Portland is Paradise Part 2

Okay, the food's great, the beer's unlike anywhere I've ever been. Beautiful. I've been driving around sampling random beers and burgers and haven't been disappointed once.

But there is one stop on the Porkland map that deserved a more scholarly approach. My sister Rachel dug this one up when she was in town, but her visit was less than complete. I would not be denied.

Voodoo Donuts

In her lifelong quest to find the perfect food she can then avoid the daily enjoyment of, Rachel found Voodoo Donuts, a hole in the wall in downtown Portland that fancies itself a haven for donut artistes. Rachel went with Dad, but by the time they got there at 10:30 in the morning most of the special donuts were sold out. Including the grand-daddy of them all, the Maple-Bacon Longjohn. That's right.

"Voodoo Donuts."

"What time do you open?"

"We're open 24 hours, sir."

"Awesome. What would you say is the optimum arrival time to make sure I get a maple bacon longjohn?"

"Are you an early riser?"

"I certainly will be for a maple bacon longjohn."

"Before 9 is optimum."

"Sweet. See you then."

This meant waking up at 6:30 am to take Kirsten to school so I could borrow her car, then driving said car through rush hour traffic into downtown. For a donut with bacon on top of it? Not a problem.

The place reminded me of Crif Dogs more than anything else, my favorite hot dog spot in New York where they serve hot dogs, um, wrapped in bacon. It was a small spot with a funky little bearded dude in old man pants serving weird donuts in pink boxes. My kind of place.

I got:

1 Dirty Snowball - Chocolate cake doughnut covered with pink marshmallow glaze and surprise filling

2 Apple Fritter - Apple/glaze/doughnut as big as your head

1 Memphis Mafia - Chocolate chips/banana/peanut butter/glaze. Big!

1 No Name - A doughnut so good we couldn't come up with a better name. It has chocolate, rice crispys and peanut butter on it.

1 Triple Chocolate Penetration - Chocolate doughnut, chocolate glaze and cocoa-puffs

Kirsten ordered a San Dimas, but got the Triple Chocolate Penetration instead. I was so overwhelmed by the very Portland-ness of the place I didn't notice. Oops.

2 Raised Glazed - Standard donut classic

1 Maple Longjohn with Bacon - Self evident as the greatest thing that ever happened to donuts

There were also quite a few other donut stylings that I didn't get, but when I got them home I realized the toppings are hardly the point. These were the lightest, freshest, tastiest donuts I've ever had. I didn't want to make such a grandiose statement, but when my mother sampled pieces of four different donuts and then said it herself, I immediately chimed in. The different toppings were all fresh as well and kept it interesting, but the quality of the bread itself is what stood out.

And the maple bacon?

Further proof that anything can be improved with tasty pig fat.

Porkalicious!

Portland is Paradise Part 1

My father has been in Portland, Oregon for two years, singing the praises of the pine tree paradise. Rachel came for a visit this summer and went home with the same attitude. My mother and Kirsten have moved here and now, apparently, it's my turn to be infected.

People go to New York to accomplish things, to chase and achieve goals. The whole town feels like it for better or worse. For everything you can say about the energy and excitement, you can say just as much about shady people and bullshit artists.

I haven't been here for that long, but Portland feels exactly the opposite. There is a kind of zen-like calm in this town that I've never experienced, at least not on a city wide scale. It's quiet for the most part, nobody's in a hurry, people don't raise their voice. It's wild. Everywhere there isn't a person or standing structure there's a tree. People let you into their lane the second you turn on your blinker. That's incredible to me, I have to say, and took some getting used to.

I spend all of my time going from flat, unattractive Kansas to gray, hurried New York. Sitting between trees breathing warm rain is an amazing change of pace.

But I'm straying from the topic at hand.

Everything I read about eating in Portland before I got here was about fresh ingredients and fine dining. There are farms everywhere and space is crazy cheap so when hot shots from cooler towns get run out for trying to nail the help, they come to Portland. These people must have been talking strictly to chefs they already knew from NY and LA, because the locals are serving huge platters of fried madness, 12 egg omelets, beer from one of the eleventy-million breweries in town and donuts with Cap'n Crunch on them. Whoa. Small portions of local forest mushrooms this is not. In fact, this town has the best onion rings on Earth.

So far I have consumed or helped consume:

A 1 lb chili burger with a patty six inches wide by an inch tall
A chicken fried steak that was more than a foot wide in the middle
Beer from over 20 local breweries, all quite good, some truly excellent
Whiskey from one
A barbecue platter consisting of ribs, chicken, brisket, pulled pork, beans, slaw and corn

It goes on and on, the Hungry Redneck Cafe over and over, better and better. The one thing I'm not eating is seafood as no one in my family likes anything from the water. Unfortunate, but I'm dealing, with huge doses of homemade mashed potatoes and gravy to drown my sorrows in.

The best meal so far has been homemade, of course. Brian, a friend of mine from New York who lives here, has been showing me around the town. Last Sunday he took Tzam and I to a lovely backyard get together at the funky home of John and Di(E!). Most of the people there were from the East Coast and all of them seemed to agree that New York was great to visit, but isn't really for living.

When we got there Di was mostly done with a huge pot of meatballs, sausages and generous chunks of rib meat, swimming in a marinara she made from tomatoes grown in their spacious backyard. There was salad with a homemade vinaigrette, bread John made from scratch and fettuccine from the stove top. Your choice of three red wines. And 10 people squeezed into 9 places at the table, bumping elbows and laughing, right at home.

Portland is Paradise. Who knew?

Big Sky Country

We left Kansas on Monday morning, 1800 miles from Portland, Oregon, where my father bought a house a couple days before. The vast majority of their belongings were in a 26 foot box truck, behind a cab, gas tank and engine painted bright yellow. The Penske Truck, same one I drove to Tennessee earlier this summer. Biggest truck you can drive without a special driver's license, I like to remind people every chance I get.

The planned route was up from Wichita to Nebraska, then head West on Highway 80 through Nebraska, Wyoming and Utah. The second half of the trip would be on Highway 84 through Idaho and Oregon until we got to Portland, a little over an hour inland from the Pacific Ocean. It all sounded great to me until my uncle Tom told me the stretch of 80 in Wyoming is known as a place where trucks catch the wind coming off the Rockies and blow off the highway. We'd have to use our soul force and a chicken-foot talisman blessed by a Wiccan priestess, because apparently gravity wasn't doing the trick.

Here I am meditating on my one-ness with the wind and the road and gathering my inner badass-itude for the danger zone.

I made it, of course, but just in case I had Earnest riding shotgun that day. Every little bit helps.

It was actually beautiful, when you could think about anything but rolling a 6 ton truck.

My sister is so crazy responsible my parents actually let her drive her car from Kansas to Oregon. She had somebody in the car with her, like the rest of us, but did her share of the driving. Pretty amazing for 17.

This is Kirsten rocking the Penske with me.

Tom couldn't find his Road Food book that served me so well on the Tennessee trip and I didn't really have time to dig around online for anything. As a result we didn't eat much of note on the drive, except the leftover smoked sausages and tons of trail mix.

The one place we did stop was simply too good to be true in the middle of our third 11 hour day of driving.

That's right, The Hungry Redneck Cafe, located in Durkee, a very small town in the South-East corner of Oregon at Exit 327 on I-84. They've got a couple of signs on your way into town, but Exit 327 is the only Durkee exit, so it's easy to miss. I'd been thinking about a burger since dawn for some reason and this seemed like the kind of place you could get a burger at 10:30 in the morning.

Sure enough. Besides breakfast options like the Redneck Omelet ("Hungry? A half dozen x-large eggs & everything but the kitchen sink & taters & toast"), there was a full array of deep fried dinner options, including a chicken fried steak described only as 'huge'.

The owner was apparently a chef in California before deciding he hated yuppies and wanted to cook for truckers. Now he's got this place with 'Git R Dun' bumper stickers everywhere and he spends half his life tinkering with breading. Perfect little greasy spoon, including the owner, who sat over a pile of bills and grunted incoherently like any other diner owner I've ever seen. Without the newspaper clippings on the wall I wouldn't have guessed his credentials, but I suppose that's part of the point of dropping out to cook for truckers.

I ordered, get this, the Redneck Burger.

2, 1/4 lb patties, Ham, Bacon, grilled onions, mushrooms, swiss & american cheese & 1 side.

Description verbatim from the menu

This monstrosity would soon be known as the Retard Burger because I felt so dumbfounded by the end of it I could hardly walk, let alone drive. It was perfect. It was everything I'd been dreaming of. It wasn't a flat sandwich from Subway.

Aside from the Redneck Burger, nothing very exciting happened with food on the road. There was the sheet of beef jerky six inches wide by two feet long that we didn't buy, or the elk and buffalo jerky that we did, but those are novelty items. We ended up eating a lot of Mexican, the only option in many towns that wasn't fast food. Works for me.

We got to Portland after three days on the road, tired but relieved that we didn't blow off the mountain or accidentally swing the back of the truck around into an old lady. When I got into town one of the first things I got to do was parallel park that big bastard in front of my dad, a perfect end to the long drive.

Next up: trying to clean my massive plate in Portland and chopping my thumb off to christen my Mom's new kitchen.

Pack It Up!

Yo! I haven't posted on the blog for two months now. There's been some cooking here and there, but I spent the end of summer working mostly, and getting ready for the big trip. My mother and sister are moving to Portland, Or, where my father has been for the last two years. Being the Truck Packing King of New York, I could hardly let them do it alone.

The next couple postings aren't going to have any recipes, they're more a record of what we were eating on the trip. And of course the road food starts before we even get on the road, with one last barbecue blow-out in Kansas. My dad didn't want us to pack any of his smokers, so this would be my last go-round with the Big Boy for a while.

Here I am working up an appetite.

Tzam, The Pirate Mover.

We finished packing the house on Friday, packed the truck on Saturday and worked the smoker all day Sunday. We smoked ribs, sausage, two chickens, a duck, six trout and it seems like something else, but I can't remember for the life of me. We had corn in the husk, eggplant, more sausage and more trout on the grill over direct flame, as well as homemade cole slaw, potato salad and baked beans.

Being a kind of Hull family extravaganza, we also had coconut cake, oatmeal cake and I think a date cake, but I was way too full on pork to eat any cake.

This is two of the three racks of ribs that went on the smoker. They were good, but could have used a couple more hours to get fall-off-the-bone tender.

The sausages were my favorite part of the meal. Tom got both hot and sweet Italian, plus a German sausage and a kind of Kielbasa. They all were smoky and fantastic when they were done, and continued to be good days later on the road. It seemed like the ribs went quick, but these sausages kept on giving.

It was a great day, a perfect way to send my parents off. We had a lot of friends over, including more members of my mom's side of the family than I've seen at once in years. The food was good and the company was close knit, just how we like it.