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[gallery link="file" order="DESC" columns="2" orderby="title"] Just in time for that special date or girls night out, join H5O bistro & bar this Thursday evening for an exciting wine dinner with Sokol Blosser Winery.
Instead of sticking close to home this Memorial Day, I decided for a change to head South with my wine buddies to the Eugene area for a change of pace and visit King Estate, Sweet Cheeks, Domaine Meriwether and Benton-Lane. This allowed us to take the less-traveled portion of Highway 99 from Monroe back to Salem via Monmouth and the Willamette River Bridge just south of Monmouth on a day that we knew I-5 would be clogged with people returning from the weekend vacations.
One of Mom’s kitchen secrets that she’s instilled in me is a method for preparing American or Chinese broccoli in stir-fry. If you try to stir-fry broccoli, sometimes it’s difficult to get the stems cooked as much as the florets. Mom’s secret: Blanch the broccoli before stir-frying it. Our sauce of choice for broccoli stir-fry at home is a combination of oyster and hoisin sauce. You need to cook the broccoli in the wok only long enough to coat it with the sauce and mix it with the other vegetables or meat that you’re using. But Mom’s technique can be applied to a more Western treatment of broccoli as well. I love the contrast between crunchy garlic and tender but still crunchy broccoli, savory bacon and a touch of sweet and tart balsamic vinegar, so I’ll often use Mom’s technique with this combination of ingredients.
For most of my life Surf and Turf has had a negative connotation. Perhaps it’s because I strongly associate it with the ’70s and all that decade represented. Conspicuous consumption. Excess. Gaudiness. Lincoln Towncars a block long. Scotch and gentlemen’s clubs (not the naughty kind; I’m thinking supper clubs for the exclusive). Leveraged buyouts. You get the idea. Michael Douglas in “Wall Street.” Wandering the aisle of the grocery store and pondering what to serve my family for dinner, I was craving beef. But I also had to deal with the reality that Mom doesn’t eat beef. So I thought of grilling some shrimp and, since I had to fire up the grill, what would it hurt to throw on some beef as well? But I decided that reason should rule. No New York steak or even fillet mignon. I settled on a few pieces of tri-tip steaks for Charles and me.
One of the fun things about going to the bays in Oregon to dig for clams or cockles is that inevitably you run into other clam and cockle lovers scouring the sand for these succulent prizes, and you get to swap favorite methods for preparing the seafood bounty once you get home. The last time I was there, I ran into a family that was knee deep in huge pits that they had dug out in the bay, their kids clawing through the sand with potato forks while the parents were digging away with shovels. I walked over to the mother and asked her what her favorite way of preparing the cockles was. “Shuck ‘em, dab some butter and chopped garlic on them and put ‘em under the broiler,” she said. On my way home with my limit of cockles from Tillamook Bay, I pondered what she said and decided that I would try chopped up garlic, capers, thyme and olive oil on my shucked cockles before sliding them under the broiler. Yup. That should do the trick.
One of my favorite dishes from my childhood in Thailand and Singapore is green beans stir-fried with ground up or fatty chunks of pork, a little oyster sauce and hoisin sauce. It’s simply delicious. I have no idea why you never see it on a menu here in the U.S. Maybe it’s considered too banal for the American palate. I just love it. The marriage of sweet crunchy beans with savory pork and oyster and hoisin sauces. Go ahead, give it a shot. And find out what you’ve been missing. It makes a delicious companion to another stir-fried dish like chicken with cashew nuts or chicken with mangoes.
May is the beginning of the Oregon and Alaska spring commercial salmon season, so you’ll be able to get wild salmon at the store. Here’s an uncommon way to enjoy salmon that is a marriage of a Pacific Northwest ingredient with a distinctly Asian presentation.
May ushers in the beginning of commercial Chinook salmon fishing season in Oregon and Sockeye salmon season in Alaska so if you haven’t noticed these wild varieties at your grocery store yet, they’ll soon be arriving. Instead of cooking an entire fillet, you can get the flavor of salmon and reduce the expense by making salmon cakes. Salmon cakes are easy to make, take very little time, can be made ahead of time and refrigerated and then cooked right when your company arrives. This recipe is not only simple, it’s spectacular.
Pork tenderloin is one of those easy-to-cook lean cuts of meat that benefits from being served with a sauce, dressing, or fruit compote. One of Oregon’s signature fruit crops is pear, and a pear compote pairs perfectly with pork, especially if it’s been cooked with pinot noir, another signature Oregon product!
Chowder is easy to make and once you’ve tasted it made from fresh cockles or clams, you’ll never feel the same about opening a can of chowder again. It will make you want to look up the tide tables and head to Tillamook Bay with your bucket and garden rake!
The Rosales family surely must have the highest ranking guardian angel of cuisine looking over them. Pedro’s hijo, David, caught the restaurant bug big time. He went to culinary school to further hone his craft and became a highly esteemed chef in San Francisco. Lucky for us, David left his heart in Salem and returned to create the successful (and stylishly sophisticated, I might add) French-style eaterie, La Capitale Brasserie, just around the corner from Papa’s place. Not long after that, David and Pedro surprised us with Bar Andaluz, Salem’s very own tapas bar. Lucky Salem!
In 2000 AD, I was gifted with a Showtime Rotisserie by Vic’s mom, Pranee. That’s right, it was the original “Set it and forget it” machine that you see on TV ads between midnight and dawn.
Being a southern boy who appreciated such retailers as Neiman-Marcus and Tiffany’s, I rolled my eyes at this one, discreetly of course. Hurting Pranee’s feelings is like fooling Mother Nature — it’s just not nice!
If you love cheese, especially cheese lovingly made in small batches by artisan cheese makers, what could be more rewarding than going to a party where many such artisans have gathered to celebrate and offer up tastes of their love? Friend Steve Martin joined me on Saturday, March 19, for a scenic drive to Central [...]
I usually poach fish in wine but I was inspired to try poaching the fish in a sake that was slightly sweet to see if the sake would impart the same silky sweet flavor to the fish while lending itself to being served cold as a meal that was more salad-like. The delicate sole did take on some of the flavor of the sake and was delicious served cold on top of some cucumber slices that were cold-pickled in a mixture of water, cider vinegar, salt and a touch of sugar.
The rest of the meal was quick and simple to prepare and the only other cooking involved poaching the asparagus and then rinsing them in cold water. To make the shrimp salad, I simply combined the store-bought cooked salad shrimp with some green goddess salad dressing and added some chopped chives.
Behold – the perfect ham for Easter, Christmas, and buffet parties. The sight of this beauty will dazzle your guests and, even better, they will probably tell you that it’s the best glazed ham they have ever eaten And they’ll be right. What’s in it for you? A glorious vision of a showstopping carnivore’s masterpiece to anchor your buffet, beaucoup praise, ample food for a fairly large gathering and, when all is said and done, a substantial bone with lovely bits of surviving ham to grace a soup of your choice.
Adding fruit to foods makes a mundane meal more exciting. Citrus fruits like oranges and grapefruit are wonderful additions to salads and grilled seafood. You might not think of it, but tropical fruits like mangoes, which are now coming into season, and pineapple also make great additions to heartier fare like grilled pork or chicken, and they can be delicious when combined with stir-fry.
There’s nothing more distinctive about Oregon than the coffee-crazed culture here. And what could be more signature Portland than a marriage of coffee and spirits? Just leave it to the creative folks behind Portland’s Distillery Row, a handful of innovative small distilleries who are making handcrafted, locally distilled spirits in the inconspicuous neighborhood of small warehouses and light industrial buildings in Southeast Portland known as the lower east-side industrial district. With more than twenty unique liquors, the six independent distilleries make everything from vodkas, gins, rums and whiskeys, to the more specialized spirits such as absinthe, aquavit and flavored liqueurs. And now they’re brewing up distinctive batches of coffee-flavored spirits.
I love fishing for trout in Oregon and go out every chance I get. Our freezer is always well stocked with vacuum packed rainbow trout, labeled with the date and lake where the fish were caught. Part of the fun is also figuring out different ways of cooking the trout.Tonight for dinner, I decided to poach the trout in some white wine, skin them, and then serve them covered in a dressing of chopped olives, garlic, herbs and olive oil. It was delicious, judging from the empty plates and smiles at the dinner table.
Mom and I took the dogs for a walk in a park not far from our home during one of the pauses in the rain, and I discovered to my surprise that several of the towering Douglas Firs in a grove at the edge of the park had green shawls of miner’s lettuce around the bases of their trunks. Miner’s lettuce grows wild in the woodlands of Oregon but its season is a brief one and it withers and dies back as soon as the rains stop and the weather warms. Native Americans ate this wild green. Early settlers of the Pacific Northwest also ate it. Folklore has it that California Gold Rush miners ate it to prevent scurvy, and thus its nickname. It’s also known as winter purslane, spring beauty or Indian lettuce.
For those craving a wild river experience and good food to boot, nowhere else in the United States can you raft a wilderness river during the day and stay in a comfortable lodge with delectable food each evening than with ROW Adventures’ series of culinary Rogue River rafting trips. ROW offers three this year: a gourmet food and wine rafting trip, a gourmet food and Oregon craft beer trip, and a gluten-free trip. The trips offer food lovers, wine lovers and beer lovers a chance to combine their passions with a fun outdoor adventure. And the gluten-free trip allows those with wheat allergies to enjoy a multiple-day rafting trek without having to bring along special meals.
“Fight Hunger, Feed Hope” is the theme for the 22nd annual Rotary Workplace Food Drive, which officially kicked off at noon today at the Rotary Club of Salem meeting at the Salem Conference Center.
The drive, one of the region’s largest, continues through March 31 and benefits Marion-Polk Food Share (MPFS). Thirteen area Rotary Clubs have committed to the challenge of raising at least 90,000 pounds of food and $90,000.
Tacos have become such a part of mainstream American cuisine that on the West Coast other ethnic groups have begun topping the ubiquitous corn tortilla with their cultural culinary specialties. Forget the fish taco, ground beef taco, or shredded beef taco. Their time has come and gone. In Los Angeles and Seattle you can find Vietnamese and Korean food-truck chefs who are creating the latest taco sensations: Korean barbecue and Kimchi tacos, Bulgogi tacos, Vietnamese lemongrass chicken tacos. I mean, when you see a dozen kinds of tacos available in the neighborhood supermarket, and Taco Bells show up in China, what would you expect, right? The taco is ripe for a cultural hijacking. And so this native Thai decided that the time was ripe for….ta da…a Thai taco.
As far as American fare goes, chicken is one of those old stand-bys. Roasted, grilled or battered and fried, it has attained comfort-food status in most American households. In the Far East, chicken also has the coveted comfort-food status on many family tables. My recipe for this dish combines Thai and Chinese techniques of poaching a whole chicken in garlic and ginger and then serving it with a zingy sauce of crushed garlic and ginger, salted soybeans, soy sauce and vinegar.
Oregon may be known for its pinot noir, but the mild climate here makes it a perfect place to also grow cool-climate white varieties such as grüner veltliner, which is starting to take root in Oregon with a handful of vineyards and wineries now growing and making this wine that is developing a strong following among white wine lovers. And many of those vineyards are in our part of the valley. Grüner veltliner is a white grape variety closely associated with Austria, where it is the nation’s most important varietal in terms of quality and volume produced. Grüner veltliner is a white wine known for its food-friendliness.
I had battered and fried mussels for the first time at Andaluz, a tapas restaurant right here in Salem. Chef David Rosales’ version had a light coat of flour and was served with a garlic aioli sauce. It was such a delicious way to enjoy mussels that I was inspired to create my own version. Preferring a more substantial batter, I played around until I came up with a recipe that was a combination of batter and breading and remained crispy-crunchy after frying, along with a more tangy, Japanese-inspired sauce based on miso. This dish makes a great appetizer. Think of them as mussel poppers! They’ll disappear in a flash.
I wonder how many Americans–Yanks, that is–discover Nutella for the first time while visiting Europe. That’s where I enjoyed it first. Lovely stuff and like much lovely stuff, it can be addictive.
Homemade Nutella or Chocolate Hazelnut Spread is no less addictive, just fresher, and the use of freshly roasted nuts along with a premium cocoa powder raises the bar for flavor. It’s a simple list of ingredients: hazelnuts, sugar, vanilla, hazelnut oil, cocoa powder and a pinch of salt.
Every time I roast fresh hazelnuts and grind them in a food processor, the perfume emanating from the bowl is almost levitating, like when the aroma of cooking bacon or fresh-hot coffee pulls cartoon characters out of bed and floats them down to the source.
Cheeses and fruit, especially pears and apples, are natural companions, so deciding on a grilled cheese sandwich was easy. Vic was pressuring me to make one of my turkey dip sandwiches, but I wanted something different to pair with the meat. After a brief gestation period I decided on a sandwich filled with Willamette Valley Cheese’s aged cheddar, roasted pear slices and thinly sliced smoked turkey breast. Making a savory and sweet dipping sauce was just a matter of experimentation in a saucepan on the stovetop.
Food and flavors are a great memory trigger. For me, my childhood memories of faraway Bangkok and Singapore are steeped in the foods that I strongly connect with that period in my life: steamed blood cockles with pungent sauce, pad Thai, pad see ew, pad lard na, larb, sour fish curry, kang keo wan, fish bladder stew, nasi goreng. Whenever I have my favorite childhood Thai dishes, the memories of monks clad in saffron robes wandering our street in the morning collecting their daily meal comes to mind. It’s the same with Charles whenever he makes black-eyed peas, fried chicken or cornbread. He’ll inevitably start talking about his mother at the dinner table. His fried chicken, black-eyed peas and corn bread may not be exactly the same as those that his mother made, but the connection is still there. And so one of our dearest friends, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, has spent the past year working on her debut book, “A Tiger in the Kitchen,” which is a memoir of food and family. It’s the ultimate cure for connection and culinary home sickness.
One of the fun things about mastering a culinary technique is that you can start innovating when you’ve got the technique down. Today I’m combining two techniques, smoking seafood and making Vietnamese spring rolls to come up with Vietnamese spring rolls stuffed with smoked trout. It’s a delicious way to enjoy smoked trout and makes for a light and healthy meal.
How many boomers cut their culinary gourmet teeth on tuna noodle casserole? OK, hands down. I grew up making it and loving it too. The Beaver and Wally must have enjoyed it, and I’m sure Samantha Stephens twitched one up occasionally for Tabitha when Darrin wasn’t looking. But how would Samantha serve it to Endora, whose tastes were anything but ordinary? Endora would probably turn up her nose at Samantha’s can of this and can of that, wave her arm, and out of rising smoke would appear something like “La Cocotte Nouilles au Thon avec la Sauce de Mornay, Sherried Champignons Forestiers et l’Huile de Truffe Blanc.” Whew!
Every now and then I open the kitchen cupboard or spare freezer in the garage and have to stifle a scream because both are bulging with so many half-used boxes of pasta, cans of diced tomatoes, packages of sausage, and frozen vegetables that I vow to challenge myself to whip something tasty and nutritious for my family from these cast-asides. In times like these, the bounty of food on hand can be the mother of invention. All you need is a spark of creativity and a sense of adventure to give birth to something delicious for the table.
I’m not sure about the origin of the name pad kee mao, which literally translates as stir-fried drunken noodles. Mom says maybe because it’s good to wash down with beer. Or maybe it’s a good cure for a hangover. I think it’s one of those quick and cheap street foods that’s widely available around Bangkok to satisfy an appetite after a night of disco. Who knows for sure? Charles and I do agree, though, that the perfect thing to serve with this dish is a bottle of Chang beer (from Ayutthaya, Thailand). We’re lucky that we can find it here in Salem at Capitol Market. This version of drunken noodles takes very little time to prepare.
Tamarind paste and canned chopped tomatoes form the base of this tangy sauce over Dungeness crab, clams and mussels. The paste from the flesh of tamarind pods are a combination of tongue-curling tartness, cheek-pinching saltiness, and lip-smacking sweetness, all rolled into one.
The secret ingredient to our version of steak salad is marinating the meat in some dried galangal root powder (available at any Asian grocery store) and a touch of oil an hour or two before cooking. The galangal will enhance the flavor of the steak and take away some of that “beefy smell” that turns some people off. Plus, while you’re searing the steak, it will add an other-worldy aroma to the beef.
Tom Warnock was the lucky winner as selected by www.random.org. Congratulations Tom!
During all of the years we lived in Texas, I never learned how to make collard greens, even though it was a dish I loved to eat with fried chicken. It wasn’t until we moved to Oregon that I actually mastered collard greens, from a true southerner who had moved here to Oregon. Mary Irby Jones is from Mississippi and learned to make collards from her mother. When I told her I wanted to learn to make them, she offered to come over to show me her mother’s secrets.
As I was growing up in Thailand, kaffir limes were a common sight. Not so much here in the U.S. So imagine my surprise when I get a call from Charles, the excitement in his voice palpable, extolling that our little organic food store in Salem, Lifesource Foods, had kaffir limes and did I want any? Are you kidding? Yes! My family has gone to great lengths to make sure that wherever we’ve lived — Texas, Maryland, Oregon — we’ve always had a kaffir lime plant. Usually, Mom has to scour her friends in Houston and bring a live plant back on the plane after one of her annual visits there. Sometimes, we beg to have plants sent to us via FedEx. The fruit doesn’t contain much juice, but in Thai cooking, the rind and the entire fruit are used to impart their bright, clean, citrus flavor and aroma. The most common dishes that use kaffir lime rind or leaves are Tom Yum soup and Tom Kha soup.
In addition to writing our designated chapters, Charles and I are getting a workout as recipe developers, reading and learning about different foods and trying to come up with a “take” that will provide an uniquely Oregon bit of flavor to the dish. Today, I was playing around with pheasant, which has a rich flavor somewhere between duck and chicken, though not as fatty as duck meat. My idea was to marinate the pheasant, which is about the size of a large Cornish game hen, in a combination of pomegranate, Port-style pinot noir and herbs, then roast it and use the marinade as the base for a sauce, with persimmons added for sweetness.
French onion soup is one of my comfort foods. I don’t make it more than a few times a year, but it never fails to bring back memories of Fort Worth, Texas, oddly enough. That’s where I fell in love with French onion soup. It was one of those loves that borders on infatuation, when [...]
