First ripe tomatoes of the summer. About time.

This is the first part in a series of posts where I grill meat in my backyard.

I like grilling. Meat. In my backyard. I’ve got an old, beat up Weber kettle grill. One of the wheels is missing a cap, so whenever I roll the kettle its legs always pop out, spilling the grill proper onto the ground. One time, while grilling, I moved it slightly (to account for the smoke I was suffusing onto my tomato plants) and had to perform a bear hug save of the grill’s current contents…and proceeded to singe the living fuck out of my forearms.

Though I often entertain the idea of getting an obscene, propane monstrosity replete with dual side burners, refrigerated drawers, and scrotum massager, I quickly abandon such nonsense. Why waste the money when the Weber works just fine? I just shouldn’t be so stupid as to embrace a burning sphere of metal just to save a few medium rare strip steaks. Or maybe I can visit the hardware store and purchase a 25 cent wheel cap.

I do much of my grilling next to my garden, which in the summer features many green and tasty herbs, including chives, mint, thyme, rosemary, sage, parsley, and basil.

As such, one of my favorite all-purpose marinades simply features a smattering of these herbs (chopped or whole), oil, acid, and seasonings.

Grilled Spatchcocked Chicken

Spatchcocking is a nice option for grilling a whole chicken. Spatchcocking, for the uninitiated, is not a sadistic, fraternity hazing ritual, but rather the act of cutting out the bird’s backbone (preferably with heavy duty kitchen shears) to leave a flat carcass. Which is much more friendly for grilling evenly. And deliciously.

• One whole chicken
• Assorted chopped fresh herbs
• 5-6 cloves minced garlic
• Olive oil
• One lemon
• Sea salt
• Cracked black pepper
• Smoked paprika

First thing: spatch the living cock out of that fucking chicken. This dude can show you how¹.

Sprinkle the bird with chopped herbs, garlic, and salt and pepper both sides. Pour oil to coat, and squeeze lemon. Using your hands, rub gently to mix in and settle the marinade. Sprinkle the top side of the chicken with smoked paprika, and allow to sit in the fridge for a few hours (or more).
Prepare your grill, dumping coals on one side. Grill chicken, 15-20 minutes per side, turning often, moving alternately from hot and cool side of kettle, covering and removing said cover as need be.

You know, grilling.

¹ However, I advise that you don’t search for more spatchcocking videos on Youtube, as it’s (evidently) a common move for strippers and, subsequently, home workout enthusiasts. Unless, of course, you want to hazard the wife walking into your office (to change the cat litter), only to discover some guy watching grainy amateur video featuring a skinny Jersey goth spreading her legs 180 degrees while straddling a long, metallic pole. And you can live with the results. Which in my case it’s the usual askew glance of tepid disgust and then eventual disregard.

The number of restaurants operating nationwide dropped this year for the first time in more than a decade, a survey shows, with California accounting for almost a third of the losses.

A new, virulent form of herpes is killing large numbers of Pacific oysters. Scientists think global warming may be fueling the virus.

To make a long story short, prohibition led to the dismantling of many small breweries around the nation. When prohibition was lifted, government tightly regulated the market, and small scale producers were essentially shut out of the beer market altogether. Regulations imposed at the time greatly benefited the large beer makers. In 1979, Carter deregulated the beer industry, opening back up to craft brewers. As the chart below illustrates, this had a really amazing effect on the beer industry:

There’s a chart and everything.

It’s a fucking awesome market. If I lived in downtown Seattle, I’d shop here pretty much daily.

Pike Place Public Market

Seattle and stuff. Next to the water. If you’re in the water, you’ve gone too far.

Tombo tuna crudo with ice lettuce. The tuna was sliced carpaccio-style, and sprinkled with an herb that gave it an anise-y/juniper note.

Steak tartare. Always a crowd pleaser.

Though it’s difficult to determine from this photo, this skirt steak with grilled cherry tomatoes and charred scallions was the hit of the night. God I love skirt steak.

Bavette steak with arugula and romesco.

I like Laurelhurst market. It’s unpretentious, straightforward, and the meat is delicious and well-priced. Many consider this a “steakhouse” but I don’t think it falls under that rubric in the conventional sense. It’s just a great neighborhood restaurant that happens to feature a variety of excellent cuts of beef that you can also purchase, in-house, at the front of the “market”. Add a great bar with excellent house-made tonic to mix with your local spirits, and you have quintessential Portland.

Laurelhurst Market on THE WORLD WIDE WEB

The Goodist has been here
PortlandFood.org

Laurelhurst Market

3155 East Burnside Street
Portland, OR 97214-1951
(503) 206-3099

Silly people. Your species will never learn.

Then again, I could have just walked halfway out to this rock:

And just grabbed my own damn breakfast.

Who is the idiot now? Invariably it is me.

Ecola Seafoods Restaurant & Market on THE WORLD WIDE WEB

• Roadfood.com
• Also, this place has a Yelp* entry but I refuse to link to Yelp because many of its inhabitants appear to be scantily clad, near-violent homunculi. Just like Facebook.

Ecola Seafoods Restaurant & Market

208 N Spruce St
Cannon Beach, OR 97110
(503) 436-9130

I wonder if there’s actual human in this.

In case you’re looking for it.

Very nice to have decent soup dumplings available in the vicinity.

Wong King’s Beaverton

10743 Sw Beaverton Hillsdale Hwy
Beaverton, OR 97005
503-350-1888

Tuesday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed landmark legislation that protects animal welfare and food safety. The new law requires that shelled (whole) eggs sold in California comply with the modest but important food safety and animal welfare standards of Proposition 2. Passed in a 2008 landslide, Prop 2 phases out production of eggs from hens crammed into cages.

The bill, A.B. 1437, requires that all whole eggs sold in California as of Jan. 1, 2015, come from hens able to stand up, fully extend their limbs, lie down and spread their wings without touching each other or the sides of their enclosure, thus requiring cage-free conditions for the birds.

This is good.

If you get there early, you’ll be able to meet a fresh batch of jap chae as it comes out of the kitchen, just in front of the deli case. Breakfast is served. For $2.99.

Thanh Thao Market, located on a strip of Northeast Sandy in the Rose City district, may not be Portland’s largest Vietnamese market or it’s most varied (in terms of sheer selection), but—since I’ve moved here over eight years ago—it’s been the market I’ve appreciated the greatest.

You’ll find Thanh Thao has all the dried goods and noodles you’ll ever really need, meticulously arranged throughout their shelves.

The meat department features all the primal cuts favored by discerning Vietnamese cooks.

I love their dressed and pre-sliced meats that ease the homestyle pho prep.

The seafood department may not feature any filets, but you can satisfy your whole fish fetish quite soundly here. A quick nod to the fishmonger and, after weighing your fish, he will use the bandsaw to cut the fins and tail off and section your cleaned fish into nice manageable chunks for your next canh chua.

The frozen meat section also features a wide variety of compartmentalized carcasses from the land and the sea.

Their superlative produce section is stocked with all the vegetables, fresh herbs, handmade noodles, and eggs that make up an essential component of any Southeast Asian cook’s repertoire.

You’ll be able to score your next claypot in their very small housewares nook.

The true area where Thanh Thao shines, however, is their deli department.

Caramel catfish, canh chua, stuffed bitter melon, whole roast duck, roast pork, and other hot savory and sweet delights are available by the pound.

And right in front of the cashier, a refrigerated “island” is chock full of Vietnamese favorites, ready to take-and-go.

Each time I hit up Thanh Thao for groceries, I find it irresistible to not pick up a loaf of cha chien (fried cha lua/Viet bologna) and a $5 package of banh cuon.

And construct my own dish at home, punching it up with fresh herbs, blanched bean sprouts, cucumbers, chili-spiked nuoc cham, and chopped peanuts. I can stretch three meals like this out the affair. Seriously.

Thanh Thao Market

6517 NE Sandy Blvd
Portland, OR 97213
Neighborhood: Northeast Portland
(503) 284-4129

Here’s an idea: why don’t you dumpster dive for oxycontin and viagra behind Eli Lilly’s HQ, and while you’re at the bottom you can suck a bag of dicks, you sanctimonious, lying sack of rat feces.

If you’ve never travelled into Canby proper before, it’s easy to miss as Uruapan is a bit adrift amongst the folksy anachronism that is rustic, downtown Canby. The taqueria nestles adjacent to a Burgerville, which is itself just beyond a Safeway strip mall (fronted by Quizno’s and Panda Express), and if you spot the Taco Bell you’ve driven too far.

Uruapan is pretty awesome inside. Allow me explain.

First, they got a menu picture board, which is the first thing you need to do in order to be awesome. Then there’s a Neo Geo arcade console to the left of the ordering counter. Personally, if I wanted to take a confident, second step towards being awesome, this would be a capital purchase I would strongly consider.

Next up is a jukebox stocked with the latest Sinaloan narco-ballads. Also a television is constantly tuned to Spanish telenovas. And there are babies just chilling out in their rocking chairs, or the employee/owner’s kids feeding quarters into the Neo Geo or just whimsically hanging out, all the time. All these things are awesome.

Then you see that there are two pool tables. They also serve beer. Not only has awesomeness been cemented, but we’ve entered a state of existence that cannot be pigeonholed with the rubrical inadequacy of merely awesome. Post-awesome.

Tacos are $1.25 here. Each includes two (2) tortillas, meaning each taco is double-wrapped. And they are great. And you get two. For each taco.

And when you order, each tortilla is handmade there on the spot, to order, one-by-one. Those ladies are hand making the tortillas and grilling up bits and pieces of flesh to crisp perfection as we speak. Well, not as we speak, as in this moment, but on that day, back then, when I had my iPhone and was hungry.

And oh what crispy nuggets of delicious taco joy these are. Some of the best asada I’ve had in my time in Oregon. The “pastor” analog here is actually adobada, which are grilled meaty pork nibs bathed in a bright red, deliciously oily marinade.

The condiments are excellent, and as you can witness are presented as sauces three, with sauce the third being an incredible avocado verde salsa that just earns this place more awesome stripes and gold stars.

Here are pictures of tacos in a various states of being.

Restaurant Uruapan

851 SW 1st Ave (Hwy 99E)
Canby, OR 97013
503.263.4480

To commemorate, it’s worth revisiting the best product feedback call of all time.

Kai Yaang (Thai grilled chicken)

• 2 1/2 to 3 pounds various chicken parts, or a whole chicken, halved
• 8 or more minced garlic cloves
• 1 tablespoon ground white pepper
• As much minced lemongrass as you like. I like a lot (like a 1/2 cup or more!)*
• 6-8 thai bird chilies, minced
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons fish sauce
• 1 tablespoon oyster sauce
• 1 tablespoon turbinado sugar
• Half a bunch of cilantro, chopped
• 1 tablespoon

* Fubonn (and many Vietnamese markets) sell finely minced lemongrass in plastic tubs in the freezer section. They are a time saver, and the industrial cut is finer than anything you can reproduce at home. Highly recommended

Place chicken parts in a bowl. Add all the marinade ingredients and mix well. Marinade for at least four hours or overnight.
Start a charcoal grill in your kettle grill, keeping the hot coals on one half.

Once the coals are going, grill the chicken for 10-15 minutes over hot coals, turning often, until a nice color develops.

Move the chicken to the cooler side of the grill. Turn every so often, and cook for another 20-30 minutes. This is backyard grilling—use your backyard grillSense. Move parts back to the hot side as needed.

Serve with sweet chili dipping sauce.

I’ve been going to this place for nearly eight years, back when it was Pho Oregon “West” (despite being only a mile from the other Pho Oregon at NE 82nd Ave).

The interior is spartan. You are automatically rationed the standard beverages.

It took a name change, and a format change, plus Extra MSG’s vetting of the assorted grilled meat platter, that got me thinking about anything but pho at this place.

But why would I? I’ve long contended this location on NE Sandy, when it existed as a namesake to the NE 82nd version, had the better bowl of soup of the two doppelgängers. Since the obvious switch of ownership (and name, and staff, who are now dressed in lovely white uniforms) a few years back, I had no reason to really look past the first turn of the first menu page, the page where various permutations of pho are listed in perfunctory uniformity, the same list xeroxed and sampled by every pho joint from Chula Vista to Bellingham.

The salad platter at Pho An Sandy, as it was back when it was Pho Oregon, is unparalleled in Portland. You will always get more than enough <em>ngo gai</em>, aka culantro aka sawtooth herb, no matter how lily white your skin or accent may be.

The broth at Pho An Sandy I believe is one of our city’s most well balanced, though—as with any soup joint with high turnover that is constantly bootstrapping their stockpot—it can vary in the amount of spice, clarity, beefiness, sweetness, etc.

The braised meats (chin, nam) are very consistent.

All in all, a very excellent pho, served quickly and without fuss. What more could you ask for? Well, Pho An Sandy also has a wide and varied menu that expands beyond the perfunctory soup offerings.

Including this “dac biet” mixed grill platter, which features bo la lot (beef wrapped in betel leaves), grilled lemongrass pork (topped with sauteed shallots and chopped peanuts)…

…grilled sugarcane shrimp…

…and nem nuong (pork patty/sausage)

As is Pho An Sandy’s MO, the salad platter that accompanied this impressive phalanx of deliciously grilled meats was generous, overflowing with spearmint, perilla, rau ram, cucumber, and lettuce.

The general idea with Vietnamese meats is to roll your own (using the carefully constructed quenelles of rice noodles served with the meats as a starch foundation), thus you’re given a bowl of warm water and dried rice paper sheets…

…and a bowl of nuoc cham dipping sauce (always add a dollop of the fresh chili garlic sauce on the table—you’ll be thankful).

A delicious strip of nem nuong about in pre-rolled state.

I can roll a fat blunt.

Come to daddy, sugarcane shrimp.

Pho An Sandy on THE WORLD WIDE WEB
Portlandfood.org

Pho An Sandy

Ramen in broth with roast pork, menma, bok choy, and king oyster mushrooms, sprinkled with togarashi. I’ll publish the broth recipe one of these days when I’m not so lazy.

This spring, scientists at the University of Missouri announced that after more than a decade of research, they had created the first soy product that not only can be flavored to taste like chicken but also breaks apart in your mouth the way chicken does: not too soft, not too hard, but with that ineffable chew of real flesh. When you pull apart the Missouri invention, it disjoins the way chicken does, with a few random strands of “meat” hanging loosely.

“i am a pharmacist
prescriptions i will fill you
potions, pills and medicines
to ease your painful lives
i am a lost soul
i shoot myself with rock & roll
the hole i dig is bottomless
but nothing else can set me free”

All 1.5 readers of this blog know I’m a big fan of Sanchez Taqueria, Tigard’s very own taste of Mexico that churns out delicious meats wrapped in hand-made pillows of fresh tortilla goodness (aka the “taco”).

Many of these readers will be interested to discover that Sanchez has expanded, usurping the square footage once occupied by (what I assume was) an erstwhile BBQ joint that formerly shared the same building.

Sanchez now bills itself as a “panaderia”…

…and in this case the strength of this size alone legitimizes their claim, even if their baked goods at the time were a bit sparse.

Ordering is done at the front counter, as before, the operative difference being that the front counter now occupies it’s own room (equipped with seating for to-go orders) at the very south side of the taqueria.

The interior is now quite cavernous, now spanning two separate rooms, each one singularly larger than the previous dining area altogether.

Tacos.

Asada. Wasn’t as crisp as I’ve had previous visits. It’s consistently very crisp, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Excellent pastor this time. Just a very tiny bit too sweet than where my tastes lay, but excellent and crisped up better than the asada this day.

Full metal taco jacket.

“Change in price of items since 1978, relative to overall inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. The price of carbonated drinks, for example, has fallen 34 percent relative to all other prices.” (“The Battle Over Taxing Soda“, NY Times)

Ron Siegel, who runs the Michelin-starred dining room at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco, said he’s grown past his partying days. But even he is having a little fun with haute stoner cuisine.

To serve slow-cooked quail eggs and caviar, he places them atop plastic film that tightly covers a white porcelain serving bowl. Then he fills the vessel with smoke from grated Japanese cedar packed into the bowl of a fan-driven bong he buys in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The smoke escapes when the diner lifts a small spoon covering a hole in the plastic.

He calls it the Lincecum, after Tim Lincecum, the star pitcher for the San Francisco Giants who was arrested last fall after police found marijuana and a pipe in his car.

As spotted at a metro-area Fred Meyer superstore.

Seemingly permanent factories in Salinas are dismantled, packed into trailers, and reconstructed in The Desert in time for the first harvest, relying on veteran farmers to determine when the crop will be ready. Glimmering steel tanks used for washing greens in a chlorinated bath, giant driers that tumble the washed greens, and conveyors that gently move the fragile leaves along and into bags for retail are all portable. And with the crop and the factory go many undocumented workers.

But many of the harvesters who painstakingly kneel to cut each head of lettuce may choose not to work in Arizona this fall in the wake of its new, hostile immigration law, putting the produce industry in a potentially dangerous position.

Under the new standards, only 7.5% of chicken carcasses at a plant would be allowed to test positive for salmonella, down from 20% allowed since 1996. Salmonella levels in chickens were tested at 7.1% nationally in 2009, says Richard Lobb of the National Chicken Council.

Emphasis mine.

I stopped by Swagat Beaverton in recently to hit their lunch buffet.

Swagat also has a location on NW 21st. I’ve been there a couple times…years, years ago. It wasn’t too good, but I heard some decent things about the lunch buffet out at the BeaverTRON location, so here I am, I have $8, the boss is gone for the afternoon, and I have an innate proclivity for exploration (as long as it doesn’t involve investigating the Tyler Perry Franchise), so what the fucking hell, heh?

The buffet features various fine Indian curries, rice, chutneys, tandoori, sambar, etc. The green chutney is some damn good stuff—I could dip strangers’ shoelaces into that manna and slurp them up.

The experience quickly morphed into a gluttonous gorging vis-a-vis the tandoori chicken, which was presented nearly entirely in drumstick form, which happens to be my favorite roast/grilled poultry appendage.

The fresh naan (as it came out the kitchen in a serendipitous moment of buffet timing) was decent (not knowing the finer points of such stalwarts), as were the (lesser regarded—not my opinion, just my observation) vegetable curry dishes.

Swagat Indian Cuisine

4325 Southwest 109th Avenue
Beaverton, OR 97005-3026
(503) 626-3000

It was a memorable lunch. I remember seeing this at the grocery stand checkout stand later in the evening.

What a crazy time! I remember thinking, back in the day, “Poor Sandra. Will she ever find a non-white supremacist, blue collar lothario who is not a self-aggrandizing twatwad with a weakness for big-boobied women who live fast, talk even faster, and dye young? Somebody, anybody (I’m looking your way George Lopez) PLEASE save America’s Sweetheart from her own earnestness.”

Kai Yaang from the Thai restaurant out in the burbs where the office is located. Nothing mind blowing, pretty simple actually, but the chili sauce seemed custom (if a bit too sweet), and—at $7.50 for half a bird—quite a damn good deal. Nothing like the aggressively marinade full court press you’ll get from a cornish hen @ Pok Pok, but good enough to stuff your ass for another 5 hours until quitting time.

Thai Village

8633 SW Main St # 400
Wilsonville, OR 97070-6584
(503) 682-6211

The salt crystals on potato chips only dissolve about 20 percent of the way on the tongue, while the center of each tiny cube-shaped crystal remains intact until after it’s swallowed. Thus, most of the salt you’re eating on your chips is not contributing to the taste of the chip, but it is dissolving further down your digestive tract and causing whatever the FDA alleges that increased dietary sodium intake causes.

The redesigned salt crystal, with more surface area, should dissolve completely on the tongue, thus theoretically allowing each chip to taste just as salty with only 20 percent as much salt.

I have much respect for the Frito-Lay corporation.

Veritable Quandary

1220 Southwest 1st Avenue
Portland, OR
97204
(503) 227-7342

One of the better bowls of soup you’ll find in our fair burg.

Pho An Sandy

6236 Northeast Sandy Boulevard
Portland, OR 97213
(503) 281-2990

MILLER: By the way, my, I also want to thank you, on the list of things I feel I should thank you for, almost kicking Patrick Leahy’s ass. Thank you very much.

CHENEY: Hehehehe.

MILLER: I love that move. One of my favorite stories. Muttering that.

CHENEY: You’d be surprised how many people liked that. That’s sort of the best thing I ever did

Now for old time’s sake…hey Dick Cheney: choke on Satan’s cock, you sniveling, wretched homunculus.

We can, of course, be a bit more exacting about this. I’ve created an index based on the amount of fat, sodium and cholesterol that the Double Down and a variety of comparable sandwiches contain as a portion of the USDA daily allowance. (In the fat category, saturated fats are counted double and trans-fats are counted triple.) The index is scaled such that the Original Recipe version of the sandwich receives a score of 1.00, a measure of gluttony that will hereafter be known as The Double Down (DD).*

A Georgia man bit off more than he could chew — literally — when he dislocated his jaw while trying to eat a super-sized sandwich.

Chad Ettmueller, a structured settlement broker in Cumming, Ga., suffered a locked jaw for 14 hours after biting into a double meat, double cheese sandwich.

Saturday’s feature is “Bun Moc Ha Noi”—pepper pork meatball noodle soup, laced with black pepper & slices of pork in pork broth.

The salad plate at HA&VL is not the largest.

But it really is just enough to make the entire bowl come together. In addition to the pork meatballs and Vietnamese spam, the soup is garnished with green onions, cilantro, rau ram, fragrantly fried shallots, a large, fried fish ball.

And lurking underneath are a few slices of this excellent pork, rimmed with a layer of gelatinous, chewy fat that’s so nice to chomp on.

I don’t know how they do this, but this bowl of bun moc was better than the half-dozen bowls I’ve had in the past. At HA&VL, the best bowl of soup always seems to be the last bowl of soup you’ve eaten here.

HA&VL Sandwiches

2738 SE 82nd Ave Ste 103
Portland, OR 97266
(503) 772-0103‎

HA&VL on the WORLD WIDE WEB

pdx Plate
Portlandfood.org

HA&VL Sandwiches on Yelp

It is now our official policy to not link to Yelp as that website is a depraved wasteland populated by deranged homunculi.

These tamales from Lerua’s were waiting for us thanks to the father-in and mother-in-law.

A fine specimen of a tamale, if a bit on the drier side. These were red chili beef tamales. The paler version (on the right) were green chili (no meat).

With an ample layer of house made salsa, these tamales became really excellent.

Lerua’s Fine Mexican Food

2005 East Broadway Boulevard
Tucson, AZ 85719-5937
(520) 624-0322