I’ll admit that after our Digital Girl proposed that I fill in today, I was somewhat concerned that anything ‘good’ would happen during the week prior to my blog entry. On the topic of urban gastronomy, I’ll say I’m a more than willing participant… the fact that I live in one of the nation’s hottest of culinary hot spots is not lost on me and my posse of foodie pals. Although I don’t want to do the math to know definitively, I assume that 75 percent of my food budget is spent on meals outside the home.
Don’t get me wrong, I love to cook; I just hate to go grocery shopping. So, when I stumble through the door at 7pm after a long day of work, laptop bag slipping off my shoulder, car keys still in hand, stomach growling due to another skipped lunch – it’s easy to justify the affirmative response to Mr. CM when he suggests that we head out to Fire on the Mountain for beers and buffalo wings.
“What do you think I should write about?” I asked Mr. CM as I licked some medium-spicy buffalo sauce off my fingers. (Mr. CM can’t take anything spicier.)
“You should write about how the food scene here is overhyped,” he says.
“I don’t think it’s overhyped! I think Portland is totally deserving of the hype. We have so many great young chefs here who are taking risks and succeeding!”
“Write about them.”
“Nah. It’ll seem too contrived. I don’t want to go to all of these fabulous new restaurants and act like that’s what I do all the time.”
“It IS kinda what you do all the time,” he observes.
“I guess, but the readers don’t know that!”
And that’s when I decided to just let whatever happens, happen, during the week prior to my guest post, and that’s what I would write about come that Sunday.
So, here’s what happened.
++++++++++
It had been a long time since I had been roller skating. I mean, a looong time. Our friends the Tibbles (not their real name… yet – they’re looking into making it legal, though) had invited us to join them at the Oaks Park skating rink on Saturday afternoon followed by some pizza and beers at the Muddy Rudder in the same neighborhood. We can always count on the Tibbles to be up for anything, and we like to think they can count on us in the same way. Sure, let’s go roller skating!
Wow. That quintessential roller rink smell was pervasive. What is that smell, anyway? It’s like sawdust, musty paper/library book smell, Murphy’s Oil soap, and Lysol all in one. It’s the same at any roller rink, and as such, upon catching my first whiff I was transported back to my childhood-to-adolescent roller rink experiences:
++ How my mom would never give me a quarter to play the video game “Carnival” just once. “You’re here to roller skate, not play video games!” she would say.
++ How, once when I was ten, my mom tried to teach me a life lesson about teen pregnancy. “Look at that couple over there.” She nodded toward a teen couple who were sitting on a bench near us as she helped me tie on my skates. The girl was wearing a tight Journey ringer tee, and she was sobbing; the guy wore a faded jean jacket a distressed expression on his face. I looked away quickly for fear of making eye contact. “She probably just told him that she’s pregnant.” I felt tremendously uncomfortable. How could my mom tell? How did this girl find out that she was pregnant at the skating rink? Of course, later in life, I realized that my mom was full of you-know-what.
++ How, when my friends and I reached 7th grade, our parents would just drop us off at the skating rink, and we would be free from their watchful eyes for the five hour skating session. My friend Joy used to totally make out with boys between the rows of lockers. I, on the other hand, would conveniently have to go to the bathroom whenever they had ‘couples skate.’
++ How that one roller skating girl I saw on TV – on either “That’s Incredible” or “Real People” – was so great at doing the limbo in roller skates, she had to fold the tops of her skates down in order to make it under the extremely low-set limbo bar. She would do the sideways splits and skate under a bar set at something like 7 inches.
But it wasn’t just the smell of the skating rink that took me back. The music was straight out of the time period I remembered. Sure, there was some Pink, Kelly Clarkson, and some other stuff that the kids are listening to today, but the bulk of the music featured artists like Expose, Kool and the Gang, Michael Jackson (“PYT” is the perfect song to skate to!), and I even couples-skated with Mr. CM to Chicago’s “Hard to Say I’m Sorry,” which actually was very romantic.
I had a heckuva busy week at work, but managed to squeeze in some deliciousness. I even went to work on Sunday, which I do every so often when I want some quiet time in the office. Prior to reporting for duty, Mr. CM and I went to breakfast at my current favorite breakfast place, Sanborn’s. Located on the SE side of the city, Sanborn’s is a sunny spot with THE best huevos rancheros in town, IMHO. They offer two different sauces, chipotle red and green tomatillo, and the waitress will remind you that you can have both by just saying that you want it “Christmas style.” And that’s how I get mine. Mr. CM always gets eggs with crispy bacon, two biscuits with house-made preserves, and Santa Fe potatoes. (My huevos come with Santa Fe potatoes, too – I mix the whole concoction together before digging in.) We read our books and enjoyed some quiet time together.
We met again for dinner that night at The Country Cat, the hip restaurant that’s within walking distance from our house. We both had their famous fried chicken – mine with braised greens, his with mashed potatoes – and had a bit of a debate about topics that we tend to disagree about in general. We should have brought our books.
On Monday, Mr. CM surprised me with weekend plans to go to Hood River (a town about an hour east of Portland that’s positioned along the Columbia River and in the shadow of truly majestic Mount Hood) to celebrate the annual Pear Blossom Festival. He had made reservations for a river view room at the Vagabond Lodge, which is pet friendly so we could bring our 5-month old Black Lab, Calvin. We would take Calvin on his very first big-boy hike on trails in the area.
Mr. CM and I were to depart for Hood River in the late morning on Saturday. As he began to dress for the day and he yanked a t-shirt off of the hanger. His “Razor” t-shirt. Razor is a thrash metal band from Canada that he was into as a teenager. He gets a lot of attention when he wears this particular t-shirt. Random guys will walk up to him and they’ll say, “Nice Razor shirt, man! I’ve never seen one of those. ‘Take this Torch!’ Yeah!” (“Take this Torch” is the quintessential Razor ‘hit.’) Then, Mr. CM and his t-shirt admirer will bandy different Razor song titles about… both taking a trip down memory lane about all things Razor.
Mr. CM had also worn his Razor shirt to just about every other event that had taken place in 2009. Including roller skating at Oaks Park, where I had taken pictures that I thought I might want to put on the blog.
“Are you going to wear that t-shirt again?” I asked.
I shouldn’t have asked that.
“Yeah, what do YOU care?”
“Well, you wear that shirt all the time, and I’m going to be taking pictures of you and Calvin on our hike today. I just want to get some pictures of you wearing a different shirt.”
“Who cares? I like this shirt, and this is what I’m going to wear today.”
I should have just left it at that. But after over 10 years of marriage, I still haven’t learned when to not press matters.
“You have SO many other t-shirts. Why not wear a shirt from one of the other bands you like?” (Mr. CM has probably 30 t-shirts – his wardrobe pretty much made up of heavy metal t-shirts and jeans.)
“I want to wear this one. Nobody who sees your pictures is even gonna notice. Who gives a f---?” (can you write swear words in blogs?)
I guess I did a good job of nagging, and he begrudgingly changed into a different t-shirt, one that I had got him for Christmas from Threadless.com. It’s a cool shirt, but in the end, I felt really dumb for asking him to change. The mini-vacation he had planned just for me and Calvin didn’t get off to a good start.
We didn’t talk much after we hit the road, but when we arrived at our first trailhead, we loved watching Calvin bound around the trail, which somehow we had all to ourselves. We let Calvin off his leash and practiced his commands in a foreign environment. “Sit,” “Come,” and “Wait” were passed with flying colors. Mr. CM and I were talking, but mainly to the puppy. We climbed the trail, and I mean climbed, with a 2,000 foot elevation gain on a two-mile trail. We came upon a clearing of tall trees where the snow-capped peak of Mount Hood could be seen in the not-too-far distance.
“Wow. That’s a nice view,” Mr. CM said. “If you want, you can take a picture of me standing on that stump. It could be the cover to my heavy metal album.”
(For different photo-taking occasions, we tend to name a fictitious situation where the resulting image will be used. Autobiography covers, indie-rock album covers, etc. are all perfectly suitable fake outlets for our photos of one another.)
When I pulled out the camera and agreed that it would be perfect for his heavy metal album, we both knew that we weren’t fighting about the t-shirt anymore. Neither of us had to say we were sorry, and we could get on with enjoying our weekend together. And we did.
Heavy Metal Album Cover with Calvin
Bonus blog copy!
Some of the gastronomic highlights of my week included:
+ Dinner with L and N at Noble Rot at its new location on East Burnside. On the fourth floor of the Chesterfield hotel building, in what used to be Rocket (whose service always got horrible reviews), the new Noble Rot has a stunning view of the city. Their wine list is amazing, and their menu is solid. I drank champagne and felt very festive. Afterward, we went to the Pied Cow on Belmont and shared a horrible room-temp bowl of Kava – an opaque brown concoction served ‘family style’ in a punch bowl. It looked like it had been scooped from a mud puddle outside, and pretty much tasted like it. It made our lips and tongues numb, but we did feel the effects promised on the menu: lethargy and sedation. We parted company and Mr. CM and I were asleep by 10pm. I don’t think I would recommend it.
+ Pho at Mekong. Eating Pho is a process. I start with roughly five slurps of the broth and noodles as the dish was served to me… tasting the umami-achieving broth without any of the accoutrements served with it. Then, I tear in some of the fresh basil leaves, mix it up, and have five more bites. The squeeze of the fresh lime comes next, same process… followed by a swirl of the plum sauce to make it sweeter, and, finally, the sriracha gives it a spicy finish. It’s like having several different soups in one sitting!
+ Dinner with L at The Observatory, while Mr. CM and N played board games with their other board-game-geek friends. We love our dudes, but they really geek out over their crazy board games. L and I both had the special: pork short ribs in Hoisin sauce with sautéed green beans and grilled white cheddar polenta cakes. We also partook of selections from their amazing cocktail menu: Hibiscus-Acai Margaritas served on the rocks with dried hibiscus flowers and martinis with black-pepper infused vodka shaken with fresh strawberry puree. Afterward, we finally saw Slumdog Millionaire, which was amazing.
+ Dinner at Celilo in Hood River with J and J from Portland, who we ran into at a brewpub in Hood River. I started with the Duck confit and house marinated cherries over microgreens followed by the perfectly cooked Hangar Steak. I drank champagne with a float of Clear Creek Distillery Pear Brandy, “Oregon bliss in a glass,” the menu said. Mr. CM had the Salmon over sautéed spinach and raspberry coulis, with skillet roasted mussels to start. It was delicious. I can’t wait to go back!
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