Caesar salad

EATING TOOK BACK SEAT today to Portland's "time-based art" festival: fascinating dance performances in three city parks, a quick Caesar salad at South Park wine bar, then the film "Z", a soccer game seen entirely as it centered on one player, Zenadine Zidane. Maybe the performance will make The Eastside View; maybe not. This is it for the Caesar salad: it was okay.

Arneis 2006

Simpatica Dining Hall, Portland

Simpatica Dining Hall, 828 SE Ash St., Portland; tel. 503.235.1600

QUITE A DELICIOUS place, another real find in this city of delightful cuisine. Simpatica is in a sort of basement on an unlikely street, open for dinner only Friday and Saturday nights, with a fixed-price table d'hôte dinner menu with suggested wine pairings. We had:

almonds warmed in oil, with salt

"tempura" deep-fried fennel

Frisee salad with cannelini, cherry tomato, onion, oil-poached albacore; tarragon vinaigrette

semolina tagliatelle with corn and basil

pork loin with sweet peppers, onions, mint and preserved lemon

nectarine crostata with blackberry ice cream

All of which was quite tasty and correctly done. The chef gave a little talk before dinner, crediting the farmer who'd grown much of the produce — he was seated at one of the five tables (two 12's, three 6's). Could anything have been improved? A little salt in the tart pastry. Would I go back? You bet. The pork was nicely brined; the produce flavors were right at the front of the mouth.

Martin Codáx Albariño 2007

Pasta with anchovies

SLICE UP A FEW anchovies; warm them with crushed garlic; cook the pasta; toss it with the anchovies; sprinkle chopped fresh parsley on top.

Cheap pinot grigio

Roast chicken

CHICKEN WITH FORTY CLOVES of garlic: one of the first recipes we learned from Julia Child, back in the 1960s. Forty years ago.

Lindsey put the chicken in a Pyrex baking dish, surrounded it with potatoes cut into cubes a big inch across, tossed in a number of cloves of garlic, unpeeled, and roasted it all until done. There's not much more needs to be done. Afterward, a tossed salad.

Louis Preston Barbera 2006

Sept. 10: Risotto

Dried porcini, soaked in chicken stock. Chopped onions sweated in oil; add Arborio, cook slow, stirring; stock added a little at a time, a little white wine, a little salt; keep stirring until rice won't take any more liquid; add the porcini.

Coffee and pastries

Mix Sweet Shop café and bakery: 57 N Main St
Ashland OR 97520; tel. (541) 488-9885

Ken's Artisan Bakery: 338 NW 21st Avenue, Portland OR 97209; tel. 503.248.2202

HOORAY! ASHLAND NOW HAS really good coffee and croissants, a necessary combination that's been lacking until now. Mix is on a strategic corner down by the triangle where the Lithia water flows (yes, that's made a long-desired reappearance); it's run by the pastry chef of the restaurant Amuse whose founding chef, a Berkeleyan, made his adolescent run through the kitchen of Chez Panisse quite a few years back; it serves Portland's Stumptown Coffee with which it makes absolutely delicious caffè latte; and all the pastries are made on site, from excellent ingredients, and baked until they have both color and flavor.

We stopped in for a latte to go yesterday morning, and I mentioned we were on our way to Portland, to visit Ken's. "One of the best there is," said the proprietor of Mix.

Ken's, in Portland, has the best bread in town, and that's saying a lot: Pearl, running a close race, is also an excellent baker of bread. Ken's a little farther from our digs, but unlike Pearl Ken's also bakes canalés, those soft, crunchy, dark, pale, sweet, solid teacakes that are quite unique. (Insinuating, too: a fascinating blog of three years ago collected quite a number of reponses from canalé fans around the world.)


Last month for my birthday I was given an ideal present, a whole box of canelés, a couple of dozen I think: fortunately, they hold well; they needn't be eaten only fresh. Today we brought a half dozen home, with our bread; after supper — a delicious potato salad with sweet onion and tasty homemade vinegar — we had them with our tea. The Cubs lost, 4-3, but the canalés helped dull the sorrow.

Salads, again

THERE ARE SALADS and salads. Today at a friend's house we had a delicious one of potatoes, tomato, olives, and hard-cooked egg, served nestled on romaine leaves and dressed very subtly with a very light vinaigrette. There was also baba ganoush, green beans in pomegranate-molasses vinaigrette (Lebanese Balsamico?), and red peppers à la grèque, along with ciabatta he'd baked, and delicious Interlaken green seedless grapes from his backyard grapevine. A wonderful lunch.

And then for dinner here in Portland, at Giovanna's, another salad, I think you could say, but a warm one: orecchiette with red and yellow tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, olives, and minced basil, dressed with a little olive oil, garnished at the table with migas, slightly toasted bread crumbs, and grated Parmesan cheese.

What makes a salad? Mac's dictionary says it's "a cold dish of various mixtures of raw or cooked vegetables, usually seasoned with oil, vinegar, or other dressing…"; but of course it can be warm as well as cold, there are plenty of warm or wilted salads. For me it's the composed nature of the dish, the tossed-together quality, and of course the dressing, that makes a dish a salad. And the salt: "from Old French salade, from Provençal salada, based on Latin sal ‘salt’."