Tandoor Bread

Back at the end of March, just before I left for Europe, Anestes over at PortlandFoodMap.com alerted me to a post on Kay Horton's blog about a guy who was baking Samoon bread in the  middle of the night in the community kitchen at the Portland Public Market House.   "We have just started carrying “Samoon” made right here in our Community Kitchen. A gentleman from Iraq, thirty years a baker, has started making them. He speaks almost no English, but his wonderful joy and energy speaks clearly. He works in the middle of the night, baking in his Tandoor oven, so as we walk into the Market in the morning we are greeted with heavenly smells. Samoon is a oblong shaped air pocket bread. We slice it the length, open it and fill it with any of our wrap ingredients."

Last tuesday I contacted Chris  from Kay Horton Foods at the Public Market trying to get in touch with the gentleman and to my surprise she called back later to say I could stop by later that night... as in 5AM! later.  Now I'm not an early riser, never have been and if I'm up at that hour it's because I haven't been to sleep yet. And I haven't been up that late for a long time, 1-2 ish is about it nowadays. I was more then a little worried about my ability to focus my camera, even thou it is an Canon EOS with auto focus. Usually any pictures I take before mid day are pretty bad.  So off to bed at 11:30 and up at 4:15 hoping for the best.

Five o'clock rap on the backdoor of the market and a 40-ish man in shorts, a tee shirt, flip flops and a baseball hat, turned backwards lets me in. It's Mr. Audai Naser.  He leads me down cellar goes right back to work as I take a quick look around for a place to put my gear down and introduce myself.  For the first half hour I mostly watch noticing how his hands move quickly in making the bread.

As I start to wake up I take a few pictures trying to get good exposures in the two main work areas.  Finally I try a little conversation. We stick with short simple words and a few hand signals and I find out that he comes from Karbala, which is south of Bagdad.  His father owned a bakery and he has been making bread for thirty years. He first moved to Atlanta in the fall of 2008 with his family, to get away from the fighting. Coming to Portland seventeen months ago. He has six daughters and one son. He started his business in December 2009 and now works mostly 7 days a week making two types of bread.

Tenur, a round flat bread made of a mix of white and whole wheat flour, water, yeast , sugar, salt.   And Samoon, the smaller diamond shaped pillows, which have only the white flour and which he had finish making before I arrived. When I leave just after seven, with a package of each bread, he still has a couple of racks to bake up and clean up to do before he loads his van and makes his deliveries. 3000 loafs a week.

Flash forward thru a little nap I wake up and have my usual lunch of sliced tomato & cuke, some feta cheese and a glass of wine, tearing off half a fresh Samoon to soak in the pepper & olive oil.  When Toby comes in for supper I look at the round flat bag of Tenur. How about we make pizza? Very nice as a crust, not quite thin, tasty and no fuss no muss. We throw the other 3 pieces in the freezer and the next night I'm on my own for supper.  I grab one of the Tenur's from the cold before I prepare my toppings: garlic, onion and peppers cooked with three strips of Appledore Bacon, five minutes more I'm saucing and slicing a hard boiled egg onto my toppings. A little olive oil on the bottom and into the hot oven it goes. Eight more minutes and out it comes! Very successful, very quick. I highly recommend keeping a package of these around if you make pizza at home.

The next night we cooked up a bag of mussels and I take out one of the Samoons from the freezer, slice it in half, open it up and pop it into the toaster, heat about 4 on a scale of 1-10.  Holds up very well, tastes great.

Mr Naser said he'd like to moved to his own place soon. Once the word spreads about his bread, he'll need too! Look for it at Sidibad Market, 710 Forest Ave ( where you'll also find a nice selection of other middle east food items ). 

Prague

I have mixed emotions about Prague, and not just because my camera was stolen at the train station as we were leaving.  It's to picture postcard for me and has way to many tourists packed into it's smallish center city, even in early April. We stayed at Miss Sophie's (google it) a very nice hostel which also has separate rooms in the building across the way. When we checked in we ran into three girls with ties to the Portland area hanging around the lobby. It's fairly well located but I didn't find a good breakfast nearby, so I became cranky fairly fast. We walked pretty much everywhere and it was coolish to cold and rained some most days. As you might expect that didn't help. But I did get one or two nice pictures because of the rain. I never did get into a serious picture taking mode in the five days we walked around and what I'm posting is an eclectic selection of images.

Architect Frank Gehry's Fred & Ginger House as it's called sits just by the river at the Jiraskuv bridge. It created a heated debate when first built, just the type of debate and building we could use more of in Portland. But we do have way better food overall, here in Portlandtown.

One thing Toby and I don't do much when we travel is go to concerts, but if you like music you should look into it in Prague as it is all around and at all times of the day and night. 

Two things we do like to do are museums and just walking and looking at the architecture. On our last day as we walked near the Kafka statue I spotted this one block street of similarly size 6 to 8 story buildings that had all differently detailed fronts and freshly painted exteriors .

All in all this section of the city tucked into the bend in the river, running from the Charles Bridge to the Stefanikuv Bridge, which includes the old Jewish quarter was the most interesting from a comfort perspective. It held the central square and the clock tower, but also hordes of tourists. However it was as the saying goes "central " but just outside of it's clutches in a circle from 9 to 12 on the clock we found by far the best breakfast and good lunch at the Brake Shop Praha and cheap eats and very good ice cream at Gourmand just a couple doors away, in what was once a butcher shop.

We also found what looked like a very interestin restaurant, Nostress, Cafe & Gallery, which had a lucious photography show of Jazz portraits in the basement gallery and wild appointments in the bathrooms. The sinks are cut into a granite slab and the water runs out of tile funnels with as you can't see very well,  large fiber leaf like covers.

On the day we went to the castle, we meandered along some of the small streets along that side of the river coming to Kampa Island. Quite by accident while desperately looking to take a p**s, we went into a small restaurant by the museum. Not very hungry at that point in the afternoon we ordered one of Prague's fine beers and a glass of wine. Killing time and resting our feet we also looked at the menu. In keeping with my preference of eating small but more often, we tried the black root soup... a winner, maybe the best single course we had in Prague. we tried a 2nd, also delicious and came back for a full meal the next evening. It's easy to find, just get to the river and look for the Penguins. I took several shots  of these and also a large sculpture that had been washed away in the floods in 2002, that the artist later replaced with a new piece.  While there a small fire works started up across the river which the wait staff could only say might be a private party for a wealthy individual.

The Charles Bridge is tourist hell, covered  with tacky venders selling trinkets and bad photos of Prague. It is however worth a look and being very centrally located you don't have to make a point of going there because it is well centrally located. We got there one day late in the afternoon as the skies were clearing from the days rain and the sun was setting, providing a half hour of rapidly changing color behind the statues. I took several pictures of this piece bracketing away as the light moved behind. later looking at the images on the computer, the backgrounds varied from light bluish to a green to purple and the gold showing softly in each. The famous statures are being cleaned and the bridge itself is being fortified.

All in all the architecture is gaga, so bring an extra pair of eyes you can pop in to give you some respite. Stay away from the heavy shopping streets connecting Wenceslas Square to the Old Town Square. Don't waste the time and energy walking up to the castle, you can take the bus up to the back side and walk down if you like, running the gauntlet of tourist stalls selling the same crap. Stay away from the King Solomon unless your wallet is overstuffed. Food was excellent the bill won't be.

I'm posting a much larger group of photos to flicker, including some poor guys car being hijacked, very funny, I almost burst out in song the first time I stumbled upon this happening.

NEXT UP

Tandoor Bread In Portland

Cinco de Mayo

Finally got back out on the streets today with a camera, happy Cinco de Mayo.  It was also the first Wednesday for the Portland farmers market in Monument Square. I wanted to see how many people both vendors and shoppers would be around?  Smallish on both counts, but I was there before the noontime rush so I expect crowds were bigger later. Some of the art crowd was in the square as well... lovely yarns in front of the Public House.

After supper I stopped by El Rayo and the place was crowded as you would expect with a waiting line for a seat inside and lots of take out orders. 

I'll post some of my pictures from Prague, mostly an eclectic selection, over the weekend.  Came close to being Volcano'd but made it back on schedule late last Thursday. Just enough time to rest up for a family wedding on Sunday.