Russell Street Sunday nights

Birthday trip

“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”

—Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Summer on the move. A month back east and south. Driving around the old places, like reading a story you forgot you wrote. Back to the house with the grand piano and the porch swing. The bar where you heard Jeff Buckley play just before he drowned. The church steps your friend crashed into trying to get someone to notice he was dying of love.

I’d had enough reminiscing for one summer, I wanted to go someplace new. So for my birthday we packed up the dogs and headed to LA. The city had been on my mind–I’d just read Amy Wilenz’ essays about Southern California water, wealth, and celebrity in the Schwarzenegger age. Before that, this novel set in an East LA barrio among wildfires, orchids, prophetic/murderous women and seductive small-hearted men.

Also I like  bungalows and palm trees and I wanted to eat a manta ray taco. And knife-cut noodles in snail broth. And what is supposedly the best tres leches cake in America.

LA is a city of countries: Thai Town, Taiwanese Town, Koreatown, Ethiopia Town, Little Armenia, Little India, Little Saigon. And others, it’s practically a continent. It takes so long to get around it may as well have multiple time zones. You can’t eat everything there that you want in four days.

People told me I’d hate it. And true, sitting for a loud hot hazy hour and a half on the 405 did not give me a sense of well-being. But there are cozy neighborhoods tucked into the hills, gardens of plumeria and hibiscus, the smell of the ocean, brilliant barbershop signs, and an incredible diversity of ethnic food.

Every cuisine is a story of what people somewhere didn’t have and what they found and made. LA is brimming with stories. And it’s no longer a blank slate for me. It’s fiery fish ball curry from southern Thailand, and caramelized pork belly in Little Tokyo, and the huge blazing view of the city from a balcony at the Getty, and families huddled in their towels at Santa Monica Beach. Waiting at a taco truck in the cold night air and waiting out a hangover in a Oaxacan banquet hall and waiting to turn 38 over camarones borrachos and smoky crispy whole grilled snook from Mazatlan. And countless other tastes and smells and sights to trigger the heart, to go down in the old story.

Sunny side

Morning Danish, the last of the apricots, goat milk-cardamom pastry cream.

Filmishmish

I’d  only eaten two or three fresh apricots before I moved to California. Hard, mealy, a poor man’s peach. That was before I met Miss Blenheim and her local kin. She’s had a tough year, Miss B. The long stretch of spring cold and rain shotholed her offspring and turned her leaves to lace. But she’s about a mover–we’re rolling in tender freckled fruit, not pristine but rich, spicy, scenting the kitchen with honey and rose.  Every few days,  another pot of barely simmered compote to chill and eat with homemade goat’s milk yogurt.  Tangy sunset-colored sorbet. A semifreddo with almond mousse. Next? A crostata,  maybe a rice pudding with cardamom and pistachios. Something with puff pastry. A gelee with blackberries from the creek.  Apricot Danish, that’s for sure. Because early summer, sweet season, the time of apricots—here, golden, gone.

A ritual

Breakaway last Saturday, the first of the season: dogs and  Prosecco in the hatch, over the hills to Napa farmers market and The Fatted Calf, Cowgirl Creamery stop in Point Reyes Station, then straight for the coast. Some things always work.

June breakfast

Morning chores while warming a tartlet, perfume drifting out to the yard: cherries in vanilla-scented almond cream, buttery golden crust, hot black coffee.

This is a nice simple way to cook almost any fruit in any crust: Par-bake the crust and brush it with egg white while it’s still warm. Slice up the fruit and set it in the shell. Whisk 1/2 cup cream with an egg, 2 tablespoons of honey, 1 tablespoon of flour, and some simpatico flavoring (vanilla and/or almond extract, orange or lemon zest, nutmeg or ginger, etc.) Pour it gently over the fruit and bake at 375 until the filling is firm and lightly browned. Makes a 9-inch tart or 6-9 tartlets, depending on their size.

Cherry season

The cherries crept up on us this year. It’s been so cold it didn’t seem like it could be that time already. Why don’t the jays eat the ones on the branches I can’t reach?

I decided my favorite French macaron is one that’s half-American.  Coconut, so we can even call it a macarOOn. The shells are almond/coconut, the filling is mascarpone (ever since Daring Bakers tiramisu challenge I’ve been all over the homemade mascarpone) with more toasted coconut, and there’s a little surprise heart in the middle.

A little portlier

I don’t like cities except for old haunted ones.  Cities that lost something, that are sinking or rotting, longing and not letting go.  Cities that indulge, that revel, that don’t know when to quit. Open air, crackly radio, torn screen, kitchen smell cities.  Hot, lazy cities, with dogs in the doorway, women laughing, men eating chicken on the steps.

So I thought Portland would be too winning for me. Too cool, can-do, and clever. And young and fresh. And gentrified.  It’s got startups and bike messengers. It’s got Nike. It’s on the list (doesn’t really matter what the list is–chefs, tech, public transport, childraising, niceness even.)

But Portland is a charmer!  It’s not so smooth after all. It’s relaxed, inviting, a little scraggly. It’s merry, funny, modest about being green. It’s got fence leaners and corner hangers.  Kids in the street. Barbecue smoke in the air. People doing hair in the yard. I saw a man walk out of a flat-top brick apartment with a skillet and call his blue Pit Bull like this:  Desirée, c’mon and get these pancakes now.

Desirée. In Portland you can block the sidewalk with your humongous crazy fragrant half-dead rosebush. You can paint your bungalow like a roll of Necco wafers. Guys eat chicken on the steps, I bet, and I know for sure they sit on coolers and play dominoes.

It’s a river town, but the Willamette is smooth, containerized, modern. Silent shipyards and nodding cranes and rail flat beds for miles. Dams, seawalls, condos, sailboats, dull waterfront parks. But bridges! Who thought of all those bridges? When you’re touring you zigzag across all day long, sewing up the banks, east to west and back on over. I’ve never seen so many bridges so close together. Drawbridges, a bridge that looks like a cathedral, another with a soaring arch, some with double deckers, one with a bottom level just for freight trains.

We hit the streets to soak up the rare sunshine. (A girl said, I haven’t unpacked my sunglasses since I moved two times ago.) There was the Mississippi street fair and a show at the  art and bar-filled Kennedy School. Friends joined us for a volcano walk and the long view from Mount Tabor. We hiked a grand green corner of the hemlock and cedar-dense Forest Park. We ran beside the breezy Columbia River next to our hotel on the Washington state line. And then there was my first Portland Restaurant Reconnoiter…

It was hard to fit meals in between bakery stops. How could I not be sweet on such a pastry-proud town? Ken’s Artisan makes great pain au chocolat–they call them “mini” but I think they are perfectly, sanely scaled. They’re the stronger bready kind that good bread bakeries tend to go for. (Us pastry people lean toward flaky and shattering, but I like quality specimens of both.) Pearl Bakery, another artisan bread legend, has crusty rolls you could eat every morning–pecan-rosemary, fig-anise. Also excellent soft Kaiser rolls, which I am deeply sentimental about, and rough tangy little rhubarb tarts.

We went looking for Gâteau Basque at Crema Bakery in Southeast, but settled for this damp delicious custard cake.

Pix Patisserie has the styliest desserts in town. (Stopped in Papa Hayden’s on NW 23rd too but it’s more towering trophy cakes.)

Portland’s got a handmade chocolate scene too. I tried a lovely rose-shaped, rose-flavored, rose-colored sugar-dusted caramel from Alma.  But the fiercest were at a tiny shop called Sahagun, which also serves ice-cold unsweetened chocolate drinks made with coconut milk. They’re dark, bitter, tonic, reviving—my dream Yoohoo.

Saturday was the farmers market on the PSU campus–pink peonies and blue irises, oozing goat and sheep cheeses, more pastry and brick oven bread, cider and wine, pastured meats and fresh fish, crowds mobbing the Italian sausage and chicken biscuits.

Portland, you’re proof that a city can have both the green and the gravy. ‘Til next time, k?

Strawberry cake

Once I ran away to a wild secret valley  in the Arkansas Ozarks to work on a farm. On Wednesdays  my boss and I would drive over the mountain and into town to deliver vegetables.  Afterward we’d take care of weekly errands—library, feed and seed, health food store. Then we’d stop in at the lunch counter off the court square, where you could get a turkey club, cottage cheese with pear half, macaroni salad, tuna melt. We’d go for the tuna melts and then split a piece of cake, yellow or green or pink, lemon or pistachio or strawberry flavored layer cake, soft sweet pastel box cake with Jello in the mix and matching frosting.

Pink cake. And the bottomless green bowl of the Meadowcreek Valley, the gut-burningly beautiful Buffalo River, cold springs and silver falls and mossy caves. Militia men, herbalists, writers, rock thieves, people who drank strychnine. And their lodging dogtrots, piles of tires and fence stone, shifting chimney smoke. We’d walk to a turquoise  swimming hole where the water moccasins were unmotivated. Y2K was coming, people were burying their stuff.  Our cabins were part greenhouse, part root cellar, part two-story fireplace. Drew and I couldn’t get enough Jimmy Driftwood.  Zach would fry fish in the yard and the coyotes would clean up.  Megan and Greg and I played Louis Jordan and drank beer and weighed salad greens. I stopped being a vegetarian and ate the pigs and chickens that had pastured behind my cabin.  Brad gave us deer meat, once some boar. Donnie drove up with movies and ice cream. For a few weeks the woods were full of morels. The bears ate the blueberries.  Thunderstorms broke the heat but came inside. At night the shadows of  luna moths made angel decals on the floor. I felt like I was settling into something as I picked peas, bundled onions, walked deep in the corn.  My truck lost parts and we made new ones.  We shot a skunk that we thought was rabid, but it was just circling a cage where another skunk was trapped.

Cake from fresh strawberries is more flecked beige than clear candy pink. These were made with ripe, almost caving berries I bought just down the road. They’re moist and not too sweet, with olive oil and crème fraîche, and a little white pepper for warmth. They’re better than the box kind, unless you have run away to dark green woods and tuna melts in the mountains of Arkansas.  There, bluestar on the roadside, pink cake, white heart-faced barn owls hiding and hunting.

They’re here!

Remember how I got winter pastry fatigue syndrome and went on dessert strike until I could ride my bike to the strawberry shack? Well, today was my first strawberry ride (all of 1/3 mile). But I did cross my own picket line last week because the rhubarb came in to tide us over.

I love my rhubarb straight up, such as in these almond-brown butter cakes (the fancy French is financiers, because traditionally these are shaped like little bricks of gold.)

And I also love it married with berries. I try to stockpile tart dough (fancy French is pâte sucrée–”sweet paste”) in the freezer so I can pull together a few of these babies. A little pastry cream, diced strawberries, and a spoonful of rhubarb poached briefly in orange flower water and vanilla. Rhubarb is best when it keeps some tooth and acidity–it’s a tannic, tonic complement in a creamy sweet.