In addition to Barwikowski, the 2012 Portland event includes several other Plate & Pitchfork Chefs including Vitaly Paley (Paley’s Place), Ethan Powell & Chef Tobias Hogan (EaT/The Parish), and Cathy Whims (Nostrana/Oven and Shaker). More details on the Cochon event can be found here. A complete line up of the 2012 Plate & Pitchfork Chefs can be found here. Chef Jason was kind enough to invite us into his kitchen in order to share a few of his favorite tools from his knife kit.

Join Chef Jason Barwikowski (The Woodsman Tavern) as he teams up with a few of his favorite people including Chef Benjamin Bettinger and Cory Carmen (Carmen Ranch) for an unforgettable five day road and rafting adventure in Wallowa County September 6th-11th. Advance reservations required, space is limited. The cost of the trip is $1500. All inclusive.

Where is your favorite place in Oregon?

It is a solid split between the wonder of the gorge & the striking craggy Oregon coast.

My morning breakfast consists of…

Black tea with milk (always!), steel cut oats with honey roasted fruit or a banana with almond butter, honey & bee pollen.

What’s the last great book you shared with a friend?

Notebooks of Michel Bras: Desserts

Favorite food city to visit?

Bordeaux, France

In my dream garden you would find the following growing…

Kumquats, figs, sweet peas, strawberries, raspberries, Meyer lemons, myrtle & eucalyptus.

My signature dish is…

Black Pepper Cheesecake

Celebrity closet would you like to raid?

Angelina Jolie

Favorite band/artist to listen to in the kitchen?

Carla Bruni or Paris Combo

Person who has most influenced your style and approach to food?

My Aunt Crys, Alain Rondelli & Jean-Louis Palladin

Why Plate & Pitchfork/ForkLift?

It is a wonderful opportunity to connect chefs & farmers to the community. It is a very special organization and it is an honor to be  part of it!

This month’s ForkLift event features Kristen D. Murray and Robert Reynolds as they cook and discuss menu construct, focusing on seasonal inspiration. This three course dinner includes wine pairings, a new bag of tools for your next dinner and a few treats from the kitchen. Event takes place Saturday, March 24th at 5pm. $60 per person. Advance reservations required. Visit forkliftpdx.com for details and reservations. You can also catch Murray in action during the Plate & Pitchfork summer season when she teams up with Scott Ketterman (Crown Paella) and Gregory Gourdet (Departure) Sunday, July 22nd. More details here.

(Meyer Lemons. Photo by Lindsay Strannigan)

Erika has let it slip that she has sweet-talked Marco, who moved his family to North Carolina in 2009 and has helmed the farm-focused Piedmont Restaurant in Durham since 2010, to head back to Portland…for a limited time. Nine years and  one cross-country move later, the original farm dinner crew is reuniting for a special anniversary dinner at Sun Gold Farm.

“I was really excited for that first dinner! The biggest challenge was just getting everything all coordinated [between the chefs] and getting all the food out at the same time. We were like, how are we were gonna pull this off? I was just happy it all went smooth,” says Marco, taking a quick break from prepping dinner service at his Durham restaurant. “You know, I did a dinner every summer [through 2009]. Erika makes it special—she gets people excited about [food] and finds good farms to deal with.”

Not that everything always went so smoothly. “I remember during the 2nd year of Plate & Pitchfork [during a dinner with Park Kitchen’s Scott Dolich], the farm tour went wrong and we had to plate entrees and desserts in the pitch black of night,” he laughs. “Scott and I had those little miner’s hats on. It was fun.”

GO: Marco Shaw cooks with Adam Berger at Sun Gold Farm on Sunday, August 5. They’ll be joined by Laurine & Alfredo Apolloni from Apolloni Vineyards and Lee Medoff from Bull Run Distillery. Tickets will be available March 3.

Bonus blast-from-the-past: I actually wrote about one of the very first Plate & Pitchfork dinners for Willamette Week way back in 2003. Even then, I knew when I tasted a good thing. And apparently I also met a man who liked to strangle chickens.

I’ve discovered a few handy tricks in my days as a cook, but never in all of my days have I ever considered saving my my dirty vegetable water. I thank Robert Reynolds for this brilliant idea.

A few weeks back, I approached Robert, the culinary educator and chef behind Southeast Portland’s Chefs Studio, and asked him if he would be willing to share a bit of kitchen wisdom with The Almanac. Besides being classically trained in French and Italian Cuisines, his passion for food is undeniable. I had no idea how he would respond to my plea for kitchen advice, but I knew that whatever he chose to share would be good.

I was not disappointed. Robert provided me with so much more than advice – he gave me a heaping dose of perspective. “Food has truth,” he said, “The taste of the earth speaks the truth, so in the same way I think that food has truth.” He talked about the merits of growing food all the way from the seed to the plate, and spoke of the inherent honesty in the process.

And then he gave me a bit of his own truth, a simple and wonderful bit of kitchen advice: he told me to save my blanching liquid. “If you have lovely winter greens, such as escarole or chard, and blanch the leaves in an inch or two of water. That water, which is usually thrown out, is iron rich and flavorful. All you need to do is season that water with a little salt and the flavor will present itself immediately.” He recommends adding a drizzle of high quality olive oil, and a generous dollop of persillade.  “Serve it like a consommé, and it will be perceived as a wonder,” he finished. “You will smile, knowing that this is blanching water, which is usually thrown down the drain.”

Truth be told, I’m smiling just thinking about it. All this time, I’ve been ditching the leftover greenish liquid that’s left in the pan and I had no idea that it could be repurposed in such an interesting way. Leave it to Portland’s resident culinary expert to open my eyes to such a simple truth…

The next Forklift dinner is on Saturday, March 24th, and features Robert Reynolds, along with Kristin D. Murray (formerly of Paley’s Place) at Little T Bakery. Kristin and Robert will be instructing on the building blocks of menu construction, with a focus on seasonality. For tickets and information, please visit the Forklift site. 

By Lindsay A. Strannigan of Rosemarried.com

I know you don’t expect this site to have any sports references, but I confess.  I love basketball. I became an addict in college. My university team always landed in the NIT championship — better known as “Not In Tourney” — but everyone on campus believed one day we’d make it to the Big Dance. Granted I’ve been out of college for a long time, but when March is in sight the prospect of watching 60+ teams play their hearts out for a championship win still excites me. Maybe it’s because once the tourney is over spring has really arrived and the gray of winter gives way to daffodils, cherry blossoms and the promise of summer. 

This summer brings with it the most intense and amazing Plate & Pitchfork schedule I’ve ever created.  We’ll celebrate our Tenth Anniversary Season with no less than 17 dinners. It’s ambitious, a little crazy and this free-throw impaired girl’s version of the Big Dance.

Thank you for support & commitment to eating good food!

~ Erika Polmar

Plate & Pitchfork Almanac Table of Contents:

• The Tenth Dinner of our Tenth Season take us back to where it all began, Kelly Clarke chats with P&P Alum Marco Shaw
  
• Ali Jepson takes you inside the kitchen of pastry goddess:  Kristen D. Murray
  
• And Lindsay Strannigan brightens the gray with Meyer Lemons and helpful hints from Chef Robert Reynolds. Read Cheats & Fakes and  What to Plant What to Eat

Emily and Scott Ketterman with their son Luke. Photo by Ali Jepson.

You already know Scott Ketterman; you just haven’t met his giant paella yet. The talented chef has been a familiar face around town, heading up the kitchen at Portland dining hall Simpatica for four years (and cooking everywhere from Paley’s Place to working behind the counter at Viande Meats before that). Now, he and his wife Emily are bringing Spain to Portland with their new venture Crown Paella, which debuted late last fall. The new event company marries Spanish flavors with locally sourced veggies and meats by cooking up massive, celebration-sized portions of its namesake dish as well as serving an array of tapas–from tortilla Espanola to stuffed mussels and lamb brochetas. It’s the next natural step for the globe-trotting chef. Scott spent a great deal of time eating, drinking and cooking his way through Spain—including a pit stop at Mugaritz–before heading to Portland. The chef teams up with chocolate master David Briggs to introduce eaters to the science behind savory and sweet for Plate & Pitchfork’s very first ForkLift event on Sunday, February 12. Before that, he stepped away from his kitchen for a second to answer a handful of P&P Almanac’s “get to know your chef” queries.

What is your greatest extravagance? 
Caviar and champagne every Christmas Eve.

What is your greatest fear?
Not living life to its fullest.

Which living person do you most admire?
My wife Emily.

What is your favorite tool?
My Suisin knife… It has a great patina from years of use.

What would you eat for your last supper?
A perfectly roasted chicken.

What do you most value in your friends?
[Being] loyal, straightforward and irreverent.

What is it that you most dislike?
Imbalance of work and play.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Family + beach.

What is your motto?
No motto, I simply try to do right.

Scott Ketterman and David Briggs cook and talk shop at P&P’s first ForkLift event at Milwaukie Kitchen & Wine, 10610 SE Main St., Milwaukie, 653-3228. Event takes place 5 pm Sunday, Feb. 12. $50 per person includes three courses with wine (additional wine available for purchase).Visit forkliftpdx.com for details and reservations. Find out more about Crown Paella at crownpaella.com.

Just think about the phrase “eat local” for a second. Those two little words are ubiquitous at this point, uttered by everyone from chefs and marketing executives to the First Lady of the United States, precocious kindergarteners and Occupy Portland demonstrators. But what, exactly, does that phrase mean to you? Only eating organic vegetables grown in the Pacific Northwest? Banning bananas from your kitchen? Pulling a Colin the Chicken at the bistro down the street from your house? And why is it important to make an effort to support the local food chain (aside from the fact that it gives people an excuse to throw fabulous dinners on farms). We asked three Portlanders who–by virtue of their jobs or passions–think about these things a fair bit, to give us their honest assessment of why and how we can eat local…and when we shouldn’t even bother.

As the executive director of Growing Gardens, Debra Lippoldt and her staff help Portland-area low income families to obtain the tools and skills they need to create their own vegetable gardens near their own doorsteps. “I think what’s important to me is how the [food producer] interacts with the local economy. If it’s a local food business that shares my values but that may not get everything locally I would choose to support them,” says Lippoldt, who has a background in health and nutrition. “Like Truitt Brothers, I’m sure not all the beans they sell are Oregon beans. That doesn’t matter so much to me, or that they are organic, but rather that I have the ability to ask questions and know more about the product. Do I have the opportunity to know what I’m eating?”

As might be expected from somebody with her job description, she sees as much social and health value in growing your own food as buying it: “When somebody is trying to grow food it creates a real social system. You’re outside. You’re getting more exercise, eating more fruits and vegetables… Seeing people in your neighborhood,” she explains, excitedly. “And then kids know where foods come from. They’re more willing to try something different if they had a hand in growing it.”

She says that when it comes to eating locally she does what she can on a “small scale.” “What I try to do is stay connected through my CSA membership and pay attention to the origin of food that I buy in the grocery store. When I have the chance to purchase from Washington and Oregon I will. I usually go to Food Front for a lot of fruit and vegetables because they seem to have more local producers for longer in the season,” she says. As for her own garden? Don’t expect her to be harvesting a feast from it right now. “The only thing that’s viable is kale,” she laughs.

In some ways, Ben Johnson considers farmers from Argentina to New Zealand his local team. As the founder of Portland’s Bridges Produce, the Kentucky native imports organic produce from across the globe, working with growers that “value and respect farm workers and are trying to do the right thing,” he says.

“Produce is something that everyone should be eating a lot more of (relative to animals), wherever it is from,” he says. “Each person weighs which factor matters most to them: Is it environmental? Is it health? Economic, social? People get very religious in their adherence to the piece they grasp on to.” He says the “fervor” around the “eat local” topic pretty much baffles him: “Certainly, there’s a lot of great reasons to eat locally. At the same time, I love avocados and I don’t think they are that bad to truck in relative to other things that are trucked in–be it Italian marble for your kitchen or gasoline from Saudi Arabia. I should feel worse getting on an airplane than eating an avocado.”

In some ways, he says the “eat local” movement is as much a triumph of marketing as it is sustainability. “It’s not all great,” he laughs. “I’ve bought apples at the farmers market and I’ve tasted them and been, ‘Ugh, those are terrible!’ But you got to meet the grower and talk about [their products] in an environment where it’s an event. “‘Eat local’ is a way for small producers and growers to have a niche and to open up an avenue for their products,” he says, admiringly. “For example, if you want to be an apple grower it’s very difficult to compete with giant apple packing companies or to try and get your products into Walmart and Safeway. So, they find other avenues like farmers markets and CSAs.”

He sees eating local as a way to preserve culture. “Being local forces seasonality and an appreciation for local color and flavor. That has been lost a bit with the commoditization of everything. The best oyster I ever ate was at a dock up in Samish Bay [in Washington]. It wasn’t because the oyster was so great but because I was part of the environment in a way that you wouldn’t get if you were in a restaurant,” he says. “We need to cherish and remember [our own regional foods] so we’re not all eating at the Olive Garden…which is the regional color of strip malls of America.”

Andrew Grasso's 100 Miles PDX food cart.

Andrew Grasso, a 28-year old art and social sciences student at Portland State University, sees eating local as a serious experiment. To that end, last summer he created 100 Miles PDX, a food cart parked on Northeast Alberta Street devoted to sourcing 99 percent of its goods from local farmers. “Certain household staples, such as tea, coffee, rice, and sugar travel halfway across the world to make it way to your table. Why go through such a painstaking, environmentally taxing process, when we don’t have to?” he says. “Everything we need is in our own backyards.”

Well, not quite. “Black pepper, mustard, sugar, and vinegar we couldn’t find. We had to use honey for all sweetening and we made our own vinegar from apple cider,” he says. “No local apple cider vinegar! No clue why, cause there’s so much cider up in the Northwest. Oil was really tricky too. We eventually found some, camelina oil, a relative of canola.”

He says that, for the most part, he considers the cart a success even though it may not reopen (it’s closed for the winter while he travels abroad). “Just being able to show that it can be done was a big thing. Most of the food came from within 50 miles, but the grains for the bread traveled the most, coming from Eastern, Washington and Oregon,” he says. “I think we as Americans and Westerners are pretty damn spoiled and many of us self-centered, and would rather live in luxury and have what we want when we want it, than make sacrifices [to eat local] for other reasons, like the environment.”

That said, he’s not sticking to a strict 100 mile limit himself anytime soon. ”It’s surprisingly expensive to do. But I do feel that it would make traveling that much more exciting, if we couldn’t find so many of the same things all around the country or world.”

In the end, even Plate & Pitchfork co-founder Erika Polmar has had to find a balance between homegrown ethics and the hard realities of a grumbling stomach. “For 10 years Plate & Pitchfork been saying, ‘Know your farmer, know your food.’ And that certainly means that we’re asking you to eat products that are grown, caught and raised close to home,” she explains. “But…I won’t give up chocolate or bananas.”

In that case, please pass the kale, my friend. And the mangoes.

Note: The P&P Almanac knows that our readers are busy people. So we’ve been compiling

If you reside in the Pacific Northwest and have ever attempted to bake bread at home, you’ve probably wrestled with the issue of baking in the winter months. Let me rephrase: you’ve agonized over how the hell to get bread dough to rise in your freezing cold house (without paying an arm and a leg for your heating bill).

Really, I blame Mother Nature and her sick sense of humor. It’s her fault that the time of year that I want to bake (and devour) fresh bread is precisely the time of year when the weather makes it the most difficult to bake it. This contradiction frustrates me to no end. My usual method of baking bread in the winter looks something like this: I turn my thermostat up to 80 degrees and set the bowl of bread dough directly next to a heating vent. I constantly check to make sure the dough is rising, and adjust the heat if necessary. I stand guard over the dough, to ensure that my cat doesn’t eat it. By the time the dough is finally ready to bake, my house is sweltering and my stomach is growling. Later, I cry over my heating bill. It’s an imperfect system.

A while back, I was bemoaning these winter bread woes to Brian Spangler, the maestro behind Portland’s lauded Apizza Scholls. He told me how to solve my problem. He told me to simply place my bread dough in the oven, turn on the oven light, close the oven door, and walk away. (Note: Not the actual oven. Just the light.) That’s it. The light generates a small amount of heat in the enclosed oven space, just enough to allow the bread dough to rise properly, even on a chilly winter day.

And just like that, my winter bread-baking routine was changed forever: The oven light!

It’s so simple, I’ve been smacking my forehead ever since and wondering why I didn’t think of it myself. Thanks to Brian, I can now happily bake bread all winter long.

What To Plant:  Realistically, there isn’t a lot you can plant at the moment, especially if you live in the Pacific Northwest. But if you start seeds indoors, you can go ahead and plant radishes, carrots, kale, lettuce, and spinach. (This is also a great time of year to order/buy seeds and map out your spring and summer garden.)

What To Eat:  Chard, kale, potatoes, onions, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, garlic, squash, pumpkin, apples, pears, black truffles.

Make This Now: Wintery Grilled Cheese with Goat Cheese, Wilted Chard, Roasted Beets, Caramelized Onions and Horseradish. Inspired by a meal I had at Bunk Bar recently, this grilled cheese takes all the best things about winter and combines them in to one special  sandwich. The creamy goat cheese melds perfectly with the earthy winter vegetables, and the horseradish gives the sandwich just the right amount of punch.

If this is what winter tastes like, then I hope that winter lasts forever.

Want the recipe? Visit Rosemarried.com