit-up by the early morning light. I love the smell of hay fields freshly cut and I love how a field of winter squash looks after the rain. I have an affection for farming and farmers- there's something about this time of year that brings back memories of growing up in Idaho surrounded by farm fields.

Every year Idaho school kids get out of class for two weeks to help in the potato harvest. It was and is a messy, dirty job that had me up to my elbows in soil all day. I wore ski goggles to keep dirt out of my eyes and often came home looking like an earthworm, blowing black snot out of my nose and feeling machine-lag after riding on the the digger out in the fields all day (a digger is a machine that pulls the potatoes from the soil and typically they put the high-schoolers on the digger.) That thing jiggled me around all day till I couldn't hear myself from the buzz of the machinery that still buzzed in my ears when I jumped off the digger and headed home in my dirty-as-hell clothes, my damp, soil-black work gloves from the farm supply store and with my goggles off and I looking raccoon-like with my face dirty except where the goggles had been. Sometimes friends and I would prop a potato onto a hot part of the machinery during the day and in a few hours, take off our gloves and dig into the white steamy flesh of the thing and each take a bite. Yum!

When dusk came, we were exhausted and couldn't tell which was a potato or a dirt clod that rolled along in front of us on the conveyor belt. How can I possibly romanticize that experience? It was miserable, truly. But we were young, so we tried to make it fun. My friends and I sang vigorously, substituting in the word potatoes for love in the cheesiest love songs. Try it, it's fun.

One year I was the only girl on the potato digging crew and believe you me, that was a tough year. Try working beside all your little brother's friends- in all their junior-high-school glory. These boys had two subjects of conversation: sex and farts. The first they knew very little about the later they were well-versed in, but they spoke about both as though they had written THE definitive guides on each subject. I remember one ill-fated day sorting potatoes from clods while massive amounts of soil flung itself upon my innocent body and I was a complete failure at deflecting the dirty jokes of my zitty, adolescent coworkers. Well, I became FED-up with my brother's little "perverted" friends and decided I was going to walk home early from work. I jumped off the digger and trudged across the trenched, soily field with a view of my house a few miles away. (Before I continue on, I need to insert a note that I was a DRAMA queen in high school... I was actually "Actress of the Year" and used to flit around the halls at Sugar-Salem belting Broadway songs with my friend Suzette and mortifying my big sister the "jock" (who was a STAR discus-thrower in track and who had bigger biceps than her boyfriend, the state champion wrestler). . . anyways, back to the story: I made it halfway across the field and decided spontaneously to throw myself at the mercy of the nematodes and other critters in the soil food web and did the most perfect Nestea plunge right in the middle of the field. I was crying hysterically, the tears making perfect miniature Ganges rivers down my cheeks. I just lay there and looked up at the clouds and breathed a little, then got back up a few minutes later and walked the rest of the way home where my mother guided me into the laundry room helping me unpeel the soil-blackened clothes from my weary body while she tried to remind me that all boys are perverts at THAT age and I just needed to take a shower and relax a bit.

But even amidst all that drama, I still recall potato harvest with fondness.

I don't really get it, but I said it, it's the truth that there's something sweet about it. What was it? Was it just working so hard and clean. How often do you get to exhaust yourself in a physical job like that? Office jobs sometimes seem to suck the life out of me. There's always either the deadline push, which makes me anxious or the downtime which makes me bored and feeling guilty about not being MORE productive. Working outside all day, we learned to tell the time on where the sun was in the sky overhead (I got pretty good at it.) We were gardeners- actually more more like peons paid to do a dirty job that not a lot of people liked to do.

But it's something I'll never regret- in fact, I hope when I have kids of my own, I can send them to work in the potato harvest too.

2008-09-22T16:36:00.000-07:00

Foodlorists Wanted!
Help Us Build Foodlore Library

This image is Public Domain from the Library of Congress. It's a Qahatika Indian Woman using a long pole to harvest cactus fruit, Arizona. c1907.

Published in: The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. [Seattle, Wash.] : Edward S. Curtis, 1907-30, v. 2, p. 108. (source)

I love the photo because in the post below, I have a similar photo of a friend harvesting saguaro flowers. A friend and I are starting a food ezine called Foodlore Library as a way of collecting images like this of food traditions from the past AND from the present. Help us build this library by reading below:

Foodlore Library is an attempt to gather, save and share food stories that might otherwise go lost. We love stories like those in prior posts: one written by Ann Gates Weaver about harvesting saguaro fruit like the Papago Indians once did - who knew it takes the saguaro 40 years to flower and that making the syrup is sooo labor-intensive. Other stories include one about wild strawberry picking by my friend Jessica Spencer from rural Pennsylvania and one written by Marilyn and Craig Toone about eating out of their garden and fishing for trout on the Yellowstone River in Montana.

Your story doesn't have to be complicated or sophisticated- just share a little part of yourself and your love for food. Share a story about a family food tradition, your fav. comfort food (and why it is) some kind of food ritual you do. Check out our developing Web site (note- it's still in the rough phases) e-zine Foodlore Library

Feel free to also send us photos with descriptive captions. Some examples: a photo of you carving out a pumpkin, cooking with your grandmother, mushroom hunting, visiting an exotic locale and the food you found there, eating at your fav. hole-in-the wall restaurant or a photo of you eating around the dinner table with loved ones.

Any questions? Email editor@foodlorelibrary,com

Happy Eating,
Jen

2008-09-10T11:58:00.000-07:00

The Slowest Food: Saguaro Syrup

By Ann Gates Weaver
of Tucson, Arizona

Sure sure, there's that saying "slow as molasses," but what about "slow as saguaro." I'm sure a phrase like that exists in the Papago language, but it simply never caught on. But saguaro syrup is certainly SLOWER than molasses

I mean the syrup itself doesn't have that kind of thick gooey viscosity, but since the cactus doesn't even produce fruit until it is about forty years old and then harvesting it takes forever, it is the slowest food I know. For the Papago, saguaro fruit and syrup was an important source of calories at a time when the desert wouldn't produce much else until lat August. Hower, after all of the hours I spent harvesting in the hot sun not to mention scooping and boiling and straining, to end up with only two pints of syrup- well this syrup is VERY labor intensive so I can see why it's going extinct. It tastes very sweet, but has a very subtle medicinal aftertaste reminiscent of cough syrup which makes it less tasty than other fruit syrups, but we still like it on pancakes!

Saguaro blooms in the spring like most of the other cactus of the sonoran desert, but the fruit doesn't begin to ripen until June. As a fruit gets completely ripe, the outer skin splits open like the petals of a flower to let the pulp and seeds drop to the ground. Seeing this, the first conquistadors wrote that saguaros had red flowers that bloomed in June. This saguaro is just beginning to ripen.

The Tohono O'Odam people would gather the fruits with a tool made from a saguaro rib with a short piece of greasewood tied at an angle to it. This tool was used to push or pull the ripe fruit from the cactus, although they would also gather dried pulp from the ground when possible.

After trying the traditional tool, I decided that my telescopic pool pole with a metal bolt coming out of the side where the net is usually attached was a much better way to harvest the fruit, although I didn't need to telescope it to harvest from the saguaro in my backyard. Even with my new and improved tool, it takes hours and hours just to fill a 5 gallon bucket halfway, and unfortunately this is at the hottest time of the year here- right before the monsoons come to cool things down a bit. Therefore you can only harvest for a few hours early in the morning.

These fruits have started to split open.

The pulp has to be removed from the shell which luckily doesn't have spines. The shell or husk is discarded. This process is quick, but at the end you realize how much of your fruit was actually husk as two and a half gallons turns into about one and a quarter.

The pulp is boiled until it turns slightly orange. Then the fibrous pulp and seeds are separated from the juice by straining it with cheesecloth. There are thousands of seeds in each fruit, all connected by pulp. Therefore, the amount of product you have left at this point is once again diminished quite a bit. The juice is then returned to the pot where it boils until it starts to thicken up and stick to the spoon, although it doesn't ever get thick like maple syrup.

At the end of all the harvesting, scooping, straining, and boiling, I have only two pints of syrup. It tastes very sweet with a very subtle medicinal aftertaste reminiscent of cough syrup. The Papago used this syrup to sweeten everything through the summer while food variety was slim, but we like it on pancakes!

2008-09-02T12:00:00.000-07:00

Here's my niece with Zucchini from her mother's garden.

Mexican Rice, Zucchini, and Chicken Salad

I'm going to make this recipe tonight with all the zucchini that is growing out of all my kitchen cupboards this week. I'll let you know how it goes. I'm going to use local Fraga Farm Cheese instead of the queso blanco cheese that it calls for. Fraga Farms is an artisan goat cheese from a farm in Sweet Home, Oregon. I plan to visit the farm and meet a few of the farmers there. I'm also going to replace some of the brown rice with quinoa and use fresh serrano peppers.

From "The Classic Zucchini Cookbook," Ralston, Jordan, Chesman

Ingredients:
3 cups diced zucchini or yellow summer squash
1 ½ cups cooked white or brown rice
1 ½ cups diced cooked chicken
½ cup chopped scallions, white and tender green parts
2 tbsp minced fresh parsley
1/3 cup canola or other light vegetable oil
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
½ tsp chili powder
½ tsp salt
freshly ground black pepper
½ cup crumbled queso blanco or farmer cheese
Preparation:
Bring a medium-sized pot of salted water to a boil. Add the zucchini to the boiling water. Blanch for 1 minute, until barely tender crisp. Drain, plunge into cold water to stop the cooking, drain again, and pat dry. In a large bowl, combine the zucchini, rice, chicken, scallions, and parsley. In a small bowl, whisk together the oils, lemon juice, chili powder, salt, and pepper to taste. Pour over the salad and toss to coat. Taste and adjust the seasoning. Transfer the salad to a serving bowl, sprinkle with the cheese, and serve.
Serves 4.

2008-08-24T21:59:00.000-07:00

FOOD AND RELATIONSHIPS

Nine Ways to A Man's Heart (through his stomach)

You know the old saying: The way to a man's heart is through his stomach. Well, I tested this out last weekend. So, here they are:

1. Take him to your favorite hole-in-the wall restaurant and let him buy you your fav. dish -here's pizza at $3.50 a slice- even the most frugal guy will foot the bill!

This is a photo of me eating at a favorite place of mine called American Dream Pizza in Corvallis, OR.

2. When you drive to the beach, give him some fresh smoked salmon to eat as he drives.

3. Ask him what his favorite foods are and plan a meal for him. Buy the freshest fruit at the market.

In this case the farm stand was in Florence, Oregon.

4. Let him help you in the kitchen. He can cut up veggies or stir the pot, etc.

5. Do something silly/cute while you cook. This will show him that while you are a serious chef, you don't take yourself too seriously.

6. Milk is comfort food- make something creamy. Don't tell him you're using goat's milk or he may not eat it- though you know it IS better for digestion.

7.Cooking should be a sensory experience- forget the measuring cups & spoons, use your fingers.

8.Eat on the back porch on a tablecloth that you inherited from your mother. Keep things simple- this will make the man pay more attention to you than the place settings or any of the bling, bling that is SOOO overdone in a more formal dining experience.

9.For dessert, pick wild berries. This will get him in touch with his primal instincts as a hunter/gatherer.

Photos by Casey Cranor...

2008-08-24T21:12:00.000-07:00

You're never too old to play with your food.
String Bean Season is Here!

This is one of the string beans from my neighboor's gardens, which I will write about soon. It's a wonderful heady garden full of all kinds of ripening veggies. My new neighbor invited me to help thin her Ruby chard.

I'm a bit of a late bloomer to gardening. I grew up in a place where the snow didn't melt until June, so we didn't really have too long of a growing season :) But now that I live in Oregon, I'm becoming a green thumb! Here's a photo of me sitting beside my whiskey barrel planter full of tomatoes and herbs. I painstakingly rolled it and transported it to my new abode. It's still flowering and fruiting. I love this little green space. I like the fact that I can step outside whenever I need a little rosemary or sage for a recipe I'm cooking up.

Oregon brings out the gardener in most people, I've realized. It's not uncommon to be around town and hear people talking about how their plants are flowering and fruiting as if they were talking about their children.

(photos by Casey Cranor)

2008-08-22T10:24:00.001-07:00

Origin of photo

Gardening for the Future
Hydroponic vertical gardens, & rooftop gardening

I've been meaning to write more about progressive ways of growing food, since we're going to have to radically rethink our agricultural ideologies. Here are a few news bites to chew on while I work on a story: Enjoy!

High-rise apartments in China integrated with a vertical hydroponic garden- for food and heat.

Rooftop Gardens could feed millions in the city. Check out this article.

For more info about growing hydroponically, check out Growing Edge magazine