Life in General

If You Are In the Lents Area

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Where Woodstock crosses Foster, right before you get to I205 there is a bakery. Bella’s Italian Bakery, a straight forward name. Bella’s? Where did that come from? In the words of the owner.

Michelle’s Nonna called all the girls in the family “Bella” – so Bella is all of us here working to bring you a little Italy. We are proud to be a woman-owned, women-led business.

We’ve been there three times now. Once for a “how is this place?” visit, a Saturday. It was also the first anniversary of their opening the place. Lucky us! Packed, delicious, a man passing out tiramisu after we’d eaten. It was jovial, people sharing their meals. And on the menu, we saw that every Sunday they served lasagna and on Thursdays pizza. It’s also a store, wines, milk, bread, pastas, and more to go. We were beyond happy with the pastries. They were enough to drive out there for. But I’m being unfair, they serve breakfast and lunch foods. Italian train station sandwichs anyone? Yes, you don’t need to go for just a (wonderfully done) coffee and snack. You can go for more.

Every day we bake focaccia, house bread, pepperoni rolls, and seasonal savory flatbreads as well as both traditional and modern pastries: almond cakes, berry tartines, lemon ciambella, sweet rolls, cannoli, ricotta cheesecake, assorted cookies, and sfogliatelle (weekends only). We also do rotating seasonal specials inspired by our farm fresh deliveries. Stop by and see what we’re baking today!

Their Menu

So we went back. For lasagna. As good as what we’d had earlier.

And then last night, for pizza. A perfect Margarita Piazza. How often do you get a perfect pizza? OK, there’s lots of pizza in Portland. We’ll go back. Again and again. Because the place is so damn good.

So if you want to feel like you’re in Italy, go here.

Sourdough Starter

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Water, flour, salt. That is all it takes from you to have a loaf of bread. There are also microorganisms. From wheat, air, or your skin, one or more of them have wild yeast and lactobacilli. Or maybe all of them have both of them. They do the big work of transforming a glop of water and flour into what I’ll be eating in a couple of hours.

First Loaf #bakewithjack

I learned about how to do this from #bakewithjack. He, Jack, has a new bit on baking each Thursday. A bunch of them have been on sourdough. Including how to make a starter, what you see in the jar. He specifies the wholemeal rye as the source flour to use. But really, any flour will do. That video was my, ahem, starter in sourdough baking. His method is pretty fool-proof and it doesn’t waste anything – the cut the starter in half, pour the rest down the drain. That always put me off. Feeding a starter, throwing away half? What a waste! There’s another method also from Mike Greenfield about just eating the starter. That’s what scallion pancakes are for. But I prefer Jack’s method unless I’m hungry.

To get started you can watch Beginners Sourdough Loaf, Start to Finish. That covers everything. You’re referred to the “how to make starter” video. But everything else is shown in that video.

I’m now going through the pain of waiting for the loaf to cool so I can eat it. It’s just a couple of hours. I think I’ll watch 15 Mistakes Most Beginners Make. It’s from Mike Greenfield’s Pro Home Cooks. He has scads of videos on cooking. Great stuff.

Or maybe read about sourdough on Wikipedia. Another rabbit hole to go down into.

What You Want to Eat

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Confession time. I’ll go to an Indian restaurant and look at the menu. Aloo Mutter? Palak Peneer? Malai Kofti? Ask me to tell you in English what they are and you’ll get a guess. It doesn’t really matter if I know what I’m ordering, Indian food is by and large great stuff to eat. It helps that I’m an omnivore and like it all. And If I thought I was ordering potatoes and get spinach instead, well that’s OK.

But what if what you ordered isn’t what you expect when you get it? Like you order an Impossible Burger and they serve a beef pattie instead? Or you order a burger with blue cheese and it is nowhere to be found? OK, the simple answer is pointing this out to the server. But wait, had I ordered what I thought I had? It was loud. I pointed. Maybe they brought what they thought I’d ordered.

I’m perplexed. Did I get what I’d imagined or what I asked for?

2019 December 1

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What happened to November? It was a month of doing nothing. I cannot even take credit for resting up. I did do Duolingo daily. In contrast to everything else, I do on a daily basis. I didn’t even drink coffee every day.

Welcome to December!

While I worked December was a month of hard freezes – no changes. It was a month of people squeezing in vacation time before they lost it at the end of the year.

Now I take the month to look at what I’ve done, the big review. I’ll tell you about in on January 1.