Eventful: Fill Your Pantry & Winter Vegetable Sagra!

Spring has always been a favorite time of year, coming, as it does, at the end of a cold, damp season here in the Pacific Northwest. The warming temperatures, the first taste of the peppery greens emerging from the soil—it rings my chimes every time! And of course the abundance of summer can't be beat, starting with the region's justifiably renowned berries and the ensuing cavalcade of summer vegetables and fruits.

As colorful as it is delicious!

But I'm finding that, in the last couple of years, fall and winter have wangled their way into my heart, especially with the emergence of new, packed-with-flavor varieties that local farmers have adapted to our maritime climate, many of which can thrive in the field without row covers or hoop houses. I'm not just talking about beets and turnips here, either, but a whole plethora of chicories—bright red radicchio, speckled castelfranco, curly endive and escarole, and even an Italian outlier called puntarelle—with their slightly bitter bite, as well as new squash types that will make your old butternut blush, along with other upstarts like purple sprouting broccoli.

To celebrate this season of deliciousness and sample it first-hand, on Sunday, December 8th, Friends of Family Farmers and the Culinary Breeding Network are joining forces to once again to present the Fill Your Pantry and Winter Vegetable Sagra. Fill Your Pantry is a one-day community bulk-buying event encouraging you to stock your pantry for the winter with items from local farms such as storage vegetables, fruit, beans, pasture-raised meats, grains, canned goods, and other products. Take a look at the incredible list of products and sign up to pre-order. (Pre-ordering is encouraged, with orders to be picked up at the event. Farmers will bring a limited amount of product to sell at the event.)

Fill your pantry and your belly!

The Winter Vegetable Sagra—"sagra" being Italian for a rural festival—will have some of Portland's best-known chefs offering (free!) tastes of dishes featuring the many different varieties of winter vegetables being grown by Oregon farmers, along with cooking demonstrations and activities for kids. Not only that, and this speaks volumes to me, there's a cookbook swap where for every good quality cookbook you bring in, you can swap for another one of your choice!

It's all happening on December 8th from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at The Redd, Portland's hub for local food and farms, at 831 SE Salmon St. in Portland.  Past events have been not only a showcase of the vitality of our local food system, but an opportunity for the community to celebrate the bounty that is available to us year round.

Photos by Shawn Linehan Photography.

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.

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.

My Kind of Garage Sale!

Instead of cracked pottery and jigsaw puzzles with pieces missing, when my friend Jim Dixon of RealGoodFood holds a garage sale it's all about estate-pressed olive oil from Italy. Here's the bulletin he recently sent out, with details on this weekend's sale at the bottom. See you there!

I started my little olive oil adventure in my garage, and the first olive oil garage sale was my effort to recreate the atmosphere of an Italian food festival or sagra. Sagre typically take place in the fall to coincide with the harvest of whatever local foodstuff is being celebrated.

In the Tuscan village of Chianni, home of Olio Novo, the Sagra del Cinghiale (Wild Boar Festival) occurs in late November, just after the first extra virgin olive oil is pressed and the vino novello, wine made using carbonic maceration from grapes harvested earlier in the fall, is ready to drink. It’s cold, wet, and molto Felliniamo.

The villagers volunteer to cook, people come from the nearby cities for a good meal and everybody eats at communal tables in the school cafeteria. After dinner, the city folks head back to their cars with a jug of olive oil and a few bottles of wine, reminders of the country life they left behind. If you’re ever in Italy and see a sign for a local sagra, stop. It’s one of the best ways to get a taste of real Italian life.

While I can’t offer a sit-down experience, I’ll have a pot of hot soup, wine and a roaring fire (if the weather forcast is even close to accurate, we’ll need the fire). Along with the usual lineup of Italian and Californian extra virgin olive oils, Portuguese sea salt, traditionally cured olives, and the Katz artisanal vinegars, I’ve got the same balsamic vinegar I imported last year.

Produced by a small family firm called Profumi Estensi, this aceto balsamico di Modena is thick, syrupy and delicious. Like all traditional balsamic vinegar, it’s made by reducing grape must to about 30% of its original volume, then fermenting it slowly in a series of wood barrels called a batteria. The batteria, different size barrels made from an assortment of woods that impart additional flavor to the vinegar, is tucked under the roof in the family’s attic, where it's subject to wide temperature swings that encourage evaporation through the porous wood. After at least 12 years, the resulting vinegar is tart, sweet, and nothing like the industrial grade, sugar-fortified wine vinegar sold as balsamic in the supermarket. You can taste it at the garage sale.

Scott Dolich, owner of Park Kitchen, visited Profumi Estensi this fall after attending Slow Food’s Terra Madre. He likes to use the aceto balsamico to enhance winter greens.

“This time of year we can get a fantastic variety of chicories,” Scott says, “I like to grill them, then dress them with a drizzle of good balsamic and olive oil.”

Nick Wood, coproprietor with Tommy Habetz of Bunk Sandwiches, was on the same trip. He elevates the already incredible eggplant sandwich they serve with a drizzle of balsamico.

Bunk’s Roasted Eggplant, Marinated Red Pepper, Fresh Mozzarella & Basil Sandwich with Balsamic Vinegar

Toss eggplant slices with extra virgin olive oil, oregano, salt, and pepper. Roast at 450° until the eggplant is tender, about 15-20 minutes. Let cool.

Marinate roasted red peppers in a little more extra virgin olive oil, oregano, chopped garlic, salt, and red pepper flakes. On a toasted hoagie roll, layer the eggplant, marinated peppers, slices of fresh mozzarella and fresh basil leaves. Drizzle with balsamic vinegar.

Details: Olive Oil Garage Sale. Fri.-Sat., Dec. 12-13; 1-6 pm; cash or checks only. Bottled olive oil available, or bring clean wine bottles for bulk purchases. 3432 NE 16th (south of Fremont).