This is a reanimation of the Vicaribus blog as lived by Miro Kazakoff and Ehren Foss in 2004 and 2005. The photos may be spotty.

The one about food (as always)

Posted by Miro

Yesterday, I had one of those road days that’s really interesting to me, but not much to others. I saw stuff, talked to people, walked around. To detail it would make the kind of self-indulgent blogging that Ehren and I loathe. Frequently, we turn to each other and ask “our blog has a reason to exist, right?” Of course, anything is good in the hands of a great writer. That I am not.

The main highlight was the Portland Chinese Gardens: an oasis of water pools, artistically pot-marked limestone, and beautiful Chinese wood carvings in the middle Portland’s Chinatown. There’s also a tea house in the middle of the garden. I duck in out of the rain for a cup of Pu-er Tea and a tea egg.

Pu-er’s are aged teas. I had the camel tea. The tea leaves come tightly wrapped into a single serving ball about the diameter of a dime. During steeping the ball breaks apart. It’s a neat show if you don’t watch TV very often. The tea tastes like wild rice minus the rice taste. In other words Pu-er flavor = (Wild rice taste) – (Uncle Ben’s Taste).

The eggs were even better. Recipe to follow, if I can recreate it on the bus.

While I’m always into food, beginning my recipe section has gotten me even more inspired to read and write more about cooking. On my way to REI, I passed Portland landmark: Powell’s Bookstore. I’ve already offended one Portland-ite by saying that in an age of huge Barnes & Nobles the mystique of Powell’s is muted. It’s huge, has a great selection and a café, but that’s not as rare these days as it must have been 15 years ago. It does have used books mixed in with it’s new selections, and that’s pretty cool.

I should be more complimentary to the store because I did mange to satisfy two long time desire. I picked up a used paperback copy of “On Food and Cooking” for the stunning price of $8.98 (no sales tax in Oregon). I also ended my long search for a recipe for zhurek. Zhurek (the ZH is pronounced slightly harder than the ZH in Zhivago) is a sour Polish soup. I had it in Krakow last summer. Not for the faint of heart, it’s very sour and porkey tasting. I’ve never had anything like it before or since and could not find a recipe anywhere online.

At Powell’s I discovered it in the third Polish cookbook it tried. The cookbook printed every recipe as a single solid block of text, and clearly translated directly from Polish. Turns out the secret ingredient, basically the only ingredient, in zhurek is soured rye meal. Should I be able to sour my own rye meal, I’ll post a recipe.

The Palahniuck evening is well documented in the Fossosphere. I’ll note that the audience was almost entirely between 15 and 30 and universally hipster. The women ran from purple-haired, pig-tailed sprite to earth-toned, library chic; the dudes from black trench coat scruffy to tight jeans and retro video-game-themed t-shirts. I considered decamping in Portland.