PICNIC

I decided to build the roof with a 45˚ pitch, mainly because it was easy to calculate and mitre. But it has other advantages. The floor of the attic is 7.5 feet across and 3.5 feet high, so there’s lots of space for the storage of sacks of flour and the hiding away of appliances. As I put the roof up it suddenly seemed very tall. I had already calculated the height but seeing it was a little scary. ‘Can I even drive down the road with a house that tall?’ is what I thought. But it’s exactly the height of a semi, 13.5 feet, so it should be OK.

Tomorrow a little rain is coming in, so I wrapped it up in tarps for the night.

I’m pretty excited about Bunk Sandwiches, which is set to open this Thursday or thereabouts. Tommy Habetz is the chef and he’s planning on making meatball parmigiana and duck confit BLTs, among other things. It’s at 621 SE Morrison, as you can see in the photo, right between Portland Swimwear and some kind of pawn shop.

A good sandwich is a rare thing, which is strange. Most restaurants that try to make good food are always wanting to do something exotic or highly refined. There’s nothing wrong with that, but what about devoting some effort to a humble american classic? So, we’ll see what Tommy does here.

I’ve been busy doing the cooking for this wedding the last several days. I ran out of coffee on Friday, big disaster. It’s like being a drug addict. Day old grounds in the grinder… I was making espresso from whatever I could find. Today I went out and got some fresh beans from Joel. I’ll report back on what they’re like, but it will be wonderful tomorrow morning.

I did this big catering job on Saturday night for a wedding reception. 600 canapes, 8 pounds of cheese, a selection of vegetables and dip, and 5 gallons of potato chips. Marcus and Skye helped me cook. I didn’t have a toaster so Marcus brought his over, a tiny little thing. Every morning this thing frustrates him with it’s cheap program modes and rusty springs, but we fired it up and ran 3 or 4 sheet pans of toast through it just fine. Skye wrote up the labels and arranged the cheeses. It was pretty fun and hopefully I can do a few more before I get the cart started.

The coolest thing about the whole job was putting together a little kitchen, cranking out a bunch of food, and then tearing it all down in the space of 8 hours. As Marcus said, we could run a great camp kitchen this way.

It was a fun party. There was a bar that had only two liquors, Makers Mark and vodka. Matt Brown, one of the bartenders, who used to work at Gotham Tavern, made me a really good Old Fashioned with crushed orange slices and a cherry that tasted like a fig. Reggie Houston was playing jazzy tunes on his saxophone. The space itself was really neat too. It’s an art gallery and stonemasons studio, so in addition to this giant granite slab I brought for the cheese there were random piles of stone in the corners of rooms and tables made of slate.