Just briefly. Nothing torrential or dramatic or tree-downing, but it rained. And the world was quiet. And I sat in a chair and read a book. Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg. It's dated, for sure, but several friends recommended it, so I'm giving it a go.
So it was quiet, and I read, and it rained, and I took a walk. And all of this may seem very mundane, but I've got to tell you, it was momentous given the chaotic state of these past few weeks. Everything is good, wonderfully good, but that quiet hour fed me like a bowl of warm soup.
I'm home now, scrambling to catch up, and the hours slip and slide. Head down, keyboard out, shoes off, back hunched, I type until my wrists ache. I'm grateful, if addled, in this state of overwhelm, a state welcome and unnerving, familiar and exotic.
I close my eyes.
I hear birds.
I listen.
Remember the quiet, they trill, softly.
It will return.
And you'll wish, once again, for the thunder of today.
...
Recipe for Avocado with kumquats and walnut oil
When I have no time to fix a proper meal, I fake it by combining two or three things. I take my plate outside and turn my face towards the sun. Just 5 minutes of peace, 5 minutes of fresh air, 5 minutes of sky, and I'm ready to return to my desk.
1 avocado Handful of kumquats, sliced Walnut oil
Eat slowly, outside.
...
Come see me in June in California and Seattle. Here's where.
I'm popping by to invite those of you in New York City to come help Paulette and me celebrate the launch of our cookbook, Ripe: A Fresh, Colorful Approach to Fruits and Vegetables. You've seen the Ripe cookbook website, watched the video trailer, and perhaps noticed a bit of early press. We feel very blessed by the warm reception the book has already received, even in its pre-publication phase.
Now that the release date is officially here, I will celebrate by pretzeling myself into a coach airline seat and eating snacks for five hours. If you hear someone mumbling incoherently in row 13, please say hi.
You are all invited to swing by Rizzoli Bookstore for the kickoff signing and toast. I would love to meet you, and I know Paulette would, too. Details are in that top photo. Rizzoli Bookstore is located at 31 West 57th Street in midtown.
In addition, we will both be signing our book at the IACP Book & Blog Expo on Sunday, April 1 at 82 Mercer Street from 1:30p-4:30p. (Tickets to the Book & Blog Expo run $10 and can be purchased online). There will be more than 100 cookbook authors signing books that day, so you're sure to get your money's worth.
Finally, I do have plans to be in Maine, Boston, Philly, Portland, Seattle, and at several venues in the SF Bay Area over the next few months. Our Events & Signings page has all the details, and will be updated regularly.
And thank you. Did I say that already? Thank you for your support. It means more than you know. More, even, than lip balm on a long-haul flight, and lip balm means very, very much to me.
With affection and sincere gratitude~ Cheryl
{{Thank you to the Running Press design team for creating such an artful invitation to our Rizzoli kickoff. Thanks, too, to IACP for permission to use the Blog & Book Expo photo.}}
If I close my eyes, I can see Rouen.The old town square, the cathedral that stretches towards the sky. I feel the awkwardness of my host father, whose little mustache makes me uncomfortable, whose eyes dart this way and that. I try to pretend I'm not allergic to the family cat. One day, I'm given a plate of meat so unusual I cry.
But discrete moments of tenderness during that summer of my sixteenth year stick with me. On the day my belly aches, my host mom brings me mint tea; she sits with me as I take small, tentative sips. Fourteen-year-old Babette brings out her radio, and we sing into fake microphones like sisters. At night, I sleep upstairs, in a room with an angled ceiling, a fact that, while I can't explain why, makes me feel very grown up.
A few weeks later, the family drives me to the train station. We say our goodbyes. We keep in touch for a little while after -- a year? maybe two? -- but soon these ties unravel, like a piece of frayed burlap that sports more holes than fabric. Do they ever think of me?
Apple products -- hard cider, Calvados, and flaky apple pastries -- are big in Normandy, the region where Rouen sits. It's also probably the first place I ever had a buckwheat crêpe, with slightly crisp edges and a dark, mysterious flavor my American palate hadn't encountered before.
I've tried making buckwheat crêpes at home -- I made these ones last week from a recipe I found in The Gourmet Cookbook -- but they only get me so far. I sauté the apples with butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon until they warm and start to collapse. I make the crêpes as directed, and they are lacy and "successful" and fine. But I'm not in Rouen. I'm not sixteen. I'm not a foreign girl in a magical land with a cathedral just outside my door. I'm not on the precipice of something I can't see.
A tightly run, highly organized press trip is many things: fun, entertaining, and broadening. If you're lucky, you'll get to experience the very best a particular region has to offer.
And that’s great. But it’s only part of the story. Oregon is an entire state, where there are kind people and jerks, sunny days and rainy ones, up-and-coming artists and those who can't make ends meet no matter how hard they try. To pretend otherwise, to pretend that this place is somehow uniquely devoid of the crime, poverty, hunger, and unemployment present in every other state of the U.S. would be silly.
A colleague of mine who has lived in Oregon for a decade and a half referred me to this article published just last week. Titled "Why are Oregon's children so hungry?," the piece notes that twenty percent of the state's population is on food stamps, and Oregon has the highest rate of food insecurity among children in the U.S.
And yet, she notes, the mayor of Portland is actually quite proactive in trying to combat these trends. "He's doing amazing work in making sure people at risk, in Portland anyway, have access to fresh local food. He's building orchards, taking the city's fallow land and turning it into gardens, getting funding for food stamp matches at farmer's markets, and even grows vegetables in his yard to give to the neighborhood." Pro.
There's also a high rate of homelessness: con. And yet, "Most of them,” she says, “come here because the assistance for the homeless is better here than elsewhere." OK, so, pro. Meth is a big problem in the state: con. And yet, treatment programs are available: so, pro.
I'm writing all this simply to provide some context -- a bit of a reality check, if you will -- for the wonderful food, wine, and genuinely impressive culinary artistry I encountered. It’s great, but let’s keep our feet on the ground while we enjoy it.
On to the food. As before, the descriptions below correspond to the slideshow above.
Father-daughter team Erica and Bruce Reininger of Arrowhead Chocolates represents the merger of two generations into a single, family-owned company. Bruce was a fish biologist, then a logger, then a web designer, and then he decided he wanted to learn how to make chocolate. So he studied like mad to master his craft. Erica is his apprentice. A graphic designer by trade, she helps her father create beautiful chocolates in the family's 1,500 square foot shop in Joseph, a small town in Eastern Oregon. Erica and Bruce taught us to make the dipped salted caramels pictured in last week’s slide show.
Jenn Louis of Lincoln Restaurant and Sunshine Tavern appears next. A former caterer, she operates two successful restaurants (her early efforts a few years ago tanked with the rough economy). In 2010, she was named a semifinalist by the James Beard Foundation for Best Chef Northwest. Her grilled octopus with mizuna, cucumber, and pimenton was outstanding.
Cousins Kim and Tyler Malek operate Salt & Straw, a “farm to cone” ice cream company that has enjoyed a sharp uptick in local and national interest in an extremely short time. The pair started with a cart on May 26, 2011, and upgraded to a brick-and-mortar “scoop shop” less than 3 months later. We tasted a flight of ice creams, among them lemon-basil sorbet, strawberry ice cream with coriander, and melon ice cream with coppa, an Italian-style dry-cured pork. Fatty, creamy, unique, and very, very tasty.
Stephen McCarthy is a distiller, and we got to visit the orchard where he sources the pears for his liqueurs and eau-de-vies. Because pears grow on the end of long branches, McCarthy and his staff affix bottles to the trees -- so that the pears actually grow inside the bottles. Walking the property is both amusing and surreal, with bottles hanging upside down everywhere you turn. Among several other fruit-based spirits, McCarthy’s Clear Creek Distillery also makes a Douglas Fir eau-de-vie, which is bright green, and very boozy. It tastes like a tree.
Another chocolatier brings up the rear of the show. David Briggs founded Xocolatl de David 2½ years ago with $50 from his paycheck as a savory chef at Park Kitchen. He grew his business and acknowledges the enormous amount of support he has received from other local chefs and artisans. His “savory-forward” chocolate-making style means he’ll incorporate ingredients like chiccharrones, which he makes himself, into his chocolates, many of which skate on the less sweet side. I’m not much of a pork-in-my-chocolate kind of girl, but I’m crazy for his two-bite Raleigh Bars. These blocks of pecans, nougat, caramel, and chocolate, with a hint of fleur de sel, are ridiculous, and I’ve been hiding them from my family.
The trip ended late Saturday night, September 10th. This meant I would be flying home the next morning, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, a fact that gave me tremendous anxiety and pause. I got to the airport early, bought a cup of tea, and heard a woman playing guitar. I wandered towards the music, unchaperoned for the first time in days. A sign said her name was Gayle Ritt.
She sang Home on the Range, and it was slow, and beautiful, and haunting. My shoulders relaxed. Then she sang America, The Beautiful, sweetly, and softly. I breathed in. I breathed out. When I boarded my flight 30 minutes later, my stress was gone.
When I got home, I emailed her. I told her how much her music meant to me on that particular day.
She emailed me back.
I asked if I could use her music behind my slideshow.
And she said yes.
And that part – that part was totally unscripted. That part was pure Portland.
Last weekend, Travel Oregon invited me and about 20 others to experience the culinary scene both within and beyond Portland's borders. Disclosure: they paid for everything.
My hope is that even though my expenses were paid, I can still provide meaningful, informative food coverage of some locales worth visiting. I try to be thoughtful. I try to approach these experiences with a critical eye. But whether I've succeeded is ultimately for you to determine yourselves.
Below is a key to my photos, which appear in the slide show above. In a follow-up post, I'll introduce you to some local artisans and their food crafts, and give you my sense of this changing, growing, youthful, and very quirky city -- warts and all.
Frame 1. Lovely Mt. Hood on a clear September day. Kayaks drifted. Trillium Lake sparkled. Flowers flowered.
Frame 2. A picnic bench at Penner-Ash Winery (15771 NE Ribbon Ridge Road, Newberg, OR). Dusk. I wanted to lie on that table, flat on my back, and gaze at the sky.
Frame 3. Powell's (flagship: 1005 W Burnside, Portland). I wandered the 68,000 square-foot bookstore, then got lost walking back to the hotel even while using the turn-by-turn on my phone's GPS. This is not unusual for me.
Frame 4. Dinner at St. Jack (2039 SE Clinton Street, Portland), named 2011 Rising Star of the Year by the The Oregonion. Highlights included the crispy-salty frites, chicken liver mousse, and...
Frame 5. ...a dessert of plums and vanilla poached pluots.
Frame 6. I like tea. This is no surprise. Portland is home to a fine little shop called Steven Smith Teamaker (1626 NW Thurman Street, Portland), which I'd toured back in 2010. Pictured is one of their herbal bags (Meadow?). I'd like to tape it above my desk, for art. It's prettier than what's up there now, which are some crappily framed postcards I bought when I was 17.
Frame 7. Dr. John Kallas led us on a leisurely forage through the woods and took care to point out several leaves and berries that would cause hemorrhaging and instant death should we consume them. I'd had romantic visions of piling a wicker basket high with chanterelles, or pretty twigs, but there was something equally pleasant, and less taxing, about listening to him speak knowledgeably about huckleberries, thimbleberries, baneberries, and cow parsnips, the lower stem of which can be peeled and eaten like a banana. I bet you did not know this.
Frame 8. A foraged salad at Timberline Lodge (27500 E Timberline Road), a ski lodge founded in the 1930s in the throes of the Great Depression under Roosevelt's New Deal. If you're an architecture buff, you'll enjoy this place and its historical importance. There were a lot of old people milling about, but that didn't faze me because a) I enjoy old people, and b) I was fed a salad of smooth yellow violet, indian paintbrush, wild ginger, tiny tomatoes, bush berries, huckleberries, and verjusette. I swear I did make any of that up. Executive Chef Jason Stoller Smith knows how to make food plucked from the forest taste like it came right from the earth. Oh, wait.
Frame 9. He also knows how to make ice cream threaded with pineapple weed, which pairs especially well with peaches and something he casually refers to as vanilla-olive oil powder.
Frame 10. Picturesque McCurdy Farms orchard (2080 Tucker Road, Hood River). The pears here grow in bottles. I'm not kidding. They grow inside bottles. More on that next time.
Frame 11. Here is a pear. I do recognize that this one is not, in fact, growing inside a bottle.
Frame 12. This man is making burgers on the roof-deck of the Wieden+Kennedy Ad Agency, which handles accounts for Nike, Kraft, Target, and (dingdingding) Travel Oregon. The building itself is crazy-ridiculous and security guards about the same age as my kids are apparently keeping all kinds of corporate secrets very safe. I'm glad they were there protecting me, too, since I was very busy eating sliders.
Frame 13. Sliders! These are the beef ones from Chef Gregory Denton of Metrovino (1139 NW 11th, Portland). They had a fancy sauce. (The menu actually said "fancy sauce.")
Frame 14. A close-in, mildly disorienting look at a gorgeous freekeh salad with toasted hazelnuts, pickled cherries (!), and borage flowers (!) from Chef Scott Dolich of Park Kitchen (422 NW 8th, Portland). Freekeh is a grain. Borage is a flower. They are both real things.
Frame 15. Dark chocolate-dipped caramels with sea salt. I dipped them myself. More on those next time.
Frame 16. And this is the real spirit of Oregon right here. There were 3 unscripted moments in the trip, all on the last day. Passing this sign while boarding my flight home was one of them. You'll have to wait for the other two.
The drive down was nothing special -- mostly highway, cars chugging along -- until we hit Morgan Hill, and then things started to slow. By the time we reached Gilroy we were inchworms, easing forward one sigh at a time. This suited me fine. Saturday was clear, music filled the car, and the boys read quietly in the backseat. We passed a burst of sunflowers.
The Gilroy Garlic Festival greeted us first through our noses: scents sweet, pervasive, unmistakable. We paid our cash, and as we wound our way toward the heart of the fairgrounds, we funneled first through an alley of sponsors and vendors -- Foster Farms chicken, Lay's potato chips, a company retrofitting bathtubs with some kind of insert. Their connection to garlic was tenuous to non-existent, but that's just the way these things go.
We wandered around. People happy. Bands played. Everyone ate. Garlic ice cream, garlic sausage, garlic pasta, garlic bread. Lines were long, with no complaints.
The children's area teemed with energy, and three-year-olds ran around, sporting mini Home Depot aprons. Someone must have been handing them out.
We passed a Scope station. I grabbed a sample and tucked it in my purse.
And then we came to a shady area with a canopy and benches. People were sitting, rapt and silent, facing a small stage. Adults, kids, all quiet. Ronald McDonald held court, and the crowd paid attention.
And my pulse quickened, and I felt, I don't know, mad. It was instinctive, and immediate. I didn't even hear what he was saying -- he could have been discussing the two Bay Area Ronald McDonald houses -- but he made my body tense, and stressed.
I grabbed my camera. Can you believe this? That he's here? Can you believe this?
And then, seconds later, shame washed over me.
For judging strangers. And assuming I knew better. And assuming I was better. For not even hearing what was being said, and thinking in my bones that it was wrong.
It shocked me that this symbol, this clown, mattered to me at all, and in a way so different from how it mattered to everyone else. That I judged this character, and this company, so much more harshly than I judged the bathtub retrofitter, and Home Depot, and Lay's Potato Chips, and Scope. That my reaction was that swift, and physical.
I'm struggling with what it means. I know all about fast food, and obesity, and legislation to stop chains from putting toys in kids' meals. I support these moves. I write about these moves. I know kids recognize logos, and make dietary choices based on who markets to them. I like Jamie Oliver. Long live the food revolution!
But what I don't know, what is bugging with right now, is this:
If you come visit, you'll know how much I like you by the size of the guacamole bowl I set down.
Sort-of-friends get the smaller bowl. It holds about three cups of guacamole, no more, no less. This bowl means: I like you. You are nice.
If we've been friends for longer, if we have real history, if you knew me in grad school or have seen me cry or lent me a dress, well, you'll get one of my BIGGER bowls. These suckers hold five cups of guacamole easy, maybe six. If I plunk one down, we're in for a long, leisurely catch-up, probably outside, probably without shoes. These bowls mean: I really like you. You are not only nice, but important to me, and I won't hustle you out the door in 50 minutes, which is about the time it takes me to get bored with most people.
Guacamole, and avocados, have always been more than foods to me. They've been barometers.
And this is basically why I said yes when Avocados of Mexico offered to bring me down to Mexico City. I wanted to learn more about the fruit with which I already had such a longstanding, symbolic relationship.
Mexican avocados are grown in the sunny central state of Michoacán. The vast majority are Hass, which is the variety most familiar to Americans because it also dominates the California avocado industry. But while California's growing season lasts only half the year (roughly March through September), Mexico's runs year-round. With four "blooms" during the year, Mexican growers can time when they pick the fruit to maximize its quality and oil content.
The health benefits of avocados are well-known, so I won't belabor that point too much (you can find more details here): suffice it to say that they’re very high in good (unsaturated) fat, and their rich oils help your body absorb other nutrients.
One thing I absolutely did not know was that avocados can be refrigerated. I'd always treated them like tomatoes, which I was told never, ever, EVER to refrigerate, but with avocados, you can actually halt the ripening process simply by tucking them in the fridge. When ready to ripen, place them on the counter at room temp, or, to hasten the process, place them in a paper bag.
While in Mexico City (which I wrote about here, here, and here), we learned some classic Mexican recipes, like how to make a cold and silky avocado soup with serrano chiles, stock, cilantro, and cream. And how to garnish an octopus taco with diced avocado and chipotle mayonnaise, in case you've got some octopus lying around. And how to serve guacamole with homemade sopes and escamoles (ant eggs). (Feeling less adventurous? Make this salad.)
We even tasted a lesser-known avocado variety called the criollo, a petite fruit whose skin is so thin you can bite into it just like an apple. Our meal at Pujol included a dish of criollo with sea bass, manzana chile, coconut water, and spearmint. (Take that, Taco Bell.)
Finally, this is my last Mexico City post. Thanks for accompanying me on this journey. Feel free to share final thoughts on Mexico, favorite avocado recipes, or expressions of effusive adoration.
At the Coyoacán Traditional Market in Mexico City, on a nondescript Friday in May, a young boy walked past Señora Tere's fruit stall with his hand in a bag of chips. She stopped him. With a long knife in one hand and a mango in the other, she carved off the fruit's cheeks and thrust them towards him.
"Eat this," she said. "It's better for you."
The boy, not breaking his stride, accepted the gift and walked on.
This is why I loved Mexico.
With the help of a translator, our small group stopped to chat with Señora Tere. She immediately started pulling fruits down off their perches, one by one, peeling them with her knife. A slice of this, a sliver of that. You haven't had guava? Take the guava. What about cactus fruit? You need to try it. Here's some mamey. Taste the litchis. Papayas, pineapples, plums, peaches.
A piñata in the shape of a spider floated above her head.
"Señora Tere," we asked, "what is your full name? So we can tell people about you..."
"It is Señora Tere of the fruit stand where there is a spider," she replied.
So the Central de Abasto Wholesale Market, which I wrote about yesterday in "Mexico City: I like you," is essentially a city within a city. There's so much hustle and bustle, and commerce and action, and so much life in this space, it's crazy-go-nuts. The market gets over 108 million visitors each year, which exceeds the population of the entire country of Mexico.
Strong young men whiz by at breakneck speed pushing little trolleys called diablos (devils), which allow them to transport food from one end of 810 acre space to another. There are constant whistles -- some of which mean, "Get out of the way!" and others of which mean, "You're cute, foreign lady!" I never quite figured out which was which (and I was walking with ladies far cuter than I), but I hustled to the side with great frequency so as not to get flattened like a tortilla.
The variety of agricultural products is both astounding and eyebrow-raising. Down one hall, you'll find an amazing display of gorgeous produce -- everything from mangoes and guavas, papayas and limes, chilies and potatoes to more unusual items like mamey (4th photo from top), a bright pink-fleshed fruit sold partially peeled, like a banana someone's already started on. Then down another hall there are grains and cereals, with bulk bins almost overflowing with Froot Loops and All-Bran. Then right next to that, sometimes literally touching the bulk cereals, are bulk bags of pet food. So if you like Froot Loops and your cat likes Whiskas, this is some serious one-stop shopping.
(Also, if you get hungry, you can stop and have some tortillas made from scratch in about six seconds.)
The second market we went to, the Coyoacán Traditional Market, was smaller, and far easier to navigate. I'll whet your palate here with the piloncillo (bottom photo), big cones of unrefined cane sugar also called panela. I've got a good story about that market coming up. You'll have to return...
Over the next few days, I'll be trickling out photos and details of my recent trip to Mexico City. Grab a Mexican hot chocolate, an agua fresca, or a Tecate beer, and come along for the ride. Start, please, with the musical slide show above.
Some quick background: Every now and then I'm offered trips to go places and cover them in my writing. I pass them up 90 percent of the time -- often, the topic is something I wouldn't normally cover, or it isn't consistent with my eating habits or values. Also, the very idea of press trips tends to make me uncomfortable. I did accept a trip to Cordova, Alaska in 2009 to learn about Copper River salmon. I'd been writing about sustainable seafood a lot at the time, so I considered the trip a relevant educational opportunity. And it was.
This time, I was invited to learn about the food culture and exploding culinary scene in Mexico City on a trip sponsored by Avocados from Mexico. Having just written a book about produce (releasing March 2012), and having written, too, about the importance of travel and experiencing new cultures through food, I accepted. I came away with a broad taste of Mexico's capital city, an even greater appreciation for avocados, and a renewed spirit of adventure. Also, I ate ant dust.
Here's a key to the photos in my slideshow, frame by frame. (The music, by the way, came from a recording I made on my iPhone of the mariachi band singing at the Arroyo Restaurant, where we had a leisurely lunch. More on that in coming days...)
1. A view of the Central de Abasto Wholesale Market, the world's largest wholesale produce market. The place was enormous, and I may devote a whole post to the produce, grains, beans, and Whiskas cat food they sell there. Stay tuned.
2. The lovely Mónica Moreno Arellano, one of our intrepid organizers and leaders, enjoying a fresh mango at the market.
3. A plate of lengua (beef tongue) tacos with an avocado/onion/tomato garnish at the Cantina la Guadalupana.
4. Bulk bins of dried beans, including frijol negro (black beans).
5. Huge displays of chicharrón (fried pork skin). I wrote about my first time eating chicharrón in southern California on iVillage back when I was a columnist there. In Mexico City, they're sometimes served in place of tortilla chips alongside guacamole.
9. A giant stoneware tub of guacamole. I thought about swimming in it.
10. Mixiote -- lamb wrapped in cactus/agave membrane -- served with beans at El Arroyo.
11. A woman selling fresh squash blossom salad, in bulk, at the Tianguis de Lomas de Sotelo outdoor market.
If you've ever been to Mexico City, or elsewhere in Mexico, share a little about your experience below. Ultimately, I hope to aggregate information not just from my itinerary but from your comments, and then at the end of this little series I can provide a bunch of links for any of you who may choose to visit in the future.
Welcome to my blog. I’m a Silicon Valley food writer with a lot to say and a keen desire to share it with a broad audience. I freelance for numerous national publications, but here you’ll find unedited tidbits to chew on, recipes to try, and provocative food-related content ripe for discussion. So poke around, read, comment, and please visit again.
To read my full bio and to see my print articles, please visit my portfolio website at www.cherylsternmanrule.com.
