Jim Dixon

There's a sub shop/pizza joint called Legends on NW Kearny just east of 23rd (Portland) that used to carry Taylor pork roll (or was it Taylor ham? or are they the same thing? My wife is from NJ and has that same craving every so often). I think they ship it directly, so there may not be wholesaler in town. And I don't think there's a local equivalent. Jim

Those pasta haters over on the Italy thread made me want some, so I roasted a head of cauliflower, tossed with penne, bit of garlic, red pepper flakes, bread crumbs, and, natch, olive oil. Had some leftover baby artichokes I'd brasied with fresh Meyer lemon and olive oil, so ate those with it. The pasta was a traditional style from Tuscany (semolina flour, brass dye extruded, air-dried) like Rustichella, but only $1.99 at TJ awhile back. Came in a brown paper wrapper, can't remember name, but it was good, especially at that price. Jim

I cut delicata squash by sticking the point of a chef's knife straight down in the center (picture the long squash on its side, knife points straight down toward cutting board, tip at midpoint of squash), then rotating the blade down through the bottom end (the end without the stem)...I pull out the knife, stand squash on stem end, and, using the existing cut, finish slicing it half lengthwise...never seems to be too hard. I typically start dinner at the last minute, so I often wrap the halves in palstic and microwave for about 5 minutes, then scoop out cooked flesh. If i have more time, I'll roast since you get that nice browning and a little caramel flavor. Jim

I also review the VQ (Veritable Quandry) in this year's guide. At its heart, the place is still a bar, but one with pretty good food. The little room full of video poker machines next to the bathroom is bleak, though. Jim

I'm always the last to know...the annual Restaurant Guide comes out next week, 10/16. You can find it online after then at Willamette Week, and eventually on my site, too. Jim

These are my favorites for a high-end dinner, not really in any order.... Higgins Bluehour Paley's Place Genoa Lucere Wildwood Cafe Azul also very good and a little less expensive... Serratto Caffe Mingo Basta's Giorgio's Jim

Helena, Esperya should have rice back in stock soon. Jim

My review for the WW Restaurant Guide comes out tomorrow, but here's a short version... Tiny, bunker-like space, expensive fixed price menu, presentation is tall and speared with a sprig of thyme or rosemary, but the food tastes fantastic. One of the best things I ate during the gluttony of the rest. guide (too many meals, not enough time) was a stack of seared tuna, fois gras, and polenta. I don't think Couvron would be my first pick ever, and I wouldn't want to pay the tab on my own, but it might be a worth a splurge if you're looking for that sort of thing. If you just want to drop $150 on dinner, which isn't that easy in Portland, I can think of a half dozen places that I think would be more fun. Jim

cotechino (locally made by Fred Carlo, renowned Portland butcher) with fagioli al ucelletto (white beans with sage and sofrito, bit of tomato paste) gratin of delicata squash (cooked, scooped out, mixed w/Parm, creme fraiche, topped with olive oiled bread crumbs) cippolini agrodolce (sweet-sour onions made w/real cippolini from farmers market...last year there were hardly any of these, now everybody's growing them), used Marcella's recipe Chioggia beets with olive oil insalata Caprese (tomatoes from my garden with basil, my home-made mozzarella, olive oil) Jim

Sometime in the mid-70s I ate at Mammounia (excuse the spelling), a Moroccan restaurant in San Franciso. The pastilla (aka b'steeya and several other phonetic spellings) blew me away, and I spent several months looking for a recipe. I finally found Eva Zane's Middle Eastern Cookery (most likely out of print, but a keeper if you find a copy) that included it. With a couple of friends to help, I spent the better part of a day poaching the chicken, reducing the stock, cooking the eggs, picking the meat, toasting almonds, and then assembling everything with what seemed like acres of phyllo and butt-loads of butter. We popped it in the oven, crossed our fingers, and kept drinking. It was incredible, almost as good as the restaurant's version (of course we had drunk a lot more beer by the time we ate). I haven't made it again since. I think this sticks with me after so many years because I'm a much better cook now. I know a lot more about ingredients and techniques, and I've cooked lots of things that were as good or better. But there was something about that long day in a tiny, poorly-equipped kitchen that still makes me feel good. Jim

I ate some recently at Wildwood (here in Portland) that had been braised, then boned (the bones were slipped out to leave the meat intact), wrapped in caul fat, and slowly roasted again to allow the caul to melt...really tasty. Jim

Pumpkin seeds have always been my favorite part of Halloween, and with the boys grown up and moved out, we don't really carve jack'o'lanterns anymore. I have found that seeds from the other winter squash varieties roast up just as well, but there are never enough of them. Here's how I roast the seeds. I put them in a bowl of water because I've found it makes it easier to separate the slippery pulp from the seeds. But if I don't get it all off I don't worry. I put the drained seeds in a bowl and toss with soy and a few shots of tabasco, then spread on a baking sheet and cook in a low oven (250-300) until they're done...the soy-tabasco dries on the seeds and leaves a salty, slightly hot coating. These never last too long, and once the boys realized how good they were I had to stash small containers in the back of the cabinets just so I could have a chance to eat some. Jim

Zeb, Thanks for sharing your journal entries, especially the tip for Carampane. I'm not sure when we'll get back to Venice, but I'll defintiely try to find it. One of my favorite experiences was wandering through the Rialto market as the sun was coming up. i had jet lag and couldn't sleep. so I took the camera and spent a few hours watching the vendors set up and drinking espresso with them in a little bar next to the market. Jim

I'd skip Do Mori...it's been written up so often that it's gotten a bit toursity and expensive, at least compared to the other bacari. Jim

I ate this for breakfast, so technically I'm off-topic...Wilfred's mention of baked figs inspired me to toss a couple of ripe ones off my new tree (planted in April, bore small crop early, second crop now ripening) into the convection oven..I just split them, nothing else added. Cooked until done (and when they came out they were sort of pulsating and, I must say, rather erotic), ate hot with sprinkled with fluer de sel, grinding of pepper, dab of mascarpone. Jim

Steven, That square Griswold is rare...I wish it was mine. My list would include the 10 or so Griswold cast iron skillets of varying sizes that I use every day for almost everything (including a #12, about 12 inches across, that my wife found at a garage sale and had never been used...remarkable for a pan made at least 40 years ago). I've also got a Cuisinart Everyday Stainless deep saute pan with lid (must be about 8 qt...10 inch diameter, straight sides, copper sandwich bottom) that I got on sale and have come to really like. It heats evenly and cleans up easily. I've got a few Calphalon but mostly use the 5 qt saucepan and 8 qt stockpot. We also have big Revereware stockpot we got for cooking pasta for all the boys. I recently picked up a pair of Calphalon 'tapas' pans, little mini-skillets with handles on both sides, that are perfect for our countertop convection oven. Jim

I just finished reading John & Matt Thorne's Pot on the Fire (a collection of their essays, pub 2000), and there's a chapter on riso in bianco. This is basically risotto-type rice (arborio, canarole, vialone nano, and other more obscure varieties that have a lot of amylopectin, the starch that makes for the creamy texture) cooked in a large amount of water, drained, and seasoned. I'd read about cooking riso this way before, but never with such enthusiasm and detail, so I tried it and have been making it frequently. Basically, you get a good-sized pot of water boiling, salt it, add the rice slowly (rice to water about 1:6 or so), stir once, reduce heat to simmer, and leave uncovered for about 20 minutes or until rice is cooked to your liking. Then drain carefully in colander (Thorne says to pour into colander and let sit without stirring). What you get is the quality of risotto-style rice, an absorbent, starchy exterior with a slightly chewy center (sounds like a candy ad), but without the creamy emulsion created by stirring all the starch off the outside of the rice. The most basic treatment of the riso is adding butter and Parmigiano, but the Thornes give several other variations. The last time I made it I stirred in a little olive and butter, some Parm, sweet red Italian peppers (the long thin variety) sauted with a little garlic, and some chopped arugula I wilted with the peppers. I've been using a rice called St Andrea that I got from Esperya, the mail-order food importer. They carry several rices from small producers in the Veneto that use more traditional milling techniques. Jim

Brined a pork tenderloin then larded it with the last bits of the pancetta from Salumi, roasted in convection oven. Ground cherry sauce for pork made by cooking shallots and halved fruit in olive oil, adding some Pinot Grigio and balsamic vinegar and reducing a bit, then a stick blender to puree, back on heat, then off and finish with butter Lenticchie al Mauro (lentils from Castelluccio cooked the way Mauro, a farmer I met in the bar in Castelluccio, told me after scolding me for putting cheese on them, "Solo aglio, olio, sedano, sale, e aqua.") Sliced tomatoes from back yard with olive oil and fleur del sel Jim

I like to add celeriac (aka celery root) to this...here's my version: Leek and Celeriac Soup I like it a bit chunky so usually just mash the vegetables in the soup pot with the potato masher. Another good variation is to use buttermilk instead of cream (or creme fraiche, which is what I call out in the recipe). Jim

maybe I should just smoke them..... You can still find hops growing around the porches of old homesteads out in eastern Oregon....apparently they act as a sort of insect repellent. I'll continue to enjoy mine as an ornamental. Jim

My little hop vine climbed up the side of our back porch and now has a nice crop. My home-brew days are long past, but I seem to have a vague memory of using the hop berries as a seasoning in other foods. Google searches come up with beer, beer, and more beer. Any other ideas out there? Jim

Jaymes When a loaf starts to get stale, I leave it out to dry, then either process into crumbs or sometimes resurrect for bread salad. And I mean dry, like rock hard. These I soak in water until they soften up. If the bread is merely stale, it usually gets a quick dunk, also in water. With both I squeeze over the sink, and in the process the bread turns into a mealy lump. I break this up in the bowl that I make the salad in. Other ingredients depend on what's on hand...often as simple as just tomatoes, shallot, oil, vinegar, and salt, but I'm not a purist and will add cukes, peppers (better if ripe, eg red, and roasted), green onions, parsley, mint, or basil. Jim

I had read the Pasternak article (he says it's how the Sicilians cook tuna), but didn't have it with me when I found some nice Oregon albacore at the fish counter. All I remembered was that he said to cook it slowly, so here's how I did it.... I loosely packed the fish (filets, and be sure to take the skin off tuna or you get a nasty fishy flavor) into a saucepan, added oil (I used a Sicilian oil, but I've got a bottomless supply...a cheap extra virgin such as Trader Joe's would've been fine), and heated slowly until it started to make a little noise. Kept the heat low for about 10 minutes, then turned it off and covered it for another 20 or so. The fish was very good, almost like the high-priced canned tuna you get from Spain or Italy. Jim

I use the soak-and-squeeze method on the bread. It turns into a sort of mush rather than discreet cubes, but that's how I like it. Jim

The weekly I freelance for does a restaurant guide in October, which means assignments for 150-word write-ups aren't made until early August and the deadline is Wednesday...long way of saying I've been eating out way too much and not cooking dinner very often for the last few weeks. I was writing them up yesterday (always wait until the last minute), but had some stuff in the kitchen that was calling... slow-roasted tomatoes (Early Girls)..cut in half, roast 250 for about 4 hours served room temp with 'sauce' made by deglazing roasting pan w/water, reducing that, adding a bit of sherry vinegar, a little sugar, and something called 'fig balsamic' (my mother gave it to me...not too bad, actually, and gives a little fruity flavor with some acid) roasted an eggplant in my little deLonghi convection oven, scooped out the flesh, mixed with about 4 of the tomatoes, garlic, shallot, mint, Meyer lemon juice, preserved Meyer lemon, olive oil, cumin, and pimenton...this was really good had some King oyster mushrooms from the farmers mkt, so sliced, dry-sauteed, then some olive oil, shallot, butter, cream, and a rustic-style pasta called tacconi that looks sort of like broken lasagna (goes well with the sliced mushrooms) pickled some cippolini onions in a lightly salty brine with bit of sugar and wine vinegar bruschetta with garlic I harvested a couple of weeks back and olive oil Jim