food
Yeah, I thought that might get your attention.
If you've somehow managed to miss the flurry of flyers, postcards and other announcements floating around town, let me be surely not the first to remind you that Eugene gets its own cupcakery this Friday, March 5, when The Divine Cupcake Café opens at 11th and Chambers. From 10 am to 10 pm, every visitor to the new café gets a free cupcake.
Yes, they're vegan. But don't let that stop you! Hey! Come back here! Look, I've had my share of dry vegan baked goods, and these cupcakes? These are not the bland vegan cupcakes of yesteryear. No, they don't have butter. Yes, they're delicious.
You can read a bit more about Divine Cupcake owners Thaddeus Moore and Emily Downing-Moore in the April 2008 issue of Chow.
See you at the cupcakery!
When I last lucked into tickets to the Oregon Truffle Festival's Grand Truffle Dinner, the event was still held at LCC. The dinner’s current location at the Valley River Inn is a better-lit, more comfortable space that manages, despite its cavernousness, to feel a little more intimate. The floral arrangements, which rose from towering glass vases and drooped back down in green fronds, were a little over the top, but who's paying attention to the table decorations when a meal like this is on the way?
I barely had time to grab a small glass of the reception wine — Sweet Cheeks' sparkling red, which I want to try when I can pay it more attention — before we were finding our way to our table (to my amusement, VRI staff removed the table numbers shortly after most people were seated, which led me to envisioning lost attendees swiping plates from servers' hands in desperation. This did not appear to happen).
Let me be honest: I am not going to review the dinner so much as repeatedly point out, in 100 words per course, how rich and delicious it was. I was there to experience it, and the experience was, for the most part, delightful.
Also, it was a lot of food.
Crème Fraiche Tarts with Triple Cream, Shaved White Truffles & Mâche Salad with Black Truffle Vinaigrette
Chef Naomi Pomeroy, Beast
In a few months, Eugeneans will have a new Italian food option. Come spring, Rocky Maselli, the executive chef at Marché, is opening Sfizio in Oakway Center.
Like Marché, Sfizio will use local producers "for almost everything," says the press release, which describes the restaurant as follows:
This 96-seat Italian eatery will be open for lunch and dinner seven days a week, with brunch on Saturdays and Sundays. In warmer weather, seating will spill out onto the courtyard of the Oakway Center and expand to serve more than 130 guests. But food and drink will be the central focus. The interior is designed around the open kitchen and bar, where patrons can be in the middle of the action at the 18-seat kitchen-bar counter. Private booths and a long family table will offer a range of experiences, from a family night out to a convivial business dinner or lunch with friends.
Maselli is working with architect Dan Hill on a space that will combine "the sleek feel of modern Italian design with the warmth and green sensibility of the Pacific Northwest" using sustainable materials including finished concrete, locally sourced wood and reclaimed timber.
I'd like to suggest we greet this news with a collective "Huzzah!"
UPDATE: After talking to Maselli, I don't know what to be more excited about: the promise of Sfizio's house-made pasta and house-cured meats, or the fact that former Bel Ami bartender Jeffrey Morgenthaler is consulting on Sfizio’s cocktail menu (I take my delicious cocktails very seriously). Let's just say that the news about Maselli's new place is welcome on multiple levels.
Maselli says he's been planning to open an Italian restaurant off and on for a few years. Sfizio will make its home in Oakway because, he says, "it's a great location" for a handful of reasons, not least the courtyard, the already-in-place kitchen infrastructure, the limited dining options on the north side of the river and the distance from restaurants operated by friends and family. Though the space is currently occupied by Oakway Wine & Deli, Maselli says it will be unrecognizable when Sfizio opens.
But enough about the place; what about the food? Sfizio's menu will be very traditionally Italian, but with an eye to the local and seasonal offerings of the Willamette Valley. I'm kind of modeling it after an osteria, which is a kind of a tavern,†Maselli says, explaining that an osteria is a kind of country restaurant, more casual than a ristorante, that specializes in local ingredients. The menu will include a take on bistecca Fiorentina “that’s just going to be gigantic" — big enough to serve five or six! — lots of appetizers and a weekly supper menu. Maselli says he thinks they’ll open with the supper menu, which will highlight a different entrée each day of the week, served as an all-inclusive meal. He estimates that prices will range from about $6-$14 for appetizers to “well under†$20-$25 for entrées. Pasta dishes should be from $10 to $18. “That’s the great thing about pasta,†Maselli says. “You can’t really charge too much for it.â€
Along with six beers on tap and what the press release calls "Eugene's favorite cocktails," Sfizio's bar will have a wine list that Maselli says could potentially be the best Italian list in the state (he prefaces this by saying "I hate to start a competition or anything, but ..."). The wines will be affordable and the list will highlight everything Italy has to offer, he says. But in keeping with the spirit of the osteria, Sfizio will also have a house red and house white served in pitchers. "That's very much osteria style. The local wine is just decanted; they put a spigot in a barrel of wine and pour it that way. I'm going to see if I can't swing getting barrels," Maselli says.
As for staff, Sfizio's chef, Alex Bourgidu, comes from Portland's Genoa restaurant and has a restaurant of his own in North Bend. Maselli says he's "working very hard" to lure Morgenthaler from Portland's Clyde Common. "It's tough," he says. "Maybe if Eugene applies a little pressure, he'll break."
Maselli is shooting to open Sfizio in May or June, depending on how quickly everything comes along. "I'm super, super excited," he says. He's not the only one.
What with the recession and all, it's up to all of us to figure out how to make some money to make up for all the budget cuts every business seems to be implementing these days.
For myself, I've been inspired. It seems that it's pretty easy to find images of the Lord and other, well, icons, too, in snack food. I figure if I invest 99¢ a week in a bag of Cheetos I may well be able to not only find God, but make a little cash to supplement my income.
My inspiration comes from a Texas couple that recently found Jesus, or Cheesus as they are calling him, in a bag of Cheetos.
Sarah and Dan Bell said of their find, "I just looked over and wow… it looks like a praying Jesus."
Luckily Sarah Bell has a pretty clear-eyed outlook on Cheesus, "It is a reminder of our blessings from God," she says in the video, "but primarily I think it's a funny Cheeto."
Their first reaction they say, was "let's put this on eBay."
They say if they don't get much money for it, they'll probably just eat it.
I checked for the Cheesus on eBay this afternoon, but to no avail. Maybe someone has already bought Cheesus to save him from being the snack food item He was destined to be.
I did find a Cheeto for sale (only seven hours left!) that miraculously resembles a penis and testicles. Hmm Penito? Penis and Cheeto just don't blend as well as Jesus and Cheeto.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Is-it-me-or-does-this-Cheeto-resemble-a-body-part_W0...
And there was also an Elvis Presley head-on-a-Cheeto:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ELVIS-PRESLEY-CHEETO-1-1-RARE_W0QQitemZ220421818418Q...
This latest cheesy sighting of the Lord is actually not the first. YouTube yields a lot of hits for the search term "Cheeto," leading me to another Cheeto Jesus.
This phenomenon in which people find significance in a random image is called pareidolia
One woman's pareidolia (or Jeus-Cheeto) is another woman's way of making some cash!
So go buy yourself some Cheetos and let's go make some money.
Update, August 2009: Sadly, Bar 201 is now for sale.
The corner of Charnelton and West Broadway just got an upgrade. Bar 201, which fills the space most recently left empty by the closing of the Moxie, is quite a charmer: a clean, urban space with quirky touches like feathery lamps and a wall tiled with green and gray squares that look, somewhat playfully, like they belong on a climbing wall. As bar manager Richard Geil said, it's reminiscent of a Pearl District spot.
Is rat shit organic food?
According to the USDA, it may be. The New York Times reports:
clipped from www.nytimes.com
Texas officials last month fired a state worker who served as a certifier because a plant owned by the Peanut Corporation of America — the company at the center of the salmonella outbreak — was allowed to keep its organic certification although it did not have a state health certificate.
A private certifier took nearly seven months to recommend that the U.S.D.A. revoke the organic certification of the peanut company’s Georgia plant, and then did so only after the company was in the thick of a massive food recall.
Despite supposedly heavier inspections by USDA, the Peanut Corporation of America's salmonella products contaminated the nation's organic food supply prompting large numbers of recalls. Local company Golden Temple recalled more than 15,000 of its Wha Guru Chew Peanut Cashew bars. GloryBee also recalled a number of organic peanut products.
To remind its organic inspectors that rat shit isn't in fact organic food, the USDA sent out a memo the NYT quoted:
clipped from www.nytimes.com
“For example, while we do not expect organic inspectors to be able to detect salmonella or other pathogens,†Ms. Robinson wrote, “their potential sources should be obvious from such evidence as bird, rodent and other animal feces or other pest infestations.â€
I'm a bit embarrassed that I completely forgot to mention this last week, when I first heard it, but better late than never: Culiarnia Eugenius, also known as EW's food columnist, Jennifer Burns Levin, reminded me with her recent post that hey! Mark Bittman ate at Bellly last week! And that's kind of nifty. Here's what The New York Times food writer had to say about his experience:
Dinner: Belly, a popular new Eugene restaurant run by a lovely young couple doing honest, straightforward food and doing it well. (Among other things, I ate tripe and pig’s foot stew, and a braised lamb shank.)
From the rest of the post, it sounds like he also ate at Plaza Latina, too — though I can't figure out which take-out pizza join he means. Clearly, someone should've sent him to PRI.
Photo of tacos similar to what you get at Belly, only the Belly tacos are better.
Unless you've ate at new restaurant Belly in the past month and received one of their cute buy one get one free cards, you probably don't know that the continental restaurant is open for lunch on Mondays for tacqueria-style tacos, Jarritos sodas and/or beer. I talked with owner Brendan Mahaney and he said that the taco lunch is an experiment they're trying out. But you better hurry, because Mahaney may pull this taco-lunch thing altogether if there's not much response. Right now the lunch special only happens from 11 am to 3 pm on Mondays in September, but the day of the week will probably shift after that (to Tuesday for example), says Mahaney, because he wants his weekends back.
UPDATE: Belly's Taco Lunch moves to 11am-3pm Tuesdays through Fridays starting in October. Yay!
Tacos are about $4 each and usually come with a free surprise appetizer like pepper-sprinkled watermelon (one of those special Belly touches I can't get enough of). So downtown workers, you know what to do come next Monday.
