Saucyman: Camellia Interuptus

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Camellia Interuptus

We’ll get back to tea in a day or so. Portland Farmers Market opened their 2010 season on the first day of spring this past Saturday.

There are days when it is easy to love Portland – Saturday, the first 70º day of the year, amazing crowd, amazing food and my first market meal of the year. I went with salmon and broccoli raab/rabe/rapini/rappini/rape. (Not to be confused with Chinese Broccoli) The salmon was cured for 8 hours with a rub of green tea, brown sugar, coarse salt. The raab, picked Friday, purchased Saturday and prepared on Sunday was the freshest, most local veg I have had since last autumn.

So what did I do with this farm fresh produce? Salt and fresh butter? Oyster sauce thinned with a little soy and water. That is right I took the freshest thing I had and combined it with the most processed substance I had in the house. Long time readers remember from the By and Bivalve post, that Oyster Sauce is to oysters as ketchup is to tomatoes, they're in there somewhere but they aren't the main component.

Yet despite being highly processed, it worked. Briny, sweet goodness offsetting a funny plant – a stem like an asparagus, a crown like baby broccoli and leaves that taste as bitter as anything a doctor might prescribe.

Meal 2 – was fresh pasta made with farm fresh eggs, spring morels and a duxelle of crimini mushrooms. Those yolks were so beautiful I nearly wept. The morels, well tasty, their crowns a sharp contrast to the finely chopped crimini, It was a good food day.

The market will be back every Saturday throughout the year, stop by if you are in Portland.

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1 comments:

Allison Jones said...: I know exactly what you mean re: fresh egg yolks. When I was younger I despised eggs, and then I moved into a Co-Op and started raising chickens and ducks. That changed my mind, to say the least. My MO during most of the PFM season is stir-frying whatever I've got on hand in cumin and coriander, sprinkling with chopped parsley and fresh feta, and throwing a fried egg on top. It's actually amazing that I manage to write a food blog because my day-to-day nosh is so incredibly boring.; March 25, 2010 3:40 PM

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Basketball

Since the lockout ended, I have been largely silent about the great sport of basketball. Despite Brandon Roy retiring, despite my beloved Blazer’s sprint out of the blocks to a really good start, despite my home team playing a style of basketball than can no longer be described as Van Gundying (Jeff) up the sport’s fluidity.

I don’t know, some interesting developments transpired: During the lockout, analysts and beat writers, the very people who possibly think about professional basketball more than I do, had a light bulb go on over their collective heads and across the league they discovered what everyone else pretty much already knew, NBA Commissioner David Stern is a dick. Over the last decade Stern forced bankrupt municipalities to build new stadiums for billionaires’ new play thing, this heavy handed behavior garnered nothing but praise. The writers sighed and thought eh, “we live in the suburbs, we write for suburban middle managers, our values are if anything anti-urban” - with all the weight that word carries. But needlessly locking out players jeopardizing their tenuous employment in publishing, well that is something that we might complain about except they hate the players more - Oh the conflict.

But mostly I can’t get excited about any team helmed by Nate McMillan. We’ll make the playoffs with a pretty good but not best record, maybe get home court advantage in the first round and then fail to advance. This is true until McMillan proves otherwise, 11 years a coach out of the first round once - this record while coaching some pretty good but not great teams. Along the way Nate will overplay star forwards LaMarcus Aldridge and Gerald Wallace so there is nothing in the tank come playoff time and risk their health. And yo-yo Nicholas Batum’s minutes so the young player becomes a head case instead of developing into a consistent contributor.

So a predictable finish is part of the my own jejune response to the return of the sport of kings (not really, that's horse racing) maybe it's the sweet science (damnit google says that's boxing). My attitude goes deeper than a finish more predictable than one of McMillan's earth toned, triple pleated suits, if the lockout exposed a fault line in NBA coverage it's that broadcasters and writers are now PR agents for the teams - so who is left to advocate for the fan - thank goodness for blogs and the posting cyborg that is named Henry Abbott.

2nd round or bust