INSIDE A CULT HEROINE'S FRIDGE: CHINA FORBES OF PINK MARTINI TELLS ALL
Story and Photos by Jen Marlow
For Winter 2007

HEAD’S UP TAO OF TEA: CHINA FORBES wants you in her rider. Forbes, the gorgeous lead singer of the Portland-based retro lounge band Pink Martini, eats what one might expect of a cult heroine. She drinks green tea by the gallon in her dressing room, and in outlandish protest, keeps split peas in her refrigerator’s meat drawer.

Pink Martini has helped put Portland on the map of the international music scene. Fans dig the band’s eclectic flair and its atypical American style. Songs are written in different languages. Rhythms are set to a mélange of Latin and jazz beats. Musical influences sweep the globe from Japan, Croatia, France, Turkey, and Portugal. The band’s whole gestalt is of a hidden America. Its music is romantic, as colorful as a Brazilian street fair, and it rocks.

Forbes’s list of favorite foods shares Pink Martini’s fusion style. “What’s preposterous about me is that everything is my favorite food. Everything is my favorite cuisine. I love Japanese food. I love Middle Eastern Food. And I love Italian food,” she says.

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TRUITT BROTHERS: PRESERVING THE BOUNTY IN THE MODERN AGE
Written by Ellen Jackson
Photo by David Loveall
For Winter 2007

AS A COOK, I have an uneasy relationship with canned foods. Other than the small, silver foil-wrapped tins of LeSueur Early Peas, for which I’ll admit a three-year-old’s fondness, not much of what I ate growing up came from cans. At that time, Julia Child had set the stage for the culinary boom in America by teaching us how to cook, and Alice Waters was teaching us about the best ingredients: where to find them, how to use them and how to savor them.

Living in northern California as we did afforded my mother the opportunity to pay homage to both women by preparing elaborate home-cooked meals featuring the region’s staggering abundance. Honestly. This is not an overstatement—we were overwhelmed by it, having moved from a slightly less fertile suburb of Baltimore. Other than the canned tomatoes she put in her spaghetti sauce, food from cans rarely figured into her recipes or our meals.

Current trends in cooking and eating reflect Americans’ renewed passion for sourcing and preparing the freshest, most delicious ingredients. Organics is the fastest growing sector of the food economy—farmers’ markets have more than doubled in the last ten years, and cooking classes at high-end markets and kitchen stores sell out regularly. And Portland is at the forefront of this resurgence.

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CRAB POT LIMITS HELP KEEP FISHERY HEALTHY: A DIFFERENT KIND OF CRABBING SEASON
Written by Polly Gravely
For Winter 2007

THE GREY DECEMBER SKIES signal Oregon’s crabbing season is underway. The deck of the Delma Ann is awash with cold seawater, and below, in the fish hold, are thousands of large, brown-backed Dungeness crab. Captain Al Pazar steers his vessel through the whitecaps toward a string of buoys. His crew of two haul out a round wiry pot, drop the dozens of crabs into the dump chute, fill the pot with fresh bait, then swing it back overboard to sink down to the dark ocean bottom. Buffeted by the cold wind, the men haul out another, and then another, and when they reach the end of the string, the boat pounds toward the next catch, until over the course of a day—or sleepless night—they’ve emptied several hundred. “It’s gruesome work,” Pazar says.

Pazar, a thick-set man with large hands and a stubble beard, has been fishing these waters since 1975. This season, he counts 500 pots in his gear—many fewer than in the past. The drop is part of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s (ODFW) new limits that go into effect this December in what they tout as a move toward a sustainable fishery. For the first time, crabbers must match the number of pots they use with an official scale, and throw out any surplus. Crabbers who have typically landed the biggest catch are restricted to 500—in some cases, a third of their former supply. Mid-range crabbers, such as Pazar, get the same allocation, while those with historically the smallest catch will be designated a limit of either two or three hundred traps.

These regulations are long overdue, says Ed Backus, Ecotrust’s vice president of Fisheries. As the stocks of salmon and groundfish have declined, fishermen along the West Coast have moved into crab, he says. “They’ve got the big boats and muscle to put out 1,000 pots and they’ve been bringing in tons of crab, causing a glut in the market. The goal of these limits is to reduce the pressure on the fishery and restore some level of social equity,” he says.

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Written by Anthony and Carol Boutard
Photo by Anthony Boutard
For Winter 2007

WHEN OUR FAMILY LIVED IN PORTLAND, we enjoyed freshly harvested greens most days of the week, even through the winter. We maintained a 10x40 foot plot at Fulton Community Garden all year and foraged for wild greens in the corners of the community gardens and soccer fields.

We had our favorite nettle patches in the Marquam Canyon, pulled blanched dandelions from the rough grass at the fringes of playing fields, and collected chickweed and miner’s lettuce from abandoned garden plots. For some reason, adults roaming around with rusty boning knives and buckets never raised an eyebrow.

When we established Ayers Creek Farm, we continued our foraging habits in our berry fields and orchards and maintained a few rows of cold season greens. Hallie Mittleman, then the manager of Hillsdale Farmers’ Market, upped the ante when she asked whether we would participate in a new winter season market. We agreed and quickly intensified our gardening efforts.

Continue reading " Edible Seasonals - Colorful Harvest: The Fresh Leafy Greens of Oregon’s Winter " »

Posted by Deborah Kane at 8:16 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )