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.

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.

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.

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!)

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."