Firefighter Adam Gibson. Photos by Leah Harb

PORTLAND FRIDGE
Vancouver Fire Dept. Station 81
Lucy Fulton
For Summer 2008

The Vancouver Fire Department is made up of nine stations spread out across the rapidly growing city. More than 150 firefighters respond to 20,000 emergency calls each year. At Station 81, the A-Shift is comprised of six men who live and work together for 24 hours straight every three days: Jack Anderson, Paul Coolimore, Adam Gibson, Rick Huffman, John Larson, and Jeremy Stuart.

When the team is not busy taming flames and answering other types of emergencies, they spend their time at the station house, ready to jump into action as soon as they get their next call. One of their favorite things to do while hanging out at the station house is cook.

ADAM: We have a full kitchen. It’s built symmetrically, with two double ovens and two stovetops, one on each side. We’re getting a remodel because the kitchen is not friendly enough. I mean, the kitchen is social, so we want to open it up and put in diner-style flat grills. Still, we use what we have and turn out great meals.

Each shift has its own refrigerator. Then we all share a condiment fridge with tons of stuff: mayo, Tabasco, Lea & Perrins Worcestershire. Salsa, definitely. Groceries we buy daily. We know that the ads change on Tuesday nights, so Wednesday morning, first off, we’ll look at what’s on sale. Collectively we say: What do we want for dinner? We haven’t had lasagna in a while so that’s why we chose it for tonight. Plus, John was craving lasagna.

You might think Adam would pull out a few commercial frozen lasagnas and stick them in the oven, but you’d be wrong: The whole team comes together to create a fully homemade meal. John and Paul pull out the cutting boards to start chopping onions and slicing coins of zucchini. Jeremy is busy opening cans of tomato sauce. When the prep work is done, John sautés the onions while Paul starts constructing the lasagna in an extra-large casserole dish. It doesn’t take long to realize these guys are pretty serious about food prep.

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Posted by Laura Ford at 4:42 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Not only did Channing Frye create a foundation that inspires youth to adopt a healthy and active lifestyle, but Edible Portland recently discovered that Channing also loves fly-fishing, supporting Oregon growers, and sushi.

Learn more about Channing at his website, channingfrye.com. See him play in one of the five remaining games of the season: Trail Blazers schedule.

Channing Frye with Lily and Milton. Photo by Leah Harb

TRAIL BLAZER CHANNING FRYE
By Louis Sanden
For Spring 2008

At home games, in front of 20,000 roaring fans, 24-year-old Channing Frye comes off the Blazers’ bench and drops in mid-range jumpers like a fisherman gently tossing his line. When he first reached Portland, he told reporters, “I bring everything…a little personality, a little leadership, a little shooting, a little defense. I’m a buffet of goodness.”

Today, our Buffet of Goodness invites me into his condo on the top floor of a soaring apartment building. Two bulldogs nip at my feet. “Milton! Lily!” I hear from a room away.

Frye appears and shakes my hand. At six-foot-eleven, he looks surprisingly normal-sized, and I feel like a tiny preschooler. He warns me that his fridge is almost empty.

Frye:
I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news. The good news is that I remember what was in my refrigerator. The bad news is that my friends came up from Arizona three days ago and ate all my food. I had bought $500 worth of groceries and they destroyed it.

FLAKY WHITE FISH
Trust me, on Friday there was everything in here — so much good stuff. I had free-range chicken and salmon. Now what do we have? Here’s some wild-caught sole. I usually go for salmon because it’s versatile, but taste-wise I like flaky white fish.

At the beginning of the year, I was on this diet where I didn’t eat red meat or chicken for about three or four months, just strictly fish. I lost 25 pounds. When the season came on I started eating chicken, because I would have to eat half the ocean to compete with the calories I burn. My girlfriend is from Oregon, so she said, “Why don’t you eat free-range chicken and stuff that’s naturally grown and from Oregon?”

KOMBUCHA
My girlfriend and I eat the same stuff pretty much, but she tried to get me to drink Kombucha. She loves it, but I’m like, “Uggghhh.” I drink only water and 100 percent juice. No sodas or Gatorades. Oh, and she’s got me drinking Odwalla Superfood, too. I don’t know if that counts as juice.

Continue reading " Portland Fridge - Trail Blazer Channing Frye, Portland's "Buffet of Goodness" " »

Posted by Laura Ford at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

You have until December 24th to catch an Oregon Ballet Theatre performance of George Balanchine's The Nutcracker. If you're lucky, Gavin Larsen will be dancing the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy.

Photo by Andy Batt

BALLERINA GAVIN LARSEN: Our Sugar Plum Fairy in the Land of Sweets
By Luther Cave
For Winter 2008

Gavin has a few hours before she’ll head across town to rehearsal. She leads me into her upstairs apartment in John’s Landing, between downtown and the Willamette River. The Portland Aerial Tram glides directly overhead.

Laughing warmly while she strides, Gavin assures me that she’s become a less picky eater than when she was a little girl. For an entire year, she ate mainly vanilla and lemon-flavored yogurts, she proclaims. Inside her bright, red and yellow kitchen, she stands perfectly straight, her shoulders still, her feet slightly out-turned in what resembles fifth position.

Gavin is an Oregon Ballet Theatre company dancer, and one of five ballerinas who will play the Sugar Plum Fairy in this season’s run of The Nutcracker—twenty-two shows in Portland and six in Anchorage.

For countless Portlanders, The Nutcracker brings tradition and magic into grey, chilly December. For a few hours we live amid childhood fantasies of Mouse Kings and toy soldiers, only to wake into a Land of Sweets. Yet for Gavin, The Nutcracker isn’t a fleeting night’s reverie; it’s a daily fact.

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Posted by Laura Ford at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Rumor has it he might run for mayor. But politics aside, check out what Sam Adams has in his fridge - and oh! - that wonderful backyard garden…

THE FRIDGE STARTS IN BACK: CITY COMMISSIONER SAM ADAMS' MIDNIGHT GARDEN
Story and Photos by Jen Marlow
For Fall 2007

It’s 6:27 a.m. in North Portland. Sam Adams is already dressed for the day in a blue button-down dress shirt, pressed slacks and dark-rimmed glasses. He invites me inside and runs to get his electric razor.

I notice empty egg cartons stacked on the porch as I pass through the front door, and then Sam leads me straight to the backyard. We pass by the fire pit, where friends gather on cool evenings for s’mores made with last year’s stale marshmallows, and the hand-built chicken coop, ending up in a mulched garden with several raised beds.

Once in the flower patch Sam gnaws on an edible chrysanthemum flower and mentions offhand that he grows his own horseradish. He gardens at night, the only free time he has available, given his dawn-to-dusk work schedule, earning him the title of Midnight Gardener from his neighbors. The story of this urban procurer’s food life is much richer told by beginning in the garden, rather than the cold storage confines of his fridge:

sam’s garden In my backyard I grow four different kinds of apples, three different kinds of grapes, acorn squash, Atlantic pumpkins for sport, and three different kinds of potatoes: Peruvian, Austrian and fingerlings; strawberries, sweet sugar-snap peas, four different kinds of tomatoes, kiwis, and mustard greens—I love spicy mustard greens; raspberries, celery, dill, cucumbers for pickling, zucchini, and ornamental gourds for my mom.

If I can’t grow my own food, I live my everyday life in support of farmers’ markets, local food growers and local food vendors. On Wednesdays I go to the farmers’ market downtown, two blocks from my office at City Hall, and I go to the farmers’ market at PSU almost every Saturday.

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Posted by Deborah Kane at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Story and Photo by Jen Marlow
For Summer 2007

THE PORTLAND FRIDGE IS BREAKING TWO TRADITIONS in this issue of Edible Portland. First, we’re changing locations from the household to the workplace, this time reporting from the Pearl District office kitchen of Nau Inc. Nau’s new clothing line—featuring corn-based fabrics—has no logo. Its hybrid, monochromatic design combines a sexy, asymmetrical look (think Urban Outfitters) with the sustainable manifesto of the wear-it-out crowd (think Patagonia).

Headed by a bunch of do-gooder ex-Nike execs, the company soulfully nurtures community, which is why we’re breaking another Portland Fridge tradition: meet Alex Hamlin, studio production manager; Otis Rubottom, Nau writer and editor; and Jolynn Ovington, vice president of merchandising. Three voices capture the Nau spirit better than one. Read on to sample the wild assortment of foods stashed about the Nau kitchen:

MARK’S GOURMET CHEESES
Alex: We ate the cheese right before you came.
Jolynn: Mark always keeps a selection of cheese and chocolate stockpiled in the fridge. We have a lot of fine food aficionados in the house.
Otis: Let’s be clear. I like soft, ripe, cow’s milk cheeses.
Jolynn: He’s the food snob. He’s not picky at all!
Otis: I like mac and cheese and cheese fries, just like the next guy. It just has to be Gruyère.

BRIDGEPORT BREW
Alex: The kitchen is the only non-work space in the office, so it’s where the impromptu groupings occur. Friday at 4 p.m., we typically meet up here and pull all the leftovers from the fridge—cheese, crackers, chocolate, whatever. People will snack, pour themselves a beer and hang out.
Otis: Technically, we’re not allowed to drink during the day, but that doesn’t stand in the way.
Alex: We have a keg in the kitchen—c’mon. And Darcy, our office manager, keeps wine and Champagne locked in a file cabinet.
Otis: I know where she keeps the key.

TRIPLE-CERTIFIED JOE
Otis: Darcy orders the coffee from Percasso coffee service. Stumptown used to be in the coffee rotation, but we had to trim some costs. I’m lobbying hard to get Stumptown back, and I think I might be successful.
Alex: Tanager Song is what we’re pouring now. It’s organic, fair-trade, shade-grown coffee.
Otis: It’s not my favorite, but it does hew all the ethically important qualities. As an office, we drink a lot of coffee. We made a concerted effort to buy two cases of travel mugs after we noticed the kitchen trash bin filling to the brim with nonrecyclable to-go cups. There are more people in the office toting reusable mugs now than there were six months ago.

Continue reading " Portland Fridge - Lunch Break Nau " »

Posted by Laura Ford at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Story and Photo by Jen Marlow
For Spring 2007

MATT ZAFFINO WATCHES the sky from Eagle’s Nest, his home office. The highest room in the house, it’s connected to the second floor by a dizzy climb up a wrought-iron twist of spiral stairs. From this carpeted perch, computers, microphones, even a weather cam hooked to the roof come as no surprise. But beckoning out the small, square row of windows above Zaffino’s desk is Sauvie Island. “This is why I moved here,” explains Zaffino, gesturing to the view. He points to where the Willamette drains into the Columbia River.

The view is simple and stunning. So is Zaffino’s kitchen, which is downstairs on the first floor. With Finnish alder cabinetry, earthy granite countertops, and stainless steel appliances, weather’s elemental shades are invited inside. A flat screen TV next to the fridge broadcasts CNN. A pyramid stack of oranges and bananas shows that Zaffino and his wife, Lisa, love to eat healthfully.

In summertime, Zaffino’s favorite fare—Italian food—takes a back seat to salads, peaches, strawberries, and blueberries. But in winter, when it’s cold outside, he says, “Bring on the pasta.” Today is that kind of day. It’s been snowing on and off all morning.

It’s perfect for Zaffino, an avid skier who is also a marathoner, hiker, and climber. His house—and his eating habits—match his lifestyle. “Some people live to eat. I eat to live,” he says. True, I think, for the most part. But wait until you hear what gourmet treats he brings back-packing. First let’s hear about what’s in his fridge:

CHEF ZAFFINO'S SAUCE
My wife Lisa loves to cook Italian food, but she can’t compete with my spaghetti sauce. My mother, who happened to be Irish, handed down the recipe. Marrying into an Italian family, she had to compete with my Italian grandmother so her sauce is extraordinary.

Growing up Italian, I was raised on great food. There is no better meal than a big plate of spaghetti and meatballs—my favorite comfort food.

Continue reading " Portland Fridge - Tonight's Dinner Forecast, with KGW-TV Weatherman Matt Zaffino " »

Posted by Deborah Kane at 1:53 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

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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Posted by Deborah Kane at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )