We spent a week in Oregon...it wasn't planned that way; we were supposed to go to Vancouver, Canada for four days, then fly down to Portland for the rest of the week, but the night before our flight to Vancouver, I dug out my passport and discovered it had expired. All my best laid plans were undone one by one as I called hotels and airlines to cancel and reroute. We booked a flight straight to Portland just three hours before it left, and I rather morosely boarded as Ben schemed ways I could cross the border. As it always does, though, it all worked out. Probably the best part of the huge snafu was spending more time with a high school friend, her new baby, and not-so-new husband while indulging in her blueberry coffeecake that still managed to be delicious and beautiful even though half of it ended up on the bottom of her oven. (We can't all be perfect all the time :) Because of her pregnancy, she was on a preservative-free, organic diet which appeared remarkably easy as Ben and I perused farmers' markets and New Seasons Market, filled with fresh, local, organic produce, meat, grains and dairy.
Reading labels in the grocery aisles, walking around Portland's myriad too-cute neighborhoods and looking at restaurant menus, Portland appears to be a DIY food utopia where everyone mills locally-grown wheat, brews their own beer from hops just a few miles away, butchers their own free-range pigs, poultry, cows, hunts elk and buffalo, picks mushrooms in the forest (but being careful to wear bright colors so that they don't get shot by the hunters), knows exactly what to do with each of the twenty different varieties of apples grown in the state, all while blithely riding their bikes in the cold rain. Even Oregon fast-food chains like Burgerville and Hot Lips pizza promote fresh, local, sustainable. It's ridiculous. I love it.
Do Portlanders even read all the farm descriptors on the menu anymore? Are "local" and "sustainable" just buzzwords that everyone throws around now or do they actually mean something to everyone and every restaurant that uses it? One of our best meals was at Le Pigeon, where the menu was spare, as if to distance themselves from menus that read like farm rosters and focus on the food (which if you do inquire, is of course locally and sustainably raised).
What we ordered: Beef Cheek Bourguignon (like Edward the vampire of Twilight, a rather menacing-looking piece of meat, but dark, complex, soft and yielding, like every high school girl's dream); Pork Belly, sweet & sour, slaw; Poussin, brussel sprouts, truffle; Cornbread, maple ice cream, bacon; Foie gras profiteroles with caramel and sea salt. I was too nervous about the idea of foie gras ice cream for a full order of the profiteroles, so I asked for just one. And I'm glad I did...new experiences are always fun, but instead of eating liver for dessert, I'd rather be battling Ben for the cornbread.
Despite finding ice on the car in the morning and still being cold no matter how many layers we put on, I was ready to move to Portland. Anyways, the cold allowed us to pack an entire Thanksgiving feast in the trunk of the car, from Rome apples with a pink flesh to brussel sprouts to celeriac to a Bronze turkey "that was just walking around yesterday", while we meandered for two days, refrigerator-less, through the Kennedy School (former school/hotel/brewery/movie theater), miles of spectacular Oregon coastline, a yurt, down to North Bend, to have Thanksgiving with Ben's parents. Rather inadvertently, this Thanksgiving dinner turned out to be an entirely local feast, though more traditional, as Oregon's bounty includes dairy, wheat, potatoes, and of course, turkey...almost all of it we picked up at the farmer's market.
One of my favorite things about Portland food is its heartiness; it appears to take its cue (and 'cue) from "soul food." Maybe it's just the time of year that we visited, but it seems that any brunch place worth its salt serves chicken and waffles, and meat (local, of course) is the star of most menus. While I could see it being easy to be vegetarian in Portland, it's even easier to be a carnivore...and an alcoholic...with Oregon's famous microbrews. Ben, a frat boy in college, says our week in Portland rivaled his alcoholic consumption in college. All the movie theaters we went to--the Living Room, Cinetopia, McMenamin's Kennedy School--served alcohol and food ranging from decent to the best chili fries I've ever had. Beer, movies, food, sustainability...there's a lot we could learn.
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