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By mlb, on December 20th, 2011
Grüner
527 SW 12th Avenue
Portland, Oregon
As much as we are trying to go to new restaurants, I am trying to post about them. We went to Grüner last month (see, I am not even that far behind!!) but I’ve wanted to go since this Summer, when I was taking volunteer photos for the Montavilla Farmer’s Market and one week’s chef demo was Eric Purugganan, sous chef at Grüner.
Chopping cherries at the demo.
I got to talk to him a little bit before the demo and he was really nice (plus his demo dish was quite tasty — cherry chutney with fresh goat cheese on crostini). I came home that day and said to jwa, “hey, we should go to Grüner sometime!.” And…five months later we finally did. Hooray!
Cherries are messy!
It’s funny, I normally wouldn’t get . . . → Read More: Grüner
By mlb, on December 16th, 2011
This week’s French Friday with Dorie is kind of neat — a Spanish Tortilla made with potato chips instead of slices of potato! You basically crush a bunch of chips and add to eggs, onion, spices and pop into a pan to cook! I’d go so far as to say that if you crushed your chips on the larger side and didn’t tell anyone that you’d used potato chips, they might not even be able to tell.
I used a mix of red onion and green onion in mine and I was very tempted to try this with the multicolored vegetable chips, but after reading the label, decided against it as they were higher in calories, fat and carbs than these olive oil potato chips. Go figure.
Anyway, here’s a link to everyone’s posts and here are my photos below!
Trader Joe’s . . . → Read More: FFwD: Potato Chip Tortilla
By mlb, on December 11th, 2011
I am officially a huge fan of millet. This is the 2nd really great recipe I’ve made with this grain and it was delicious. I suppose if you don’t have millet, you could use orzo or pearl couscous, but really, get some millet!
This is made in a few different steps, the millet is cooked separately, then stirred into the tomato and pepper mixture and then the fish is cooked in a different pan and added to the top.
The original recipe used shrimp, which would be great of course, but I had some frozen Ono* that I used (defrosted). Halibut or cod would also probably be delicious! Oh and I always thought saganaki was just the flaming cheese — apparently it refers to the actual frying pan that you maybe flame the cheese or say, cook tomatoes, peppers, olives and millet. Who knew? well, I guess I . . . → Read More: Greek Millet Saganaki with Grilled Ono and Ouzo
By mlb, on December 3rd, 2011
I recently had the very good fortune of being invited to a festive Pear Lunch hosted by Pear Bureau Northwest at Castagna Restaurant. This was completely awesome for a number of reasons, including I got to leave work early for a long lunch and Castagna is practically in my neighborhood, so jwa and I could just walk there. And although we go to Cafe Castagna pretty frequently, it’s been a while (a couple of years?) since we’ve been to the restaurant side. So that was very nice too.
I took some photos of the lunch and at the time, I was pleased to not be the only one photographing my food. Seriously, everyone had a camera and/or iphone out and was snapping pics before trying anything. I was quite amused.
I missed a photo of the pear juice flight but I have two images of . . . → Read More: December is National Pear Month: Pear Lunch at Castagna
By mlb, on December 1st, 2011
Okay, so I almost forgot about this French Fridays with Dorie but I’m glad I didn’t, this was a very interesting FFwD experiment. I made a number of changes, mainly because I wanted to work with what I had on hand. Here’s how that went:
1. First off, I made a half recipe, so I had one potato that was about 3/4 of a pound.
2. I used a…sweet potato! I know, it’s probably not a real matafan then, but I had about 5 red potatoes (which I figured wouldn’t work at all) and 1 perfectly sized sweet potato. So, there you go. I used that.
3. I added about 1/2 tsp curry powder to the batter.
4. I went ahead and still oven roasted the potato on the bed of salt. I’m not sure it had the same effect, but is seemed interesting.
5. Strangely, I thought the sweet potato and . . . → Read More: FFwD: Matafan (Fluffy Mashed Potato Pancakes)
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About Me I like to cook. I like to eat. I like to take photos. I live in SE Portland with my husband jwa and a grumpy, old lady cat named Chelsea. That is all.
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