A recipe that will make you game for pheasant
Roasted pheasant stuffed with wild rice served with pomegranate and persimmon sauce makes a flavorful winter dish.
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Easy and delicious Pulpo Gallego
One of the loves that I developed while living in Texas was a love for Spanish-style octopus. The first time I tasted it was at a tapas restaurant in Dallas. The octopus had been boiled, grilled and simply dressed with olive oil and lemon. Tender, smoky and tangy with lemon, it was delicious. I’ve periodically craved Pulpo Gallego since but it wasn’t until a few years ago that I got the nerve up to cook it myself. This is an easy and tasty recipe and the octopus comes out perfect every time.
Sublime albacore recipes use 5 or fewer ingredients
I never tasted fresh line-caught albacore until I arrived in Oregon. I didn’t know what the all the fuss was about until I tasted it myself. Call it skepticism. Call it one of Oregon’s lores. Seafood lovers I met after I moved here sang the same chorus: Once you taste freshly caught albacore, you’ll never go back to Charlie or the “chicken of the sea.” Here are two simple and delicious recipes that use five or fewer key ingredients. Try fresh albacore and you’ll be hooked.
Peach jam kissed with a touch of cinnamon
I’ve always been intimidated by making jams and preserves. But my neighbors Matt and Brenda Russell make it seam so easy that anyone could do it. Even me.
Smoked steelhead bruschetta and Left Coast White Pinot Noir: A perfect welcome for spring
Bruschetta using bread from The Bread Board made with smoked steelhead, miner’s lettuce and tomatoes and yellow bell pepper. Pair it with a great Oregon white pinot noir and say welcome to spring.
Easy lamb entrée for Easter reflects Oregon flavors
For Easter, lamb as well as ham are traditional entrees. So I set out to create a low-intimidation lamb recipe that can be easily tackled by most home cooks as well as include uniquely Oregon flavors.
For this recipe, I use lamb chops, which are easily found at grocery stores (even Winco carries them) and are easy to cook, and I combined them with an herb rub of sage, rosemary and juniper berries to complement the flavor of the lamb and then included a glaze using Marionberry jam and a crust of hazelnuts and bread crumbs to give it a signature Oregon flavor.
Boiled Apple Cider Syrup - Reviving an Early American Tradition for Flavoring Apple Pies, Baked Beans and More
Boiling fresh pressed cider into a thick syrup, much like the sap from maple trees, was common in colonial New England. Hardly a pantry was without this sweet-tart ingredient used for sweetening and flavoring dishes from baked beans to pies and fruit cakes.
Enjoy the syrup drizzled over pancakes, waffles or corn bread. Use some to sweeten mashed yams or sweet potatoes. Brush winter squash or carrots with it as a glaze. Try it in vinaigrettes and as a sweetener in barbecue sauce. Drizzle some in a mayonnaise based dressing for a knockout Waldorf salad. And it pairs ever so nicely with vanilla ice cream.
Sourdough pancakes topped with peaches, a perfect way to start the day
After several months of making sourdough artisan loaves and baguettes, I got tired of bread and the sourdough culture went into the back of the fridge for a deep sleep. It wasn’t until early summer that the notion of sourdough pancakes came to me as I was looking for a way to use up some farm-fresh strawberries from the farmer’s market. Since then I’ve used the sourdough culture to make sourdough pancakes mixed with bananas, blueberries, and finally late this summer, topped with peaches tossed in triple sec.
Linda’s Smoked Salmon Dip
Most regions of the US have traditional party dips – In Texas we enjoyed guacamole and a wonderful hot dip made from Ro-Tel Tomatoes and Chiles mixed into melted Velveeta (you read right….Velveeta and it’s addictive.) In Maryland it was, of course, Maryland Crab Dip. So it seems perfectly natural that our wild salmon would end up as the main ingredient in a Pacific Northwest party dip.
I’ve enjoyed quite a few salmon dips since moving to Oregon and Linda Weiner Petrin’s is the one I love the most and she is generous with her recipe.
Tomato Aspic - A Quivering, Chilled, Jellied Tomato Salad
One of my treasured memories from Baltimore was enjoying meals at The Womens Industrial Exchange tea room on Charles Street. One of their time honored items was a tomato aspic served with a homemade mayonnaise. It was summer on a saucer.
Chilled Cream of Corn and Crab Soup with Oregon White Truffle Oil
Vic and I had the pleasure of trekking through a cool, damp grove of young Douglas firs in Yamhill County with Jack a few years ago and returned home with a nice bounty of white truffles and even a couple of large black truffles. When I told Jack about anointing a chilled cream of corn soup with his oil, his face lit up with a broad smile of approval and suggested adding dried onion and mushroom powder to the ingredients.
Black and Blue Barbeque Sauce
Sometimes you serve up something everyone loves and wish you could boast, “Yes, it’s my very own secret recipe.” Alas, honor requires me to fess up that a slight tweek to a Blueberry Barbecue Sauce created by Crescent Dragonwagon is all I did.
I merely officiated for a shameless shotgun wedding of blueberries and blackberries all gussied up with ingredients from Crescent’s recipe. I can assure you that nothing naughty occurred between a passionate blueberry and an innocent blackberry resulting in a bruised out of wedlock cultivar. The couple lived happily ever after by dressing up a couple of hot chicks slow smoked on the barbie.
Curried Chicken Salad with Summer Fruits and Oregon Poppy Seed Dressing
Cold chopped chicken dressed up with fruits, nuts and highly seasoned with curry powder appeared on my radar screen sometime in the 1980s. It was and still is a most definite hit.
This is a hearty, chilled salad with the pungent flavor of Indian curry balanced with the addition of fruit and an accompanying side of summer fruit dressed up in a nutty, fruity poppy seed dressing.
Summer Is Cherry-berry-licious in Oregon - An Oregon Summer Berry Pudding
The utter simplicity and ease of making this is a welcome dessert in the heat of the summer because there is very little cooking required - just simmering the berries and sugar until they give up their juices. The vibrant colors alone make this a stunning showstopper. You could dress it up with a fancy mold, artfully garnish with whipped cream and maybe some roasted, chopped hazelnuts. Yum!
A crunchy Northwest treat: Deep-fried salt-and-pepper spot prawns
One of my favorite Chinese dishes, fried salt and pepper shrimp, where shrimp are deep fried whole and then sprinkled with salt and fresh ground pepper, inspired me to try the method with spot prawns. I figured that it would highlight the sweet meat of the spot prawns to cook them this way. Plus deep frying them with the heads on would mean that after removing the shell from the head and most of the legs, you could eat the remaining head with crunchy bits, like the way heads of ama ebi shrimp are deep fried and served to diners to crunch on whole.
Crab Louie Salad - A West Coast Classic for 100 Years
Crab Louie Salad may have been born in San Francisco, Portland or even in Spokane. Written history informs us that it was being served at Solari’s in The Golden Gate City as early as 1914. A cookbook by Victor Hetzler, chef at the St. Francis Hotel, included a similar salad he called “Crabmeat a la Louise” in 1910. Some attribute its creation to Louis Davenport who built the Davenport Hotel in Spokane. An amusingly unorthodox source is The Neighborhood Cook Book, compiled by The Portland Council of Jewish Women in 1912.
One Big Strawberry Shortcake Makes One Big Happy!
Strawberry shortcake - two words that sing America, the Fourth of July, picnics and a reason to stop everything and enjoy its pleasure.
Pasta with Shrimps in a Creamy Tomato Sauce
When is the best time to enjoy the bright flavor of tomatoes? Anytime! These native Mexican fruits are at their best sun-ripened and just off the vine. For me, out of season tomatoes are merely flavor-lacking fruits disguised in a reddish skin.
Tomatoes, like fresh spring peas that maintain their freshness in a frozen state for months, can be preserved in a canned state for even longer. Happy is the summer canner whose larder is full of summer tomatoes put away as sauce, concentrated paste, chopped, whole or juiced. Tomatoes and cream pair happily with shrimp for this treat.
Poached Whole Chicken with Spring Vegetables - A One-Pot Meal
Poached chicken looks rather naked compared to a beautifully browned roasted hen. Add some spring baby vegetables to the pot and Henrietta Hen arrives at the table adorned with beautiful, edible bling.
Goldie Lox and Four Friends - Soft Scrambled Eggs with Lox, Red Onion, Capers, Chives and Cream Cheese
Goldie Lox and Four Friends - our little Goldie shuns her three bears and dresses up with four strong flavored condiments: Soft Scrambled Eggs with Lox, Red Onion, Capers, Chives and Cream Cheese
Mahonia Vineyard making mark in Portland
I had the pleasure recently of visiting with John Miller, owner of Mahonia Vineyard, and Travis Henry, Mahonia’s vice president who handles sales and marketing, and getting a chance to learn more about their operation and their wines. This small producer in South Salem has been growing and making wonderful wines for more than 20 […]
Eating Cool - Shrimp Remoulade Salad
I grew up in the Dallas/Fort Worth part of Texas and am familiar with the scorching heat that bakes Texans and much of the mid-west in the simmer summer months.
Putting food on the family table in the blistering heat of summer requires some advance planning. If cooking is necessary, it’s best done early in the day or outdoors. A cold shrimp remoulade salad fills you up with cooling, crunchy ingredients.
Roasted Buttermilk and Dill Marinated Salmon
Among our edible gifts of providence is the Pacific Northwest Salmon. It is food fit for the gods. Rich in flavor and an excellent source of omega-3 fatty acids, protein, minerals and vitamins, it is often recommended for consumption twice a week.
When the Going Gets Tough in Oregon, the Tough Go Trout Fishing…Guess What's for Dinner?
Most people work all day at a stressful job in an office and then, to blow off steam, go work out at a windowless indoor gym somewhere. In Oregon, you can still go to an indoor gym, but why do that when there’s so much more you can do outdoors? Right around the end […]
Life in Oregon Is Berry, Berry Good in August and September
It’s that time of year in Oregon when marionberries and blackberries appear in abundance. Wild blackberries are everywhere in the Willamette Valley, even growing along the median of Interstate 5.
I can literally walk out my front door and return in a very short period of time with enough berries to make a pie or cobbler from scavenging along the nearby streets.
Congress Gives Pork a Bad Rap — Sage and Rosemary-crusted Roast Pork Tenderloin with Pear Ginger Compote
Pork has frequently been a controversial food. Various religions forbid the consumption of pork products and there was a time when pork carried dangerous parasites and required thorough cooking. Most controversy today centers around pork fat. Most will agree that pork fat delivers a wallop of flavor, especially if the pork is smoked. There's a reason so many dishes call for some bacon or salt pork; a pot of beans gently simmered along with a smoked ham hock is undeniably delicious. And who among us hasn't awakened to the aroma of frying bacon?
Coho Gravlax: An ode to the fjords of Sweden from the much-less-rugged coast of Oregon
Some people crave sweets. Others crave beef. Recently I had an irresistible lust for gravlax. I don’t know what was driving it. I joke with my friends that my lust for wine is because in a past life I tended a beautiful vineyard in Bordeaux. Maybe my lust for gravlax was because in a different […]
Lingcod — A Fish So Ugly Only Its Mother Would Love It…Unless You're a Seafood Lover
Being a Buddhist, I don’t believe in killing animals for the sake of sport. But that has its drawbacks when you’re angling on the wave-soaked rocks of Garibaldi’s north jetty. I’m thinking back to the first time that I took my partner, Charles Price, jetty fishing with me. I was happy to rig his line […]
