At 9:45 on a drizzly May Wednesday we met Collette and Kurt from KGW at the Farmers’ Market. We were really excited because they were filming us to be on TV. We set up mics and started our shopping. We had $20 to prepare a meal for four people.

First we got the baby red spring onions followed by the baby carrots at the next stand. We noticed the mint and the garlic. Later on we found out it was French garlic. It had two differences: one was the amazing smell the other difference you will learn later. Next at the other end of the market was a spring onion and some beautiful garlic spears (which happened to be curly). Then we backtracked and found some awesome chive flowers.

Then we took a little break from our mission. Ever since we ate at Evoe we have been obsessed with elderflowers and its syrup, so we had to stop and get a taste of elderberry honey tonic with echinacea propolis apple cider vinegar. It was amazing enough that our Dad bought some (this was not under the budget). We were told that there are three kinds of elderberry plants, and all the flowers are edible and tasty, just the berries are different. We turned around and there were delicious vegan chocolates. You don’t have to be a vegan to eat vegan food, so we tried it and it was delicious and is made by a naturopathic doctor.

Back to the budgeted food. We headed over to a stand with leeks. By now, if you’ve been reading our blog, you know that leeks are our favorite vegetable. We picked out two and they were only 50 cents each! Then we raced back to the garlic and mint stand and bought ourselves some mini-four-inch-long artichokes, which were kind of a steal because you paid for them by the pound, so even though they were $4/pound, they made a good artichoke dinner for a single person. For us they made really good appetizers. With our final $1.60, we bought two chocolate vanilla bean macaroons from Two Tarts Bakery, which were awesome. On our way out, we found goose eggs, for only $2 each so our parents bought us two for breakfast tomorrow.

Then we all went back to our house to cook. The very first thing we did was pop an entire chive flower into our mouths. We learned that they were very sweet at first and then very strong and chemically hot.

Next we cut off the tops of the French garlic. One was was full of cloves, like normal garlic and the other one was sort of one big clove. We grabbed six pieces of bacon we already had at home, cut them into inch long pieces, and laid them in a baking pan. We saved four pieces of  bacon to put on top of the garlic so the bacony-goodness could seep into the garlic. We were going to use one piece for each head of garlic, but we added another on each just for good luck. Then we popped them in the oven along with the minced baby carrots.

We boiled some water and put the artichokes in, and put some water on to boil for the pasta.

Next it was onion time. We chopped up the spring onion and the last head of garlic. Then we chopped up the baby red spring onion and the leeks. We put just the spring onion into our sauté pan with some olive oil and about five minutes later, we added in the baby red spring onion and the leeks. Five minutes later, we put in the last part of the onions, which included the the cut up garlic spears and the garlic .

Then we cut the beautiful purple flowers off of the chives and roasted the stems in olive oil. They were like crispy chive fries.

We also took out the roasted garlic. Quote from Soren: “After squeezing out the one large clove of garlic, there was still some mush on the outside. After giving up I just squished in straight into my mouth and it was so, so good.”

The pasta and the sauté was done, so we drained the artichokes and the pasta and threw all of the vegetables into the pasta. We garnished it with the ripped-apart chive flowers and mint. It looked really, really cool. It was one of the best presentations we have ever done because it looked like purple snow on top with a ring of mint leaves that had fallen all around it .

They were filming us this whole time, but we weren’t nervous because we knew what we wanted to do with all that great food. In fact they filmed us writing the beginning of this post!

Now for the eating. The baby artichokes were super tiny but super good and creamy. You could eat almost the entire thing, except for the tiny spikes at the end of the leaves. The main course, the pasta dish, yummy carmelized onionyess. The carrots were so sugary and carmelized that we don’t know how they got that way, but it must be because they are so fresh and organic. We can’t really describe each type of onion because there were so many, but they were probably one of our best carmelizing jobs and they were very yummy. This is our longest blog, but it makes sense because it was one of our favorite dishes. We call it Onion Attack!

Veritable Quandary means it is really hard to make a decision…so we just ordered it all. We went there after we went to see our first opera, Falstaff, which was awesome and super funny by the way. First we ordered the duck confit spring rolls. In case you ever crave something bad that’s fried, like chicken nuggets, why don’t you try something good that’s fried like this. These are the best spring rolls we have EVER had. Then we got dates wrapped in bacon, with an almond inside instead of a pit. So tasty. We got the osso bucco and pork chop for entrées. The pork chop was great, but the osso bucco was               AM-AZ-ING!! Succulent ox meat, some sort of tasty creamy risotto thingy and, the best part, the marrow. We love it so much we eat the pork marrow (from the pork chops at our house) too. Speaking of pork chops, the pork chop was incredible. They cooked it medium-rare and, unlike some restaurants, they cooked it perfectly. Also, they have some kind of crazy-good sparkling apple cider there that is almost like liquid gold. Run, don’t walk, to VQ (unless crossing a street).

http://www.veritablequandary.com

Hands on Café is the restaurant at Oregon College of Art and Craft. We spend a lot of our summer at their awesome camps. We took our mom and grandma there for Mothers’ Day. It’s a really nice view from outside. Then the food comes. We had some of the most amazing pancakes ever. We would review more of the menu, but we both badly wanted the pancakes and didn’t want to share. Mom and Dad ordered the zucchini and corn fritters with salmon and we agreed that it was an amazing dish, even though we didn’t get much because we were busy hoovering our pancakes. This is a really amazing brunch spot that not many people know about, plus you can look in the gallery and explore all the great artwork all over campus afterward.

http://www.ocac.edu/cafe

We took a kid’s menu just to look at it, but then our friend, J.P. took it from us because he knew we wouldn’t need it. But later into our meal, we discovered that the mac n cheese and the burger were supremely awesome. We ordered the mac n cheese off of the adult menu and it was seriously the best we have ever had. We may not have eaten the kids menu burger, but we saw a kid at the table next door and his Dad was trying to steal bites from him so it was clearly amazing.

Now back to the beginning. Our friend J.P. made us a drink out of lemon-verbena infused simple syrup, ginger ale, and grapefruit juice. It was so good we wanted to ask for another, but our nettle fritters came out and we got distracted by their green, yummy, fried deliciousness. Serious nettles. Seriously good. After the nettle dumplings at Evoe, we loved nettles and these fritters made us love nettles even more. Most people think of nettles as a weed. We think of them as a delicacy. We definitely want to learn how to cook with nettles.

From the daily meat selection, we picked out a braised lamb shank and a pork chop and our parents shared a steak. The lamb was so well braised that it fell off the bone and we could take the bone home and use it as a whacking stick, because it didn’t have a single speck of meat left on it. The pork was one of the most delicious pieces of pork we have ever had, and we’ve had a lot. Garnished with cubes of bacon, the perfectly cooked pork chop, seasoned with cilantro and salt, rested on a bed of some of the best, fresh, homemade apple butter we’ve ever tasted.

It was our tenth birthday and our mom’s 45th birthday (we all have the same exact birthday) so we got dessert!! We got this delicious chocolate pie. It was more like brown whipped cream that stayed in place with just enough high-quality chocolate. Of course it came with salt-caramel ice cream..not very unlike Salt and Straw’s. It was like sweet caramel ice cream with just the right amount of salt.

Get over there and get some meat (and friends…like vegetables) RIGHT NOW. Why wait for this kind of awesomeness???

http://www.laurelhurstmarket.com

First of all who wouldn’t want to try a restaurant that has a fish swimming through the corner of its brick walls??The first thing we had at Southpark was some amazingly delicious calamari. It was crunchy and had a lemony sauce . There were a lot of tentacles that were really soft and tender on the inside and crunchy on the outside. We ordered the prosciutto wrapped trout, and the garlic confit and lemon zest pizza from the bar menu. The trout was troutalicious. it was perfectly tender with a beautiful outside crispiness of prosciutto. And now for the pizza. Think of a really good cheese pizza, like one from hotlips, take out a little sauce, add in some garlic confit and lemon zest and to finish it off make the crust just a little thinner. That’s pretty much what our pizza was. It was in the top two pizzas we have ever had.

They also gave us two fat covered bowls of meaty yumminess. One was liver and one was salmon. Without knowing it was even liver, not that it would have affected our eating of it, we slurped it down bite after bite until there was nothing left. Our friend Megan recommended this and she was right! The meat butters also came with some candied walnuts which were so crunchy yet sweet. Also blue cheese and tasty sweet carrot marmalade were on the plate. We don’t really like blue cheese that much, but the carrot marmalade was awesome.

Oh we also got a shallot. Just kidding. But we forgot to tell you about the salt cod fritters which were really, really good. It came with really great sauce, which we fought over because it was so good.

They buy their food from local, sustainable farmers and even shop at the farmers’ market so you don’t have to worry about eating any nasty chemicals like you would have to eat at McDonalds.

http://southparkseafood.com

Last Saturday, we were given $20 to spend at the farmers’ market however we wanted in order to make dinner. This is what happened.

First, we saw this stand that was selling noodles, fresh noodles, that is.

It took us some time to choose, but we found a really cool one in the upper-left corner of this photograph which was called coral pasta. It was rolled up and had fringed spiky ends. We had never seen anything like it before. When we were paying, we saw this quote:

We thought it was very smart to put it at the stand, and it really represented some types of food. Cooking makes you happy and food makes you happy. It also says that kids are often misunderstood.

Next was the where we got are leeks and a sunchoke, but before we saw them we saw these

after realizing we had no use for them and they weren’t in our budget, we saw our favorite winter vegetable: LEEKS !!!!!!!!!!!!

 (Soren gives the “leeks up” sign)

As we went over to pay we saw something mysterious that looked like ginger. It was a sunchoke.

Then the person working there told us it was the root of a sunflower and that it was bitter and was best roasted. We decided to get one.

Then we came across The Rabbit. After much searching through the meat stand for the right meat, we found the rabbit “front legs” or “the wings”. We could only afford a little bit of meat, but it was fatty and we knew that would give it taste. Some of our friends were amazed to know that we could get rabbit under $10. Our little piece was $6.63.

This season’s asparagus was just arriving, so we knew we had to jump on that quick to top off our meal.

Here’s everything we got, laid out:

We also got  a goose egg and a turkey egg for the next morning’s breakfast, plus we had to go back for a second bag of pasta. All for $20.00 exactly because the sunchoke guy let us pay 3 cents less.

This is how we prepared the meal

1. Boil the water, then cook pasta until soft but not slurmy. It takes very little time because it is fresh.
2. Sauté the leeks and shallot. Oh yeah, we also bought a shallot.
3. Peel the sunchoke and slice it.
4. Brown the rabbit in butter, add the sunchokes and shove it in the oven
5. Cook the asparagus (see recipes) and slice them into chunks.
6. Mix it all together in a big bowl and serve. Leave half of the asparagus for garnish.

Here’s how it turned out:

Here’s what it looked like after 10 minutes:

By the way, here’s what the goose egg looked like for breakfast. It was very tasty.(Click on image to see actual size)

The yolk is the size of a whole chicken egg. And check out how orange it is. Very tasty.

Why would we go to all this trouble to shop at the farmers’ market? Why wouldn’t we???

Evoe’s mainly sandwich and meat menu makes for an adventure of meat. When you walk in, the first thing you will see is the pig leg. Then you see a big chunk out of it where they get the ham. Next you see the four burner kitchen stove and the griddles. It is really amazing that the chef, Kevin Gibson, makes all this great food on a home kitchen stove and some griddles! Plus he does it right there where you can watch.

When we went to lunch at Evoe we ordered some things to share. The Little Bo Peep is a lamb meatball sandwich. The only problem with the meatball sandwich is that it is almost a little TOO awesome.  It also came with small pickled curly peppers which at first we thought were pickled mustaches. We also had a self explanatory prosciutto sandwich and of course the meat plate, which is just a big face full of incredibly tasty meat. Our parents got the nettle dumplings with meyer lemon cream, but we had bites and it was amazing that something so stickery as nettles could taste so good.

One of the best non-meat selection is the elderflower spritzer. This meat-based restaurant is a truly amazing place, but they also have lots of good stuff for vegetarians. We were just on a meat rampage yesterday.

http://bit.ly/uJcMKJ