Quick note on GRO (that's Grass Roots Organics)

I dropped in to Grass Roots Organics yesterday to check out Portland's new raw food, vegan cafe. The guy who owns the place has his brain chemistry turned up to 11. He talked the ears off Avery Yale Kamila for a long time; it was funny. The chef is way more mild-mannered.

Things we liked: the almond, cacao, banana and nut milk smoothy; a miso sea veggie "soup" with shitaakes; an excellent sea veggie salad with ginger-miso dressing; the dog that hangs out on the sofa.

Things we didn't like: the burger was hard, dry and had an strongly unpleasant flavor and the raw "bread" was still a bit wet, so I had a sort of bizzaro-upside-down-world burger that was dry on the inside and wet and slimy on the outside.

Things we haven't tried yet: the chocolates.

The place is still coming together. Give them some support.

Updated thoughts here.

The Critical Beet Down; Also, an Ingredient Alert: Swallow Tail Farms

What winter vegetables are you tired of? For me it's beets. There are definitely some ingredients that are best left to the basics of preparation. For me, beets are best roasted. Maybe there's room for gussying them up with some fancy glaze, and borscht is good and makes one pee red, and there's the french classic of boiled beets with a mustard cream sauce, but it still all comes back to roasted beets for me.

But, of course, that hasn't kept us from trying other methods:

Recipe: Grated Beets with Shallot from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian.
Verdict: Almost good. The method of grating and then sautéing beets has a lot to recommend it if you are in a hurry. It's certainly fast, but it's also messy and I don't think it overly enhances the beet. If one is short on time, I recommend the pressure cooker instead, in which large beets, quartered, will take only 10 – 12 minutes.


Recipe: Beets prepared like hummus also from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian.
Verdict: Better than it looks—honestly!—but not something I ever need to make again.


Recipe: Curried beets with mushrooms; yet another offering from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian.
Verdict: Epic Fail!


Recipe: Beets with greens and chèvre, adapted from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone.
Verdict: This was really good. We used the last of the beets we had from Freedom Farm with some baby greens grown in a poly tunnel in Dresden and some chèvre from Swallow Tail Farm in Whitefield (more on that further down).

• 2 lbs. beets, scrubbed, quartered
• 2 tsp lemon juice
• 1 clove garlic
• 2 Tbs. olive oil
• baby greens
• goat cheese
  

Cook the beets until tender (this takes only 10 minutes in a pressure cooker). Grind the garlic. with some salt into a paste. Whisk the oil into the garlic and lemon juice. Season the dressing with salt and pepper. Dress the beets with most of the dressing, reserving enough to dress the baby greens. Saladify.

Cornucopasetic Ingredient Alert: Any Cheese Made by Swallowtail Farms.

Before going mostly dairy free, I tried my share of goat milk cheeses. Here's an anecdote by way of example. As part of my job I get called out, on occasion, to oil tankers and other large vessels that call on Portland Harbor. As the U.S. Merchant Marine is seemingly moribund, many of these vessels are crewed by Greek officers. On one call, I got into a conversation with a Greek captain who insisted that Greece produced the finest goat cheeses available on the planet and, after pausing to have a brief fist fight with his Chief Engineer, he insisted that he would prove this statement true. What followed was a crazy four course lunch in the ship's galley with each course accompanied by a different array of goat milk cheeses straight from Greece. Sure, those cheeses were good. Really good, in fact. But Swallowtail Farms' cheese blows all of them out of the water (no pun intended).

You can pick up their cheese at the Brunswick Farmer's Market now and in the Bath Farmer's Market this summer.

Bonus Recipes

Wash greene Beetes cleane,
picke out the middle string,
and chop them small with two or three
well relisht ripe Apples. Season it
with Pepper, Salt, and Ginger: then
take a good handfull of Razins of the
Sunne, and put all in a Coffin of fine
Paste, with a piece of sweet Butter,
and so bake it: but before you serue it
in, cut it vp, and wring in the iuyce of
an Orenge, and Sugar.

Excerpted from John Murrell, A New Booke of Cookerie; London Cookerie (1615).

I like the usage of "Coffin of fine Paste." I think I shall bake some blueberries in a coffin of fine paste this summer. Too bad my paste making skills aren't up to snuff.

And how about this one, which actually sounds good:

To make Lumbardy tartes.

Take Beets, chop them small, and put to them grated bread and cheese, and mingle them wel in the chopping, take a few Corrans, and a dish of sweet Butter, & melt it then stir al these in the Butter, together with three yolks of Egs, Synamon, ginger, and sugar, and and make your Tart as large as you will, and fill it with the stuffe, bake it, and serue it in.

Excerpted from The Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin (1594, 1597).

One of Those Nights; Also, Braised Cauliflower

Ever have one of those nights where nothing turns out right? Well I just did:

The roasted red carrots, parsnips and pears got left in the oven too long. The patties of lamb sausage got burned. The greens fresh from the poly-tunnel in Dresden were nice, but sadlty the dressing broke. The only thing noteworthy was the braised cauliflower, which I'd like to repeat as it could have benefited from better herbs. This was the second of two recipes I tried to commit to memory the other day while leafing through a copy of Alfred Portale's Simple Pleasures. The gist of it is that you sauté some diced onion, bay leaf, garlic and thyme, then add wine and diced tomatoes and reduce. Then braise the cauliflower in the that base plus a lot of chicken stock. Once the cauliflower is tender, it's removed and the sauce is reduced to a manageable amount before olives and fresh herbs are added. Yum.

Ingredient Alert: Mainely Poultry's Awesome Avians

I haven't roasted a whole chicken in years, but the urge to do so came over me this week. My go to method has always been the one in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking as transmitted to me by my mum. That method has always yielded such good results that it did not seem worth exploring the matter further, but I've often wondered why is there such a fuss over the roasted chicken recipe in Judy Rodger's Zuni Cafe Cookbook?

I have to say up front, that I don't really care for Rodger's book, although I am grateful to her for turning me on to brining pork chops. That said, I just made the best roasted chicken of my life using her method where the bird sits salted for a few days and is then high roasted, untrussed without any additional fat. I'm placing the bulk of the success, however, on the shoulders of Mainely Poultry's amazing chicken. If you're not already treating yourself to their chicken, you can pick it up at the Portland and Brunswick winter farmer's markets or at Rosemont Market & Bakery.

Where else are people getting good local birds? Any recommendations? How about for duck? Is there a Mainely Duck?

The photo was a bit of an afterthought:

Goodby Old Squash.

The last butternut squash of the year from Freedom Farm was an eight pound monstrosity that apparently no one else wanted. I gave the thing a home and have seemingly been eating it ever since. Part of it was roasted up with the chickpea cutlets below, part of it became baby food and the final vestiges of the thing were roasted and turned into this soup.

Kinda Curried Butternut Squash Soup
Adapted from Alfred Portale, Simple Pleasures (2004)

• 2.5 pounds of roasted squash—Portale specifically says not to avoid butternut in favor of a kabocha or a pumpkin instead, but what the hell …
• 1 medium onion, diced
  
• 1 stalk of celery, diced
• 1.5 tsp. of fenugreek, toasted in a skillet, then ground in a mortar
• 2-3 cloves, ground in a mortar
• 1 Tbs. ginger, peeled and microplaned into a pulp
• 1 clove garlic
• About 3 Cu. of veggie stock
• 1 crisp apple, peeled, cored, diced and left to sit in some lemony water
  
• A handful of pepitas, toasted in a skillet
• Chopped chives

The ingredients sort of speak for themselves here. Saute the onion and celery a bit, then add the spices and saute a little further. Add the squash and enough stock to make soup. Simmer it for a while and then go at it with an immersion blender until it is smooth. Garnish with the apples, pepitas and chives.

I just glanced at this recipe, noted the basic ingredients and then made the soup later when the recipe was no longer available to me. I think the amounts might need a bit of tinkering with, but the flavors are a good mix. I see now that adding diced fresh apples as a garnish to squash soup is old hat, but it's new to me. In any event the apples make the whole thing work and the pepitas add a needed crunch to the squash. Also, he might be right about ditching the butternut for a less sweet squash.

With the baby food in the freezer, this monster squash may be with us until summer!

Local Blogwatch

Hey, Portland Food Map, check out Anna Hewitt's new blog (still shiny new).

Cooking With The Bloggers, Part II: Four Vegan Blog Recommedations

The infamous, overblogged and, frankly, overhyped chickpea cutlets from the Veganomicon with braised fennel, roasted brussel sprouts and the last of this year's butternut squash from Freedom Farm's winter market. What stood out was the walnut sauce we made, which was inspired by a recent recipe from Tofu for Two.

Finding decent vegan cooking blogs is somewhat challenging if all you're interested in is food and you don't really care about other people's cats. There are a few that really raise the bar though. Even if you're not a vegan (for example we eat vegetarian, say, nine days in ten), it's worth adding these to your feed reader:

Vietnamese Night (First Attempt) and Two Cookbook Mini-Reviews

Up until the flu struck our household we were working our way through the vegetarian chapter of The Simple Art of Vietnamese Cooking and also some recipes in Corinne Trang's Authentic Vietnamese Cooking (both of which, I recently noticed, are in the Portland Public Library). These are both great books that caused me to spend a lot time in Friendly Market buying oddities like bean curd sheets, garlic chives, saw leaf and tapioca shreds.

Curried Tofu
Adapted from Binh Duong, Simple Art of Vietnamese Cooking (1991)

• 1/2 Cu. veggie stock (I used some left over from a recipe in China Moon)
• 1 lb. (more or less) firm tofu cut into 1/2-inch slices then cut into triangles
  
• 1 red or orange bell pepper, sliced into bit you would stir-fry
  
• 1 medium onion sliced or cut into wedges, connected at the root end
• 1 tsp. curry paste (the Indian variety, not the thai curry paste you buy in little cans)
• 1 can of unsweetened coconut milk (mixted well before hand)
  
• 1 handful of cilantro, chopped
• 1 or 2 handfuls penuts, chopped with a blade (not destroyed in your food processor)

You'll want to serve this with rice, so get that started first. White Jasmine rice would be apropriate, but we mostly east brown rice here. Fry the tofu in a pan with enough vegetable oil to nearly cover the slices. Fry only a few slices at a time, turning once, until they are golden brown and then remove them to a towel or some other suitable place for draining. In a wok or a suitably large frying pan, heat some oil and saute the onion and peppers for a minute or two, without burning them. Add the curry paste and cook for another minute or so. Add the stock and half of the cocunt milk and stir. Add tofu and cook for a few minutes to make the curry. At this point you need to decide whether it's saucy enough for you. You can swirl in some more coconut milk to make more sauce if you want. I think a lot depends on your tofu and the type of milk you have. Garnish with the cilantro and penuts and maybe some sriracha.

We also made this saute of green beans, tofu and bamboo shoots, which seems less authentic or perhaps just draws more heavily on the french influence with its sauce of dry white wine, soy sauce and tomatoes. It was excellent, or would have been had I properly reduced the sauce at the end.


Simple Art of Vietnamese Cooking feels a bit old school for world cookbooks of its time, but it's one of those cookbooks you can sit down and just read. The vegetarian chapter was fairly good, but is a bit of a one trick tofu pony at times. The vegetarian springrolls we made, which were a bit of a hybrid of recipes from Simple Art and Trang's book, were the best I've ever had.

Trang's book is a bit heavier on the details of the author's life in ways that I didn't find that interesting, but the photography is mostly useful—what there is of it. What makes the book probably the better of the two for omnivores, however, is that she discusses a lot of big picture tips and tricks like how long curries should sit to let their flavors develop. [Also, Corinne Trang, in the picture on the book's jacket: yowsa!]

Cooking as Humanity's "Killer App."

From an article in The Economist (via 3QD where the comments are more insightful than the original article).

Restaurant Mini Review: Asmara

There aren't that many places in Portland where one may find an entirely whole food vegetarian meal, but Asmara is certainly one of them. I knew about this place a few years ago, but never found the time to go. What a mistake. If it's your kind of thing, it certainly hits the spot. The owner, Asmeret Teklu, serves up a variety of Eritrean stews on a teff flour pancake. These are good, simple stews and veggie dishes with just enough chilis to make you slightly euphoric when you leave. You need to know what you're getting into here, so I'll take it from the top.

Everything one orders is served on a light, spongy, almost sourdough-like pancake made from teff flour—an "injera." Teff is far too small to hull, so it's always eaten as a whole food. The batter sits for three days, fermenting—hence the sourdoughness—and is then cooked like a crepe. The menu has a selection of chicken, beef, lamb and vegetarian stews. Pick one and you'll also get an extra veggie or bean stew to accompany it. Everything comes with a simple green salad dressed with an excellent vinaigrette. The heat in the dishes comes from berbere and, in some case, green chilis. There are no utensils; one eats everything in the Indian style by grabbing bits of food using the bread. She brings you a hot towel to clean your hands just before she brings the food.

Everything I had was excellent. It's simple food, done well, which is always a treat. Some highlights: the red lentil stew is exceptional, as is the spicy kale. By means of a "vegetarian sampler," I've since tried all the vegetarian stews and they are universally excellent with the possible exception of the spinach, which had a vaguely unpleasant flavor I couldn't identify.

Ms. Teklu is really nice. She taught me how to make the spicy kale and showed me how the injera are made and was generally excited to talk about her food.

Things I didn't try but hear are also wonderful: the lamb stews, mango juice and a powerful honey wine akin to mead.

Asmara: If you like simple, food with spice mixtures similar to, say, indian curries, and if you are searching for a whole food, vegetarian experience, this is highly recommended.

The picture doesn't do the meal justice, so don't let it put you off.