Party Photos: Mardi Gras Bash at Irving Street Kitchen

What: ISK's First Annual Portland Mardi Gras Party
Where: Irving Street Kitchen, 701 NW 13th St. - irvingstreetkitchen.com 
The Dirty Details: Strong classic NOLA drinks from shakers Brandon Wise and Allison Webber (think Hurricanes and Sazeracs till the sun came up), tarot readings, masked and beaded shenanigans, live funk and bluegrass music, burlesque dancers, two WHOLE ROASTED PIGS from Chef Sarah Schafer, the never-ending raw bar of oyster-shucking glory, jugglers, traditional king cake. I didn't find the baby in the cake, and I almost fell on those dangerous floor balloons about seventeen times, but otherwise the night was AMAZING. These kids know how to throw a party - and I've got the beads to prove it.

Happy 152nd Birthday, Oregon!

On February 14th, 1859, Oregon officially became the 33rd state in the Union. Sure, today may be Valentine's Day, but here's something really worth celebrating: Happy Birthday to the best place in the country. There's a reason this green piece of earth was the end of the road for thousands of weary 19th century pioneers, and it's the same thing that pulls 21st century dreamers to the banks of our rivers and the waves of our shores. The soil is fruitful, there's room for everyone, and we'll be the last place on earth with plenty of fresh water.

Happy Birthday, Lemonbasil!

Today marks two years since I opened up my laptop and decided to start a food blog with a silly name. Thanks to everyone who reads these words; it's been an absolute joy to share my meals, adventures, and emotions with you through the seasons. Two years ago I was a student with a new camera, a penchant for fruity desserts, and the goal of getting a few people out there to comment on some blog posts. Now, as a graduate, a photographer, a (small) voice in the Portland food media, and an experienced navigator of the harvest year, I still find the greatest pleasure reminiscing about last night's meal, last weekend's party, or this morning's news. I've cooked in so many different kitchens in the many places that I've called home, and all the while Lemonbasil has been my virtual dinner party through the changes. I'm recently come to figure out that I don't necessarily love food - I love sharing food with people I love, even if it's through the blog the morning after. I can only hope to spend many more years taking in the farmers' markets, typing away at these keys, snapping photos around Portland, and meeting friends around the world. I can't wait to see what comes next, and I truly hope you'll join me for the ride.

Here's to another year of eating well!

Fourth of July on the Oregon Coast

Memorial Day BBQ

There's nothing I love more than lounging in bed going through photos and video clips the morning after a really great party. My eye makeup is more than a little smeared, the sink is overflowing with baking pans and mixing bowls, and it's STILL raining outside, but I can cocoon into my comforters and pillows and scroll through hundred of pictures of my friends faces, relive the good food, and hear again the laughter and jokes of the night's misadventures. With Gillian Welch singing to me from the record player, and my socked toes all comfy under layers of cool cotton, I've spent a few blissful hours cropping, rotating, and sharpening these memories...

We had amazing weather for one of Portland's favorite holidays - the Rose Festival was lightly toasted by warm sunshine and high clouds, the river looked beautiful as I crossed over to the east side, and our humble little BBQ in the big, beautiful orange house known as Crib Largo went off without a hitch. I was in an extra-fantastic mood because I just got a new job (!!!) and a summery white dress, two factors I'm relatively sure had a direct impact on the good weather... We even played a little frisbee in the intersection, yelling "CAR!" (or, just as often, "BIKE!") and skittering to the side of the road to let passersby pass by. Chess games were played, Jim Beam and Icelandic Schnaps were sipped and shot, and somehow most everyone ended up in random articles of womens clothing...



Anyway, the food. Oh, the food. The boys got started on the brisket pretty early, smoked it to perfection. Honestly, it was the best meat we'd ever had at a Family Dinner^® gathering (aside from Travis' Dancing Ladies Chicken, of course...). Meatmaster Jesse made the rub from the scrappy spice collection of the Largo kitchen, set up the Weber for success, and painstakingly monitored the smoke levels over the course of a few hours. Damn, that was good brisket. We also had a huge pile of variously-flavored sausages, grilled veggies, roasted kale, confusingly good pickles, Sweet Tea, watermelon (both in cocktail and analog form) and my contribution, strawberry shortcakes and strawberry thumbprint cookies. In the past four days, I've eaten at Kenny & Zukes, Hash, Foster Burger, and Tastebud... but the dinner we had last night topped them all.



Rereading that last paragraph, I just realized I ate a LOT OF FOOD this weekend. Which is likely why I'm drinking tea and eating cucumbers while digitally thumbing through my photo uploads. A girl needs balance. A girl also needs great friends, and this girl has them, and how. Summer may still be a few weeks off in this crazy town, but I can already tell it's going to be a good one.

Eat well.












Strawberry Shortbread Thumbprint Cookies
adapted from Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa Family Style, 2002

• 3/4 pound (3 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt (Or more, if you want. I always up the kosher salt in cookies... it's kind of my thing...)
  
• Good Strawberry Jam
  

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

In an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream together the butter and sugar until they are just combined and then add the vanilla. Separately, sift together the flour and salt. With the mixer on low speed, add the flour mixture to the creamed butter and sugar. Mix until the dough starts to come together. Dump on a floured board and roll together into a flat disk. Wrap in plastic and chill for 30 minutes.

Roll the dough into 1 1/4-inch balls. Place the balls on a parchment-lined cookie sheet and press an indentation into the top of each with your finger. Drop 1 teaspoon of jam into each indentation. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until lightly golden. Cool and serve.

Catering a Teenaged Fiesta

My little sister called me up a few weeks ago and asked if I'd cater her high school yearbook staff party. I thought, sure, why not - 35 kids, mexican-ish food for a bunch of Southern Californians, unsurpassed access to inexpensive, fresh, "seasonal" produce. Tomatoes, avocados, and citrus in May? Almost enough to make me think twice about swearing I'll never move back to the Southwest. Almost.





Some of my ingredients were incredibly local - the lemons were from my parents' back yard, and most everything else from the local ethnic stores, Middle Eastern markets and latino supermercados catering the diverse population of Los Angeles. That's not to say these kids were necessarily discerning foodies - I provided both lime crema and plain ol' sour cream, cotija and cheddar, pork chili verde and grilled chicken, fresh pico de gallo and salsa from the jar, shredded iceberg lettuce and pickled jalepenos.

Plenty of goods for the vegetarians - my trademark butternut squash and corn enchiladas, yummy black beans and spicy Spanish rice. For desert, pan dulces, cherries, berries, and watermelon. My little sister even mixed up some mock-margaritas, while parents and I sipped on not-so-mock cocktails in order to drown out the shouting of thirty seventeen-year-olds playing Apples to Apples.









No, the food wasn't super authentic, but everyone had fun, my dad got to man the grill, and I got to munch on a few hard-edged tortilla chips before getting my wisdom teeth out this morning (by the by - OUCH. This blog post brought to you by Vicodin and puffy cheeks full of gauze and bruises). A few more days and I'll be good as new, back in the City of Roses. Hopefully, by then, the rain will have subsided and we can get into that lovely Portland Summer that recharges our batteries. I hope my tomato plants have survived my absence!

Eat well, friends.

My Idiosynctratic Seder Table

Last year my family and I began a new tradition. Instead of eating a Passover Seder meal and having a separate Seder plate, we combined the two, incorporating each part of the traditional (and newer egalitarian) Passover plate components into the meal itself. Because so much of my personal Jewishness is enacted in my relationship with the environment, social justice, and--most of all--food, it only makes sense to translate the ritual objects of the Jewish spring holiday into a satisfying meal shared with people I love. Some of you may know that I'm finishing up my bachelors' in Religious Studies, and writing my thesis on ethical and sustainable kosher food movements, so I spend a LOT of my time thinking about the meanings of food, both in relationship to Jewish tradition and to my own (still developing) value system. So here's my idiosyncratic, hodge-podge of a Seder plate-turned-meal. And, most warmly, Chag Pesach Sameach!

So, quick background for the unfamiliar (Pesach in 140 characters!):
Jews: slaves in Egypt, were liberated, ate flat bread, sacrificed goats. Today, we don't eat chametz*, eat symbolic foods, & tell the story.

*"Chametz" includes anything made from wheat, rye, barley, oats and spelt that has not been completely cooked within 18 minutes after coming into contact with water. Some Jews also avoid rice, corn, peanuts, and legumes as if they were chametz. All of these items are commonly used to make bread, so the use of them was prohibited to avoid any confusion. Such additional items are referred to as "kitniyot." (Ok, so I love how that explanation was longer than the first...)



Aside from the ubiquitous matzah, my table was full of new and old Passover dishes and symbolic foods. At last year's Hazon food conference (a weekend of exploring the intersection of Jewish life and contemporary food issues), I had the pleasure of meeting Roberta and Robert Kalechofsky, the uncontested Queen and King of Jewish vegetarianism and animal rights. They are responsible for creating the standard vegetarian haggadah, Haggadah for the Liberated Lamb, in which the replace the lamb shank with:

"Olives, grapes, and grains of unfermented barley, which symbolize the commandments of compassion for the oppressed, to be found in the Bible. We use olives to commemorate the commandment to leave the second shaking of the olive trees for the poor, we use grapes to commemorate the commandment to leave the second shaking of the grapevines for the poor (Deuteronomy 24:20), and we use grains of unfermented barley (or other unleavened or unfermented grains), to commemorate the commandment not to muzzle the ox when it treads out the corn in the fields (Deuteronomy 25:4), in other words, to recognize the natural appetites of the animal and not interfere with them. This commandment is considered to be the oldest extant concept of 'animal rights,' and enshrines the dignity and rights of the animal."

I'm not a strict vegetarian (though that's a post for another day) but I love this idea, and while it may not be traditional Seder fare, I'm a firm believer in the adaptability of Jewish cultural traditions to progressive interpretations.

Another option for the vegetarian replacement of the lamb shank is a beet: the blood-red color recalls the Pesach sacrifice, though Cynthia Baker of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University offers a different explanation for the beet.

"What is the meaning of the beet? It is here to remind us of an incident that occurred in 1945, when women slave laborers in Buchenwald concentration camp changed a negative definition to a positive one. 'It hit me suddenly that the Haggadah could have been written for us. If I only changed the tense from past to present, it was written about us.... At this time, the scene in the barracks was bad, there was really fighting, cursing, and yelling... so when I asked the women to be quiet it was like a miracle, this absolute silence in the barracks. I started the seder by asking why is this night different. And I said that every night we quarrel and we fight and tonight we remember. There were close to a thousand women there. I picked up the slice of sugar beet and I said, this is the bread of our suffering.... And then we made a vow that if we survived, a beet was going to be on our seder table.'"

I decided to incorporate the beets into my main dish, a roasted curry beet and carrot casserole:

One of the best parts of the Passover meal is Charoset, a mix of fruit, wine, spices and nuts that represents the straw and clay which the Jewish slaves used to construct Egyptian buildings. One of my dinner guests is a huge Charoset fan, so I kept this pretty traditional. I did choose to cook my apples down with cinnamon, then added currants, pecans, red wine, and honey.



For the bitter herbs, Maror and chazeret, which represent the bitterness and harshness of slavery, I used the traditional horseradish and romaine lettuce to make a salad. The dressing was made of olive oil, yogurt, horseradish, apple cider vinegar, and salt. Is it wrong that the "bitterness of slavery" turned out to be really, really tasty?


The Beitzah, or roasted egg, on the Seder plate was replaced with deviled eggs, simply because I LOVE DEVILED EGGS. I'm a total traditionalist, just mayo and eggs, but I go crazy for them. The egg represents a lot of different things, and many people have a different interpretation of it's place at the Seder. It may represent the korban chagigah, or festival sacrifice, prepared at the Temple, but I usually talk up the connection between Pesach and earlier pagan holidays of springtime, fertility, and renewal:



Then there's the karpas, any vegetable other than the bitter herbs--though parsley is the standard--that is dipped in salt water representing the tears of oppression. This is typically the first thing eaten at a Seder after kiddush over wine, when bread would usually be consumed, prompting the four questions of why the first night of Passover is different from other nights. I turned the parsley and salt water into a tabouli (sans grains). I make so much tabouli, this was a no-brainer. I call it kitchen-sink tabouli, because I throw in anything I've got in the fridge--here I used cucumbers, tomatoes, red onion, Israeli feta, and toasted walnuts, with a dressing of olive oil, lemon, and plenty of salt. Tabouli should be salty!



Lastly, to connect the Passover holiday to the beginning of Spring, I roasted up my favorite vegetables from the market this time of year: asparagus and raab. I used collard raab here, and simply tossed the veggies in olive oil and salt and put in under the broiler until tender. So good!



I also have an orange on my Seder table, representing the fruitfulness of a Judaism that celebrates the inclusion of all Jews: women, the GLBT community, and patrilineal Jews. The tradition comes from Jewish scholar Susanna Heschel, and you can read about the evolution of this symbolism here.

So that's how I celebrate, with good wine, good food, good friends, and new traditions as well as old. If you celebrate Passover, how do you explain the individual parts of the Seder plate? If you're making Easter Dinner instead, what new and old traditions do you incorporate? However you celebrate this season, enjoy the Spring (with it's crazy weather here in Portland) and the great foods that come with it.

Eat Well!

The Great Pumpkin Event!

Every year around Halloween, the Portland Farmers' Market throws one hell of a party. Dozens of pumpkins for carving, vendor costume contests, kid's costume parade, really fun kid's music, and two, count them TWO chef demonstrations hosted by yours' truly. I had the pleasure of cooking a green tomato and celery root soup with Scott Dolich of Park Kitchen, and a great arugula and butternut squash panzanella salad with Jenn Louis of Lincoln and Culinary Artistry catering. They were both fantastic, and two more reminders of how much I love the Portland chef community.



When I was walking around with Scott shopping for our demo, he, like most chefs I've had the pleasure to meet at the market, seemed to know just about everyone. Every Portland-area farmer seems to know pretty much every Portland chef, and vice-versa, which makes sense because they have such a mutually beneficial relationship. Also, people who I would normally view as other shoppers like myself were suddenly revealed to be chefs of well-known restaurants, specialty shop owners, food writers, and other notable characters. It's such a treat to glimpse into that close-knit community, like a carrot dangling in front of me luring me into the Portland food scene. I suppose I already have a couple toes in that door, thanks to the market and blogging, but I've got a long way to go.



This year's bash was extra special because the event fell on Halloween proper, which I believe compelled a few more people to dress up and brave the rain for the festivities. Creative (and warm) costumes were everywhere, from an adorable stop light complete with light-up red, yellow, and green circles, to more princesses, butterflies, monkeys, monsters, and zombies than you could keep track of. No one cared too much that the rain speckled our costumes, but it's safe to say that when the sun peaked out around noon, smiles were considerably brighter.


Umm... Could this little thing be any cuter? I think not.

On the home front, I'm moving this week! Which means kitchen stuff might be living in boxes for a few days, and I'll be making a lot of salads. At least I like salads. I'm moving into a friend's house while he and his band go on tour, and then who knows... a world of domestic possibilities. As long as there is a kitchen, it's a home. Why I decided to move (a few times) in the middle of writing my thesis is quite complicated, but it's exciting. It also gives me something to think about other than writing and food. Hmmph. Like I need anything else.

Happy Halloween! Eat well!

Labor Day Feast

Labor Day is pretty special to my group of friends. It was on Labor Day, two years ago, that a group of us got together for a potluck that would turn into a veritable institution - Family Dinner. Every Friday night dozens of people fill a home, a feast is made, instruments are brought out, music is made, people fall in love, I make cookies on the fly without a recipe, someone covers a Radiohead song, people fall asleep, and in a week's time, it happens all over again.

The cornerstone of "My Portland", Family Dinner has bred our sometimes band, The internationally acclaimed Ivonrose Family Jamboree (as featured in French Glamour and, more often, our front porches), has been the source of the best friendships a girl could ask for, and has required a hell of a lot of cooking. It's also probably the reason I'm single, but hey, that's another story. I really think it is greatly because of this rag-tag bunch of hooligans that I am who I am today. Week after week, when school, work, family, or Portland weather has got me frazzled, it means so much to be able to walk into a kitchen and help cook food for my best friends. Who gets to do that? It's amazing, and it's ours. So, I don't know if any of you read my blog, but I love you, each and every one of you.

Ok, emotional blathering aside, let's get down to the food. Because that's what you are really here for. You know how they say you don't want to watch the sausages being made? Well, they say something like that, and apparently they weren't talking about veggie sausages, because that process is relatively benign.

Full disclosure, all of these recipes were either made up on the fly or were from books at my dear friends' abode. So, I'm not tracking them down unless someone is desperate, in which case I'll do my best, because I'm nice like that. We made homemade veggie sausage, bean burgers, Greek green beans, potato salad, and more grilled vegetables than twenty people could eat, which is a lot.

Many of us are vegetarians, so aside from the occasional (and beyond amazing) roasted bbq chicken from our humble tattooed glickenspiel player, we consume a whole lot of beans, quinoa, and veggies. Which makes it a lot easier to feed about twenty people a week on a budget of, well, not much. But don't think we can't grill a mean Labor Day feast from scratch. Because we can.

I hope you find yourself lucky enough to be able to make food and music with friends as often as I do, because let me tell you, it's an absolute lifesaver. Just don't ask me to do the dishes.