The best bagels in Portland, if I do say so myself.
When people here in Portland find out that we moved here from New York, the conversation invariably works its way around to bagels. “How do you like the bagels in Portland?” they want to know. “Who do you think makes the best bagels here?”
We’re under budget this week, coming in at $109.18 total, but I spent a healthy chunk of food money this week doing something that was a regular part of my life before this experiment started, and it felt weird and wasteful enough that I’m going to need to make a change going forward.
Jul 15
Baby greens and baby zucchini from our garden. We like 'em young.
I’m kind of obsessed with my vegetable garden. I walk through it every chance I get, peeking through the leaves to see how the zucchini are coming along, propping up the cucumber vines and cooing at the teeny little cucumbers now emerging, encouraging the okra to grow even though the odds are against them here in Oregon. I love knowing that with a little bit of effort I can feed my family fresh, organic vegetables straight from our garden. And the more the garden produces, the lower our food bill goes. We’re not fancy-cheese eaters. (In fact, we don’t eat much cheese at all. Plain yogurt, and milk for coffee and tea are pretty much the extent of our dairy consumption, unless there’s the occasional pizza involved.) The bulk of our grocery money goes for organic produce. A non-negotiable for us, particularly since we’re feeding a child. But with the garden there’s also the benefit of knowing EXACTLY where our food came from.
You know what I really like about moving into a new house (besides the obvious stuff, like, well…the new house)? Seeing what bulbs come up in the spring, planted by the previous owner. We moved to Portland in September 2007, leaving behind our Brooklyn garden full of irises, tulips, lilies, narcissus, and grape hyacinth –all of which had been planted by the previous owner or spread there on their own. Spring 2008 rolled around, and it was time to see what would pop up in the yard of our Portland house. There were some tulips, some daffodils, and some weird (but oddly familiar) stuff with thick green stems that would send off a center stalk but never quite flower. This spring the mystery non-flowering bulbs returned–many more of them than the three or so we had last year. A couple days ago, after staring at them for weeks, I finally realized what they were. Leeks. Volunteer leeks, scapes and all. Knowing the previous owners, I seriously doubt they planted leeks. They were strictly ornamental gardeners. So how the hell did the leeks get there?
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