Carl Alviani

Let’s ease back into this with something familiar, that I know everyone likes: more pictures of food. Or in this case, pictures of things that are going to eventually be food.

The truth is, it’s hard for me to think too hard about food in February or March. The grocery stores are still full, the restaurants and carts are serving, and I’m cooking as often as ever, but it’s not quite the same as walking down the street and seeing food sticking out of the ground, which is a not uncommon occurrence in Portland. In the right season, anyway. A friend of mine was heavily influenced to move here during one particular visit from New York as we were walking down a residential sidewalk and he abruptly stopped and exclaimed, “Wait, is that rosemary?!”

“Yeah. And that’s mint, that’s sage, that’s parsley and that’s thyme. And that bed back there is fennel and leeks.”

“And people just grow that stuff out here by the sidewalk?”

There are plenty of things I miss about New York, but the quality of the edible gardens is not one of them.

I still have those sorts of realizations myself pretty frequently — tiny epiphanies that the world is benevolent enough to have devised biological entities that can craft scraps of air and soil and carbon and nitrogen and water into something as delicious as a beet or a peach or a leaf of bitter lettuce. And that I can watch it happen.

Anyway, that’s what today’s (this month’s, this year’s) photos are of: new things growing in my house. Not even edible mostly, just reminders that it’s that time of year, when, entirely without effort or intention on my part, things decide to start growing again.

These are seedlings of Pimientos de Padron, which I’m hoping to grow a bunch of myself and spare the $7 or whatever it costs for a bowl of them at Toro Bravo. It’s still in the 40s outside, but I set the pot on my radiator and tell the seedlings they’re in Spain. So far, it works.

And this is Tropical Houseplant That Lives In My Bathroom. It doesn’t do much: no growing, no shrinking, no drooping, no decaying. Except that all the sudden, with no prompting or special treats, it’s making two new leaves. Weird, right?

A little forlorn at the Hollywood Market today, despite a partial sunbreak and a better than average band in the music tent. It’s the last market day until 2011, so in addition to the diminished abundance in nearly everyone’s stall, there were also a lot of sighs and promises to “see you in March.” That’s how seasons work, I suppose: you don’t get excited about something opening unless you first watch it close.

For all that, not a bad haul, and I didn’t even touch on the root vegetables or squashes this time around. Clockwise from the top: more Brussels sprouts (these were everywhere, stacked like Martian Christmas trees in half the stalls), Russian kale, leeks, yellow onions, levain batard from Fleur de Lis (A little cheat on this, since I actually walked to their bakery five blocks from the market, after finishing my produce shopping. But they used to have a stall, so I figure it still fits in the Market Haul category), artichokes, Italian frying peppers (not sure what you do with those, but I’m up for a challenge), parsley.

In light of the upcoming season of overindulgence, I think dinner this Tuesday’s going to be vegetables exclusively.

The harvest season slowly winds down. From November 6, the last great Haul of the year, I suspect: leeks, squashes, kale, carrots, beets, bread, garlic, cheese, chorizo, an intimidating stalk of Brussels sprouts, and a bag of some of the best salad greens I have ever eaten. Also, a rare indulgence in a $10 bottle of cider, justified by my current “learning about cider” status and wanting to see what all the fuss was about single origin pressings. The bottle shown here is from Salem-based Wandering Aengus, and it’s made from crab apples (no kidding). Complicated and delicious, and worth at least 2/3 of what I spent on it.

Now contrast that with the Haul from just a week later (yesterday): small heads of butter lettuce at 3 for $5, radishes (perpetually available), some smallish Yukon Golds, apples, pears, escarole for braising along with meats and roots, and a bag of bacon ends.

True, I could’ve grabbed some more beets, but I’ve got plenty left over from last week through the magic of pickling. And the cheese and meat lasts longer when the weather gets cloudy and life gets more sedentary. But I specifically asked for those salad greens, and they were already out, along with plenty of other things. Captured By Porches and Fleur de Lis, my reliable sources for beer and bread, are long gone, along with about a third of the vegetable vendors.

It’s easy to say how good it is to see the seasons change when it’s light until 9 and the market’s full of strawberries, but times like these make me wonder what I was thinking. Maybe I’ll just crawl into my kitchen with a bottle of bourbon and a side of pork and call you in May. Happy winter everyone.

A little more dirt on the produce this time around, and with good reason. Jeanne and I missed the Hollywood Market on the 16th, because we had driven 300 miles east for the weekend, to visit some friends of hers in Joseph.

Joseph is a preposterously lovely town at the southern end of the Wallowa Valley, at about 4000 feet of elevation, and perhaps 40 miles from where the Snake River grinds through Hell’s Canyon. When you sit on the front porch with your coffee in the morning and look east, the distant mountains you see are the Seven Devils, in Idaho; the much closer ones to the west and south are the Wallowas, home to Oregon’s largest wilderness area, and, judging by the photos, alpine landscapes that evoke the Sierra Nevada more than the Cascades. I like that I live in a state with enough diversity to reliably surprise you on every new trip.

What To Do in Joseph and neighboring Enterprise on a crisp fall weekend:

1. Visit the Terminal Gravity Brewery, twice in 48 hours, because there are seven offerings on tap that they don’t bottle, each strong enough to limit your consumption to three glasses per visit, if you’re sensible.
2. Hike up Hurricane Creek, because it gets high and wild very quickly, and the trailhead’s just outside of town.
3. Go to the cider pressing, because it’s a much bigger deal than it sounds — 200 or more people by my estimates, a band, a hay bale maze for the kids, a massive potluck anchored by slabs of pork emerging from an ominous black smoker at regular intervals, and all the cider you care to take home (we put ours in a donated Carlo Rossi bottle) . I shot some movies of this, which I may take the initiative to post someday soon, but no promises.

The lamest Portland summer ever yields a belated run of summer produce. If a shopping bag full of tomatoes, eggplants, peaches and peppers looks weird to you in September, you’re not the only one.

Most of what’s here should be familiar so I won’t go into details, except to point out that yes, I’m now completely addicted to those bizarre-looking fluted giganto-zucchini, and the peppers were presented as Ancho but look identical to the Poblanos at the next stall over. Serves me right for not growing up in New Mexico.

Unpardonable lapses on these. My only excuses are a number of personal events that interfered with Saturday marketing, and a lost charger for a dead camera battery. One of these photos was actually shot with an iPhone (guess which).

The unintended benefit, though, is getting to see a fast-forward progression of the season’s offerings over the course of the summer. First we have the haul from June 26:

Lots of classic indicators of early summer here: snap peas, garlic whips, porcini mushrooms, asparagus and strawberries of the particularly fragile and incredibly delicious ‘Hood’ variety. The latter are identifiable by their diminutive stature and the wet spot on the pint container where one of them’s gone squishy from the bike ride home.

Now contrast that with last weekend, August 21:

Peaches and tomatoes! And huge piles of each at several stalls. It’s almost as if Oregon is apologizing to us for running out of strawberries. That white orb-thing hiding behind the basil is a tiny orange-fleshed honeydew melon, which was nice but a little disappointing. Best leave those to hotter dryer places, and we’ll stick with the berries and stone fruits.

It doesn’t show up that well, but the fluted thing resting on top of the purple artichoke is a variety of zucchini that my friend Tobias at one of the market stalls (he’s also an industrial designer — cool, right?) recommended so emphatically I had little choice. It was fantastic. Whatever this variety’s called, it’s uglier than a normal zucchini, gets way bigger without getting woody, and tastes twice as good. On the other hand, he also recommended that strange dark green jutting out above it, which is apparently an ancient predecessor to broccolini or something. It tasted like twigs.

It honestly does my heart good to see the progress of time in my shopping basket, especially when one joy gets displaced by another in this way.

On the other hand, ask me again in February after I’ve filled my tote bag with parsnips and rain for the ninth consecutive weekend and maybe I’ll have something different to say.

Bit of a redundant haul photo this time, I’m afraid: bread, fish, beer and strawberries as per usual, with the addition of an astonishingly good 12 dollar pinot noir from a small winery that sells exclusively through farmers market stalls. I owe that discovery to a co-shopper who prefers wine to beer, lucky me. The conversation with the winemaker was extra interesting–wine, along with just about everything else, owes more of its price to the distribution and marketing than the actual making, so a 12 dollar bottle like this would probably run closer to 30 if he were to actually jump through all the hoops needed to get it on a supermarket shelf. Also available through the internet for a few dollars more, if you’re interested.

Clockwise from left: strawberries, lacinato kale, beer, romaine lettuce, beets, green garlic, black cod, carrots (topped), torpedo radishes. Center: Fleur de Lis demi baguette

Slightly less ambitious haul this week, partly reflecting a busy week that left less time for cooking. It’s not all bad–every evening spent not cooking was spent elsewhere in good company–but that’s meager consolation for the stack of magnificent collards slowly wilting in my fridge.

A few new and notable things in the basket this week. Black Cod from Linda Brand, which sadly ran out before I could score any last week. Enlightening tidbit from the conversation with the stall guy: black cod is a mostly Pac NW thing, and enjoys nowhere near the notoriety it ought to considering that it’s likely the world’s most delicious fish.

The opening of the Hollywood Farmers Market in Portland ranks as one of the most exciting days of the year for me; whether this is a sign of how wonderful the food is here or how boring my life has gotten, I can’t really say. Probably both.

But I was there May 1st, an unusually chilly day for a venue I tend to associate with summer. The pickings were good, enough to convince me to invite the Communication Design department over for dinner the following week, giving a reason to shop with purpose the following Saturday, May 8th (the market’s just on Saturdays). To entice them, I shot the picture above.

Food photography is a specialized discipline, I’m aware, and I’ve read through enough cookbooks to know that lighting, composition, mood, framing and all of the other things we associate with portraiture are just as important when shooting broccoli. My personal favorite example of the art is undoubtedly Nigel Slater’s Appetite, a gorgeous cookbook crammed with full page elegantly disheveled still-lives, of food the way we wish we were eating it: lush and chaotic and indulgent, tightly cropped to suggest bounty, with crumbs and wrappers and well-loved wooden utensils scattered around.

There are some shots of sausages simmering in gravy, and roasted chickens, but also messier and more charming ones of the seedy underbelly of the culinary process: grease-smeared carving knives, stain-spattered aprons, the burny bits left on a grill pan post-grilling. I sigh and coo when I read this book, and well up with gratitude toward my friend Alex, a food writer with exceptional taste, who gave it to me as a present very many years and meals ago. The small sampling visible on the book’s Amazon page hint at its glory, but definitely miss the best ones.

Considering how much effort I lavished on this blog during its first few weeks of existence (new platform, new theme, portfolio pages, resume and so on) it might seem a bit odd to have suddently dropped updating it for four months. If you’re mathematically-inclined enough to calculate the ratio, in fact, you’d get a

[time spent redesigning the site]/[time spent completely ignoring the site]

ratio of about 1:12. Which is undeniably pathetic.

If you were indulgent, you might give me the benefit of the doubt and suspect that it’s because I’ve been busy elsewhere, and you’d be right. Or you might have just checked my LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter status and discovered that I have a job. A writing job, ironically, and more specifically, a design writing job, for a firm called Ziba that looms quite large in the creative landscape of Portland, Oregon.

Perhaps it’s for similar reasons as the cobbler leaving his progeny unshod or the barista who drinks Taster’s Choice (er…excuse me….Via)(which my former boss referred to as “coffee sauce”) at home, but one of the initial side effects of writing for a full-time living has been a reluctance to do any for my own benefit. This has included lapsed and paltry email correspondence, I’m embarrassed to say, and reluctance to write journal entries, tweet beyond the bare minimum, contribute to friends’ experimental magazines, and participate in cool shit like 48 Hour Mag.

Well enough of that. Over the past few days I’ve taken a second look at this so-called writer’s fatigue and discovered a hidden inverse: once you’ve spent three months writing daily for other people, the process starts to get automatic, and this imparts a certain fearlessness to writing of the non-career-building sort. So while I can’t ensure anything particularly fun to read (this post, for example, has been about approximately nothing), I can make a decent promise that there will be words.

Next post: How I got this odd job.