Return to Viking Soul

Although we'd been to the Good Food Here pod a few days ago with KD,

we wanted to try a savory lefse wrap rather than the sweet ones...

D Street Noshery - PDX 671, Fuego de Lotus & Bailey's

Our awesome lunch from one of Portland's food pods...

The D Street Noshery....

Let's take a look...

Good Food Here

Located just mere steps away from Slappy Cakes was this food pod...

KDB wanted to show us a few of his favorite food carts...

Cartopia

All that hiking at Mount Tabor and horsing around on the monkey bars and see saws made us hungry.

No, we did not go to Burgerville (this is the Hawthorne location) although we did go here three years ago.

Back in 2009, I vaguely remember seeing the Potato Champion cart. It was the only one (or maybe one of two or three) that was there. It stood out to me because it had trees, mountains, and a squirrel painted on it.

I thought this flyer was funny, the "Geek Olympathon"! That should be interesting. Seeing all of these wooden telephone poles plastered with flyers reminded me of a sketch in "Portlandia" where unseen people are angrily stapling over each other's flyers.

That episode was called "Flyer Wars"...

Cartlandia

The other night when we were with KDB, we passed by this food pod, located on SE 82nd.  We made a mental note to check it out...

It was a Sunday and we learned that most food carts and food pods aren't really open, but we wanted to try our luck...

Wicked Wienerz

So, here we were...drawn to the siren call of meat in tubular form...

The kids left on their charter bus at 3 pm. A few of us parents needed a little something for the road...

Bag o' fruit!

I'm going to backtrack here...

Robsessed's husband spied the fruit stand just a few steps away from the Museum...

Portland - Day 1 with photos

Okay, because I'm super lazy, I'm kind of recycling my original Portland posts, but this time with photos and slightly different commentary by yours truly. Why reinvent the wheel right? Well, I'll try to spice this up...

Hey now! We're in Portland, Oregon!!!

We spent the night before we left at Bert's bro's place in Aliso Viejo. Our flight wasn't a direct one from San Diego, but flew out from LAX. Hence the night at bro in law's. Man, the shuttle picked us up at the ungodly hour of 3:30 a.m.! We only got a few hours sleep that night. Our car rental was at an offsite place from the airport. The car we ended up getting was a dark reddish PT Cruiser, which was cool because I'd never been in one before. We also got to use my mini (and outmoded) iPod with the FM transmitter. For the most part, it worked, but it would get staticky (is that even a word?) from time to time. We arrived in Portland at 9:30 and got our rental at 11'ish. Luckily, we were able to drop off our luggage at the hotel even though we couldn't officially check in yet (since there were no available rooms until after 3 pm).

Here's a freeway shot:
Man, the scenery is so different here! It's so green and lush, unlike airid Southern Ca with deserts and palm trees and dead shrubs...
Look closely...can you see the "Made in Oregon" sign? It looks nicer at night when it's lit up but my (future) night shots of it came out rather crappily.

Okay, after the luggage drop off. We headed out to Beaverton. Heh, heh, she said BEAVER.

WTF is there in Beaverton you ask? Well, besides being the headquarters of NIKE (Uh, like I care or wear their products), it is also one of the locations of Uwajimaya, a huge Seattle based Asian supermarket. When we were in Seattle several years ago, we made sure to eat and shop for snacks at Uwajimaya in the International District. Ironically, we were steeling ourselves for cold ass weather and rain and all. However, it was actually quite pleasant. Not too cold or nipular, but comfortable to go out without a heavy jacket or anything. The sun was also out and there was no sign of rain anywhere!

Lunch was at the Japanese deli/take-out sections of the market. Then we went snack/grocery shopping. Yes, snacks galore! We got shrimp chips, wasabi peas, sweet rice crackers, some top ramen (for breakfast), mini mandarin oranges, bananas, and some other stuff I can't remember because it's now nearly two weeks later. Here are the sodas I chose for our lunch. Nice and sugary these are. I also got two Spam musubis, although only one is pictured below. The musubis were only $1.50!!! Not bad!

There was a hot food section for the takeout place in the supermarket. Since Bert was on his 'no meat' (and no chocolate or rice either) kick, he got the yakisoba noodles with vegetables.

For TC, I got her some fried shrimp with some fried bean sprout and vegetable fritter thing. It reminded me of ukoy (the Filipino version of fried shrimp/vegetable patty). It came with rice, a slice of pickled vegetable, which she took one bite of and promptly spat. It was that good. The green thing is some plastic decorative fake grass thingy.

I got the soba noodles salad. It came with sliced fish cake, soy sauce, seaweed, egg omelette strips, sliced cucumber and one of the ukoy like vegetable patties. I wanted to eat noodles for some reason and also wanted to share it with Bert since I wasn't sure if his noodles and vegetables would be enough for him.

Pig that I am, I also ordered the Portugues sausage with eggs and rice. TC and I shared this and we took the leftovers back to the hotel, intending to eat the rest for breakfast the next day. Oh yeah, I also bought this pre-cooked and packaged white rice at the supermarket so we would eat that for breakfast with Vienna Sausage (don't hate!) and scrambled eggs. This was pretty good - the sausage was kind of small and didn't taste smoky enough though. It kind of looked like Chinese sausage from afar, but it did taste like Portuguese sausage.

There were also these Geoduck clams in the seafood area. Very phallic looking. I remember going to Ranch 99 last summer with TC and my sister's boys. We were poking these geoducks with the tongs and making water squirt out of it! Spouting water from a penile appendage is always good for a larf...

Our hotel was just a few blocks away from the world's famous Powell's Books and a few of the famous food carts in Portland. This book store is huuuuuge! It's as big as one whole city block. You need a map to get around in there. Each room is color coded. They also mix new books with used books. You could get lost in here. We spent about an hour just browsing around and didn't even hit the upper levels. We figured we could always come back since it was close by.

Some wierd sculpture across the street from Powell's. Those thin brushlike strands actually moved!

The Harry Potter section. Our daughter is totally into the Potter books. Right now, she's rereading "The Mysterious Benedict Society", which is not a Harry Potter book. She's also into Meg Cabot's "Ally Finkle" series, anything to do with horses as well as dragons.

Our hotel was also a few blocks away from the food carts on SW 10th and Alder. Most of them were already closed by 6 pm. Across from Jake's restaurant, we noticed a few of the carts were still open. This one sold hot dogs and crepes, so we decided to sample a couple of the crepe offereings. . Most of them were already closed for the day like one that sold Bosnian food, but we eyed a few of them for good eats later that week. This was the crepe cart. I can't even read what it says - the sign was so weathered and messed up.

The crepe was pretty big. I got one with turkey and cheese.

Okay, this is either my crepe or Bert's. Both had tomatoes, spinach and basil in them. The only different is that mine had meat and Bert's was just cheese and veggies.

The crepe itself was nice and springy. When you bit into it, it tore apart nicely. It wasn't overly soggy until the very end. I think when we ate this, it was closer to 7 pm. We sat out on a table on the sidewalk and watched very well dressed people walk by. Perhaps they were on their way to a show or something.

Here's my turkey and cheese crepe...aack, blurry.

A few blocks down from the food carts was this colorful mural:

The other side of the mural:

Me and the mural...I'm all Princed out in my purple...

That was day 1. Coming up, day 2!