Native Bowl

I was up in Portland this weekend for a class so I decided to take advantage of some of the great food that city has to offer. I was near the Mississippi Marketplace food cart pod so I decided to stop by one of my favorite carts - Native Bowl.

First let me tell you a little bit about Mississippi Marketplace. The setup is fantastic - there are ten different carts located there and plenty of (covered!) seating. They are also located right next to a beer pub called Prost! which has heated outdoor seating and will let you sit there and eat your food cart food as long as you purchase a drink - a fantastic arrangement if you ask me, and one I would have taken advantage of if I wasn't in a hurry to get home this weekend! Another plus for people like me who don't live in Portland and have to travel there is that parking has never been an issue there - there has always been a ton of available street parking right around the corner.

But now let me tell you about Native Bowl. I love the bowl concept - grains, proteins, veggies, and sauces all mixed together? It's hard to go wrong. Native Bowl offers five different bowls named after different streets in town: Broadway, Alberta, Hollywood, Couch and Mississippi, with various sauces and veggies and either tofu or soy curls.

I usually get the Mississippi Bowl because I'm a sucker for BBQ sauce and soy curls, but this time I decided to branch out a little bit and try something different so I went with the Broadway Bowl. It's a combination of jasmine rice, garlic tofu, ginger peanut sauce, red cabbage and carrots topped with scallions and sesame seeds. I think it was nearly perfect except several of the cabbage shreds were on the large side and kind of awkward to eat. Other than that I have no complaints - the sauce was delicious, the tofu didn't have any sort of gross squishy texture and the cabbage and scallions give it a nice freshness.

I lied a little when I said I branched out, because I also ordered a Mississippi Bowl to take home with me (hey - it's far and I don't get to go often, I need to make the most of it!). The food is of course best when it is freshly made, but I think it kept well until lunch the next day. I love this bowl - it has homemade (vegan) ranch sauce plus two kind of BBQ sauce and soy curls topped with coleslaw and more scallions. Just like the Broadway Bowl, the cabbage in the coleslaw and the scallions give it a nice crunch and freshness which goes well with the creaminess of the ranch and the tangy taste of the BBQ sauce.


  I'm kind of in love with the food cart trend and Native Bowl is definitely one of my favorites.

Food Adventures in Portland

Somehow I ended up with some extra vacation time that I needed to take this year, so my friend Allison came down from Seattle to visit and I took an extended weekend. This is us - not from this weekend (thankfully!) but from the summer that we lived together when we accidentally dyed our hair (or part of it anyway) orange out of boredom. I think it took about 4 bottles of hair dye to correct for this adventure, and this is the only photo that survives of the accidental-orange.


Summer 2006

Anyway, she is moving to Astoria  in a few months, so we took a mini road trip up through Tillamook (mmm, cheese!) and stopped in Astoria so I could see her future home city! I hadn't ever been that far up on the Oregon coast - it's so beautiful there! We then looped around and headed over to Portland for the night.

Do you have any idea how much I love Portland? Because it is a lot. A lot, a lot, a lot. I never thought any city would beat out Seattle for me - but Portland managed to do that. I was especially excited to be there on a weekday because I really enjoy (ok, am obsessed with) the food cart scene and a lot of them are closed on the weekends or aren't open at convenient times. In case you didn't know, Portland has about a million food carts all around the city. You can read about them here: http://www.foodcartsportland.com/  In the end we didn't really end up going to too many of the carts, but more about that in a bit.

We took the Street Car up to Bridgeport Brewery for dinner. I'm not really a big beer drinker, but I'm starting to explore the world of beer a little and actually finding a few that I like. We split a sampler so that we could try a bunch of different ones. I didn't care for most of them, which I expected, but there were actually three different ones that I liked pretty well! Two of them were the seasonal beers - Nightcap and the Ebenezer, and the third was their ESB but I liked that the least of the three. The Nightcap was actually good enough to order a pint of but I wasn't able to finish it due to all of the delicious food I had consumed prior to its arrival.


Bridgeport Sampler

 Bridgeport is my favorite Portland brewery not because of the beer (which I obviously don't know much about) but beacuse I think they have the best food. I had the Vegan Bowl (the name does not do it justice, it is way more exciting than it sounds I promise). It's a bowl of quinoa with kale, red peppers, sweet potatoes, black beans, tofu, grated carrots, and probably some other things I am forgetting - but the very best part is the spicy cashew sauce they put on it. I have to figure out how to make something like that - it's amazing!



Bridgeport Vegan Bowl

We were out late and ended up unintentionally eating at food cart - Adam's Falafel or Gyros or something. The biggest downside to Portland? I can't seem to find anywhere the does late-night pizza delivery! But anyway, the Falafel Sandwich I had was pretty good, it had fresh cut french fries in it which I found a little strange but tasty. There was definitely too much garlic sauce on it though, so take note - if you ever find yourself at Adam's Something or Another on SW 3rd and SW Pine make sure to ask for less of the sauce.

My food highlight of the trip was Flavour Spot. I have been wanting to go there forever and ever but never seem to make it. I'm not sure why, because they have 3 locations so you'd think it would have been easy at some point. It's probably because my favorite Portland breakfast restaurant is a half block away and I end up in a tug of war in which Bijou Cafe always wins. But not this time! Flavour Spot is a waffle cart, but this particular waffle cart also makes vegan waffles, and they also serve them wrapped around vegan sausage! For those of you who could care less about vegan friendly option, they mostly serve regular old waffles with regular old meat choices. But that's not nearly as exciting. I was slightly concerned because a hand-held waffle sandwich just sounds messy - but they really pull it off. Instead of maple syrup they have a maple spread so it doesn't drip everywhere. I think it was one of the best vegan waffles I have had - my only complaint is that if you don't eat it fast enough the bottom gets a little soggy sitting in the foil. But that's not really much of a complaint.

Flavour Spot Vegan Waffle and Sausage Sandwich

I suppose we could have visited the food carts near PSU for lunch, but I decided that someone can't come visit Oregon and not try Cafe Yumm (there is one in Portland now, also near PSU), so we ended up there for lunch so that Allison could experince the joy that is Yumm Sauce. I don't really know what to say about this one except that it is delicious. I find it appalling that I brought my mom and sister here and neither of them ordered the bowls - that's just wrong.

Original Yumm Bowl

Well, enough rambling about food - more about Christmas time soon!

-C