Flowers

"One of the things you have to do with a flower," he said, "is let it grow, it's own way. You have to give the flower what it needs to grow.

Avocado Melltttt

From Lili's.

First, a scone, then an AVOCADO MELT with a surprisingly awesome combination of lemon and salsa.

(with a side of really good soup ... I forgot which kind...)

Sprouted Lentils

Among the various inspirations I get from one of my friends has been the inspiration to sprout things.

I had some things that I believed to be green/brown lentils that I got from the bulk grains section of the Peoples' Food Co-Op

I had intended to make dahl sometime, but I noticed that the lentils were labeled 'sproutable'

so I took some of the dried lentils,



and placed them in a bowl completely submerged in water for a little over 12 hours. They absorbed a lot of water. Then I drained off the water and re-watered them, but draining off the water. I did this a few times now and then. This is just to keep them freshly wet.

In another 24 hours, they'd sprouted!




They're so excited about growing, I'm thinking of trying to plant some somewhere.
But they're also delicious and have a great texture, so I've been snacking on them pretty heavily...

I can stop if I want to ?

Things that are hard to stop eating until it's gone, in the order I can think of it:

- sticky rice (the sushi kind, with rice vinegar)

- pickled ginger

- olive oil and salt (and pepper)

- roasted, unsalted peanuts

- raw walnuts

- certain colby cheeses

- coconut oil

- salted butter

- roasted garlic

- grilled onions

- The Californian from Otto's (I think it's the bacon)

- quinoa

- pumpkin curry at Tom Yum

- butter-garlic sautéed button mushrooms (I call it vegetarian escargo -- vegan if you replace butter with olive oil)

- cod veronique a la Lili

- good peanut sauce

Lyrik: Food Art Drink

The Fine Grind on 39th has recently become LYRIK. I was attracted by the stylishly drawn words and image of a small floating monster. Also, I needed to get out of the house and go somewhere else to work. I'd never been to the place while it was still the Fine Grind, so I can't compare, but I was pleased with what I found on my adventure today!


There's a great assortment of weird and art on the inside, complete with lots of counter/table space and windows a-plenty so that even the gray daylight of January Portland provided pleasant natural lighting. Lots of little notices and cards for the taking to alert people to art shows and craft nights.




baked goods: fresh ones for $2, day-olds for $1. This large walnut/cranberry scone gave me something to munch on for a good while.




hot chocolate:



I test hot chocolate everywhere I get a chance, and I was sad that my hot chocolate here tasted very much like chocolate syrup. *Edit: I found out that they use Ghirardeli chocolate sauces. If you like Ghirardeli chocolate sauce, then this is great news. However, I am somewhat particular about what makes good hot chocolate good, and I guess this is not on the list. It has a weird sweetness, I think. They used to use Monin flavors for chocolate, but people seemed to prefer seeing Ghirardeli. They still use Monin flavors for other things though. I am going to have to find an excuse to get the irish cream flavor in something.

Good news though - I have been becoming more agreeable to the taste of coffee. So maybe next time I'll have to try a mocha nutmeg whatever whatever.






bagel sandwich:

Oh, this was great. The breakfast sandwich menu is both extensive and easily adaptable. I got a toasted everything bagel with cheddar cheese lathered on and a beautiful fried egg right in the middle, plus the extra tomato slice I asked for. Warm toasty cheesy egg bagel goodness, with tomato. Yes, it was a pretty standard breakfast bagel sandwich, but it was a very solidly well-done standard breakfast bagel sandwich!



I know what I'm getting next time I'm there for lunch. There's a sandwich with my name on it!





I've never really done the coffee shop thing, but with it's endearingly border-insane artsy-ness, Lyrik is such a Portland coffeeshop. I will miss places like this whenever I get around to going elsewhere.



I have decided that the city of Portland is not unlike a small, cuddly monster, as far as city personalities go.

Fig and Lemon Tart

I recently had the joy and privilege of viewing and eating this.








A marvelous lemon-and-fig tart from Patisserie Cafe Lili.


The curl of lemon perches atop the four quarters of a soft, sweet figs moored in a brightly-flavored dish of thick, smooth lemon filling.

Breakfast at Lili's

Cinnamon roll french toast!

Mango'd

Today I shared 2 mangoes with a housemate.

After unsuccessfully cutting most of the the fruit away, I tried the soft yellow around the seed with my teeth.

And I found myself again in Cairo. I felt it before I recognized it. I felt it before my mind filled in the nighttime, people, traffic, and dust.

There are not juice stands here, on every other corner, the way they are in Cairo. The sense Mango filling my mouth and the memories that filled my brain took me back to buying glasses of fresh mango juice from the juice stands - a tall glass filled with liquid fruit - we competed with each other to find the best and cheapest stands.

I maintain that Tiff and I won.
I don't remember the exact price, but I remember it was less than anything else we knew of, and the juice was first rate - eating mangoes that you didn't even have to chew. The place is in Arbaa-Wa-Noos - I think it's in the Northeast. Hop in a mini bus that goes to Seleb! Seleb! Seleb! and get off when you see the sign for the textile factory: 'ال سلاب,' if I remember right. There was construction here, a few years ago, so it probably looks different now. But find the school - ask someone to take you to Central, school for displaced Sudanese. Stop at the school and play jumprope with the kids and drink tea with the teachers. Ask them if they ever got the pictures we took with them. Ask them whose gone back to Sudan and if there are new teachers. Ask them if Bafi is still there, or if he and his family have made it out. Then keep going down the direction you were headed in. I think you'll come to a fork in the path between sand and abandoned buildings. They're not abandoned - most buildings are not falling apart but rather are unfinished, so as to avoid the tax that applies to completed buildings. Take the right fork. In that direction, I think, and not too much farther, is the best mango juice stand I know of.

It's past Gheda's house and near the restaurant where we took her out to dinner. Gheda, who spoke a little more of our language than we knew of hers, who was engaged to be married, who invited us into her home, and whose friendship with us consisted mostly of smiles, nods, and laughter to replace the words, but none of it ingenuine.

I am going against Pascal's musings.
I am trying to be everything
Is this why I unravel?

Is anything correlated?

I think I cast the thread of these stories in the partial hope that someone will recognize the spool that spins them or the fabric they might be trying to weave.


I hardly dare ask for causes,
but is anything correlated?

The Perennial Pedagogy

(Imagine this written in the italic hand of Lloyd J. Reynolds. Maybe I can get a picture sometime.)


The Perennial Pedagogy

1. Get the idea. (Formative image.)
2. Concentrate.
3. Get the feel.
4. Practice, practice, practice.
5. Take it easy. (Easy does it.)
6. Get the swing of it.
7. Be in good form.
8. Get lost in the work.
9. Let IT do it.
10. Work for the work's sake.
11. Don't sell out.
12. Do it the right way.
13. Keep to your calling.
14. Teach. (Share your skill.)

"Lessons in the Kitchen are Life Lessons,"

he said during his Classic Deserts American Club Demonstration Kitchen class.

Speaking partly of Baked Bananas Foster, Chocolate Gooey Cake, and Rosemary-Honey Créme Brûlée and partly of life in general, he phrased it slightly better than I'd worked out in my own head:

"If you are so afraid to make mistakes, you'll never do what it takes to risk innovative things and you'll stymie creativity."
-Richard Palm
Pastry Chef

yes.

Some things are more difficult to experiment with than Créme Brûlée, but still.
yes.

Lili's

The restaurant is on the corner of a block with space to eat outside at small round tables.

Indoors, it's like being inside of a very nice gift box or a giant petit-four. The place would be a great still-shot backdrop for a lighthearted cartoon.

The color of choice seems to be the spectrum of beige, from cream to chocolate with a hint of pink. Wide robin's-egg-blue stripes appear on the parts of the walls that don't have windows or circle mirrors, and the cabinets are what I'll call green tea with milk or cream olive forest green. The chairs are autumn-windfall-apple red.

Flowers, still-life russet-goldenrod fireworks lean silently against
each table's vase.

Quiet jazz (catch the trumpet?) from the radio matches the floor: vanilla cream and medium-brown outline paintings of kitchen utensils, each labeled with smooth curly-edge brushmanship.

A friend and I eat outside,
After much deliberation and indecision (so many good ideas), she orders the Tex Mex Breakfast, and I the Cornmeal Pancakes with Apple Compote and Caramel. They're so good that during the course of our meal, we switch plates twice.
Hers is some magical synthesis of beans/rice/salsa with a fried egg on top and ample guacamole served in a ceramic medium-dark blue bowl with a handle that makes it look as if it might have been raised with the saucepans.

I've never had cornmeal in pancakes before and I don't expect wheat to come anywhere near it anytime soon. Two slabs of pancake, served slightly off-center on a smooth white ceramic plate, were topped with an inviting pile of apple compote laced about with caramel. I think perhaps the best justice I can do to this pancake is again to list the ingredients:

*cornmeal pancakes
(Not grainy at all, but soft and very willing to separate when prompted by a fork)
*apple compote
little chips of apple in a little hill with cinnamon
*caramel
drizzled in an artistic entropic fashion.
Not too sweet to cover the cornmeal, not too much to make anything soggy, just enough to know that its there and mixing with the apple.





I know.. the flowers in these pictures are differently colored than I described... but that's because they use fresh flowers!

Llena de Estrellas

from 9/17



谢谢，郝鹿路






9/18/07

Pear Monster

title="Yes, this is what I decided would be a good birthday gift">

Once in the CoOp, Always in the CoOp

It was so good to hear the words I'd used
to verify community
spoken back to me in invitation

Pseudo-Persephone

Yesterday, 8/6:

"It's like, a chocolate pomegranate thing," he said, intently applying teeth to the still some-frozen cold dome of chocolate.

plastic wrap lining a small bowl,
microwave-tempered chocolate shell filled with
freshly-picked blackberries (and more chocolate for structure),
set in shape by time and a freezing,
chocolate leaves and berries added at the end

I watched
the chocolate hull of the cake hemisphere gradually give way under white enameled pressure, revealing an interior of many cold juicy beads.

I built him a cake that won't leave anyone stranded in Hades

Ratatouille

(this post actually written several days after the indicated date)


Following this recipe, I produced an acceptable ratatouille.

Well, the ratatouille didn't give me any crazy childhood memories, as in, it didn't evoke any.

But I think it created one.

Now it will mean sunflowers bowing out of a pitcher
a table packed tight with dishes
in honor of a friend
who has not disappeared.

It will mean love and blackberries, french bread, olive oil, and rosemary,
a full table
so full
and admired by bowing sunflowers



I saw a field of yellow light in 5 nodding stalks.
How did you pick the whole field?
Thankyou.


Good food, Good friends, Good God...

A Toast!

(posted 12 18 2007)

Gold Fish and Bananas

I was walking during lunch break the other day when I saw a goldfish cracker lying on the road, twitching slightly because it had a bristle of ants for a mohawk.

I'm almost embarrassed to report that one of my first thoughts was about writing a blog post in which I (so cliche...) describe how many puny ants working together can move something great, and OH if only we humans would put our strengths to use, throwing our ant-ly lives together towards a common cause!
(I'm sure you've never heard that one before)

Come on, I chided my own thoughts, It's JUST a goldfish cracker.


Just a goldfish cracker.


My mind had not yet released the metaphor
Great, I thought. How many causes toward which I throw my life will end up being just goldfish crackers?
This troubles me slightly.
I have so much life and yet,
too little to waste on a metaphorical goldfish cracker.

(No offense intended toward goldfish crackers)


(the whole thing also reminded me a bit of this)



The top part says,

The Collective Consciousness of society that creates many a golden banana that you can never quite reach.

22/7

Rough Approximation of Pi Day*


A Rough Approximation of Pie Cake was necessary...

Strange Tortilla

hah. weird..