restaurants open on christmas in eugene 2013

This is the post for 2013. For 2014, click here.Have you seen the new Eugene Magazine food issue?  Rush out and get it now for great profiles on some of our best restaurants, old and new, and ideas about holiday gifts for locavores.  My contribution, the regular column Eat Drink Think, focuses on a local farm, Sunset Lane, that is one of the only commercial producers in the U. S. of that singular winter vegetable, Belgian endive.  I included an updated recipe for braised endive nestled under a blue-cheesy, candied walnut and pear topping.  Perfect for Christmas.

But if you don’t want to cook, you can really help our local economy. The Great Winter Freeze 2013 affected local businesses deeply, so any support we can give to our restaurants in December would be deeply appreciated.

So…here’s my annual roundup of restaurants open on those celebratory days of December!  This year, Eugene Cascades and Coast has gathered a list of some eateries open Christmas and Eve 2013, so go ahead and click ze link for many details.  In addition:

Christmas dinners: Sweetwaters on the River, Shari’s (multiple locations) and Sixth Street Grill, are all open, as listed in the link.  Izakaya Meiji, not mentioned on the list, is also open on Christmas Eve and Christmas.  Taste of India is open, with specials of saag paneer and lamb vindaloo.  Sizzle Pie is open, and there’s a buy-one-large-get-one-free special!  It’s also worth calling your favorite Chinese restaurant to see if they are open.  I hear Fortune Inn is one of ’em.

Christmas Eve dinners: Belly has a special menu, including goose and chestnuts; Rye also has a special menu. Marché Restaurant is offering their annual Réveillon de Noël, details here.  I don’t see any information on King Estate’s website this year, so I’m not sure if they’ll be doing Christmas Eve.

New Year’s Eve Dinners: Izakaya Meiji, Noli, Ox & Fin, Marché, Soubise, and the new Whiteaker establishment, Grit.  Party Downtown and sushi restaurant Mame are collaborating on a NYE extravaganza — seats are going fast, so contact them for a reservation ASAP.

Looking for holiday libations?  Belly has their excellent egg nog; Soubise has hot buttered rum and mulled wine; Party Downtown has MULLED ALE OMGWTFYUM, an old recipe revived by James, tasting of gingerbread and a little bitterness, so ideal for the holidays; and Marché has plenty of bubbly.

Please let me know if you know of other places or specials I should add.

If you’re looking to volunteer or have a low-cost meal, Lane County holds an annual Christmas dinner for seniors.  They’re especially underfunded this year, so please consider donating.  More information on KEZI’s report.  For more programs, including holiday food boxes, see this useful handout from 2012. Some info will have changed, but it’s a good start.

And it might be too late for this last announcement, but worth a shot.  Many of our favorite restaurants do catering, special dinners, and holiday parties.  Give them a call.  I had the great honor of introducing James Beard award-winning author Hank Shaw at a dinner promoting his new cookbook, Duck, Duck, Goose earlier this week at Party Downtown.  It was a benefit for the McKenzie River Trust, and a sold out and wonderfully relaxed, cheerful event. Check out the menu and all the photos here.

separate two eggs: briefest shelter, most fleeting piece of mind

I’ve been tongue-tied, unpalatable, and without appetite lately, sorry.  It’s hard to write didactic prose when your thoughts are stubbornly fixated on impermanence.  I’ve been mucking through applications (always an existential crisis), writing, putting up the harvest, traveling for food assignments, organizing as little as possible, and attempting to plan less and live in the moment more.  This is like telling a tomato not to ripen or a squirrel not to pack its cheeks with apples and bury nuts in the ground. But I’m fighting.

Part of me resists, insisting I’m not a Buddhist, and dammit, stop forcing meditation and all that American liberal Zen shit on me.  And another part of me is all:

The waters of a flowing stream are ever present but never the same; the bubbles in a quiet pool disappear and form but never endure for long.  So it is with men and their dwellings in the world.

I’m fermenting, watching bubbles appear and disappear, watching new life rise from decay.  Part of me thinks it’s inexpressibly sublime.  And another part of me is all:

When a man observes the conventions, he falls into economic difficulties; when he flouts them, people wonder if he is mad.  He who depends on another belongs to another; he who takes care of another is chained by human affection.

And I’m cooking; I’m teaching someone to whom I’m chained by human affection to cook.  I see love in his eyes.  And I’m raking my leaves and riding my bike and occasionally I can bear company and new projects, and more importantly, it’s no longer complete hell to witness the decay of the ruins of the architecture of the life I built and bolstered and finished and painted and decorated and defended like a settler.  Part of me thinks: time passes; new lives are built and they will need your paintbrush and shotgun.  And another part of me is all:

Where can we live, what can we do, to find even the briefest of shelters, the most fleeting peace of mind?

And one answer is literature, of course. No house, no fragile body, nothing the process of life ingests and digests and turns to refuse, nothing that can be set afire or drowned in a flood or splintered to bits or mortgaged and repossessed and reinhabited. Ideas linger and have afterlives.

If there’s any one thing that make my Japanese degree worth the suffering (Highest Honors and Department Citation, U.C. Berkeley, B.A., pwnd, humblebrag, LOL, thankyouverymuch), it was medieval recluse Kamo no Chomei’s “Hojoki” or “An Account of My Hermitage.” The tale of the hermitage is a story of a man who left home to live in a tiny hut in the mountains after witnessing natural disasters and waves of destruction in the capital at Kyoto in the 13th century.   I’ve taught it a couple times right around now, right before the students went home for Thanksgiving, many for the first time since entering college.  I ask them to think about their idea of home, and what it will be like to see their old bedrooms, their old friends, and whether they think home is permanent or impermanent.

A part of me thinks: it’s a bit unfair, I know, a bit manipulative.  But then: this work has given me so much food for thought over the years and I read it first when I was in college, what, 19? 20?; seed it for when they really need it.   And I think they do appreciate it, because for many it’s the first time they really connect with literature; they really get it that a medieval recluse can sing out from the hills of Hino and capture your breath in his ten-foot-square hut.  So that’s worth it, right, for the price of a little innocence?

And I’m thinking about this, as usual, when the sweet, cute, serious, dedicated Iranian girl in the front row in November 2012 raises her hand and shares with the class that she’s not able to go home because of the distance.  But that’s ok, because she’s so grateful to be here at the university, but she’s under so much pressure to do the best she can for everyone at home, for her family and for all the girls who can’t get an education in Iran.  And suddenly she’s crying and I’m crying and the class is crying…

Men do not usually build houses for their own benefit.  Some build for wives, children, relatives, and servants, some for friends and acquaintances, some for masters, for teachers, and even for household goods, treasures, oxen, and horses.  But I have built for myself this time, not for anyone else.

The responsibility — the weight — of others certainly doesn’t give more than a brief shelter, any fleeting piece of mind.  But is it better to let go and build for oneself?  Kamo no Chomei finally concludes no (sorry for the spoiler).  One shouldn’t build at all, just marvel at the bubbles in the stream appearing and disappearing, breathing in, breathing out.  It’s against cultivation, against stability, against bolstering and against defense.  And then it’s amazing how little anything really matters.  Completely.  Utterly.  Terrifying.

And surely out of place in the type of food blog that’s supposed to represent normative family values and the insidious re-domestication of women.  And not at all a shelter for a planner, someone who invests in the future.

So I hold my impure tongue, fall silent.

—

Italicized quotes are from Helen Craig McCullough’s translation of Kamo no Chomei’s “Hojoki,” which she translates as “An Account of My Hermitage,” a slight failing in an otherwise wonderful translation, because it fails to convey the tiny size of the “10-Foot-Square Hut” we see in the original and in other translations.  Still, it’s the only translation worth reading, in my opinion, for the beauty and elegance she conveys, and sometimes adds.  It appears in her anthology of Classical Japanese Prose (Stanford, Stanford UP, 1990).  You can also read an online translation here.

Separate Two Eggs is my new, very occasional, series about a lonely single woman eating sad meals alone.  Or not. It’s really just a way to continue to queer food writing to add diversity to the Mommy-blogging and monogamous couple-oriented fare (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

best of eugene?

Just a quick reminder to vote for Culinaria Eugenius as Best Blog and Food for Thought as Best Radio Show in Eugene Weekly’s annual poll if you are so inclined.  Closes today at 5:00 Pacific, so make like the federal government and shut down operations so you can mess around on the internet.  You’ll need to be able to vote in 10 categories for your vote to count.

Photo: Courtesy Alaska Airlines and yours truly, flying over some of the best farmland in the world, our very own Willamette Valley.

coughy and tea

Oregano courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Must have been all the excitement yesterday.  Woke up this morning unable to speak with painful, swollen breathing bits, felled by the upper respiratory virus that’s been making its rounds on campus and sniffing around my feet for the past few days.  Very, very, very bad timing (which seems to be the theme of 2013).  I’m usually uncommonly healthy, and any respiratory illnesses are particularly mild.  In fact, I can’t think of the last time I had a serious cold.  Maybe 10 years ago?  My body is usually polite enough to have the decency to wait until I am not otherwise occupied with classes or travel.  But lately, it has not been interested in the comedy of manners I call my life.

And as in uffish thought I stood, or rather lay there in my bed, my savior in the form of my cleaning lady, Mercedes, knocked on the door.  Mercedes has been helping me since I hurt my knee in the summer, but I was never as thankful as I was this morning.  She brewed me up some of her home remedy for cough and various flu symptoms, a strange but oddly comforting herbal, sweet, and savory tea made from oregano, alliums, and spices.  It seems to be one of many interesting variants of Mexican cough remedies.  Mercedes is a great cook and precise, too, so I present her version to you herewith, as I suspect you might need it as much as I do.

Also, for good measure, I’ve included my recipe for anti-nausea tea, just about the only thing that helps me when the tsunami hit my shores, and a recipe to keep the wolf from coughing at your door. I’m going back to bed.

Cough Tea

• 5 cups water
• ¼ medium yellow onion, skin on
• 5 small garlic cloves, skin on
• handful of fresh oregano (about two dozen sprigs)*
• honey to taste (start with a tablespoon)
• juice of one lemon

Boil down the water, onion, garlic, and oregano to a cup and a half of tea.  Season to taste with honey and the freshly squeezed lemon juice.  Drink 2-3 cups a day until symptoms subside.

*My guess is that Mercedes grows Mexican oregano instead of the Greek stuff I have in my garden, but it worked in a pinch.

Nausea Tea

• 5 cups of water
• 1 small fresh ginger root
• honey to taste (optional)

Chop up ginger root coarsely and mash a bit with the back of your knife or a spoon.  Simmer for at least 30 minutes.  Add honey to taste.  I omit honey because I like the medicinal flavor of the ginger.  Drink with a soda cracker back, if you can.

When I have the flu, I will keep replenishing this brew with the old ginger in the pot for days.  I also pour some into a mason jar and keep it chilled for feverish moments. One large cup will almost immediately quell nausea, but the effect may be short lived.

Tea for Two

• There’s really only one version, as far as I’m concerned.

Starts around 4:45, but you really want to listen and watch the entire thing.  Absolutely perfection.  Makes one almost want to drag one’s phlegmy, unwashed body into the kitchen to bake a sugar cake.  Can’t you see how happy we can be-ee-ee-ee!

a prayer for fat tuesday: paczki day 2013

A souffle-waffle experimentA slice of chocolate mousse cake from Bon Appétit circa 1980Truth in Portlandia

Thank you, cruel Dominates of Moderates, for leaving your groveling minion one last day of respite: Fat Tuesday, the day we celebrate all that’s excessive and fat and delightful in carne-vale-esque fashion.

For I sing (softly and despairingly and despondently at times, but I sing) the body electric, for those of us who look like paczki and act like paczki, for we endeavor to lick the creamy filling out of our mortal days on earth.  I sing against watering down bourbon and decreasing diversity and kneecapping the tasty and pleasurable and loving.  I sing against the heart made of stone and the heart heavy as a stone and the body denied and the breath captured and the unseeing eye and the muted word, even though I know that Lent will still come and what will rise in the place of pleasure is not nearly enough.

But today, wearing my new perfume — no, not THAT perfume, Jesus — I will sally my pączek form forth into the daylight, and greedily, desperately, try not to feel the legacy of enforced continence, the pinch of the present, the undeniable, frightening, slouching-toward-us-inchoately horrors of the future.

Nothing better we can do, really.

Culinaria Eugenius Paczki Day coverage throughout the years can be found here.

parsley pips

Beachscape still life, unknown Dutch contemporary artist

The garden lies in waste, ravaged by the recent cold weather and the slugs that reign supreme over Western Oregon for most of the year.  No, I shouldn’t say ‘waste’ — even without serious intent, mustard greens and various alliums and artichokes are up and running, and wonderfully peppery wild arugula that reseeds each year, and a few lettuce and escarole heads here and there, and enough flowering borage to make a winter bouquet.

And ‘waste’ is wrong for the promise of spring, too.  It’s hard to feel hopeful right now.  But I know that under the hay and reddened leaves the strawberries will blossom, and the currants and gooseberries, now sticks, will emerge and fruit again. I know this patch by the shed will become a rhubarb, and that bare spot of ground is an 8-foot-tall lovage plant, and that over there is a much healthier asparagus patch than it was last winter, and this bucket of dirt is horseradish about to break free.  It’s the luxury of being rooted.

But just as there’s a place for patience, life also entitles us to say enough is enough, and we’re tired of waiting around for the wind to change.  On those days, we scavenge. I am reminded of M. F. K. Fisher’s recluse artist friend Sue, who hosts dinners on the windy coast of California on no budget at all, augmenting stolen flora and fauna with weird plants she finds in the hostile, rocky cliffs. (Although how hostile could it be if other people manage gardens and chickens. Eh. Details.) Sure, we call this ‘wildcrafting’ now and have made it a thoroughly acceptable bourgeois diversion, but ‘scavenging’ is better.  It means making something of refuse, castaways, leftovers, junk.  It’s creating value where none exists, if you’re the capitalist type, and it’s making art of one’s surroundings, if you’re the creative type, and it’s experiencing the world with your nose, the tip of your tongue, and your throat, if you are fundamentally, irrevocably, unflinchingly a cook.

Today it is the pale green tops of the overgrown parsley in the herb bed.  I usually let these go all winter, for unlike dill and quite horrifically like fennel vulgare, the fronds burst into seed and then drop them everywhere, making little parsleys that are great when thinned to enliven spring salads and greens and new potatoes. But we’re about a month from that moment and I need a burst of spring, so off with their heads!  I crush the tender new growth and the green seeds (pips, the British call seeds, a much better word because it captures the jaunty spirit of those little newborn chaps)…the parsley pips I smash down with my fingers and throw them in the pot of purple barley, which I’ll use tonight to stuff more cabbage.  For stuffed cabbage is the best reminder that life is infinitely variable, and there’s comfort in quarters unknown this morning to you.  Comfort in quarters you’ll know, I promise, by supper.

No, one can’t get tired of scavenging; it’s a mandate, really.  Carpe diem isn’t for lovers and it isn’t wasted on the young; it’s the last hope left.

 

watch out 2013!

After being knocked around for a couple of years, life decided to take off the gloves in 2012.  What violence! What misery! What an intolerable piece of work!

If the looming storm clouds on the metaphorical and literal horizons are any indication, 2013 is going to be even more horrendous than its older brother.  So what can we do? My goal is to bike straight in to the eye of the storm, for yea, o readers, I am the newest thing on two wheels.

Retrogrouch has several fancy bicycles, and if I had my druthers, I’d have a Dutch-style old commuter bike.  But I’m rather smitten with this new one.  It’s as basic as can be as a one-speed, but I’m enjoying it.  I need to buy a basket so I can ride off to the market.  I’m trying really hard to resist the urge to buy streamers and a neon orange flag with a pirate skull-n-crossbones drawn on it, as I had on my former bike two ack, three! decades ago.

All this bike action means, I might add, that my knee injury is doing pretty well after being laid up for two months, then another four months of learning to move again with physical therapy.  As you might imagine, there is considerable trepidation to ride in traffic, but I do think this fear is worth conquering, especially when it makes one hesitate to interact with the world.  I have most of my range of motion back and a good deal of strength, and although it still hurts pretty much all the time and has affected other parts of my legs and feet, my limp is only really noticeable on stairs.  A pox on the careless driver who hit me: I won’t wish you injury or death, but instead a thousand thoughtless acts to nestle up with you in bed, like a chef dropping your chicken on the floor and putting it back on your plate, or your keys falling into a clogged toilet, or an airplane screw left unturned causing you several hours on the tarmac. May you forget your wallet on your date; be served ruined holiday meals; run out of gas on a deserted highway; be abandoned by clients, friends, and family on important occasions.  I hope these things will make you learn why life is not best lived on autopilot.

Sound bitter?  Perhaps.  It’s been a rough year.  But these fragments I have shored against my ruins…and turned them into a shank.  So bring it on, 2013!

consider the vegetable: produce as modern art

Squash growing five feet up an elm tree; Eugene, OR

Sweet trompe l’oeil pastries shaped like bok choi mimicking jade sculpture in National Museum, Silks Palace Restaurant, Taipei

Of all the odd patterns I’ve discovered through my study of food in modern literature,  fruit and vegetables as victims of circumstance is probably the one I like best.  Meat, since Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905), had its battleground drawn between the forces of good and evil.   But produce, it would seem, was contested land.

Red cabbage sauerkraut lacto-fermenting; Eugene, OR

Seed zucchini in the winter rain; Open Oak Farm, Sweet Home, OR

Breaking free from the cornucopia and vanitas imagery that played out in paintings over and over again from the Dutch Old Masters onward, the vegetable in particular was portrayed in new and unusual and almost unrecognizable ways, frequently being destroyed by man’s (or woman’s!) hand: decaying, tortured, forced to adapt and survive in unfriendly conditions.

Display at Food Network’s Food and Wine Festival Grand Tasting, 2011; New York, NY

Native but tropical-flavored pawpaw, first crop in seven years; The Gourd Patch, Springfield, OR

Indian drumstick vegetable (Moringa oleifera), steamed; Oakland, CA

Be a modernist.  Try it yourself. It’s winter and raining and your imagination has nothing better to do to combat the Christmas onslaught of kitschy, rehashed icons and themes. Promote, as M. F. K. Fisher did, a tonic of mixed leftover vegetable juices as a tasty treat.  She fooled no one.  Would you have better luck with an apple-paw paw-drumstick cocktail?

Or think of vegetables not as their perfectly ripe, brilliantly colored, archetypal forms, but rather in a state of decay, too big and fecund, too shrunken, cut into pieces, out of place, misshapen, a seed, growing awry, doomed…

First harvest of Belgian endive, next it goes into deep chill then darkness to grow the familiar pale yellow chicon; Sunset Lane Farm, Brownsville, OR

…or is it dormant, exceptional, whole in its fragmentation, full of promise?

poppies will put them to sleep

It’s been harder than anticipated to get back to writing.  I blame the somnolent state of the blogger, laid waste by a general anesthetic and the drowsy lullaby of pain medication, not the tiny field of poppies growing in the back of her garden. For these are ‘Elka White’ Slovakian bread poppies (from local seed savers Adaptive Seeds), papaver somniferum, a relative to the ones that halted Dorothy and her companions on the way to the Emerald City.  If I ever wake up, I’ll turn the seeds that tumble from the dried seed heads into fine Eastern European poppyseed pastries who will be forgetful of their gardener’s sleepy summer start.

Hope things will be more normal soon.  It’s harder than one might expect to be laid up with all the time in the world — and unable to turn thoughts to words.

please, sir, i want some more: whole-grain morning gruel

Living with 100 lbs. less of a husband, and a newly minted marathoner yet (training for his first full one), causes some food clashes in a house formerly dominated by the taste principle of cooking.  Alas. But even with my weak willpower and distaste for nutritionism in American food rhetoric, I had to admit that my 20-year habit of eating a big white bagel in the morning was Not Good.  I would often start to crash and need a small snack around 10:30 a.m., and then turn into a raging bi…g white bagel if I didn’t have lunch by 1 p.m.  I had tried many times to change and found myself crashing even harder with cold cereal or oatmeal.  Adding cream cheese or butter to toast didn’t seem to help, either, and I found anything heavy and savory, like eggs, revolting in the morning.

I’ve really come around on the eggs issue, though, and after my strict debagelization training regime with Retrogrouch, I now usually can eat a fried egg with a piece of thin pumpernickel German toast in the morning, as long as it’s not first thing.

But he’s taken, lately, to making an overnight porridge with whole grains, not the chopped or rolled version you see in packaged grain porridge.  I took to calling it gruel as a joke because of its austerity, but it’s anything but thin and watery. [Edited to add: he has switched over to the crock pot, thank god.  It affects the texture and makes it slightly more gluey, but it’s still good.]

The gruel usually features oat groats that we get locally from Camas Country Mill.  He’s also done it with ryeberries from Open Oak Farm, also local, and occasionally with Open Oak’s wonderful purple barley, which we’ve been eating quite a bit of since he’s returned from his leave in Seattle.  What these grains share in common is that they are not processed at all but left whole and un-pearled or rolled, processes that break down the groat so it is more easily digestible, but removes some of the nutrients.

Retrogrouch makes his gruel even more healthy with the addition of flax meal, which may not be to everyone’s taste.  Whole grains lack the starchy quality of those that have been pre-digested.  I find flaxmeal tastes like mealy wheat germ, and the texture is difficult for me, but it does add some “stick to your ribs” quality that using whole grains lacks.  He also adds whole flax seeds and chia seeds, the latter currently trending in pop nutrition circles, which add crunch and a pleasant slipperiness.  He adds no sugar or salt, but I think it would benefit from a pinch of salt.

It’s critical to note that the gruel cooks very, very slowly for about 12 hours.  He claims it is better than the version he’s tried at half the time, because the grains finally break down and yield a creaminess (see above).  However, at 12 hours, I constantly worry about him burning the bottom of the pot.  So far there have been no casualties.

He likes to add frozen thawed blueberries and walnuts as a topping in the morning and eat gruel as a snack throughout the day.  I, being my own weak self, prefer cream and brandied apricots with a little vanilla powder, and can’t fathom eating it more than once every few days.  But surely there’s a happy medium.  And it’s really quite good.  I wouldn’t be surprised if you couldn’t go back to regular oatmeal (or god forbid a bagel) after trying it.

[ETA:  You can find oat groats in the bulk section of better supermarkets, including Market of Choice.  Retrogrouch also wants me to explain that he uses oat groats not merely because he likes the flavor, but they have more protein than other grains. Chia seeds add protein and fiber; chia and flax also are high in Omega-3 fatty acids]

Do you like this kind of information/post?  Let me know in the comments.  I don’t want to turn this into a health food blog, but if you like Retrogrouch’s very different approach, I’m happy to include more from him.

Whole-Grain Gruel

• 1 cup oat groats (best from Camas Country Mill)
• 4 tablespoons Chia Seed
• 2 tablespoons flax seed
• 2 tablespoons flax seed meal
• 4.5 cups water

No need to presoak the grains.  Bring all ingredients to a boil, stirring frequently to incorporate the meal and to break up the chia seeds, which tend to clump. Lower temperature to the lowest setting (we use our gas stove’s simmer burner) and heat gently for 12 hours.  If you have an electric stove, you may want to use a crockpot instead.  Once you have the technique and your own stove’s capacity down, just stir every couple of hours, but you might want to be more vigilant to make sure nothing is burning on the bottom of the pan.  Be particularly careful in beginning of the cooking process because the flax meal goes to bottom and may stick.

For cooking in the crock pot, just add all ingredients and cook on high for the first couple of hours, stirring every hour or two to integrate the water that rises to the top and scrape the sides, which cook more rapidly. Turn to low for 3-4 more hours to finish cooking.  Won’t be hurt if it gently cooks overnight.

Makes about 4-5 cups of gruel.  Can be refrigerated for several days.