Note: Dried porcini mushrooms are available at specialty markets. To make porcini powder, pulverize dried mushrooms in a spice grinder or blender.
Crème fraîche is two parts heavy cream to one part buttermilk (blend, let stand overnight until thick, then refrigerate).
Western Culinary Institute
Portland's old guard of rich cheapskates don't want you to know this little secret of theirs. The waiters and chefs at the institute have not just their jobs and wages riding on your satisfaction, but their grades and future as well. The dining room is swank and intimate, and the service is very snappy with no more than two tables per server. Fat's no issue—it's real butter and cream—and the food's terrific. All this and free parking. It's no wonder folks flock down from the West Hills for fine dining at a fast-food price.
The dining room is at 1316 SW Thirteenth Avenue. Phone: 503-294-9770. Lunch is served 11:30-1:00, five courses for $9.95. Dinner is served 6:00—8:00, six courses for $19.95. Thursday is buffet night, offering at least thirty-five items. Very important: Reservations are recommended at least a week in advance.
Wild Abandon
The building is a former link in the chain of Ginger's Sexy Saunas—several massage parlor "jack shacks" that used to dot Portland in the 1970s. You can't get a handjob here, but you can get a great dinner, and breakfast on the weekend. Say hello to the owner, Michael Cox, and look for the actress Linda Blair, a vegan regular. The restaurant is at 2411 SE Belmont Street. Phone: 503-232-4458. The menu changes, but I always look for these:
DEAN BLAIR'S LEMON-LAVENDER SCONES
1½ cups flour
½ tablespoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ cup brown sugar
½ teaspoon salt
¼ pound cold unsalted butter, cubed
1 tablespoon lavender flowers
Zest from one lemon
½ cup buttermilk
1 small egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
In a medium bowl sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and salt. Add the cubed butter, lavender, and lemon zest. In a separate bowl combine the buttermilk, egg, and vanilla and whip with a fork. Create a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the buttermilk mixture. Combine with a rubber spatula until just moistened. Transfer to a cookie sheet and form the dough into a wheel roughly 9 inches in diameter and ¾ inch thick. Score it into eight pie slices and top with brown sugar. Bake for about 25 to 30 minutes.
(a postcard from 1986)
Somewhere a man's hollering about devils and demons. From some other hospital room he's bellowing and screaming about how the niggers and fags are out to get him. You can hear him all over the third floor when he screams, "Get away from me, you cunt!" And his shouting just goes on and on.
This is Emanuel Hospital, the big medical complex at the east end of the Fremont Bridge. I'm here as a volunteer for a charity hospice. My job is to take people places, mostly relatives of dying people. Mostly, I drive visiting mothers from their motel to the hospital. After their son or daughter is dead, I might drive them to the airport for their flight home.
Today we're waiting for a man to die of AIDS while his mother sits beside his bed, holding his hand and singing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," again and again. It was his favorite song when he was a boy, she says. Now he's just bones and body hair, curled on his side under a thin knit blanket. A pump injects him with morphine every few seconds. His face has the slack look, yellow and dried, that means this is our last trip to the hospital.
The Mom is from Minnesota—I think. Maybe Montana. It's been my experience that nobody dies like in the movies. No matter how sick they look, they're waiting for you to leave. Around midnight, when I finally take his mom back to her Travelodge on E Burnside Street, when he's alt alone, then her son will die.
For now she sings "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," over and over until it doesn't make any sense. Until the words turn into a mantra. A bird's song. Just sounds without meaning. I look at my watch.
It's then the yelling starts. The rant about spies and niggers and fags and cunts. It's a man's voice, huge and hoarse, shouting from some room nearby.
A nurse comes into the room to explain. The shouting man has taken a drug overdose, they really can't sedate him because they have no idea what drugs he's already taken. The nurse says the man's in restraints, down the hall, but we're all going to have to tolerate his shouting until he wears himself out.
Still, the man's shouting about gooks and kikes.
With each shout the dying son jerks a little, winces, and his mother stops singing. After a little while, a few automatic injections of morphine, the man's still shouting about demons and devils, and the Mom picks up her purse. She gets to her feet.
She goes to the door, and I follow.
She's giving up, I figure, heading back to the motel. To the airport. To Minnesota.
As we're going down the hospital hallway, the yelling gets louder, closer, until we're right outside the man's room. The door's half open, and inside is a curtain pulled shut around a hospital bed. The Mom goes in. She goes through the slit in the curtain.
The man's shouting, calling her a cunt. Telling her to get out.
I go to look, and the man's naked in bed, his hands and ankles buckled to the chrome bed rails with leather straps. He's huge, filling the whole mattress, and wrestles against the leather straps until every muscle pops up, huge with blood and veins, smooth with tattoos of snakes and women in bright red and blue. His face flush, he yells for the "fucking" nurse. She should "fucking get in here." His hands and ankles strapped down, he twists and fights. The way a fish arches and flops on hot sand. The inside of each arm is poked with IV needles. The skin scabbed from old injections.
The Mom sets her purse on the edge of his mattress. She says, "What pretty tattoos."
I remember that because it's the only thing she said. Then she takes a tissue out of her purse, an old, crumpled tissue.
You can't tell anyone about a naked man without getting to his penis and balls. They're the only part of him not fighting. And not covered with tattoos. His genitals are just red, wadded flesh in the nest of his black pubic hair.
At this point, I've been volunteering around hospitals since I was fourteen. Where I grew up, you had to perform several hundred hours of volunteer work to be confirmed in the Catholic Church. About the only place to do this was Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. Fourteen years old and I was cleaning delivery rooms. No rubber gloves, and I'm tossing out afterbirths. Washing coagulated blood out of stainless steel pans, I loved it. My other job in the hospital was dusting shelves in the pharmacy. A few years down the road and this would've been my dream job—me alone with this smorgasbord of painkillers—but for now, it was beyond boring.