#144 - port traits: intro.

oh portland, oregon. why must you tempt me so? for years now, i've been hearing about how awesome you are from friends who live there, reading about your bounty of food carts, dreaming of the benefits of your progressive transit system. at one point a few years back, i was even set on moving to you. you're really far from the east coast though, so i never made the plunge & still have yet to, but i'm still young, so you're still on my short list of "places to eventually settle down." sit tight.

as i mentioned a few weeks back, one of my childhood friends (mr chris dorin) came to visit me from portland & when he came, he brought a viking's load of portland-area vegan snacks along for me to sample. in honor of these snacks & my faraway outsider obsession with portland, over the next week or so i'll be bringing you a four-part series devoted to the snacks & "the city of roses." in it, i'll be peppering you with all sorts of knowledge about the city, mostly based on stuff i've heard & things i've discovered via the power of the google & partially based on stuff i made up. it'll be like a mini, slightly-fictional travel guide from someone who has only visited the city for a few hours in the early part of last decade. TOTALLY professional.

let's start with the basics...portland was incorporated back in 1851, a few years after a couple of dudes were all "with these here rivers, this place will make but a fine port." these days, it's home to almost 600K mostly crunchy hippie types & is quite possibly the most progressive city in the nation. check this out: their mayor's name is...get this...sam adams! also, he looks like he should be hosting a cooking show & is totally gay! in fact, he's so gay that he was the first openly gay mayor of a major u.s. city. take that conservative jerkfaces! unfortunately for him, this week a bunch of haters launched a second recall attempt against him in response to him lying about an affair he had with an eighteen-year old back in 05. oh those gays with their agendas. he probably just needs religion. in fact, there are a lot of people in oregon who need religion, as it's the state with the most non-religious people in the country.

heathens aside, it's a purty city. all i remember of my time there (which consisted of a few hours that i had to kill before a flight out of seattle) is green leafiness. sure the skies might be grey a lot of the time from that overcast pacific northwest weather, but at least there are copious parks in the city & tall timbers up route 5 to escape to. i mean, check out this panoramic photo of the city that i found on wikipedia. if you don't look at that & want to have sex with portland, there's really no hope for you. you may be more of an "ominous building & tunnel streets" sort of urbanite & you're entitled to your opinion, but i think your opinion sucks.

from what i can tell, portland's got a lil something for everyone. if you care about basketball, you've got the portland trailblazers, who have made it to the playoffs most of the last few decades. if you're a foodie, you've got thousands of food carts sprinkled throughout the city. it makes nyc, with its quaint schnitzel trucks, look comical by comparison. as far as famous people who were born or reside there, if you're a indie rock nerd, you've got bands like the decemberists & the thermals & the shins. if old timey stuff is your game, you've got clark gable & mel blanc. for artsy types, there's miranda july & gus vant sant & todd haynes. anyway, like i've mentioned, i've spent less than a james cameron movies worth of time there but doesn't it sound awesome? maybe i'll have to find out first hand one day.

#144 - port traits: intro.
snack: black bean kettle chips & salpica mango peach salsa
drink: thomas kemper root beer



one of the snacks that mr dorin brought with him was a bag of black bean kettle chips, which he declared his favorite tortilla chips. while these aren't that exact bag, they're essentially the same damn thing. deal with it. they're made by a company based in salem (the oregon state capital) & since they're all oregonigal, they're into all-natural products & sustainability & all that hippie oregon stuff. absolutely no puppies or robots were harmed in the making of these chips.

since you have to pair tortilla chips with something & it's apparently salsa week here at eat!drink!snack!, i decided to pair the black bean chips with a jar of salpica mango peach salsa. salpica's based out of chicago, which doesn't go with the whole oregon theme at all, but i'm once again going to have to strongly urge that you suck it up & deal with it. it's not like i'm a paid journalist or something.

while i'm not prepared to declare the black bean kettle chips my favorite tortilla chips, i will say that they're ten times better than full-on corn chips. in addition to the black beans, they're made with some corn, sea salt, and garlic & onion powders...nothing but natural ingredients. they're anything but flashy but they're tasty nonetheless & have a nice, firm crunchy feel to them. also, since they're made with black beans, they have a positive impact on your poo.

as for the salsa, the revitalized & renovated bodega a block away from my apartment just started carrying the salpica line so i've been sampling them recently & out of those that i've tried, the mango peach one stands out as my favorite. its mixture of mango, peach & tomato make for a sweet salsa & that sweetness is the dominant taste. that's enough for me but if you're into spicy salsas, what they label as "medium" spiciness is actually "little to no" spiciness. it'll make you cry & not in a hip, jalapeno-induced way.

since i've been on a serious root beer kick lately, i'm having a bottle of thomas kemper root beer along with my chips & salsa. thomas kemper's brewed right in the northwest quadrant of portland by a company that's celebrating their twentieth anniversary this year. congrats to them. on the flip side, as of last year they have a distribution agreement with anheuser-busch inbev & i'm not quite sure how i feel about that. technically, they're in bed with the devil but if it helps them reach more people, i guess i can't fault them for that. regardless, at the moment, it's the only fault i can find with them & their tasty tasty root beer.

up until i tried the thomas kemper root beer, i'd declared that the maine root root beer was my favorite root beer. sorry maine root, but thomas kemper's root beer has knocked you from the top spot. this shit's the bomb. since i've given up the HFCS soda, i've been buying six packs of it to satiate my incurable lust for root beer. it's made with cane sugar in place of HFCS & the main ingredient that gives it its amazing flavor is honey. they have a buzzing bee on their website & label to drive home that point. it pours nicely into a glass & if you're as obsessed as i am with root beer or want to be obsessed but don't know how to make it happen, this root beer is your gateway brew...but you won't know until you try.