My Kinda Garage Sale!

There are Italian festivals called sagre (plural of sagra) that celebrate the harvest (above) and often center around a type of local food from the region like eggplants or onions or polenta or, yes, even frogs. Almost every village has an olive oil festival at some point in the year, often after the olives are pressed. The oil, stored in 50-liter metal canisters called fustino, is poured into containers, often wine bottles, brought by the villagers and then taken home to be used throughout the season.

For the last several years, Portland has been one of those villages celebrating the Italian olive oil harvest, thanks to Jim Dixon of Real Good Food. He originally began his own sagra in the garage of his home in Irvington (left), selling olive oil to friends and neighbors who would bring their containers to be filled from the fustino he imported from Italy. A pot of soup was on the hot plate, there was wine and often some homemade nocino from the walnuts that fell from the tree in his front yard, and a crackling fire pit in the driveway to warm the villagers'…I mean, customers'…hands.

One year, though, it got so cold that the oil in the fustino (right) in his unheated garage started to solidify, making filling the wine bottles somewhat problematic. It was about the same time that his selection of products expanded from olive oil, salt and dried beans to grains, oregano, capers and more, much too much to fit in the old garage.

So for the last couple of years Jim can be found celebrating the sagra in his (thankfully heated) retail space in inner SE Portland, where he still fills wine bottles with oil from the fustino and ladles out soup and sips of wine to customers, with a warming fire in the parking lot outside. And I can say from personal experience that a basket of, say, a small bottle of olive oil, a bit of fennel pollen and some Pantellerian capers and oregano make a very appreciated gift under the tree for your favorite cook or holiday host.

Details: Olive Oil Garage Sale (and more!). Fri.-Sat., Dec. 20-21; Noon-5 pm. Real Good Food, 833 SE Main St., Suite 122, on the ground floor on the NE corner of the building. 503-380-1067.

Photo at top of Sagra Astigiane by Andrea Marchisio from Wikimedia Commons.

Garage Sale Soup

Every year, at contributor Jim Dixon's annual Olive Oil Garage Sale, he made his famous soup to warm the souls of shoppers willing to brave freezing temperatures to attend the sale in his driveway. Now that he's moved inside, he still makes the soup and hands it out for free to his customers to thank them for their support.

Garage Sale Soup

Soak a cup or so each of Bluebird Grain Farms farro and Haricot Farms red beans in plenty of water for at least a few hours, preferably overnight. Drain and discard the soaking water.

Chop an onion, a few stalks of celery, and a couple of carrots; cook them in a healthy glug of extra virgin olive oil for a few minutes. Add half a head of green cabbage, coarsely chopped, and a bunch of cavalo nero (aka Tuscan kale, usually sold as “lacinato” kale, a word I don’t like to use since it’s mispelled Italian; should be lacianato for "lacy"). Add the soaked beans and farro.

Pour in enough water to cover the vegetables and heat until it starts to bubble. Peel and cube a couple of yellow potatoes, add them along with a large can of diced tomatoes. Salt to taste, add a good pinch or two of Pantellerian oregano, cover, and simmer for at least an hour or until the beans and farro are tender.

Stir in about a cup of good polenta, Ayers Creek if you can get it. Reduce the heat to a gentle simmer, and cook for another hour. Taste, add salt if necessary, and if the soup seems flat, add a small splash of Katz Gravenstein Apple Cider or Sparkling Wine vinegar. Sometimes a little acid is just the right thing, but go easy and taste. Like all soups, this will be better the second day.

Livin' in the Blurbs: Shopping, Eating…and Dieting?

One of my favorite events this time of year is a garage sale. No, it's not where I get all those special gifts for the people I care about, like half-burned candles and only-slightly-worn sweaters. At this garage sale you can do some serious power shopping for the foodies on your list. Put on by contributor Jim Dixon of RealGoodFood, it was originally held in his garage. The last couple of years he's moved it to his warehouse, the better to display the stunning range of imported olive oils, salts, grains, beans and other goodies he brings in from around the Northwest and the world. He also sells many of his olive oils in bulk, and he can fill up your (clean) containers from genuine Italian fustino. Like the garage sales of yore, he'll be dishing out free homemade soup and wine to make your shopping experience that much more pleasurable.

Details: Jim Dixon's Olive Oil Garage Sale. Fri.-Sat., 12/3-4; noon to 6 pm; cash or checks only please. At 833 SE Main (corner of SE 9th & Main), space 122 (On the NE corner of the building facing the parking lot. Look for the olive oil sign on the sidewalk out front.) Please park on the street since the other Activspace tenants need the lot during the day.

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And because this is Portland, there are many opportunities to give the gift of food from our bounty of local producers. One place where you'll be able to see (and sample) many of them under one roof is coming up at the 3rd Annual Season's Eatings Local Food and Spirits Market, an event that benefits the Oregon Food Bank. Sponsored by New Deal Distillery, which is introducing its brand new ginger liqueur at this year's market, you'll also find products from pie to charcuterie and cheese to pickles and coffees. Look for the full list of fantastic vendors on their website!

Details: 3rd Annual Season's Eatings Local Food and Spirits Market, Sat., Dec. 10, 11 am-6 pm. At New Deal Distillery, 1311 SE 9th Ave. 503-234-2513.

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He rocked the Portland food scene with one of the first carts in the city, and Kevin Sandri's Garden State quickly became known for its amazing take on East coast Italian-American classics like a to-die-for Meatball Hero and crunchy arancini, always served up with some Jersey attitude on the side. It eventually moved to N Mississipppi Avenue from its original Sellwood location and spawned a burger cart called Burgatroyd. Recently, much to the chagrin of his throngs of admirers, Sandri decided to close GS down and take a 9 to 5 job with a new business called Farm to Fit. A "chef prepared meal service," it's the brainchild of Dre Slaman and G. Scott Brown and features an all-organic menu that caters to the weight-loss crowd. Sandri's challenge is to breathe some life into usually drab diet meals…perhaps a low-cal version of the Hero? We'll see!

Details: Farm to Fit, 503-688-9248.

My Dream Garage Sale This Weekend!

Contributor Jim Dixon of Real Good Food has an annual, not-to-be-missed pre-Christmas garage sale, and lucky for us it's not old clothes and cracked pots but real, good food.

The annual olive oil garage sale returns this week. The sale runs from 11 am to 5 pm Friday, December 4, and from 10 am till 6 pm Saturday, December 5, in our driveway at 3432 NE 16th (just south of Fremont). Cash or checks only, please; more details at the bottom.

When I started importing real extra virgin olive oil from Italy a decade ago, I worked out of the garage at our home in NE Portland. But after several years of constantly rearranging the bikes, lawnmower, table saw, and our 1966 Tom Cramer VW bug so I could squeeze in the growing shipments of oil, I broke down and moved to Activspace.

The garage sale attempts to capture the feel of an Italian sagra, the Italian equivalent of the Verboort sausage festival. Usually held after the fall harvest, these small town fund raisers typically celebrate some local foodstuff. The residents volunteer to cook and temporary dining rooms sprout in warehouses or school gymnasiums. People come from the nearby cities to eat and drink, and they usually go home with a jug of freshly pressed olive oil.

In the tiny village of Chianni (where we spent three weeks on our first visit to Italy), the Sagra del Cinghiale offers the wild boar that roams the area in several different dishes, from boar ragu over pasta to a hearty stew flavored with fresh olives (I made the mistake of biting into one of the incredibly bitter fruits, but for some reason they don’t don’t make the stew itself bitter). Unlabeled bottles of vino novello, wine made from that year’s grapes using carbonic maceration, are filled from massive wooden casks and cost a few dollars, so everyone’s carrying one. It’s usually cold, often wet, and night comes early so the piazza sparkles under bare light bulbs strung up for the weekend.

My little sagra involves a big pot of soup, a few bottles of wine, and a fire to fight off the chill (if it’s not raining too hard). Our driveway becomes the piazza, and the stainless steel fustini holding the extra virgin move back into the garage. It’s not exactly a rustic village in Tuscany, but you get the idea.

This year I won’t have as many extra virgin olive oils from Italy, but I will have some freshly pressed olio nuovo from California. I spent a few days after Thanksgiving in Napa with Albert and Kim Katz, picking olives and watching them pressed into the bright, almost florescent green new oil, cloudy and intensely aromatic, sharply pungent and peppery from the abundant polyphenols. I also picked up some olio nuovo from the California Olive Ranch, so you’ll be able to taste two different new oils.

Bulk oils this year include Antheo (Sicily), Everyday Extra Virgin (Sacramento Valley, California), and a limited quantity of Katz Chef’s Pick (Suisun Valley, California). Bottled oils include Antheo, COR Olio Nuovo & Everyday Extra Virgin, Katz Chef’s Pick, Rock Hill Ranch, Meyer Lemon (limited quantity), and December’s Olio Nuovo (limit 2 bottles per customer). Haricot Farms red beans & garbanzos, Bluebird farro, and Portuguese sal cinza will be available, as will the Katz vinegars and the aceto balsamico from Profumi Estensi. Sorry, no olives this sale.

Porchetta Possible on Saturday

Cliff Allen cooked at Tastebud, and he’s currently in the kitchen at Nostrana. Saturday he’s bringing his People’s Pig truck to the olive oil garage sale around 11 am, hopefully with porchetta, and will be selling sandwiches full of porky goodness. Come hungry.

Details: Olive Oil Garage Sale. Fri., 12/4, 11 am-5 pm, and Sat., 12/5, 10 am-6 pm, cash or checks only. Bring clean, dry containers (preferably dark glass wine bottles) for bulk sales. I’ll have bottles for sale, too, for $2 each. 3432 NE 16th Ave. 503-380-1067.

Jim's Garage Sale Minestrone: The Secret's Out!

I bundled up against what felt to our Northwestern sensibilities like subzero temperatures, gathered a few empty wine bottles and hauled them to Jim Dixon's Olive Oil Garage Sale last weekend. I stocked up on his "Family Oil," the blend of leftovers from the 50-gallon fustini barrels he uses for bulk sales, as well as some absolutely orgasmic balsamic vinegar. He always has a pot of soup on the stove to warm up his customers, and this year he shared the recipe.

Garage Sale Minestrone

This year I used purgatorio beans from Ayers Creek Farm, but any white bean would work. While you could use canned beans, dry beans are cheap, easy to cook and taste much better. And cooking them generates delicious stock. I usually don’t soak dry beans, but go ahead if you have the time. Otherwise, use enough water to cover about a cup of dry beans, add a generous pinch of sea salt, and cook gently until tender. You need to cook them separately because the acidity in the tomatoes you’ll be adding to the soup would keep then from getting tender.

In a separate stockpot, heat about a quarter cup of extra virgin olive oil over medium heat. Add a chopped onion and a pinch of sea salt and cook for a few minutes (I dice the celery while the onion cooks, so I let it cook as long it takes to chop a couple of stalks). Add the celery, cook a bit, then add a couple of chopped carrots. If you’ve cooked the beans ahead of time and they’re ready, add them and their stock at this point. If not, add a couple of cups of water. If you’re using canned stock or broth to make soup, read Michael Rulhman’s blog entry.

Peel and dice (for me, chop or dice in the context of soup means smallish bite-sized) a couple of yellow potatoes and half a medium-size celery root. Use the other half to make smashed celery root and potatoes.

Add the root vegetables, and keep chopping, this time with half a head of green cabbage and a bunch of cavolo nero (aka Italian or lacinato kale). Toss them in the pot along with a big can of chopped or diced tomatoes. If you’ve got them, add any old, dried out rinds of Parmigiano Reggiano (if you don’t save these, start now; they’ll keep forever buried in the cheese drawer [or freezer - KAB]). Add the beans and their stock if you haven’t already.

Simmer the soup slowly for a couple of hours. Add salt to taste. Serve with a healthy drizzle of good extra virgin olive oil.

You can get his oils before Christmas, though not the soup, alas, at his store at Activspace (833 SE Main) on Sat., Dec.20, from 10 am-1 pm; then from 2 pm-5 pm at Great Wine Buys, 1515 NE Broadway. And then back at Activspace, Sun.-Tues., 12/21-23, 4:30 pm-6:30 pm. Bottled olive oil is available, or bring your own bottles for bulk purchases. Subscribe to notices of upcoming sales on his website.