Portland Food Lover's Suite Airbnb

I'm really sorry for the long delay in writing here but so much has happened this summer that I had to drop a couple things and unfortunately blogging was one of the casualties. I'm back though and I hope that you will forgive the silent treatment.

I recently got introduced to Airbnb -- do you know about it yet? If not check it out because it's a great way to travel around the world and stay in folks' homes usually for very little $. I'm doing it with the entire second floor of my home and I'd love it if you or a loved one or even an acquaintance would come and stay at my food lover's suite. I'm including a copy of my book for those who stay four or more nights. It's $70 a night.

The second bedroom/reading room attached to the bedroom.

I hope that you are doing well and, of course, eating well!

Here's the description that I have up on Airbnb:

airbnb.com listing

The 400+ square foot entire second floor of my house has hardwood floors, sloped wooden ceilings, a queen bed, a full bed/couch, two closets, dressers and reading nook along with an attached office/reading room and private bathroom with bath at the base of the stairs. It's perfect for one to four people. There's a TV with DVD player (for DVDs or VHS, no TV stations) and free WiFi. Cozy and clean, no pets please. Check in/out time is flexible, please inquire.

North Portland's Overlook neighborhood has all sorts of restaurants (Mextiza, Pause, Mio Sushi, food cart pod with 10 carts), bars (Old Gold, Palace of Industry, Barlow's, Hop & Vine), cafes (DiPrima Dolci), coffee shops (Blend) and parks all within a short walking distance of my 1907 cedar shake bungalow with front and back edible gardens and a comfortable front porch with chairs.

I'm a local food writer and editor and I've lived in Portland for 10 years. Included in the cost of a four day or more stay is a copy of my book, Food Lover's Guide to Portland. It will help you find all that is delicious throughout the city! I'm more than happy to offer eat, drink and be merry suggestions to you during your stay.

Guests can easily travel the city without a car from my house. The light rail line is five blocks away and takes you to/from the airport, downtown, the Rose Quarter and all over Portland. A bus to the Alberta Arts District also runs by my house and gets you there in 10 minutes. There is plenty of street parking available and it's a quick car or bike ride to downtown, Alberta Arts District, Mississippi Avenue, and all sorts of other great Portland neighborhoods.

You're more than welcome to use my fully functional and equipped kitchen (French press, refrigerator, oven, shelf space etc.), living room, as well as the washer and dryer and there is wireless throughout the house.

Please help share this with anyone that you think might be interested. Thanks so much!

For Your Viewing Pleasure Pt. 7

There's a lot going on right now so I'm sorry to do two of these types of posts in a row but such is life. We had an incredible eat/drink trip to Spain last week for the Toro Bravo Cookbook and hit Madrid and Barcelona hard. Three hours of sleep a night hard. We only had a little less than a week in Spain total so we felt like sleep should be the last thing on our agenda. While there we ate old cuisine such as roast suckling pig and Cocido Madrileno, new cuisine at Ferran and Albert Adria's restaurant Tickets, drank all sorts of tasty cava, cider, wine and spirits and we had some true blue adventures some of which I'll describe in detail in future posts and some of which I never will. When in Spain. I plan to do a series of posts with photos from Spain in upcoming weeks. I hope that you're doing well!

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For Your Viewing Pleasure Pt. 6

We leave this week for our week-long trip to Spain for the Toro Bravo Cookbook (McSweeney's Fall 2013) and I'm so excited! I've been looking forward to this trip for a while and to have it come at the end of the cookbook writing process not long before our final deadline is perfect. John Gorham, Toro Bravo chef-owner, got us all tickets and rooms (incredibly generous) for this eating/drinking pilgrimage. Going on the trip: John, the book's photographer David Reamer, myself, the book's editor Rachel Khong from McSweeney's, Toro's chef de cuisine Kasey Mills and Toro's charcuterie manager Josh Scofield. I'm probably not going to post for a few weeks because of the trip and everything going on when I get back but I thought you might like this peek into the book. We only have 10 recipes left to test! Hope you're doing well and enjoying the last bit of summer.

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Hillsdale Paella Party 2012

Last year I wrote about the Hillsdale Paella Party here and I'm doing it again because there's a 5 foot paella pan involved (!) and all sorts of other tasty food and drink and I really like the community behind this Hillsdale Main Street, a non-profit dedicated to revitalizing Hillsdale, second annual event.

I'm going to pull all of the most important info. from the press release below. If you're interested in attending I suggest getting a ticket sooner than later (purchase tickets here) because last year's event sold out. From the press release...

This Saturday you're invited to eat, drink and be merry for a great cause with the largest paella offering in the Northwest -- cooked up by James Beard Award-winning chef Greg Higgins. Desserts will be by Portland's Baker & Spice Bakery, with executive baker Julie Richardson who just released her new book Vintage Cakes. Latin music will be by Ojos Feos. This year more 300 Portlanders will attend to support this annual fundraiser.

On September 15th, guests will escape to Spain in an outdoor summer setting here in Southwest Portland, enjoying Spanish wines, live music, gourmet tapas and desserts, along with traditional paella. "When added to the outstanding tapas, still raved about after last year, and the decadent desserts created and donated by Hillsdale’s own Baker & Spice Bakery, this year’s event will be one-of-a-kind.”, says Hillsdale Main Street Executive Director Megan Braunsten.

While attendees dance to Afro-Cuban and South American style music, enjoy wine and tapas and, they will also be entertained by the making of the paella. The paella dinner, a tradition in Valencia, Spain, is a means of bringing the community neighbors together to connect, share in the meal and have fun. The paella is a traditional Valencian rice dish including saffron, shrimp, chicken, sausage and vegetables, cooked in a large round pan (a paella) outdoors for large groups of people.

Sponsors include Wyse Kadish, Willamette Week, Baker & Spice Bakery and Food Front. Hillsdale Main Street, one of the three Portland Main Street programs, is a program of the Hillsdale Community Foundation, a 501c3 whose mission is to make Hillsdale a better place to live, learn, work and shop by fostering community building and by raising and distributing resources. A portion of the proceeds will also go to benefit the Neighborhood House Emergency Food Box Program. Neighborhood House now serves approximately 14,000 low-income children, families and seniors around the city each year through programs that educate children and parents, feed and house hungry and homeless families, and assist seniors so that they can continue to live independently.

Hillsdale Paella Party Saturday, September 15th, 2012 6-9pm In the Hillsdale Business District in the big tent next to Bank of America at 6309 SW Capitol Hwy., Portland, Oregon 97239 $100 per person (Proceeds benefit Hillsdale Main Street and Neighborhood House Emergency Food Box Program) Purchase tickets Contact Tamairah Boleyn for more information: tam at korkagewine dot com 503.679.8699

Portland Garagistes Pt. 1

When I was a full-time freelance food writer I got used to rejection. If you can't accept the lack of a timely response too often eventually followed by rejection then you shouldn't freelance because that's unfortunately the nature of the beast most of the time. I learned how to spin very different pitches for the same story as well as restructure stories for numerous local and national publications. Now that I've published a book, am working on another book due out fall 2013 and am editor and publicity director at a publishing house I have less patience for that process so I mostly just write stories that I'm asked to write or put things that I'm interested in up here on my blog.

A while back though I met one too many people in Portland crafting delicious foods and drinks in their garages and decided I should write a story about it. I set up interviews and spent a good amount of time in garages throughout Portland talking with folks about the delicious foods and drinks that they craft in them -- a dessert maker, a cider maker, a winemaker, a beer brewer and a Persian pickle maker. I learned a lot and had a great time.

When it came to pitching the story the process took much longer than I remembered. I know that editors are very busy and receive an never ending, steady supply of pitches -- some good, many bad -- so I understand their often delayed responses to a certain degree. This is all a long way of saying that I tried and failed a few times to get this story published nationally and locally and I don't want to try to spin it any more. I'm doling it out to you in five installments here over the next several weeks because I love these people and think what they're doing is inspiring and important and, of course, delicious. I should have put this up here in the first place because it would have been a longer, more developed story if I hadn't tailored it so much. Stop complaining. Without further ado...

Portland Garagistes

In the Bordeaux region of France the term "garagiste" was coined in the mid 1990s when a group of winemakers began a movement of small batch wines, often made in their garages, that bucked the Bordeaux standard. I like the name "garagiste" and think it fits in spirit with what the five Portlanders featured here are doing -- making tasty stuff in their garages.

Sure, a kitchen is for cooking but they can get cramped and sticky hot -- especially when you've got a five-gallon homebrew pot simmering on the stove top for hours. I don't cook anything in my garage but in the past several years I've moved a lot of my food and drink ferments into the utility room at the back of the house. That's where I make and store crocks of miso, carboys of homemade fruit wines and hard ciders and buckets of kraut and sour pickles. More and more Portlanders are taking that kitchen extension one step further and into their garages.

I spent time with five such folks checking out their set-ups (all of their garages are average-sized at 250-350 square feet) and tasting what they make. Some are crafting commercial products and see their garage as an affordable space to work with while others just enjoy the larger square footage and freedom to be a little dirtier, a little scrappier, and a more isolated and less distracted by the outside world. Portland is fairly temperate so the home garage never gets too hot or cold. Nothing a couple space heaters or fans can't fix.

Stay tuned for Portland's "Garagistes" to be featured in five upcoming installments:

Pickler Charles Attarzadeh Sweetmaker Cheryl WakerhauserCidermaker Nat West Homebrewer Aaron Cohen Winemaker Jan-Marc Baker

For Your Viewing Pleasure Pt. 5

Things have been crazy around here in more ways than one so rather than writing much this week I'm putting up a snapshot from recipe testing for the Toro Bravo Cookbook: The Making, Breaking and Riding of a Bull (McSweeney's fall 2013). We're quickly approaching our deadline and making so much headway. And in three weeks we head to Madrid for it! Hope you're doing well and spending as much time outside as you can.

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Yard Fresh Pt. 23

We've been eating a lot from the yard these days with much more to come. It was in the 90s for a good enough stretch that the fruits are ripening and the zukes and cukes are going crazy. Hope you've been eating good local fruits and veggies lately too...

There is a reason people go crazy over Hood strawberries for the short window that they're available every year. They're that good.

First garlic harvest...

Second garlic harvest a couple weeks later. It was a pretty wet spring and early summer and I lost a lot of garlic to rot.

Made these for a 4th of July barbecue. Blended chipotle chiles and lime juice into cream cheese and then wrapped it in Freybe salame topped with a bite of homemade spicy garlic dill pickle. They went fast.

I always look forward to hazelnut arugula pesto...

Beet salad with a creamy Meyer lemon vinaigrette. A couple years ago I had an incredible beet salad at Evoe on Southeast Hawthorne and I've been dreaming of it by making various versions at home ever since.

Great year for lettuce. One of our many heads of delicious flashy trout's back lettuce.

All of 2012's cherry plum wine is bottled -- nearly 50 bottles. So good. The plums in the front yard are ripening now and I'll probably start this year's plum wine this weekend.

It's not exactly edible but wanted to share with you this Powell's promo. that includes my book and a whole bunch of other great food and outdoor books from publisher Sasquatch Books. 30 percent off all of these titles for a limited time at Powell's Books.

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2012 Tour de Hives

The Zenger Farm Bee Group has organized Portland's second annual Tour de Hives and it's taking place in backyards near you on Saturday, August 18th in celebration of National Honey Bee Day. Local backyard beekeepers will host self guided apiary tours throughout the Portland area from 1-4pm in order educate the public about urban beekeeping and how to be a good steward of the honeybee.

Tickets can be purchased online at the Tour de Hives website at a sliding scale of $5-15. Children are free with an adult. All proceeds benefit Zenger Farm. I'm not sure if I'll be back in town by then but if I am I hope to see you there. Sounds fantastic.

One week prior to the event, a tour map and site addresses will be emailed to ticket purchasers. For the self-guided tour participants transport themselves to each site, and set their own pace exploring a wide spectrum of urban beekeeping styles. A full list of tour guidelines is available online. And I think that they're still looking for volunteers if you're interested in lending a hand.

Following the event from 4-6 p.m. tour participants are encouraged to head to the Lucky Lab on Southeast Hawthorne to continue the conversation. For more information, contact Sydney Mead at sydney@ecotrust.org, or visit the Tour de Hives website.

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. For more information visit www.zengerfarm.org.

Tour de Hives 2012 www.tourdehives.com Organized by Zenger Farm Saturday, August 18 Self-Guided Apiary Tours: 1-4 p.m. Post Event Gathering: 4-6 p.m. at Lucky Lab (915 SE Hawthorne Blvd.) Tickets can be purchased online at a sliding scale of $5-15. Children are free with an adult.

Friend Food Pt. 5

I'm so grateful for my friends near and far -- such a great family of friends in my life. I don't have any friends that don't love food so we eat, drink and are merry a lot and also gift one another with tasty food and drink often. In this installment of friend food you may feel a little jealous. I hope not. I hope that it inspires you to make something yummy and give it to someone you love -- every last bite of it.

My friend Michelle recently moved and she has an enormous rhubarb plant in her yard. She didn't have time to cook with it so she gave me all of it and I chopped it up and made...

Rhubarb syrup! So far we've just had it with seltzer but rhubarb margaritas are in our near future...

My dear old friend Autumn moved to India a little more than a year ago and when she visited us this spring she brought us all of these treats. Lucky.

Our friend Anthony grows all sorts of chiles from seed every year and he's kind enough to always give us some. This year he gave us shisito, cherry bomb and aji chile plants and they are happy and healthy in the backyard. Future hot sauce.

My King of the Brine friend David Barber of Picklopolis recently gave us a couple bottles of his excellent hot sauce after he got his lovely new tattoo from my boyfriend Tyler at Grizzly Tattoo to commemorate his baby girl. The tattoo -- "Junior Pearl -- mon petit cornichon." Love.

Finally finished bottling the 50 or so bottles of last year's plum cherry wine. It would have been without the cherries if it weren't for my lovely friends and neighbors.

Our friend Nat West dropped off a case of his super tasty hard cider that's now available in all sorts of restaurants and bars around town. Go Nat!

And last but not least our friend Alison and her boyfriend Chris brought us back some tasty candy from Massachusetts. Witches did not make it.

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2012 Oregon Brewers Festival

The 25th annual Oregon Brewer's Festival is less than a week away and if you haven't made plans yet to attend I think you should consider it. I'm really looking forward to this year's OBF because there are all sorts of tasty beers that I haven't tried yet on the lineup. This year OBF will host 85 craft breweries from around the country and serve more than 30 styles of beer. The expected attendance is 80,000 so be ready for the madness, 130-plus beers to try and the festival's debut of a sour beer tent if you like the winky beers.

A few facts about this year's Oregon Brewers Festival:

The highest alcohol content beer this year will be Dogfish Head's Positive Contact at 9 percent ABV.

There will be more fruit beers this year -- 21st Amendment's watermelon wheat has been the festival's top seller for years.

There are six breweries bringing organic beers: Bison Brewing Company, Eel River Brewing Company, Fort George Brewery, Hopworks Urban Brewery, Logsdon Farmhouse Ales, Mt. Emily Ale House and Old Market Pub and Brewery.

Here's the gist of the festival straight from the press release:

Better known as the OBF, the festival was the brainchild of Art Larrance, co-founder of Portland Brewing Co. Art had traveled to the original Oktoberfest in Munich and knew what a big beer party was like. His goal was to re-create a similar atmosphere here in Portland and bring attention to the resurgence of microbrews.

Art collaborated with craft beer veterans Dick and Nancy Ponzi of BridgePort Brewing Co. and Kurt & Rob Widmer of Widmer Bros. Brewing Co. to produce the first Oregon Brewers Festival in 1988. Despite the limited number of microbreweries nationwide at the time – or perhaps because of that fact– the festival was overwhelmingly successful and has never looked back.

25th annual Oregon Brewers Festival www.oregonbrewfest.com July 26-29, 2012 Tom McCall Waterfront Park Main entrance at SW Oak Street and Naito Parkway Thursday through Saturday taps are open noon to 9pm; Sunday taps are open noon to 7pm. Admission to the festival is free. In order to drink beer you must purchase a $6 2012 mug. Beer tastes are purchased with $1 tokens. 4 tokens gets you a mug of beer and 1 gets you a taste. Cash only event -- ATMs are on-site. Minors are allowed into the event only if accompanied by a parent.