The James Beard Foundation (JBF) has selected Portland, Ore. as the site where it will announce the nominees of the 2011 James Beard Foundation Awards, the highest honor for food and beverage professionals working in North America.  The celebration will begin on Sunday, March 20, 2011 with a benefit fundraiser dinner at the Multnomah Athletic Club featuring past and present JBF Award-winners and nominees.  The 2011 nominees will be revealed at a press conference the following morning, Monday, March 21, 2011.  More information on both events will follow in coming weeks.

James Beard:  Portland’s Native Son

James Beard was born in 1903, in Portland, Ore. His mother, an independent English woman, was passionate about food. As a child, Beard spent his summers at the Oregon coast, fishing, gathering shellfish, picking wild berries, and cooking meals with what he collected.  Often hailed as “The Father of American Cooking,” Beard was the champion and the embodiment of American food. From his best-selling books to his pioneering work in television to his famous cooking school, Beard’s efforts provided a strong foundation for a country just becoming aware of its own culinary heritage.
The Oscars of the food world
Covering all aspects of the industry—from chefs and restaurateurs to cookbook authors and food journalists to restaurant designers and architects and more—the Beard Awards shine a spotlight on the best and brightest talent in the food and beverage industry. The awards are presented each spring in New York at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. Nominees and winners are fêted at a weekend that has become one of the culinary industry’s “must attend” events.

About the James Beard Foundation

Commemorating its 20th anniversary, the James Beard Foundation is dedicated to celebrating, preserving, and nurturing America’s culinary heritage and diversity in order to elevate the appreciation of culinary excellence. A cookbook author and teacher with an encyclopedic knowledge of food, Oregon-native James Beard, who died in 1985, was a champion of American cuisine. He helped educate and mentor generations of professional chefs and food enthusiasts. Today, the Beard Foundation continues in the same spirit by administering a number of diverse programs that include educational initiatives, food industry awards, scholarships to culinary schools, and publications, and by maintaining the historic James Beard House in New York City’s Greenwich Village as a “performance space” for visiting chefs. For more information, please visit www.jamesbeard.org.

The first prize is two one-evening classes at Robert Reynold’s Chefs Studio. Located in SE Portland, Robert offers French and Italian cooking classes for both professionals and amateurs. Intimate instruction and supervision means a teacher stands right next to you, directly translating concepts to practice. The small class size allows for an exceptional exchange of ideas among participants.

Second prize is a $25 gift certificate to the dramatic Gilt Club in downtown Portland.

All you need to do is write about a food memory. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about Portland; perhaps your memory is of an evening on Corfu. There will be prizes for first, second and third place, as voted by our readers. Let’s keep the entries to 500 words or less. Please leave your entries in the comment section here, or email them to me directly: pdxfooddude@gmail.com

We’ll open them up for voting by the readers this week!

Picture courtesy FoodCartsPortland.com

I’ve been waiting for push-back against food carts, and it sounds like a groundswell is building. From the EnzymePDX website,

there are currently 534 licensed food carts in Multnomah County, with applications for 82 more under planned review. Even John Hamilton, vice president of communications for the restaurant lobbying group the Oregon Restaurant and Lodging Association, admits that Portland has surpassed other major cities as the No.1 spot for food carts in the country.

…

In terms of sanitation and how the food is handled, the carts are held to the same standards as restaurants and receive twice-yearly inspections, according to the Multnomah County Health Department. But other costly requirements that apply to restaurants, such as maintaining plumbing for an on-site restroom and a three-sink hand washing facility, do not pertain to carts. Kirchmeier wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with that, if most mobile food units would actually live up to their name. The county health department necessitates that all carts must have the ability to move at all hours of operation, but they are not obligated to relocate from one place to another at any specific intervals.

Hamilton agrees that there is an inconsistency with how these rules are applied. He says Oregon Restaurant and Lodging Association is working with the county health department and the Oregon Department of Human Services to review food standards and may look specifically at food cart regulations beginning in September.

What do you think? Do food cart regulations allow food carts to compete unfairly with restaurants? EnzymePDX has more information here. You’ll want to read the whole article.

(On an unrelated note, I’ve got some medical stuff going on, and won’t be very active until the weekend.)

Curi, who started at the restaurant in June, is focusing on finger foods designed to complement Spanish cocktails and wines.

He was the runner up in “Eater’s Hottest Chef in NYC” last year.

He launches into a screed about US coffee, before going on a tour of NYC’s “best” coffeehouses. Finally, they arrive at Stumptown Coffee. From Salon.com,

“What is called espresso here sometimes really isn’t espresso,” he wrote. (The response from readers made him qualify that, saying that any drink pulled on an espresso machine is ‘technically’ an espresso, but baristas shouldn’t be playing fast and loose with the traditional water-coffee-temperature-time formula.)…

…Our last stop is Stumptown, the superstar Portland transplant in the Ace Hotel on 29th Street. It is the one place where Milos has been before, several times, because he likes the vibe, but each time he’s come away hoping for a better espresso the next visit. When he gets his espresso there is a white stripe across the crema instead of the tigerskin. “See that? It’s burnt. The machine is probably too hot.” A second espresso arrives. It’s also burnt. “This is less than one ounce. Very concentrated, very sour, very salty.”

We leave Stumptown, Milos giving it the worst rating of the places we have visited today. As we exit onto the street, however, we both notice the same thing. There is a line of Stumptown fans going out the door and onto the sidewalk. He might not like what he’s buying, but they keep coming back for more.

My opinion? Let’s take a collection to send Milos back to Italy

Rahr had been eating at Sinju for nearly a decade. The headquarters for his environmental group is located in the Ecotrust Natural Capital Center, across the street from the restaurant, and is home to several other conservation and sustainable development groups who share similar concerns about endangered species.
Rahr didn’t just mention that bluefin was overfished, he took the time to come back with printed materials detailing the seriousness of their plight in the hopes that at the very least, the team at Sinju would think twice before putting the fish on the menu again.

What did the restaurant do? Why they banned Mr. Rahr from their restaurant.

I wouldn’t have gone there anyway, because I think the restaurant is lousy, but I definitely won’t ever go there again.

If you’ve never seen sharks being harvested for their fins, it is truly horrible. The shark is brought aboard the boat, the fins sliced off, and the shark is tossed back into the water to die.

I’ve been aware that this is a very common practice in some Asian countries, but never noticed shark dishes on Portland menus. Willamette Week has highlighted Wong’s King for five kinds of shark-fin soup, which go for $26 – $29.00 a bowl. Ocean City Seafood just down the street, also serves the soup.

“Disgusting.” That’s how Phil Tobin, a Portland scuba diver who has encountered de-finned shark carcasses, summarizes the practice. In March, Tobin started a letter-writing campaign to Wong’s King to urge it to drop the soup from its menu.

A growing number of people globally object to this brutal trade. Last month, The New York Times reported on a disastrous credit-card promotion by Citibank Hong Kong. After the bank offered cardholders discounts on shark-fin soup, angry Hong Kongers waged an email and Facebook campaign, and Citibank ended the promotion.

I urge you to read the entire Willamette Week article here. It includes a video which isn’t for the faint of heart. Kudo’s to Willamette Week for bringing this up.

All you need to do is write about a food memory. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about Portland; perhaps your memory is of an evening on Corfu. There will be prizes for first, second and third place, as voted by our readers. Let’s keep the entries to 500 words or less. Email your stories to me, or post them here in the comments for this post. You can read some of the entries from the last time here.

The winner last in 2008 was “Granny Moon” for this memory:

Breakfast when I was a kid was a weekend event – cold cereal before school didn’t count. And every weekend it was pretty much the same thing. Daddy would get out his cast iron skillet, place it on the gas stove and start frying. Always eggs. Sometimes bacon, occasionally ham – and if it were fishing season there would be fresh caught rainbow trout from his 4 am jaunt on the lake.

But the thing I remember most was his fried potatoes. If I were really lucky he would grate them, then dump them in the hot grease and make them oh so crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. I’ve tried forever to duplicate that. 4 out of 5 times I almost get it. That 5th time is heaven. Makes my arteries harden just to think about it…

Daddy grew older and ended up having a triple bypass. But he never lost his love of fried potatoes. When he reached the age of 88, I moved to Tucson and lived with him and my stepmom. Over the course of 16 months I perfected the fried potato. Not the grated wonder that my dad turned out; but a thin sliced, perfect circle of crispiness. With a soft center that melted in your mouth.

I would get up at 6 am when Daddy came out of his bedroom to get the newspaper, and we would have a cup of coffee together while I peeled a couple of small potatoes. Then I would slice and fry them up – using that same cast iron skillet and a gas stove. When I served them to him in his recliner, he would eat them with his fingers – savoring every bite.

My step mom always said that I was spoiling him. But I like to think that I was feeding his spirit – transferring the love that he gave his baby girl right back to him, by way of a fried potato.

Here are a couple of examples from me:

Away from home for the first time, waiting for the beginning of my college semester, I was in Sebastopol California, staying in a very cold drafty old barn surrounded by apple orchards. The winter wind was so strong, it would blow bits of hay across the old barn floor, covering me with little pieces of summer perfumed straw while I slept. On my second night, the wind was so strong an apple tree kept banging its branches on the roof. Warmed by several hot buttered rums, I stumbled outside and climbed the tree, trying to get to that overloaded branch. It broke with a loud crack, sending me crashing into the wet grass, pelted by apples shaking loose from above. Drenched and drunk, but ever the epicure, I grabbed some of the fruit and ran back inside, where I stripped off my clothes and hung them on the old saddle hooks in hope they would dry. Shivering under a blanket, and huddling over my electric kettle for warmth, the idea of rum and apples appealed to me, so I sliced some up and threw them in the pot to simmer. As the water bubbled away I bit into another apple, and for a moment everything stopped. It was the height of perfection, a diamond thrown from that gnarled tree, unlike any that had come before. I sat naked under grandmother’s old wool blanket, apple juice running down my face, hot-buttered rum warming my hands, listening to  the sound of the rain and the wind flexing tired timbers back and forth. Everything was right in my life.

I can remember my mother packing us in the car to every Thursday to go to the strawberry stand. It was run by a Japanese farmer and his wife on the back side of the Palos Verdes peninsula. We’d pile into the old VW van and wind along the bluffs overlooking the ocean. Just before Marineland, she would park, and me and my friend Jacques would run down the steep dirt trail to the tide pools. At the time I wanted to be a marine biologist, and would dash from one pond to another, picking up rocks to see what was underneath, and carefully putting them back again. My friend taught me how to smash open a sea urchin, and we’d eat them raw, sitting on a rock with the salt spray floating over our heads. As the tide came up, we’d race each other to the top of the bluffs where mom would be sitting, patiently reading a book. Back in the van, we’d follow the cliff line the coast where a little white strawberry stand sat surrounded by acres and acres of dark green fields. I’m sure I’ve had berries since that were of as good quality, but never any that tasted as good as the ones we’d eat in that dirt parking lot. When we got home, Dad would serve them simply, with a sprinkle of Kirsh liquor and a dusting of powdered sugar. I still eat them that way.

What memories do you have? Email me here.. Please let me know what name you want used when I post them. I’ll announce the prizes in a couple of days.

Via WineGuyWorld, via Eater

From Elizabeth, “Thank you to all you who ever came to Sahagún, I love you”.

You will still be able to find her chocolates around town, as well as through mail order on her website:

Cacao
Cheese Bar
Extracto
The Meadow
Ristretto Roasters
Water Avenue Coffee

I wish her good luck with her new focus