Desperately Seeking Salem

Oh, Baby.

When I see you laid out on that puffy red furniture, your back pressed into that quilted velour couch, your neck bent towards a plate of pot stickers, my mind races back to that summer of 2002 when we spent our days rising out of bed only to eat  and shower and drink and prepare for sleep again.

But then I look around a little bit and it strikes me that the couches are just a ruse to make me forget that I haven’t eaten in a real Chinese restaurant — not a hole-in-the-wall noodle joint, which I have frequented often — but a real, serve-you-tea-before-you-ask, Chef-shows-up-at-the-table-after-dinner, face framed by fans and wall hangings, these-people-are-all-really-Chinese kind of Chinese restaurant, in about 12 years.

You know, the kind of restaurants that existed through the 1980s in towns all across America until a spate of China Kings and China Express and Shanghai China and Ming Buffets replaced all of the finery with takeout boxes, packets of duck sauce, universally similar lo mein, and tables that can be wiped down with the sleeve of your shirt.

I remember three such restaurants from my childhood. The best of them was the Tiki Tavern in Park City, in the Lancaster County, PA, shopping mall. It heralded our arrival with a five-foot-high golden Buddha statue and a bridge spanned over a stream that ran through the restaurant.

The Tiki Tavern took a hike in the early 1990s.

The 14 ft. Buddha statue at Kwan’s in Salem should be the first sign that the restaurant hasn’t been redecorated since the first big wave of small city Chinese restaurants a few decades back.

Thank god for that.

We weren’t terribly impressed with the cuisine at Kwan’s, which frequently wins Best Chinese in Salem’s annual best-of polls. The pot stickers looked like they had been stamped under someone’s foot, the noodle dishes were somewhat tasteless (no MSG!).

But oh, to have a place nearby that so completely takes you to another world! Not to China, per se, but to a dingy back alley of an American China town restaurant, the door leading into a smoky parlour filled with dubious characters, the guy in the hat, the one at the end of the bar who says he’s a businessman but has no business cards.

Really, someone needs to hold some meetings at Kwan’s. Where’s a hard-boiled detective fiction club when you need one. All the groups I have joined are meeting in places like Roth’s supermarket or in interchangeable sports bars downtown.

Yawn.

I’ve really taken to foraging and fruit-picking since moving to Salem and have been waiting patiently for a chance to plunder some really overgrown, menacing blackberry bushes.

These bushes are EVERYWHERE. On the side of the road, lurking in the ditches, hanging down from the trees they are strangling. But we decided to head to Willamette Mission State Park, home to its share of blackberry-edged walking paths with bushes so full that birds and men alike cannot strip them of all of their bounty.

They are the bitchy ex-girlfriends of invasive species.

Now that are longish-term visitors Jeff and Foy from Iowa (near the Cottonwood at Willamette Mission) are here, we’ve got a team of produce pickers as well as happy house guests.

Adam, armed with the best protective device among us (a cardboard berry flat), discovered the best possible approach to picking. He simply lays the flat over a cheeky bramble that is obscuring a particularly large clump and goes to town.

I was less lucky. And kind of dumb, because I wore a long, flowy skirt and frequently got caught in the brambles. Indeed, if ever I gave up on a particular bush, it wasn’t because of lack of berries, it was because that bush had just hurt me too many times. Like a jilted lover, I finally got it and moved on.

Check out those scratches on Jeff’s hands. Actually, they aren’t from thorny blackberries, but from his jungle cat, Zeus, whom he brought back from Panama.

Jeff and Foy were champion pickers, and in the end, the four of us yielded about 12 pounds of blackberries in about an hour. The box sagged with the weight of them.

These berries are dark and shiny as Obsidian, so plump and full of juice that they sometimes exploded with ripeness as we pulled them off the bush. By the time we got them home, they were already falling apart.

Adam says they taste draconian.

Ten pounds of ripe and quickly deteriorating berries, and two for our neighbors, means a necessarily speedy processing time.  I would have liked to fall down off my feet and read a book after the haul, we set to turning them into things. First on the docket, blackberry pie.

Now that’s a pie that sings — compensation enough for so much torturous picking.

Oh, you adorable Oregonians with your corn festivals, and your heaping mounds of corn at E.Z. Orchards, and your hand-bagged corn at the Saturday market, and God forbid, your Fred Meyer corn.

I fear you don’t really know what good corn tastes like. If you did, why would you keep coming to our door and offering us bags of it, lifting it to your chest as if it were Frankincense and myrrh, to see if these treasured kernels meet the approval of one perpetually hungry Iowan and his East Coast wife?

There are many areas where Oregon’s bounty kicks the butt of other states — see fungi, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, hazelnuts, and peaches — but corn is not one of them. Say what you will about Iowa’s monoculture of corn, they know how to do it right, and Iowa farmers produce the most sublime ears I have ever had.

I have scaled no similar Mattercorn in Oregon in my quest to replicate the Iowa corn experience.  Until recently, I haven’t found any corn that is so good you can make an entire meal out of it. I’m talking plump, full kernels, tightly packed, slightly sweet, firm to the tooth (al dente if you will), laid out in deliriously cute, non-uniformly straight rows.

Corn you are happy to get all over your face.

But then my landlord came by with a bag of four ears. That’s what kind of neighborhood we live in. We keep sharing the good fortune of our land with each other.

Keith shows up in his plaid shirt carrying a bag of corn and hands it to me as if he is proffering some jewels fit for the queen. And he wants to know: Is this corn any good?

Well, it already is good because it’s his favorite corn and has been for many years. He’ll drive the whole way to Schlechter’s Farms to pick up enough for the micro-hood.

The verdict: Not Iowa good, but the best I’ve had in the West.

We made a meal out of it.