Portland is considered one of the most livable cities in the country. Why then does my stuff keep getting stolen. Two months ago my bike was stolen from inside my apartment building and today some ruffians absconded with my car.

I called my parents to tell them and they both laughed hysterically. They have seen my car and refused to ride in it last time they came to visit. Yes the Escortia is a complete piece of shit, but it runs fine. Focusing on it's cosmetic defects would be superficial and shallow.

If you live in the greater Portland area please be on the lookout for a group of drunk teenagers riding around in a '91 maroon Ford Escort. I want my car back and please tell them without a poo in the back seat.

On to more important things. Restaurant life. Only two months into this new career and my back is already starting to tell me to pick another profession. But I'm having fun and really enjoy it still. I have learned so many things.

Orange is the decaf.

Whipped cream good.

There are two major hazards in the kitchen.

Hot

and Sharp


Hot is worse than Sharp

This is not called a squeezy thingy.

It's called a pastry bag.

You use the pastry bag to squeeze out sweet delicious things. Whipped cream and also cannoli filing. I get to make the desserts in the Italian restaurant. Actually someone else makes them, but I do put them on plates and make them look nice.

Prep Cook Confidential.


This is a picture of a nude bike ride I went on in June. The world's biggest nude bike ride. Coincidentally I happened to be riding at exactly the same speed as that girl on the right for almost forty-five minutes.

So last week I asked the cooks at the Italian restaurant I work at what the most disgusting thing was that they've ever put in anyone's food. No boogers or dingleberries from these guys, but one of them had an interesting response.

"Never put anything nasty in anyone's food, but at a restaurant I used to work at the chefs used to fatten up the annoying servers."

They don't call them waiters or waitresses anymore (I guess it's just too demeaning and of course server sounds so much more respectful and empowering). Anyway it turns out that the pain in the ass servers would be given meals with extra high portions of fatty foods whenever they ordered anything from the kitchen. Apparently it worked and a few poor souls were unknowningly plumped up.

Although I am still a neophyte to this whole restaurant thing in both of the places I work I definitely sense a tension between the front of the house (servers and bussers) and the back of the house (chefs and knife lackeys like myself). I guess it makes sense. If the food doesn't come out perfect the servers have to deal with the consequences and will make lesss tips. If the servers mess up orders and change things around then the cooks end up with extra work. And while working in both the front and the back at my two current jobs I am beginning to see both sides of this story. What I do know though is that in both the front and the back people are working their asses off. I have never worked so hard in my life for such long periods of time without even stopping for five minutes to take a break.

The thing that confuses me the most though is the huge discrepancy in pay scales between servers and cooks. Most of the guys in the kitchen have been to cooking school for two years (at $20k/year) and come out earning $10-12/hour. These guys are amazingly knowledgeable and skilled at what they do. The servers, some of whom may have been doing it for years, can sometimes make 3 or 4 times that amount. It just doesn't make sense. Yeah it takes skill to be a good server and know about wines etc, but cooks should be making more.

Last Summer I started a regular blog feature called RECIPE CORNER. I think it could be time to bring it back again. Here it is, straight from the kitchens of Portland, Pencil Penne.

RECIPE CORNER #3 - Pencil Penne

Boil four quarts of water in a large pot. When boiling add one pound of penne pasta and salt. Pasta water should taste like the sea. Mediterranean Sea not Dead Sea.

Cover bottom of frying pan with olive oil and when hot add two finely minced shallots. After two minutes add one cup of white wine (please don't substitute wine cooler). Simmer until wine has reduced by half.

When done, remove pasta and drain in a colander. Don't rinse with water and wash off all the starchy goodness. Put penne in a large bowl.

Pour shallots over pasta and add 1/3 cup of grated parmesan cheese.

Now for the final touches. Drizzle about 3 tablespoons of Pepto Bismol (Walgreens generic version also works fine)and then sharpen about one third of a number two pencil on top of pasta and toss. Season with salt and pepper and serve immediately.

I've found that grittiness of the pencil sharpenings really meld well with the softness of the shallots creating a simple, but truly wonderful summer dish.

Is Speed-metal one or two words?

Back at the blog again after a long absence. I hope to finish recounting my South American adventures at a later date, but for now I want to talk about the present.

In March after I got back from my trip, I spent a month in Europe. Well actually mostly England, which doesn't sound quite so glamorous, but I did spend a week in Milan visiting my cute niece Tallulah. I spent a couple of weeks in Cambridge working for my dad at his catering company to find out if I would like working in the food industry.

I liked it.

I came back to San Francisco, very briefly, and then drove up to Portland so see if I liked it.

I liked it.

Now I live in Portland and I work and earn money. I have a new nephew named Otis. He lives in Portland also.

By the time June rolled around I hadn't worked in almost eight months. I was broke, discouraged, and a little desperate for some incoming cash. I had spent quite a bit of time pounding the portland pavements in search of restaurant work. I had the dual handicap of being overqualified for any entry level position and having no real experience in a town where twenty and thirty something slackers are as common as dental floss bikinis on a Rio beach.

Finally my friend Jonthan introduced me to a friend of his who runs an Italian restaurant and I was given a chance to prove my worth. "Ever worked in a kitchen" he asked me. "No" I replied. "OK, come in on Sunday and we'll see what you're made of."

So a month later I'm still working as a prep cook at this same place as well as bussing and hosting two days a week at another place. My first week I had to ask a co-worker the name of the verb for what I was doing. I knew it wasn't traveling cause I kept waking up in the same bed. I also knew it wasn't something I actually chose to be doing. What I'd choose to be doing would be watching three World Cup Matches a day and then going home to drink beer and read about them on the internet. But I had to come to this place every day and do things that other people told me to do.

Work. That's what it's called. That's the name of the verb of what I was doing, hunched over a chopping board finely dicing vegetables for bolognese and pulling the innards out of calamari for a sum smaller than what I made in high school carrying golf clubs for rich assholes.

So now I am in the restaurant industry. The restaurant industry while sharing a love of exploiting workers with the non-profit world is, as you would expect, a completely different world. There are no check-ins, no weekly facilitated staff meetings, in fact no interactive decision making processes at all. After looking carefully around the restaurant I have not seen a talking stick and not once have I heard "so what I hear you saying is........."

It's also been quite a while since anyone yelled at me while I was working. After my three day honeymoon period had ended, the owner came in one evening while I was peeling carrots into the carbage can (and also in equal amounts onto the floor). "Clean up the fuckin' floor Simon, it looks like Denny's in here."

And that was just the beginning.

At first I got defensive, making excuses about why I hadn't done this or that, but now I just stand there and take it. See my boss (who is actually a really nice guy most of the time) is one of those people who just needs to yell at people now and then, thinking that it will keep them on their toes and work harder. While this may be the case for a small business owner such as himself, the yelling sessions rarely have anything to do with when I do something wrong (which is quite often).

The folks at the restaurant have been really patient with me. They have had to teach me everything. How to hold a knife. How to stand so you don't fuck up your back. And a thousand little tricks for cutting onions, peeling potatoes, pitting cherries and cooking pasta to perfection. Now I finally feel like I'm an asset and not a liability. I start my shift, the sous chef gives me a list of tasks, and I spend the next 8-10 hours slicing and dicing away with very little supervision.

I like this work. I like the physical aspect of it and I love the fact that food is still the focus of my livelihood. I think I may want to own a restaurant or catering company one day. Just need to figure out some shortcuts to learn the skills to make this happen.

More on Portland in future blogs, but this afternoon I went to my favorite cafe (Stumptown) and overheard one nerd hipster barista ask the other nerd hipster barista (with a mustache).

"Is speed-metal one or two words "(I hyphenated it cause i don't know the answer).

"God that's a good question" he replied.

And then there was short silence as they both mulled it over, yearning to go home and look it up on the internets.

Farmer Simon

The long version volume 2: Thumbs up

After three fun filled days in Rio, we took off for Ilha Grande which is on the stretch between Rio and Sao Paolo known as Costa Verde. It was Christmas Eve and our only reminder of the holiday season was a bizarre TV show we watched in the evening. Brooke was sick and after coming back from a hike I found her in the room, watching the tube. The title of the show was something like the ‘Philanthropic Bikini Patrol’ and consisted of five very attractive and buxom ladies decked out in red bikinis and Santa hats. They were also accompanied by an unattractive midget who was also wearing the special red attire. The Bikini Patrol was patrolling, as patrols usually do, through some not so good neighborhoods in Sao Paolo and bestowing good will on the local residents.

The first group of guys they encountered appeared to be homeless and were given wine and cake by the swimsuit models. It was expensive wine and from what little Portuguese I knew at the time the announcer seemed to be making fun of the fact that they had never drunk wine before and didn’t really appreciate how nice it was.

The merry band of bikinis then traveled onward and found an encampment in the street. Basically a tarp pulled over some scraps of wood. Some poor guy was pulled out and then given an instant makeover on live TV. The leader of the posse proceeded to squirt hair gel onto the top of his head and run a comb through his matted locks. They then pulled off his shirt and pants and began spraying deodorant in his armpits, his old clothes were replaced with brand new ones which were much too big for him. He now looked like some poor confused homeless guy in oversized clothes with far too much product in his hair.

After also loading him up with cake and wine some of the patrol made motions like they were going to kiss him, but then pulled away at the last moment in disgust. What teases! Now it became apparent why there was a midget in the group as she was then pushed to the front of the group so she could give the homeless guy a big kiss on the cheek. And then they were on their way again, ready to do more good deeds. I suppose that's one solution to the homeless problem.

The next day I hiked along the coast and along the way several groups of people warned me that there was a snake up ahead. I was able to gauge that it was green, it was by the side of the path and it was right before a blue house. As I got close to the house I started staring at the ground and every vine, tree root and branch looked like a snake. A leaf fell on the ground and I almost peed my shorts. I finally got so nervous that I made a quick u-turn and calmed myself over coffee and ice cream back in town. I had no idea there were so many fuckin’ snakes in this country.

After a couple of rain filled days on the island we headed back to the mainland and onward to Paraty, which was a couple of hours away by bus. Paraty is a beautiful coastal town with cobblestone streets and lots of restored colonial buildings. Here it is.

The highlight of our stay in Paraty was not the beautiful waterfall we saw, the world famous puppet show we watched or almost being killed every five minutes trying to ride my rented bike to a neighboring town. It was the black eye I got from my travel chum. One night we got back to our room and there were hundreds of mosquitoes waiting for us. Luckily these were the slow kind and were pretty easy to kill. After massacring most of them, Brooke tried to jokingly kill one on my back. She missed and ended up hitting me right in the eye. I almost fell over from the pain and could not open it. I stumbled into bed and the next morning I had a real shiner. To think that I had been such a good friend to Brooke while she was sick and this was how I was repaid.

Portuguese for Dummies

I think I made a pretty decent effort to learn Portuguese. I had a couple of lessons before the trip and I tried to study at least fifteen minutes every day. In a few weeks I was at the point where I could comfortably ask basic questions and do Brazilian Sodoku puzzles, but in two months I never really got much beyond that. Compared to Spanish, Portuguese is really hard to understand and the words all seem to blur together. I really did try to talk to people, but after someone asks you where you're from and you ask them to repeat it four times, there’s not much chance of a conversation happening. I think if you speak a lot of Spanish, you can learn Portuguese pretty easily, but if you’re like me and just know a little you end up being muddled and confused. The languages are so similar that most of the time I didn’t know which one I was speaking.

Portuguese is a beautiful language to listen to, but hearing the Brazilians pronounce English words was really comical. I was walking around Olinda (a town in Northern Brazil) one night with my Brazilian friend Rosangela (pronounced Hosangela) and we stopped for a beer. ‘Peachy stoppy’ she said and the other Brazilian guy we were with nodded in agreement. ‘Peachy stoppy’. I had no clue what they were talking about, but after inquiring further I discovered that we were all in the middle of having a pit stop. Then a few days later I heard another Brazilian talking about Bradgie Peachy. Surely you know about Bradgie Peachy. He is a famous American movie star and goes out with Angelina Jolie. They are very happy together.

So here are a few basic pronunciation rules if you want to speak Portuguese.

T sometimes has a CH sound. Boa noite (good night) is pronounced boa noich.

R has an H sound. Rio is pronounced Hio.

D sometimes has a J sound. Boa tarde (good afternoon) is pronounced boa Tarj.

And a lot of words that end in consonants seem to have an ‘ee’ sound added on.

Here are a few examples

Banana Spleechy - Banana Split

Peeky Neeky - Picnic

Milky shaky - Milkshake

Ketchy Shoopy - Ketchup

Fas chee Fuji - Fast Food

Pinky Floy jee - Pink Floyd

Hock and Holl - Rock and roll

Heggae - Reggae

Hippy Hoppy - Hip hop

And so on…………………

So even though I never really learned that much Portuguese and undid all of my Spanish, I ended up being saved by my thumb. You see in Brazil all you have to do when you see someone on the street is stick out your thumb and ask the question ‘Tudo bem’ (all well?) and all your communication problems will be instantly solved. This is no exaggeration. Throughout my trip whenever I would stick out my thumb I would be instantly greeted with a huge smile and the prompt response of ‘tudo bom’ (all good). Even the grumpiest frowns would turn into smiles at the sight of my outstretched thumb.

Here’s Brooke and our surf teacher, Leandro executing two perfect thumbs up. Note Brooke’s beautiful technique even while clasping a longboard.

And here’s another one, performed while also cradling an ice cold beer.

I did this move just once as it’s really only supposed to be used on special occasions. Try not to focus too much on my bulging surf muscles and look at this beautiful double thumbs up.

A round of smiles please bartender. Oh and a Caipirinha for me. Don’t know what that is? Well stay tuned.

The long version volume 1: Rio De Janeiro

On December 20, 2005 I went to Brazil with my friend Brooke and flew to New York to meet her the day before. The next morning when we left it was twenty degrees and thousands of transit workers were striking for luxuries like health care and job security. It was the first day of the transit strike and millions of people were trying to make it to work on time. We were trying to make it to paradise.

Now I am all in favor of workers’ rights and the environment and all that business, but not when it affects my ability to buy whatever the hell I like for the lowest possible cost and do whatever I want with the least possible hassle. On Tuesday morning these crazy strikers were severely affecting my ability to get to the airport. The car service we booked flaked on us and Brooke had to call one of her friends to take us for fifty bucks. What if we never got to Brazil and just froze our asses off in Brooklyn all winter? No one would ever see our matching wax jobs.

The car service finally showed up half an hour late and as we pulled into our terminal at JFK I once again affirmed my support of the workers and their right to strike..

I am in solidarity with you brothers and sisters!! And Fuck you Bloomberg you fascist twat!!

We finally got into Rio 14 hours later where we would be staying with Brooke’s ex-boyfriend Dave, who had been working in Rio for the last year as a freelance journalist. I slept on the most uncomfortable bed you could imagine, which felt like a few chairs pushed together. Some of the other trip participants, however, were lucky enough to share a comfy bed with our host.

The next morning we woke up late and spent the day sightseeing. First it was Sugarloaf Mountain for spectacular views of the city and then later on we wandered around downtown before ending up in an area called Lapa to hear some samba music. Now I have been a fan of Brazilian music for a while, but hearing it live is something else. It gets in your joints like some kind of musical arthritis. As I was listening to the music, two questions crossed my mind: how did these people invent such great music and secondly why can everyone in this place from teenagers to senior citizens dance so much better than me.

Is it genetics that makes the Brazilians who they are or are they just products of a vibrant culture? Quite an interesting question don’t you think? We will be exploring some of the biological aspects of this nature vs. nurture debate later on in the blog, but watching the crowd was certainly as enjoyable as the music.

The next day we took a bus about half an hour away from Rio to a nearby national park, Tijuca. We were only a few miles from a city of almost ten million and yet we were in the middle of the jungle. All the jungly bits you could ever want were there; bird noises, vines, waterfalls, and dense greenery everywhere. In fact, after we climbed to the peak of one of the mountains we came across the jungliest bit of all.

Brooke, who was walking in front of me, all of a sudden jumped back and shouted, “snake!” And there it was coiled in the middle of the path, partly camouflaged underneath leaves and twigs. As later internet research taught us, it was a pit viper. It’s not the most poisonous snake, but it causes more fatalities than any other in South America. We had to bushwhack to go round it, but it really scared me how close we came to stepping on what we also learned has a ‘highly irritable disposition’. When I look back at the bravery and cool demeanor I showed throughout the whole incident I can only think about how lucky Brooke was to have such a calm and collected travel partner.

After the jungle adventure and the muscle sores I acquired on the trek, there was no more fitting activity than to partake in a little beach action the following day. We were staying in Ipanema and the beach was just a block away. I’m not such a beach person, but this was a treat. Ipanema is a serious hive of activity. Just look at this picture, for example.

Even if you are only a fraction as pervy as me, you could easily spend all day gaping at the wondrous sights on the beach. It seems that the dental floss bikini is in fashion this year again in Brazil, for something like the 40^th year in a row.

After looking around for a while I remarked to my friends that I had never seen so many guy friendly bodies. You know, really skinny, beautifully tanned, a well pronounced bottom and perfectly spherical 36DDs engaged in a continual fight with their surrounding fabric.

Do you get the picture? I was too shy to take one myself.

I was shocked to discover later on that a lot of these boobs are fake, but unless there is some new ass enhancement surgery I don’t know about, the bums are all real and right there in 3-D for your viewing pleasure.

Later on in the trip a couple of Norwegian friends and I made up a game called true or false. It’s really easy to play. You just lie on the beach tanning and sipping fresh coconut milk, and when a girl walks by you look at her boobies and shout out TRUE or FALSE. It’s great because even if they happen to speak English they have no idea what you are talking about.

I promise there will be no more crude sexist observations about ladies’ bodies in this blog, but some people have been asking me about this.

A few years ago the New York Times published an article about increasing rates of obesity in Brazil accompanied by a less than flattering photo of some beachgoers. The article caused uproar in a country which takes extreme pride in baring their beautiful bodies and even more so when it was discovered that the fatty bum bums in the picture were all from Europe. One woman from Czechoslovakia was planning on suing the New York Times when she got back from her sun soaked adventure in Brazil.

The Short Version.

So here’s the short version. After reading about how bad airplane travel is for global warming I feel a little bad about this map. Since my last blog i have been to England, Italy, back to San Francisco, New York, Brazil, Bolivia, back to SF and then back to England.

The long version will be posted up here in the next couple of weeks. Just to whet your appetite, though, here are some upcoming morsels.

• How farmer Simon became surfer Simon.
• A picture of the $1.25 haircut I got in Bolivia.
• A run-in with a poisonous snake in Rio.
• My failed attempt at smuggling coca leaves into Miami.

Paying members also get to read about all the hot Brazilian girls I shagged and explicit descriptions of my stomach problems.

I also started a music blog

Farmer Simon

Goodbye farm bling. Hello other bling.

I am now departed from Vermont and am essentially going to be on vacation for the next three or four months.

Finally something I can really sink my teeth into.

And now that I have high speed internet most of the time, it now takes me four hours to do nothing each morning instead of ten minutes when I get up and turn on my computer.

I am making real progress in my search for a meaningful vacation. I mean vocation.

So I left the farm two weeks ago just as the first snow of the year began to fall in East Thetford. As I write this entry I am now sitting in my friend Skip’s house in Santa Cruz, after driving 3,646 miles across country. My piece of shit car continues to confound its’ critics. I had to have two tires replaced, but other than the second sun visor falling off there were no major problems. It is quite hard, however, to drive all day using your hand as a makeshift visor.

So I guess I could fill this blog with insightful remarks about my drive across country and the pithy observations I made, but that would be boring. Do you really want to read about how strip malls have replaced the town square as the centre of all human activity? Do you really want to read about the obesity crisis sweeping the middle of our country? Do you really want to read about the terrible state of dental affairs in West Virginia or Wyoming? Well actually that last one might be interesting, for as someone who grew up under the care of the British National Health Service it felt great to have the best set of pearly yellows in town for once.

Instead here is my top ten list.

Ten memorable things about my trip across country.

1. A meal I had at Bob Evans in Ohio.
2. Riding in critical mass through downtown Manhattan with my friends B train and Nicole.
3. Riding past the house where I grew up in Evanston, Illinois and still seeing my name etched in concrete in front (I guess I was also the one who wrote ‘The Cure’ in florid letters right next to it).
4. Riding my bike along the river in Morgantown, West Virginia
5. Being accosted by a nutcase Christian holding a scrumpled up piece of poo paper outside the toilet in a rest area in Nevada. “Have you heard the news………….
6. Staying at my friend Dori’s house in Chicago. All of her pets are rescued from abusive situations and for three days I got to live in a pet version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
7. Getting to wear my new matching sweat pants and top every day.
8. Seeing two coyotes that live in a cemetery in the middle of Chicago.
9. 40 part motet. This is an exhibit i saw at the MOMA in New York. The artist arranged forty speakers in a circle. Each of the speakers recorded a different voice in a forty-part choral piece from the sixteenth century. I wandered around for thirty minutes sticking my ear to each of the speakers.
   
10. Have i already mentioned my new leisure wear? Fashion and Function.
    

A blog at the crossroads.

Now that I have left the farm I find myself torn as to whether or not to continue this blog. I guess we could say that the blog is at a crossroads.

Do I take the road less traveled or the one well trod?

If I stop I may disappoint the tens of devoted readers who anxiously check the refresh buttons on their browsers all day to see if a new post is up. But if I continue, I may be further contributing to the immense amount of mediocre and trivial content on the internets. I originally started this blog to let urbanites know more about farming, but now I am one of them. And I haven’t really talked that much about farming anyway, it’s mostly been a venue for me to vent my frustrations. What to do, I just don’t know. Let think for a little bit.

Ah fuck it, we must continue and in a few months if the content on this blog is completely boring at least there’ll be pictures of hot babes on the beach in Rio for you to look at.

So now we've got that out of the way, how about taking a little visit to that culinary cubbyhole known as recipe corner. In the coming weeks we will also be debuting a new column called ‘Ask a British dude’. This next recipe is inspired by my friend Carrie. I couldn’t find the original recipe she sent me a few years ago, but I think I have replicated it pretty well. And don’t forget to send in any interesting recipes you have. You could be featured in the next ‘corner’.

Recipe Corner #2: Grilled Mice and Avocado salad.

This is a nice salad to serve on a warm summer day washed down with a cool glass of freshly squeezed lemonade.

Dressing ingredients:

1/3 cup minced shallots
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 small garlic clove, pressed
1/2 cup olive oil

Preparation:

Whisk shallots, vinegar, mustard and garlic in small bowl to blend. Gradually whisk in olive oil. Dress right before serving.

Salad ingredients:

2 cups mesquite smoke chips, soaked in water 30 minutes, drained
4 small mice

9 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup orange juice
3 tablespoons fresh lime juice
1 tablespoon minced seeded jalapeño chili
1 tablespoon finely grated lime peel
1 1/2 teaspoons finely grated orange peel

2 avocados, halved, pitted, peeled, cut into 1/2-inch pieces

3 large tomatoes, sliced

10 cups mixed baby greens

Preparation:

Prepare barbecue (medium-high heat). Place smoke chips in 8 x 6-inch foil packet with open top. Set atop coals 5 minutes before grilling mice. Bring large pot of salted water to boil. Blanch mice in boiling water (1-2 min). Transfer mice to work surface. Remove fur with potato peeler.

Arrange mice, belly side up, on grill. Cover; grill 4 minutes. Turn mice over and grill until just cooked through, about 3 minutes. Remove from heat. Cut into ½ inch wide strips

Whisk oil and next 6 ingredients in medium bowl to blend. Season with salt and pepper (can be made 1 day ahead). Rewhisk dressing before continuing.

Add avocados, tomatoes and mice in bowl. Pour 1/2 cup dressing over; toss. Season with salt and pepper.

Toss greens in another large bowl with enough remaining dressing to coat.

Divide greens among plates. Spoon mouse mixture atop greens and serve.

Serves 4.

Farmer Simon