A Jersey Girl in Portland

Amazing potato salad minus the WOW factor

It's 70 degrees in Portland and I have the day off. I'm grilling steaks later, with broccolini (grilled) and baked potatoes.

Oh, potatoes. I love potatoes and I love baked potatoes. But, given my choice, I'd eat potato salad every day.

Last week I had The Tribe over for a cook-out in the rain. Burgers, pork BBQ, potato salad and a lot of other stuff. The BBQ was wonderful, but the spud salad was awarded best in show.

<sigh> I love my Mom's potato salad. Savory bacon, crisp celery, hard cooked eggs, and the mouth feel of mayo. Heavenly.

It's evolved over the years, but the basic recipe is sound. I now use red potatoes, hard-cooked duck eggs and high quality bacon, but it's still the same pot salad my mom makes.

This is about the least precise recipe I use. I make potato salad by feel but--to the best of my recollection--this is the formula.

Potato Salad

4 pounds red potatoes, scrubbed and cut into less-than bite sized pieces

1 pound bacon, cooked and chopped (minus two slices for the cook)

4 stalks celery, finely diced

4 hard cooked eggs, cut up with a hard-cooked-egg-cutter

1 pint (two cups) real mayonnaise (I use Hellman's/Best Foods)

Salt to taste

Place the potatoes in water to cover. Add 1 Tbsp salt. Cook until done -- preferably before the skins fall off.

Rinse under cold water, spread on a sheet tray to cool.*

Combine ingredients, mix thoroughly, and chill.

This potato salad is pure comfort food, entirely lacking in WOW factor (according to a culinarily sophisticated friend). But, damn, the kids and guys will love it.

My sweetie Jay Lake has a killer heart attack potato salad (oops, poor choice of words) with about 21 ingredients. Yummy but really complicated.

Do not misunderstand me. I'm not looking for One Potato Salad To Rule Them All. What I do want is variety. WOW or comfort? Vanilla or not-vanilla? If asked to choose, I'd say YES. I'd like it all, thank you.

Love Big,

Eat Well,

xoxo 

Nancy

  

 

 

 

*Cooling the potatoes is important as adding mayo to hot potatoes and not cooling the finished salad properly is a germ incubator. No bueno.

Porchetta di Testa, Rolled pig face, or what I did at work

I work for an amazing company, Deschutes Brewery, specifically the Portland pub. Yesterday the culinary management team and a couple of line cooks (like me) had a

butchering lesson with Camas of the Portland Meat Collective.

We butchered a pig head to make Porchetta di Testa, rolled pig face. You take the skin, cheek meat and jowls off the pig (in one piece), trim it, season it, roll it and cook it -- chill it, slice it and eat it. Easy peasy.

Here's a photo montage of the process. The pig, the face (and my face), the rolled and trussed Porchetta di Testa, and the stock pot of mirepoix and skinless head to make hog stock.

I made stock last night and this morning. Tomorrow I'll braise the Porchetta in the hog stock and chill it. It'll be yummy. And weird.

     

 

Love big.

Eat well.

Have fun.

xoxo

Nancy

PS: Housemate Lisa, do not look closely at the pot in the fridge.

Adventures in Portland: Big sando and a bold move

It's nutty when you're so busy and work such odd hours that you have to schedule time to have dinner with your house mate. Such is the home life of HouseMate Lisa and I.

So, schedule we do. Last week, for our scheduled dinner, we went to a bar on Division called North. It was a totally random decision. We liked their happy hour menu and it was close to home.

We arrived and realized that the menu wasn't as interesting  as we thought. But the bar had a good vibe and large picture windows that let in the sun of a gorgeous Portland spring day. Great for drinking but to eat? Not so much. The printed menu was really dirty and there was no one eating. Actually, there was only one other person in the bar.

Food Carts to the Rescue! The bartender said we could pick up something from the cart pod, A La Carts on SE 50th & Ivon, and bring it in to the bar.

Perfect. So we picked up "Midwest style pork tenderloin sandwiches" from The Burger Guild.  

Holy Humongous Sando Batman!

It was freaking DELICIOUS. Pork pounded thinly, breaded and deep fried. Served on a hamburger bun with yellow mustard, onion and lettuce. $7.50 for a sandwich that Lisa and I could have easily split.

The top photo is my sandwich. It was Very Large. Housemate Lisa's Sando of Culinary Delight was Scary Large. It was about ten inches wide, dwarfing the standard-sized hamburger bun necessary for conveying the fried pork to one's mouth. It was a beast. So yummy, juicy, crisp and fresh.

As I mentioned, there was only one other person at the bar.

A senior hottie who looked like he'd just stepped out of an AARP print ad. Silver hair, tanned and very well built.

No wedding ring.

He was sitting in the sun reading Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities." We made serious eye contact while Lisa and I attempted to eat our big pork patties. 

Lisa had tea, I had two Manhattan's.

On the way out of the bar, we chatted with the hottie for a minute about Tom Wolfe and "A Man in Full" (which I thought rather fitting as the hottie was all that). We exited the restaurant.

I had a twinge of regret while waiting to cross Division. I wanted to meet him.

I don't know if it was the booze, the sandwich, or the sunshine but I handed my leftovers to Lisa, went back into North, got a cocktail napkin from the bartender and gave the hottie my phone number. I dropped it, smiled and ran out the door -- my cheeks crimson with embarrassment.

Well, what do you know, he called me the next day.

And he's not an ax-murderer, just a lovely hunk of a man, hanging in Portland for a week or so.

The moral of the story? Take a chance. Even if we hadn't hit it off (we did) the act of giving and receiving something as simple as a phone number made two people very happy. And made Lisa giggle.

Love big and eat huge sandwiches.

xoxo

Nancy

 

 

 

A new toy -- a Weber grill

I'm finally settling into the new house. Pictures are hung, the grass has been mowed, and the kitchen has been baptized.

Now it's time to work on the outdoor kitchen. I got a propane-powered from an old BF who moved in with a gal who apparently doesn't like smoked food (or dogs or cats or seafood). To each his own.

I bought a Weber kettle grill. charcoal fired. Big, black and beautiful.

I christened it with a fat, juicy organic chicken. I brined it when I got home from work on Tuesday and cooked it last night.

Oh, it was delicious. I brined it using Ruhlman's Basic Brine.

It cooked for almost two hours, which was roughly 20 minutes too long. Because it was brined, the meat was as juicy and flavorful as a medium rare steak. Also, as a result of the extended cook time, the skin was perfection. Well seasoned and flavored with mesquite smoke.

I used offset heat -- with charcoal surrounding a center drip pan.

Believe it or not, in 25 years of outdoor cooking, (and 15 years of writing about it) I've never made a chicken on the grill. Well, that's going to change.

Hell, yea! It was perfect.

And it passed the first date test.

xoxo

Nancy

(Welcome to the tribe C-Lee.)

Making mead

I've started my first batch of mead. I feel so medieval. Mead was one of the first brewed beverages made by ancient European people. Experts disagree as to which came first, beer or mead, but mead is so easy, my vote is for mead as the First Hooch.

It's quite simple, 4:1 water to raw honey. Stir and wait.

This batch is 20 oz (2.5 cups) honey to 80 oz (5 cups) water.

If I had access to local fruit, I'd have added a cup or so of fruit. It adds another layer of useful yeast. As it is, I have to rely on the yeast in the honey and the wild yeast in the air to ferment the honey water.

I'm using Sandor Ellix Katz' book, "The Art of Fermentation" as a guide.

The honey water is to be stirred vigorously, several times a day for a week or so. The author uses cool or room temp water (oops, I used warm water) and stirs clockwise then counterclockwise to create the 'vortex' that rapidly aerates the liquid (in the biodynamic style), nurturing an optimal growth environment for yeast.

Making mead is a really Portland thing to do. Frankly, I'm the last of my cohort at work to take a crack at the stuff. I did try elderflower wine last spring, but it spoiled before the yeast could ferment the sugared water.

If it works, I'll make a batch as soon as the berries start to roll in. I also have raspberry bushes in the back yard so I may make mead with my own fruit.

I don't think I'd be doing any of this stuff -- from fermenting to brewing -- if I didn't live in such a DIY place.

<sigh> I ♥ Portland.

I'll report back in coming weeks.

xoxo

Nancy