25 May 2012

Holiday Road

For most parts of the country Memorial Day weekend is the start of the summer season.  Portlanders are obliged to wait a few more days until the end of the Rose Festival. Even if summer starts here late and lingers well into the ‘er’ months, this weekend we’ll still have the same cookouts and backyard get-togethers, they’ll just happen at lower temperatures and higher precipitation rates as the rest of the country would tolerate.

You can go to your cookout armed with food. There are the grillables: Salmon, asparagus, pono sausages, Sexton steaks, Pine Mountain all beef hot dogs. I’ll be post a recipe for Potato-artichoke-Pesto Salad Saturday

The Raw Ingredients for
Seasonal Syrup

morning. (I really avoid things with mayonnaise and the outdoors; not just together, either/both). Markets will have strawberries for shortcaking and for a twist on a theme, try topping with Elizabeth Miller’s Rhubarb Mint Syrup instead of whip cream. Or if you want to stick with classics, Lady Lane will have their creamy, cream, ready to be whipped and you can save the Rhubarb Mint Sryup to julep.

For those looking for something foodish to do but maybe without all the cooking and shopping, try attending the informational session of NW Earth Institute’s 6 week course on the future of food. The location is Smith Hall in the middle of the Market on the PSU Campus, 12-1, the theme is food and sustainability. For $23 you can attend all the sessions to learn about our current food system and what you can do to make it better for the future.

Next Wednesday, our friends at Oregon Humanities are hosting Think & Drink, an informal and free lecture series. This week’s topic is food as Robert Paarlberg, professor of political science at Wellesley College and author of Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know; talks with Susan Bragdon, an international sustainable development advisor who is currently serving as the executive director of the Agriculture and Innovation Policy Network. We’ll have more info on Tuesday for you, but you can pencil in May 30, Mission Theater, 6:30

This week, PSU is getting a visit from Organic Valley. They are on hand to promote their new Grassmilk, a product that actually doesn’t have any grass in it at all. I don’t want to give away trade secrets, but the grass is what the cows eat and you can read about Organic Valley and grassmilk here.

This Weekend it’s PSU from 8:30-2. King

 

 

runs 10-2 NE 7th & Wygant. Next Friday, June 1st, our inaugural Kenton Market kicks off, bringing local food to the 217 (it’s a zipcode thing). Located at N Denver Ave & N McClellan St, our newest Market is 3-7 on Fridays through September. NW Market returns June 7th,  across the street from Trinity Episcopal and On Monday, June 18th, the Market at Pioneer Courthouse Square is back, which means we will have everything but the Winter Market in operation, We’ll have  high quality, farm direct, local foods 6 days a week (Sorry Tuesday).