P I C N I C

I walked up to Belly Timber last night for a dinner by myself. They are a very strange restaurant, devoted to a sort of Victorian style of cooking. Like everything in Portland it is of course Victorian/Portland food. This is now the third time I’ve been. Previously I would order whatever sounded most exotic and exciting: Deep fried pigs tail, roast cauliflower with anchovies, french fries with bone marrow aioli. This food was all well made yet the flavors were rather unappetizing. I made an effort to order the most simple and restrained items this time. It was good.

The salad has a mustard, sour cream, and vinegar dressing. The pears are roasted with lots of salt, then sliced when cool. They were firm and tasted pickled. The ribs came with mashed potatoes (it’s a color balance issue making them yellow) and root vegetable dice.

PVC pipe now comes out from the floor, allowing air to escape from the holding tanks as they become filled with sink water.

Today Alex, down at Joels, told me that this current espresso, the Ethiopian, is not the same as an older Ethiopian they used to use. This previous bean had an incredible blueberry aroma. I thought the current Ehiopian bean was the same bean, because I haven’t gotten espresso from Joel in months, and I thought it was perhaps aged and had lost a temporary fruitiness. But Alex tells me it’s a different bean. So there you go. In any case, I’m brewing french press with it now.

The shutters are glued up and now I need to cut them down a bit to get them to fit right.

The kale is growing around the other large stump in the front yard. Today Doug Belgarde is coming with a backhoe to remove it, so I harvested all the kale. The majority went in the compost but I cut out about 5 gallons of tender spring leaves.