Oven & Shaker fixing up and serving tasty little meatball puccia at the 2012 Portland Taste of the Nation.

This year’s 25th anniversary Portland Taste of the Nation at Jeld-Wen Field was incredible and rather than type up all of the reasons why I’m going to lay it all out in photos for you. If you were there you might see yourself in some of the photos below because I snapped a lot and managed to only drop my camera once. It’s ok. This was the first year Taste was held at Jeld-Wen Field and I think it’s a fantastic venue. You’ll see from the photos. If you weren’t able to make it please consider attending next year. It costs a pretty penny but 100% of proceeds go toward hunger relief in Oregon. Without further ado…

One of the most decadent treats of the night was Gruner's foie gras torchon on toasted brioche topped with riesling pickled rhubarb. One of my favorites of the night and they went fast.

Another favorite only available to VIP ticket holders (spend more on your ticket for several additional tastes and early entry) was Bamboo Sushi's amberjack topped with red jalapeno, cilantro, black flying fish roe and miso vinaigrette.

My friend Craig joined me this year and this is what his tray looked like 10 minutes in. So many tasty treats. And we got to sample a lot of nice wine, beer and spirits as well.

Chop's table was very popular and they had one of the most diverse spreads of any of the partipants. Tried all kinds of delicious salames, proscuittos and pates and had a difficult time leaving that table and moving along...

This was probably about 30 minutes into general admission. Packed but not uncomfortable because of all the natural light and air flow above. Everyone was in great spirits sampling all the food and drink and knowing that all money spent goes to a great cause.

For $25 you could try your luck at restaurant roulette. All sorts of local food and drink gift certificates to be won...

I won these! Anya Spence of Miss Zumstein is a good friend of a friend and looking forward to using both GCs.

Departure was serving up one of my other favorites of the night -- spicy steamed honey chicken bao.

They deserve a close-up -- Departure's spicy chicken bao.

I always look forward to what Andina cooks up for Taste of the Nation. This year they did lomo saltado empanadas and potato, avocado, smoked tomato causitas. Both were delicious as always.

My boyfriend's friend Brewer Dylan Goldsmith of Captured by Porches poured my friend Craig an alt beer right before Mayor Sam Adams gave a speech declaring May 8th officially No Child Hungry Day and at the end thanked Dylan for the tasty IPA he was drinking.

Happy to donate some copies of my book to the silent raffle. My book came with gift certificates to Chop, Nong's Khao Man Gai and Missionary Chocolates. Not too shabby.

Closing shot -- love this one of Irving Street Kitchen's station cooking up potato latkes with gravlax and apple butter. Can't beat cooking in sunglasses...

Stay tuned for next year’s Taste of the Nation!
www.portlandtaste.org

Zenger Farms seed packets with all Burgerville kids' meals through May!

There’s a great promo. going on at all Burgerville locations throughout Oregon and Washington that you should know about if you have kids in your life. Local, sustainable fast food chain Burgerville is offering seed packets in its kids’ meals. They’ve partnered up with urban farm education center Zenger Farm and this spring through May — until supplies last — when you purchase a Burgerville kids’ meal you get a packet of seeds, an illustrated plant stake and a Zenger Farm activity bag. So go get some burgers and fries and plant some seeds!

Straight from the press release…

“It all starts with a seed. When kids plant, tend and harvest vegetables, they are more inclined to eat them. We see it over and over again at Zenger Farm,” said Jill Kuehler, Executive Director of Zenger Farm. “We are proud to partner with Burgerville to encourage families to plant a garden this spring and cook with what they grow.”

About Zenger Farm

Founded in 1999, Zenger Farm is a working urban farm that models, promotes and educates about sustainable food systems, environmental stewardship, community development and access to good food for all. It now consists of 9.7 acres of farmland and wetland in outer southeast Portland. Learn more at zengerfarm.org or call (503) 282-4245.

About Burgerville

Burgerville is a restaurant company with 38 locations throughout Oregon and Southwest Washington, serving guests fresh, great tasting food from the mission “serve with love.” Burgerville’s values extend beyond locally grown berries, all-natural Country Natural Beef, Walla Walla onions and cage-free eggs. At Burgerville, the commitment to fresh, local and sustainable values is about helping people and communities thrive. The innovative company, established in 1961, is redefining industry norms by providing affordable health care for hourly employees and their dependents, purchasing wind power equal to their electricity use, converting used trans-fat free cooking oil to biodiesel and implementing comprehensive resource stewardship and recycling. For more information about Burgerville, please visit burgerville.com

Congratulations lucky number 6 commenter! Email me so we can set aside two tickets for you at will call!

You know who you are lucky #6 commenter! You’ve won yourself two tickets to this year’s Taste of the Nation next Tuesday, May 9th at Jeld-Wen Field. Drop me a line @ info at lizcrain dot com with your full name and contact info. and I’ll pass that along to the organizers who are donating the tickets. Your two general admission tickets will be available the night of the event at will call. (Don’t worry if it takes me a few days to respond — I’m out of town for work and will be back mid-week.)

Thanks everyone for all of your tasty comments! I hope that some of these businesses come to fruition. If you build it they will come!

For those of you who didn’t win tickets there are still tickets available for this year’s 25th anniversary Taste of the Nation. It’s one of the best food events in town and I highly recommend it. In addition to it being delicious and super fun 100% of proceeds go toward ending local child hunger. Gotta feel good about that.

Thanks everyone!

Share Our Strength’s Taste of the Nation
Tuesday, May 8th, 2012
6:30-9pm
Jeld-Wen Field
1844 SW Morrison St.
Portland, OR 97205
Tickets $85 and up (order by phone 877.26TASTE, online or at any New Seasons Market)
www.strength.org/portland

Biwa kicked ass at last year's 2011 Portland Taste of the Nation as usual with their braised pork lettuce wraps with pickled veggies.

Share Our Strength’s annual Taste of the Nation on Tuesday, May 8th at Jeld-Wen Field is just two weeks and a day away and it’s the 25th anniversary of this fantastic event. In the interest of shouting it out loud and clear and getting as many people to come out for it and support it as possible I’m giving away a pair of tickets here on my blog.

I love this event because 100% of ticket sales go toward working to end child hunger via Oregon Food Bank, Klamath-Lake Counties Food Bank, St. Vincent de Paul Food Recovery Program and Partners for a Hunger-Free Oregon. Read about last year’s Taste of the Nation here.

This year’s TOTN will showcase food and drink from 50 restaurants, 25 wineries and 5 breweries — these folks. The list is growing daily.

So it’s a VERY worthwhile cause that I highly recommend buying tickets for. You can also try your luck for a pair of general admission tickets here on my blog. I’ve got a number in mind and I’ve written it down and taken a photo of it as proof. That numbered person to comment takes the cake. You get me your name and contact info. and there will be a pair of tickets waiting for you at this year’s Taste of the Nation will call the night of May 8th. Please help me to spread the word about this ticket giveaway and Taste of the Nation on Twitter, Facebook etc. I’m foodloverPDX on Twitter.

So what to comment about? Let me know what sort of food/drink business you’d love to see launch in Portland. It could be a food or drink product, a market, a non-profit, coffeeshop, brewery. It could be something that already exists and you’d like to see replicated in another neighborhood or it could be a business you’ve just always wished existed here that you’ve never seen. Leave a comment and let me know — just because I’m curious.

I’ll announce the lucky winner early next week!

Share Our Strength’s Taste of the Nation
Tuesday, May 8th, 2012
6:30-9pm
Jeld-Wen Field
1844 SW Morrison St.
Portland, OR 97205
Tickets $85 and up (order by phone 877.26TASTE, online or at any New Seasons Market)
www.strength.org/portland

We had good friends over for this one -- Vij's lamb curry. It was really tasty and we will definitely be making it again.

I first wrote about Vij’s cookbook — Vij’s Elegant and Inspired Indian Cuisine — here in late December. At that point I’d cooked a few tasty dishes from it (love their Vancouver, B.C. restaurant so much) and just about licked the plate clean with every one. Since then I’ve cooked some more from it and I’m sharing some of that here with you.

I don’t often cook so much from any one cookbook in such a short amount of time but this one never lets you down and I’ve learned so much. I also happen to love Indian cuisine and haven’t found too much of it in Portland to be honest that hits the spot. (Although I’m really looking forward to checking out the newly opened Bollywood Theater.) If you love Indian food as much as I do I recommend checking out this book.

We served the Vij lamb curry with this quick cabbage curry with mustard seeds that still had a lot of crunch and flavor to it and was really tasty.

I went ahead and bought a twenty pound sack of basmati from Fiji Emporium on North Interstate Ave. since I cooked a lot of Indian food over the winter and early spring.

I've been bulking up on my Indian spices as well...

This simple vegetable curry was really tasty with raita and black chickpea curry.

We make a lot of the Vij chai now too. It's a simple one with green cardamom and fennel.

Vij’s Cookbook Pt. 1

Vij’s Elegant and Inspired Indian Cuisine
www.vijs.ca

Tyler packed me lunch the other day and it made me very happy...

Things are starting to get going in the garden — right now I have tah-tsai (which I thought was a new green for me but it’s actually another way to say tatsoi — funny), flashy trout’s back lettuce and borage are all sprouting and we’ve been eating some volunteer arugula as well. The rhubarb is getting very big and leafy and the snap peas have finally sprouted! The garlic is looking great although it still has a few months of growing — I usually pick it in June or July. And I have all the vegetable seeds I’m going to plant this spring and summer and will probably start my indoor seed trays in a week or so to be transplanted out in several weeks.

That’s all just a long-winded way of saying happy spring! Although not very much of the food photographed in this post came from the garden I still call it Yard Fresh as a catch-all for good things that I’ve been cooking and eating lately. Hope you are doing well. Growing anything interesting this season? Eat anything tasty lately?

Loved the art on the bag and the sandwich inside it. Simple ham sammy with seeded wheat hit the spot.

The only thing really going in the yard right now that's ready to eat is the arugula that volunteered so we've been having a lot of salads with it and throwing it in scrambles and sandwiches.

I love Edelweiss Sausage & Delicatessen and their oregano-coated Nuremberger is one of my favorites. I sauteed it and served it with potatoes and kale with lemon butter. Really good.

And I can't make a trip to Edelweiss without getting some of their paprika loaf thinly sliced. If you haven't had it then please do yourself a favor and go buy some. You won't be disappointed.

My favorite way to eat it is stacked on lightly toasted bread with mayonnaise and sometimes slivered onion. That's it -- keep it simple.

Simple broiled cheese bread with egg. Mixed mozzarella, onion and mayonnaise for the cheese sauce.

Another tasty, savory breakfast -- this time with leftover spaghetti in red sauce.

John and Tyler recipe testing the chicken with jamon and manchego for the Toro Bravo Cookbook, due out fall 2013 from McSweeney's.

Every once in awhile I get too busy work-wise to put together a blog post so I throw up a photo and call it a day. We’ve been busy working on the Toro Bravo Cookbook so that means a lot of recipe testing and essay writing. I love it all — having so much fun with this project. I’m also doing all my other usual work and then some — all of it involving words, food, or words + food. Good stuff. I hope that you’re doing well and enjoying spring. Happy late April Fools’ Day! Hope someone got you good this year. I fooled a few…

www.torobravopdx.com

For Your Viewing Pleasure Pt. 1

I decided to cook up this blackened bluefish recipe in the second issue of Lucky Peach...

I’ve been pretty loud and clear about my love of Lucky Peach magazine published by McSweeney’s. I wrote about it here in late November but at that point I had yet to cook from it. (We also hadn’t sealed the deal for the Toro Bravo Cookbook with McSweeney’s, fall 2013, at that point…) Now that I’ve cooked from it — and now that issue number three has hit the shelves — I’m putting photos of a couple of the things I’ve made here. That’s it. Oh, and go get yourself a copy if you don’t have it already. It really just keeps getting better and better.

I got the fixings together -- homemade miso mayo made with my year-plus old homemade miso, pickles, spicy chips and thinly sliced iceberg.

I blackened dover because that was what looked best at the market...

And then I put it all together in between buttered and broiled ciabatta. So fucking delicious. Cook this!

I made a custardy breakfast sandwich with the leftover blackening spices, miso mayo, iceberg and some cheddar on ciabatta.

The third and latest issue of Lucky Peach, on shelves now, has this story by Rachel Khong...

Including a recipe for this Two Minute Chocolate Mug Cake that I've made a couple times now. It's not so pretty but it is fun, quick and tasty.

LUCKY PEACH
Subscribe!

I've had this Nigel Slater's cookbook Tender for about a year now and I'm really looking forward to cooking more from it this summer.

A peek inside...

When I first started writing about food professionally in 2003 I turned to Nigel Slater and his writing in The Observer and I loved his voice. A lot of food writing can wax poetic and favor form over the content but Nigel Slater’s writing never does. It’s honest and I’ve really enjoyed reading him over the years. If you haven’t read his memoir Toast I recommend it. It’s a wonderful book and I had fun reviewing it for Culinate way back when. (While putting this post together I learned that a film based on it starring Freddie Highmore and Helena Bonham Carter aired this past Christmas on BBC1 and at the Berlin, Taipei and Warsaw Film Festivals. Can’t wait to see it!)

I purchased one of Nigel Slater’s newest cookbooks — Tender — pretty soon after it hit shelves last spring in America and I’ve enjoyed cooking from it ever since. (It was published in two volumes in the UK in 2009; in the US by Ten Speed Press in 2011, the second US volume Ripe comes out this April.) The book is part recipe and part narrative — giving you background into Slater’s London home garden that he broke ground for in early 2000 and maintains with his partner.

Chapters are based on ingredients sourced from Slater’s garden and cooked in his kitchen so it’s homespun and inspiring and feeds right into my Yard Fresh ways. I love this book and I hope that you will too. Here are some of the tasty foods that I’ve cooked from it lately…

Thinly sliced roasted potatoes with butter and thyme.

Beer braised beef stew with homemade applesauce and roasted potatoes.

Stew and potato leftovers with one over-easy for breakfast.

This cauliflour cheese mustard soup is so good that I got a few friends to make it in the same week. Really.

Cabbage sausage soup with a few other bites on the side.

Tender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch
by Nigel Slater
pub. date April, 2011
620 pages
$40, Ten Speed Press
www.nigelslater.com

Because Gruner was out of their's the last time I went I decided to try my hand at deviled pickled beet eggs. They turned out great.

I planted my peas over the weekend even though I usually wait until early April. It’s been so warm that I thought I’d give it a shot. While planting them I noticed that the nettles are all coming up around the front porch along with the rhubarb and all the tiny oregano, peppermint, sorrel and lemon balm.

I bought a bale of straw last weekend at Urban Farm Store and weeded a few areas in the front and then covered them with it. Next weekend I’ll do the same in the back and plant some borage and arugula. I’m so happy that spring is on its way. I’m really looking forward to gardening this summer especially now that we cut down the old apple tree in the backyard. It’s bittersweet because we really loved that tree but it was old, hollowed out and threatening to do some structural damage. We’ll also get a lot more backyard sun light now that it’s gone.

Hope you’ve been getting outside more now that it’s been so nice. Here are a few of the tasty things we’ve been cooking and eating lately…

Dungeness scramble with butter, Meyer lemon and yellow onion.

Roasted chicken and brussels sprout sandwich on sourdough.

Big and buttery Grand Central Bakery peanut butter cookies.

Breakfast in bed with those PB cookies, tangerine and coffee and orange juice.

Leftover beans and rice from the excellent Mi Mero Mole with Costa Rican Lizano. Gallo Pinto!

Yard Fresh Pt. 19
Yard Fresh Pt. 18
Yard Fresh Pt. 17
Yard Fresh Pt. 16
Yard Fresh Pt. 15
Yard Fresh Pt. 14
Yard Fresh Pt. 13
Yard Fresh Pt. 12
Yard Fresh Pt. 11
Yard Fresh Pt. 10
Yard Fresh Pt. 9
Yard Fresh Pt. 8
Yard Fresh Pt. 7
Yard Fresh Pt. 6
Yard Fresh Pt. 5
Yard Fresh Pt. 4
Yard Fresh Pt. 3
Yard Fresh Pt. 2
Yard Fresh Pt. 1