garden yumyums

Just so you know (Mom) that I haven’t been inside staring at a computer screen ALL summer, I bring you some garden updates…both mine and one about a new Master Food Preserver class!

First, the important stuff.   The Master Food Preservers are holding a class called “Cooking and Preserving Green” to help raise funds for our survival.  It will take place on Saturday, August 23, from 9 am -3 pm at the Lane County Extension Building (next to the Fairgrounds).  Learn how to put up the fruits of your harvest — to pickle, can, freeze and dry green beans, zucchini, cukes and more!  There will be demonstrations, tastings, small workshops, recipes and delicious preserved food to take home.  It should be really fun and not at all intimidating for beginners, so help us out and learn ways to turn that zucchini into something other than bread!  I’ll be there on duty, so if you want to complain about the Serge Gainsbourg videos on my blog in person, please consider this an open invitation. Early registration is $40 a person, $75 for couples, and at-the-door is $50 a person.  Call 541-682-4246 to register.

And then, the garden updates!  My garden is growing along happily.  The imported dirt really made a difference, even with our crummy weather earlier in the season.  I lost one tomato, which was quickly replaced by a tomatillo plant, but that space seems to be doomed and I’m losing the blossoms as they set fruit.  The other seven tomatoes are doing well, and I have tons of cherry tomatoes, plums, and slicers just beginning to yellow.  My cucumbers and beans were planted late, but I already have some pole beans ready for eating.  Herbs and Hungarian paprika peppers are going like gangbusters.

Zucchini already producing more than I want, and I have tons of little gourds on the vine!  A volunteer something — either a melon or a pumpkin, sprung up in the good soil where my plum tree was, and it’s growing perfectly, like crazy.  I’ll plant more squash there next year.

The wormwood is taller than me; a volunteer sunflower sprung up next to the cucumber hill; my raspberries gave me a couple of handfuls of sweet, beautiful berries — next year’s the charm.  Transplanted bay bush doing ok, as is the little fig tree.  My elder trees don’t seem to be doing much of anything.

I left in my Russian kale to collect aphids, which it does beautifully.  My artichokes aren’t doing well for some reason, an infestation of earwigs, perhaps?  I’ve lost many of the beautiful leaves.  Lettuce patch planted for my cat has bolted and tastes bitter.  Fennel growing slowly, as is the sole Japanese eggplant.  Japanese kaiware radish sprouts come and go, producing flowers as pretty as Michaelangelo.

 

pomegranates market closing

I’m sad to share the news that Pomegranates Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Grocery on Willamette at 28th (next to the TrueValue hardware store) is closing their doors.  The owner, Julie, has decided to focus her attention and talents on catering, cooking classes, and home cheffing, which means she’ll still be very much of a presence in the Eugene culinary landscape, and perhaps in a more delicious form.

She expects the store will be closing at the end of August, so if you’d like to stock up on Italian, Spanish, or Middle Eastern groceries, including a fantastic olive oil and vinegar selection, cookbooks, dried beans and herbs, pastas and specialty canned goods, drop by the store as soon as you can.  Everything’s on sale at 30% off.  Check out their website for hours and other information.

I’ve seen some of Julie’s Persian menus and cooked a couple of her recipes, and I’d recommend her catering services for an unusual and delicious change from the usual summer party fare!

 

dining niblets

(1) Whoever invented the term “niblets” is a marketing genius or a wizard or something.

(2)  Sushi-ya.  Try Sushi-no.  It opened a short while ago in the space formerly known as Misako on Willamette at 8th.  Poor quality — poor quality — tuna, soggy, tasteless and mushy.  The snapper, which I should have known was bad (given it was offered as a special with lemon and ginger) was almost dangerous.  I did like the Hawaii roll, and speaking as someone who is disgusted by most American kitchen-sink-type sushi rolls, this is high praise.  They keep that one simple, with tuna, chives, and hot peppers.  Wormy little bean sprout salad as a free starter, no thanks.  The food took forever to arrive and was disappointing when it did.  Young white men manning the sushi station: never a good sign.  Probably the worst sushi I’ve had in a very long time.

But a serious, serious problem, and one I can’t believe no health inspector has noticed, is that the sushi is served on old wooden boards that were once food-grade, but now the varnish is peeling from the corners and the wood has cracked.  We ate from one with a big hairline crack down the middle, and another one that had two significant flaws in the wood — the knots and divots that create pretty patterns on your hardwood floors, but a health hazard when on service items in a commercial kitchen.  And one featuring SUSHI?  Ugh. Two wasabi-green thumbs down.  (No, the picture isn’t the board we ate on.  It’s a used BBQ cedar plank from our woodpile.  But evocative, no?)

(3)  And a delight, for balance.  The late-night Lebanese hummus plate at Café Soriah.  Simple, fresh sliced broiled lamb, seasoned with mint and sumac, atop a big mound of delicious, creamy hummus, with pretty green marinated olives and some hot pink pickled onions on the side.  Want.

(4)  And oh heck, more delight.  Ish.  The prosciutto and fresh arugula pizza at La Perla.  The restaurant itself could use some fine tuning, but the pizza oven rocks.  The first night we went was during the Olympic Trials, and we were seated on the south side of the pizzeria, which is acoustically flawed (I fear for good) and we could hear the other tables better than our own dinner companions.  The second time was much better, with fewer kids running around and more adult noise levels on the north side.   The service was less snotty Barbie doll high school girl with attitude, too.  (Jesus, give me a fuckin’ BREAK.)

Eschew the expensive, prepackaged desserts and the pedestrian salads, and get your pizza topped with a big handful of arugula leaves.  Do salad like the Italians do.  Well, pick off the bruised and yellowing arugula leaves (La Perla, shame on you), then do it like the Italians do.  The peppery, greeny, crunchy arugula is a perfect match, dare I say synergy, with the cheese and the salty prosciutto and the blackened bits on the pizza dough.  I’ve been looking for a pizza like this since my trip to Italy in 2002.  Yum.

(5)  The laab beef salad at Aiyara Café in Springfield (in a sad little strip mall at Harlow Road and Gateway).  Finally, a Thai restaurant in the area that doesn’t over-sugar its food, gah.  This is one of my favorite Thai dishes, featuring rare beef slices, mint, cilantro, onions and fresh lettuce, tomato and cucumbers in sour and spicy lime dressing texturized with roasted rice powder, and Aiyara makes it well.

(6)  From another car on the arugula train, Midtown Bistro’s bacon, arugula and tomato sandwich with homemade mayo is really quite delicious.  Thick, chewy bacon, great bread, and a summer tomato —  ah, I’m drooling just thinking about it.  Take a hint from me and order a green salad on the side, though, to supplement the skimpy serving of arugula on the sandwich.  Or just tell them to add more.  I guess you could be less passive-aggressive.

(7)  Belly.  I haven’t been.  But a little bird told me very good things.

 

sigh.

Billy Mac’s is opening June 10. I’ve already posted about my fears that this will be the same old, same old: a Eugene restaurant that serves the same stuff that every other place in town serves. It looks like I was right. But tapas, you argue, they’re serving tapas. And I say TAPAS?! Why in the ethnic-food-diverse world? Has Eugene finally caught on to the Bay Area hot trend of…1999?

I’m sorry I’m preemptively bitter. But when I see that the McCallums are redecorating with family pictures to recreate a bit of Eugene gone by, I get really grumpy, rite quick. And last week’s Register-Guard headline, “El Vaquero back to its own ways,” didn’t help much. (Maybe that’s where they got the tapas idea.) The owners of El Vaquero decided not to sell and instead dump the expensive yuppie menu (good idea) and go back to the old menu (bad idea). Eugene, Eugene, Eugene, Eugene, Eugene. There are more than two ways to skin a cat.

And since I’m bitter today, I’ll just make a brief comment about a restaurant owned by another group of locals who is trying to do the same old, same old with pizzas and pastas…or rather trying to make meals you can make at home and charge restaurant prices for them. We finally made it to Pasta Ravello. Good god. I haven’t had a meal that dreadful in a long time. The space is nice, but it ends there. Indifferent service, slow kitchen (on a night where we were one of two couples in the restaurant), a wine “special” that was a scant glass of the dregs of a bottle of their priciest wine, a pizza with sauce so sweet it was like candied tomatoes, a spaghetti and meatballs special that was large, boiled (??) grey, under-seasoned meatballs with no more than a third of a cup of sauce over a huge mound of pasta, and Caesar salad that was nothing short of revolting. Thank god they served a lemon with it; we squeezed it on top and pretended it was wilted greens. Unsalted. Peh.

New blood, Eugene Restaurant Powers-That-Be, new blood!

 

graduate!

I’m now an extremely proud Master Food Preserver! Our eight-week course through Lane County OSU Extension for volunteer certification in Family Food Education/Master Food Preservation finished up today. I haven’t been so thrilled to take part in anything for a long time; I’ve lived in Eugene for three years but not until this program have I felt that I’m a real Oregonian. So like all those newly granted citizenship, I’m going to brag about it!

I am so honored to be a part of this group of great volunteers. We hail from rural areas and towns in the Mid- and South-Willamette Valley. Several local farmers were in the class, and we also had writers, educators, cooks and bakers, administrative folks, homemakers, and social service professionals. Many of us volunteer at places ranging from the farmer’s market to the fire department to shelters for homeless kids, and a big group of us (including yours truly!) will continue on next week to be trained to volunteer for the Food Pantry Project, helping educate consumers at the food banks in our towns. As you can see, our outreach into our communities is wide and varied, indeed. Just to give you a sense of some of our interests, just look at some of the final presentation topics:

• fava beans as green manure
• using up mature green beans and all that zucchini
• homemade wheat gluten
• grinding your own flour of different types of wheat
• wild fermentation of kombucha and hibiscus elixirs
• Congonese preservation of cassava root
• GMOs and oils
• making biscuits
• how to fillet and quick-smoke salmon
• harvesting rhubarb

As I mentioned earlier, ours was last class taught by Nellie Oehler before her retirement after over 25 years running the program. If there’s one thing I can recognize after being in school for most of my adult life, it’s when a class is being taught by a master, and I feel so fortunate I got to see her in action. It looks like the OSU Extension budget will be cut by a half-million dollars next year, so the program’s face may be changing drastically. All I can say is that I’ll do everything I can to spread the word about what we’ve learned and what we can teach others as educator volunteers, so the folks who make budgetary decisions know what a huge impact this program has in Eugene, Lane County, and surrounding counties in the Willamette Valley.

I’ll be out there in public this summer with others in the program, staffing exhibits and doing demos at our many local festivals and fairs and markets. We’ll be at the Lane County Fair and out there each week at Saturday Market and the new farmer’s market in Springfield, and we’ll be manning the Oregon-wide Food Preservation Hotline from mid-June until late-October. If you have a chance, please stop by and ask us your questions about food safety or preservation, or even how to cook something you’ve picked up at the market. Chances are someone will have tried everything and will be willing to share! We’d also deeply appreciate it if you could let us know how we’ve made an impact on you through the programs at OSU Extension, whether it’s identifying a weed you brought in to the Master Gardeners or answering your question about canning zucchini in pineapple juice at Lowell Blackberry Days. We’d love your feedback and hope that the program can continue to be such an integral part of life in the Willamette Valley.

 

jefferson street grill becomes billy mac’s bar and grill

Hrm. We eat at Mac’s at the Vet’s (as unpalatable as the apostrophes are*) not infrequently. Untenured professors (and a few hoity-toity elite tenured types) like to gather there because it’s a strange and unique Eugene institution: part small-town male social club watering hole with period decor, part fancy menu, part live music, part lottery machines in the back. The food is OK, but oddly (but not for Eugene, sigh) too “upscale” and pricey for the venue. But it’s quirky enough to be enjoyable, and there’s a great Wednesday burger and brew special.

Note to Chef Bill McCallum, though, before we proceed: the jo-jo potato things that you serve as french fries…please, man, for the love of god, cease and desist. Give us an honest french fry. Those things are almost inedible.

OK, sorry, off track here. As I was saying, we eat at Mac’s at the Vet’s not infrequently, so we know it’s not that bad, and certainly better than Jake’s Place, which was Chef Bill’s previous venue. Jake’s Place, a schizophrenic restaurant with a vaguely Hawaiin motif and a fancy menu, was sold and turned into Jefferson Street Grill, a place for which we had great hopes because it is in our neighborhood and the perfect venue for a neighborhood pub with light, fresh, creative food. Alas, it was not to be. They tried the more formal restaurant with a similar, inappropriate menu featuring dinosaurs like prime rib and low lighting, and it failed quickly.

I was excited to see the new sign — Billy Mac’s Bar and Grill opening in June! Then I figured out that the place was going back to its OLD vision of Jake’s Place with the same chef. I don’t have anything AGAINST Chef Bill, but for Chrissake, Eugene, give us some new blood! I’m frustrated to think that nothing’s going to change with this little place that holds so much promise.

So. Do I speak for other Eugeniuses when I say WE DON’T NEED ANOTHER BAR AND GRILL? I hope I do. Let the people speak!

Edited to add: OK, OK, one person (my husband) spoke, and he said that I haven’t even tried the place yet, so I should wait to release the hounds. Yeah, good point. So I amend my rant thusly: CHEF BILL, PLEASE SURPRISE US WITH THE BEST BAR AND GRILL IN EUGENE WITH A COMPLETELY NEW VISION!

* Mac’s is OK, as it is short for McCallum’s, I assume. Vet’s is not so kosher, as it is housed in the Veterans’ Club, not the singular, only veteran in Eugene’s establishment.

 

greeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeenz!

While I’m waiting for my brisket to braise, I thought I’d share some of the gazillion pictures I’ve been taking of glorious spring in the Willamette Valley. Since I was in full-on tourist mode from my trip to other places I’ve lived, I only felt slightly strange snapping photos at my own local farmer’s market, which is a wonder in this small town and one of the reasons I love living in Eugene.  Each Saturday, from April to October, we get a full-fledged food, plant, arts & crafts market with ethnic cuisine booths and live music when our (recycled, post-consumer) bags are full.

Last week, it was tender yellow wild mushrooms and walnuts and lettuce. We found some delicious baby greens at Saturday market this week — kale sproutlings and a gorgeous head of something I thought was chicory, but it turned out to be young mustard greens!

The raw colors of grey-green and purple are so pretty, and the little yellow buds that all major brassica share are so yummy and peppery. I also couldn’t resist a big bag of tiny arugula leaves, my favorite salad green.

Of course, my impulse buys mean that I have not only the kale, mustard greens, and arugula, but also chard, spinach, romaine lettuce and cabbage waiting for me to actually cook with the stuff. Let’s see what I can do this week. In the meantime, rally on! Here’s how we do it in Eugene: standing waving placards on the Saturday Market political street corner, amid throngs of hackeysackers, drummers, spoken word open mike concoctions, homeless kids and tourists, all united under a giant marijuana leaf flag. Ah yes, Eugene in Spring.

 

sunshine!

Finally! It has been unseasonably cold here in the Willamette Valley, so everyone who isn’t a polar bear has been huddled inside for the past few weeks. Then, yesterday, the sun made its reappearance, foreshadowing the summer to come. Heatbunnies like me got outside and gardened with a vengeance.

I have a really old bed of purple bearded irises, like the ones that inspired Van Gogh, but unlike Van Gogh’s bearded irises, mine are overgrown and squashed into a place that made them unproductive. We don’t get many flowers, and that’s entirely ok with me, since I don’t much like purple anyway. In fact, I call my garden endeavors in this house The Great Unpurpling, since most of the landscape is purple or pink. Me, I like red. And here’s why. That’s me with my flowering quince. Yes, I want my landscape to match with my hair. Is that too much to ask?

But I’ll spare you my gardening complaints and just report that I made it through 3/4 of the irises, weeding and thinning and transplanting. (Yes, it’s late, but I was away in fall and didn’t get to properly winterize the garden.) It felt so tremendously delicious to be out in the sun. My assistant (see above) helped me by soaking up the Vitamin D and making sure no birds came too close to me. He also helped mow the lawn by eating a few errant tufts of grass, and he held office hours behind the shed.

What does this have to do with food? Well, mainly it is a defense of carnivorism. I have to prove that I can do plants. I’m feeling guilty because we went to the second Saturday Market of the season and mingled with the hordes snapping up strawberry plants, tender lettuces, bags of tiny carrots and little turnip golf-balls, dahlia tubers and cut daffodils, and we bought…

MEAT.  We came home with a bag of meat. Retrogrouch disappeared when I was musing over a fig tree, and reappeared, triumphant, holding Sweet Briar Farm peppered bacon and lamb chops. We visited the Deck Family Farm stand and took home their price list with info about their meat CSA. Then, some grilled vegetables in the very last stand caught my eye, and I went over and…

OMFG. Carnitas. A giant copper vat filled with oil, orange segments, bay leaves, cumin and hunks of pork shoulder, boiling away. Carnitas might be my favorite pork dish of all time. We bought almost a pound of the stuff and snacked away. Delicious. Not as good as it would be fried in lard, but still. I was so enthralled by the deep-fried meat I didn’t notice the name of the stand or anything other than an intriguing creamy asparagus salsa that tasted like guacamole but didn’t have any avocados in it. Mmmm…carnitas. The stuff didn’t last long enough for us to take pictures of it, sorry, but if you go to Saturday Market next week, be sure to stop and check it out with your own two meatilicious eyes.

 

reuben blasphemy?

I would never, never, ever disrespect corned beef. Ever. Corned beef on rye is my favorite sandwich, and I respect it so much I won’t even EAT it at a West Coast deli. I’m not joking. And I take it even purer than the New Yorkers do — without even a hint of mustard. Nothing but corned beef and rye.

So why would someone like me even dare to discuss a tempeh reuben? Well, because they’re actually good. As much as I love corned beef, and as fat-soaked greasy meaty delicious as a corned beef reuben is, I know that I can eat half before my stomach starts to rebel against me.

Enter (1) a sometime-vegetarian, meat-lovin’ husband, (2) Eugene, Oregon, and (3) a hippy-friendly local neighborhood pub, Cornucopia. Cornucopia is one of the only local places we like for the ambiance. The beer’s great, but the food is hit-or-miss. Their ingredients are fresh, and some dishes are really good, but the menu seems a bit lazy to me — there’s someone creative back there, and I wish they’d give the menu a good scrubdown and coat of paint just like they did the restaurant a couple of months ago.

One of the hits is their tempeh reuben. It’s exactly like a reuben but the corned beef is replaced with tempeh.

Tempeh is a vegan fetish object. If vegans flew a flag, it would be made of tempeh. And with good reason. These little soybean cakes are better than tofu, a similar product, because the soybeans are fermented and processed quite differently, leaving whole beans or chunks in the mixture. The intarnets tell me that it is not only high in protein, but also in several other vitamins and minerals, and the fermentation aids digestion.

What does tempeh bring to the table in terms of deliciousness? Well, texture, mainly. A corned beef reuben falls apart and is generally kind of mushy and oozy. Not that there’s anything WRONG with that, but it relies on bread to keep it all together, and we all know bread doesn’t do that altogether too well.

With a tempeh reuben, you get a bit of backbone. The soybean chunks in the tempeh give the sauerkraut, cheese, and dressing something to cling to. Sure, the smoky, meaty taste of the corned beef goes missing, but the tempeh has mouthfeel and a slightly nutty taste, and it soaks up the other flavors in the sandwich.

I fry up the tempeh in a bit of oil until crispy. I’m not in this for the health. I suppose you could bake it with a bit of soy and brushed with vegetable oil. In the picture, we have tempeh chunks, but I’d recommend leaving it in larger pieces, like maybe 3 x 3 or 4 x 4 inch-squares, so the cubes don’t fall out of the sandwich. You may also want to experiment with slicing the entire cake in half widthwise, so it’s only about 1/2 inch thick. It’s all a matter of preference.

I’m not going to get all crazy-granola on you, but if you do partake in a vegan diet, you can certainly substitute the delicious cheese and russian dressing with soy versions of both.

Tempeh Reuben

Serves 2

4 slices New York rye bread

2 t. butter, softened

1-2 T. vegetable oil

1 cake tempeh (plain, not flavored), cut into squares large enough to cover your slice of bread (3 x 3″?)

1/2 cup raw sauerkraut, drained and squeezed as dry as possible

6-8 thin slices of a good mild cheese, like Noris Farmhouse (our house cheese) or Jarlsberg

Russian Dressing

1 T. sour cream or mayonnaise (mayo will be sweeter)

1-2 t. ketchup

1 t. srirachi or other chili sauce

1 T. dill pickle relish, or chopped dill pickles

Mix ingredients for Russian dressing in a small bowl and set aside. In a skillet on medium-high heat, add 1-2 T. of vegetable oil, and fry tempeh cake until golden brown.  Add more oil if necessary.  Remove from heat and blot excess oil. This step can be done ahead of time and tempeh stored in the refrigerator, but be sure tempeh is at room temperature before you assemble the sandwiches. Wipe excess oil from skillet if you are preceding immediately to make sandwiches.

Butter one side of all four slices of bread. Preheat skillet on medium heat, if necessary. If you have a large pan, you can make both sandwiches at once, but it might be easier to make one at a time. To make one sandwich, place one slice of bread butter-side down in the preheated skillet, then add a wide swath of Russian dressing, tempeh cake, half of the sauerkraut, enough cheese to cover the sauerkraut, and the second slice of bread, butter-side up (you’ll be flipping the sandwich in a moment).

After 3-4 minutes, or until bread on bottom is golden, crusty brown, flip sandwich carefully, using a wide spatula and your hand as a guide. Flip the sandwich in one, quick motion so it doesn’t fall apart. Cook until cheese is melted and sandwich is heated through, another 3-4 minutes. If bread starts to burn, turn down heat, or, if you’re in dire trouble, take it off the burner, put it on a plate, and microwave for 20 seconds or so to melt the cheese (this is what we did for the picture above, since the heat was too high).  Don’t forget you need to make another sandwich for your partner, as much as you want to eat your sandwich immediately.

You’ve now achieved the blissfully ambivalent state of being partly healthy, partly super-fattening; partly green, partly sickeningly-overindulgent; partly Asian, partly New York Jew.  Enjoy this liminality, savoring each bite.  Congrats: you’re an American.

 

in a pickle

Pickle is such a great word. I love its air of transformation, its fortitude. It defies the odds. A pickle is something that’s lived two lives and perseveres, salty, for *you*. And yet, the colloquial expression, “to be in a pickle,” means you’re in difficult situation. I can see that being stuck in a briny solution, your fluids being drained out of you as salt works its magic, would present a problem for you.

But pickle, in my house, is also a celebratory word. It means I’ve secured something like French haricot-style skinny green beans or tomatoes or, say, a few pounds of Korean cucumbers that miraculously showed up fresh and pretty at Sunrise Market the other day. Yay for greenhouse gardening!

My husband, being an East Coast boy, hankers for the half-sour, or “new,” pickles one gets at Jewish delis in New York (and, if you’re very lucky, Northern California). The ones made by Bubbie’s are all right, but nothing like homemade. So I decided to surprise him — fresh home from a week of eating British food (ugh), mostly at a cafeteria in Cambridge (UGH!) — with some love pickles. They won’t be ready for a few weeks, but he can at least look at them and dream of pickle heaven.

My dill pickles were made without vinegar in the Mittel-Europe style. Instead, I use whey made from organic local yogurt and a salt brine. As with the sauerkraut, I don’t feel confident about my recipe, which was cobbled together from several sources, to share it until I’ve tasted the pickles, but I will once I can prove no one will die eating these beauties. That would be a pickle, indeed.

And speaking of which, I will literally be in a pickle come April, when I begin my certification as a Master Food Preserver. Oregon State Extension, housed locally at our fairgrounds in Eugene, has an excellent program, operational for almost 30 years, for disseminating information about food safety and preservation during the summer months. Volunteers in the Family Food Education/Master Food Preserver program receive over 40 hours of in-house training, take a state exam, then volunteer for another 40 hours per season handling questions from the community on a hotline and at workshops and booths at our many local venues for such things. Since the training requires a full day once a week for a few months, I normally wouldn’t be able to devote the time, but since I’m now only (only!) working on my dissertation and not teaching, I am able to do it this year! YEAH! GO TEAM PICKLE!

I’m also really excited about being able to volunteer for our community in a way that shares information about my two passionate hobbies: cooking and gardening, and to meet new people. It gets lonely sitting here all day by myself! Canning has such a devoted niche of followers, and there’s something kind of exxxxtreme sports about it, too. It’s like the snowboarding of cooking. During my interview for the program, one of the women in charge urged me to take her class on canning fish. Canning FISH? That is so badass. She looked like a sweet, grandmotherly type, but I could just tell she had a can of sardines tatooed on her bicep and could stick her bare hand in a pot of boiling water to retrieve a Ball lid without even flinching.

And this, this is what I yearn to become.