Glenn Ohlsen, a mild-mannered second generation Dane, grew up in rural Oregon in the early 1900s. He always felt like he was born a century too late. He wanted to be one of those pioneers of the frontier, bravely slugging across the country in a quaint but efficient covered wagon. He never went to college, preferring to spend his time working in the woods.

Later in his life, Mr. Ohlsen and his wife and three kids moved to the bustling hot spot of Eugene, OR. One cannot imagine that he was too happy with city life, but he was taken over by one innovation that the globalizing 20^th century had brought in to his life. He called it Pih-Zuh.

The bustling city Mr. Ohlsen encountered

About 50 years later, this Ohlsen is back in Eugene, continuing the family tradition of being happy in the woods, pronouncing things incorrectly, and eating pizza. It is doubtful that grandpa Ohlsen would like this pihzuh at first sight, as it embraces an unconventional combination of toppings. Roasted garlicky butternut squash, kale, and caramelized onions bathe in gooey blotches of goat cheese atop a hearty crust. After a teeny taste, it’s fairly certain that even the most diehard pihzuh fans would cave and add this combo to their favorites.

Crust:

1 ¼ cup warm water

1 packet Instant Rise Yeast

1 tsp olive oil

1 tsp honey

a hearty sprinkling of salt

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 cup buckwheat flour

1 ½ cups white flour

cornmeal

Recipe for the dough:

1. Dissolve the honey, olive oil, salt, and yeast in the warm water. Let it sit for five minutes.
2. Mix the flours together.
3. Knead the water into the flour until the dough doesn’t stick very much to the sides of the bowl. I use my mixer for this, so if you don’t want to invest in very much hard labor you might just want to buy pre-made crust dough. But the buckwheat flour is damn toothsome.
4. Cover your hands in oil, then handle the dough so it gets slimy all over. Cover it in a bowl with a towel, and leave it in a warm spot for an hour.
5. When you’re ready to bake your pizza, stretch and roll the dough into your desired pizza shape, and put it on a pan sprinkled with cornmeal.
6. Bake with toppings at 400 F for about 15 minutes.

Toppings:

Butternut squash (a wee one), cubed

Minced garlic (5 cloves)

Yellow onion

Kale (one bunch, chopped)

4 Tbs butter

Goat cheese (an 8oz log)

Mozzarella cheese (about a cup, shredded)

Recipe for the toppings:

1. Toss the squash with the minced garlic in a roasting pan, and scatter 3 tablespoons of the butter in there. Put it in the oven at 375 F for about 35 minutes, or until the squash has deep brown edges.
2. While the squash is in the oven, slice the onion in two, and then in thin slices. Put them in a dry pan over low heat and sprinkle with a little salt and pepper.
3. The onions will emit some liquid, but when they’re drying out, add the remaining butter. Stir occasionally for about 30 minutes, or until the onions have shrunken down into delicious little brown snakes of flavor.
4. Steam the kale for about 7 minutes, and drain it before you put it on the pizza.

Assembly:

Scatter the kale accross the dough first. Then artistically arrange the squash and onions. Dot the masterpiece with circles of goat cheese and a snowy strew of mozzarella.

Bake the pihzuh for about 15 minutes, or until the cheese is bubbly and irresistible.

My number one discovery thus far is a dish originating, and probably known only to the country of Denmark. In Danish, it is called “koldskål” (pronounced kohldh-skoahl). Literally translated, koldskål means “cold bowl.” I suppose it could be an acquired taste, as the main player in the ingredient composition is buttermilk. If you look past the fact that you are about to ingest some artfully sour milk, though, you might just realize that this rotten thing in Denmark is in fact the opposite of rotten.

Koldskål is basically a cold, creamy, sweet soup that serves as an ocean for dense, vanilla-flavored cookies to float. The soup is mainly buttermilk, whisked together with sugar and vanilla, and thickened with a (pasteurized) egg or yogurt. A little lemon or lime juice is often added to sew the ingredients together in a more cohesive blend and to perk up the scarily sour flavor of the buttermilk with a more safe sour of acidity. A little sugar is essential to take away the vicious tartness of the buttermilk, but it takes less than you would imagine.

The cookies (“kammerjunker”, pronounced kammer-yunkher) are dry when eaten alone, but their dryness is essential upon their entrance in the soup sea. The combination of a little vanilla crunch followed by a flood of tangy liquid is one of perfect harmony.

Koldskål is traditionally a “summer” food for Danes, and I suppose rightfully so (though I have been known to whip up a batch in the dead of winter). It is usually a dessert or a snack, though I fell so deeply in love that I wanted to eat it as a meal at least once a day.

Next time hunger comes gnawing at your navel, consider making some koldskål. I have had to Americanize some of the ingredients, as Denmark is very far away and the demand for koldskål in the US remains low. The taste isn’t absolutely authentic, but it’s enough to curb my cravings until the next time I am allowed to spend some summertime in Copenhagen.

Ingredients:
½ gallon buttermilk
2 egg yolks (pasteurized, if you’re concerned about salmonella)
¼ cup to ½ cup white sugar
2 tsp vanilla (Danes use vanilla sugar, which just tastes a little sweeter)
juice of ½ lemon
Nilla Wafers (an OK substitute for kammerjunker – otherwise you have to bake some sugar cookies and wait for them to get a little stale)

Method:
Whisk everything together (egg, sugar, vanilla and lemon juice first, then the milk in about three additions). Ladle some into a bowl and throw (gently) some cookies in. Mmmm, summer.

What’s better than a big hunk of grapefruit for breakfast? A lot of things. But if you’re in the tart citrus delicious arena, why not go for a pint of blood orange sorbet?

You get the best of so many worlds.

The taste is one of those tastes where you’re forced to close your eyes for a second and sigh. You can’t eat it too quickly, because your throat somehow detects the scrumptuosity and luxuriates in the time it takes for the spoonfuls to glide down to your stomach. The sorbet sits on the perilous edge between too sweet or too bitter, but balances perfectly between the two. It’s perfect for waking you up and stimulating the juices in your body that inevitably need stimulating in the morning.

You can pretend that you’re a vampire. The rich color of blood in your cereal bowl is bound to do more good for your ego than plain old cheerios. The redness of the blood oranges is as intense as one of those sunsets that you have to go west from Eugene to see (try Santa Fe). The color almost violently springs into your mouth.

It’s ice cream for breakfast. That always seems like a no-brainer, until the rebellion of the stomach a few hours later. But this is different. You feel like you ate a boring old piece of super-powered fruit, when you really had the indulgence any short-lived human morning should have. Glorious.

The only drawback I’ve encountered is that only one company makes blood orange gelato, and their price tag makes me want to cry a little bit every time I see it ($6.99 at the worst). The company is called Ciao Bella Gelato, and they have hoards of intriguing flavors (Chocolate Jalapeno, Maple Ginger Snap, Blackberry Cabernet, Prickly Pear).

So until the day comes that I grow my own blood oranges and have my own ice cream maker, I’m stuck with blood orange sorbet as being a sometimes breakfast. It would probably be good for lunch, too.

It’s 5:30 and I don’t want to drink any more bad coffee. I can’t stop thinking about how bad this badness is in front of me. Dux Bistro, I’m sorry, but you just can’t fulfill my needs. Your joe is like liquid dust reheated in a microwave several times over. I’m not one to pour anything out, but this blackness might as well be bile.

I think I’m allowed to be a little bit of a coffee prude. I grew up making espresso drinks in my dad’s coffee shop. The smell of a good grind is enough to start me springing around on my toes, like a stray puppy at a new home. My mood is significantly lowered when I am sustained by the soulless airpots from the residence halls.

My problem is a fairly easy one to solve, as long as I’m capable of getting my butt out of it’s accustomed radius on campus. After going to Morning Glory Café, my tusch is far more motivated to shimmy out of its comfort zone. I ordered an Americano, the “European” equivalent to a cup of American coffee. After the first sip, my senses numbed and the world melted in elation in front of me.

They operate their espresso machine in plain sight. This means that they’re confident about their espresso shot-making skills, a good sign in a coffee shop. The machine is also completely manual, meaning that the employees actually have to know some technique to produce drinks in a consistent manner (as opposed to Starbucks, where automation is preferred). The shots of espresso come out in about 25 seconds. I was trained that this is the correct time, and my taste buds concur.

Coffee shouldn’t taste like dirt. It should taste like molten sunrises sprinkled with sweet hints of fresh roasted nuts. You shouldn’t have to hide it beneath sweeteners and cream to make your mouth appreciate what’s going through it. If you’ve never had the experience of enjoying the unembellished taste of coffee, I recommend a trip to Morning Glory.

Apart from the glorious coffee, Morning Glory also serves breakfast and lunch, and they bake pastries. I should mention that they are vegan. It doesn’t subtract anything from their coffee or their pastries, and soon I will likely be able to say the same for their breakfast and lunch.

I only wish that their hours were longer. Then I could stop this dreaming and exchange it for the real satisfaction they have consistently supplied me.

Location:

450 Willamette Street
Eugene, OR 97401
(541) 687-0709

Hours:

Open 7 days a week
7:30am – 3:30pm

http://www.morninggloryeugene.com/

Yogurt Xtreme (the new frozen yogurt shop on 13th St.) isn’t exactly anything special. The frozen yogurt tastes like frozen yogurt from every other yogurt institution. The peanut butter flavor did melt me a little bit inside (especially when combined with fresh bananas, hot fudge, and whipped cream), but the place itself awakened no raving lunatic within me.
The self-serve yogurt business is a soulless one in my opinion. The ability to pick your own quantities and toppings is delightful at first, as the concept pleases every inner or outer child. However, one of the most striking skills a chef can have is the ability to please other palates. Yogurt Xtreme satisfies the child within me, but I often leave with an unsatisfied grumpy grown up moaning in my stomach. There are too many options and combinations, and since there are no boundaries for my little paper cup, it gets filled with a mass of infinite tastes that hardly ever mingle correctly.
For my second visit at Yogurt Xtreme, I tried harder to make my yogurt follow a theme. I failed, but I learned something in the topping bar. Pebbles cereal no longer comes just in fruity or chocolate. There’s also cupcake pebbles.

Cupcakes, as I’ve said before, aren’t really that special. But Cupcake Pebbles know that their using the cuteness of cupcakes to sell themselves. They are more than cute. They are sweet little pebbles of bliss, swimming in rainbows of colored sugar dots. They are light and puffy, each spoonful a puffy warm cloud that allows your taste-buds to dance around gleefully for several seconds before it sinks to your stomach and forces a smile to spread across your cheeks.

While allowing the pebbles to dance down my esophagus, my mind began to wander as I imagined going to the grocery store to pick up a big box of cupcake pebbles. I knew they might be hard to find, because the cereal aisle is so bright and rainbowy. The boxes always fight to the death for my attention, though what’s inside them usually isn’t as exciting as the vibrant pictures on the box. The sheer number of cereal varieties would make it difficult to pick out my longed-for pebbles. This led me to realize how saturated the market has become with diversity.

Cheerios: Banana Nut, Apple Cinnamon, Yogurt Burst, Whole grain, Honey Nut, Plain, Frosted, Berry Burst, Fruity, Chunky Clusters, Chocolate, Cinnamon Burst
Special K: Blueberry, Chocolatey Delight, Cinnamon Pecan, Fruit & Yogurt, Granola, Multigrain Oats and Honey, Protein Plus, Red Berries, Vanilla Almond, Plain
Pebbles: Fruity, Chocolate, Cupcake, Marshmallow
Life: Cinnamon, Original, Maple & Brown Sugar
Honey Bunches of Oats: Original, with Almonds, with Real Strawberries, with Real Peaches, with Cinnamon Bunches, with Vanilla Bunches, with Pecan Bunches, Just Bunches Honey Roasted, Just Bunches Caramel, with Raisins
Chex: Corn, Honey Nut, Chocolate, Cinnamon, Rice, Multi-Bran, Wheat

Do we really need this many choices? Is this democracy at it’s finest, or does it model the consumerist American at his worst? Personal taste is not something to be belittled; it must be hard for cereal companies to create a taste suitable to many mouths. But is the time spent on creating varieties to please the refined palates of humans who can afford boxed cereal really used in a productive way?

I really do enjoy Cupcake Pebbles. I also thoroughly enjoy frozen yogurt. But is it good to have so many options when it comes to things as luxurious as lower calorie frozen treats and nutritionally deficient breakfast treats?

The little perturbations bananas send through me are apparently not applicable to most of the country. Americans ate 7.6 billion pounds of bananas last year. Apples and oranges, even when combined, didn’t achieve this poundage. Ground beef consumption is about 4 times that of bananas, but one banana to four hamburgers? It’s a step in the right direction.

We may have to go back to 5 burgers and no bananas soon, though. Tropical Race Four has arrived on planet earth, and it’s out to get our bananas. We’ll soon be singing  Yes, We Have No Bananas.

Tropical Race Four is a fungus that makes the leaves of a banana tree turn yellow, and the entire plant begin to rot from the inside out. Since there is only one species of banana that is mass marketed in the US, it’s an epidemic that is not easily cured.

I thought I might be thrilled when I first heard this news. Since bananas are my personal least favorite fruit, I thought I wouldn’t be hit very hard. But then I started thinking harder.

No peanut butter banana sandwiches.

No banana cream pie.

No banana bread.

One less Gwen Stefani hit..

No bananas in pajamas coming down the stairs!!

No bananas to freshen up boring cheerios.

Don Hertzfeldt’s brilliant cartoon would never have come to exist…

And then I started researching. Bananas are basically magic. They contain Vitamin C (helps heal wounds), Vitamin B6 (supports the immune system), potassium (reduces risk for high blood pressure and strokes, and helps you build muscle), and fiber. They have no fat, but are laden with carbohydrates that give you sustained energy. Eating them can also help your digestive tract out when it’s having a hold up. Bananas might even enhance your mood, since they contain an amino acid that helps your body produce serotonin.

Other (slightly dubious) medical uses of the banana include a hangover cure, wart killing, and PMSing. For the hangover cure, if you blend bananas with milk, honey, and ice, your stomach will be calmed and your depleted blood sugar levels will be refilled by the all-powerful fruit. To kill a wart, put a piece of banana skin on top of it and hold it in place with surgical tape. For PMSing (the mood-swing aspect), all you have to do is eat a banana. There seems to be little bananas can’t do.

So far, the superfruit has been unable to ward off Tropical Race Four. The bananas we eat don’t have seeds and don’t reproduce sexually. Each plant grows a new stalk of identical bananas every year. This method of reproduction makes it easy for a fungus like Tropical Race Four to attack.

The solutions proposed are to either genetically engineer a new banana, or somehow stop the spread of the fungus. Neither has had much success.

So for now, go bananas while you can.

Sources:

http://www.whfoods.com

www.banana.com

www.chiquitabananas.com

New Yorker: Mike Peed “We Have No Bananas”

Pie is more than a three-letter word. It is a divine creation, not to be taken lightly. Pie is flexible enough to come in varieties to please every palate, but stable enough so that whenever you hear the word “pie,” your taste buds spurt out bursts of expectant saliva. Pie beats cupcakes on so many levels, it’s easy to see why cupcakes preceded pie in the evolutionary cycle. Cupcakes are cute, but pie is perfection. It takes major skill and special gumption to produce quality pie. Cupcakes are easy; you can’t not like them because they’re too cute.

Let’s take apple pie. When you bite into a firm, flaky crust, your mouth is tantalized by a simple hint of sweetness. Then a burst of juicy, ambrosial apple caresses your tongue. For a moment all the flavors blend together as your teeth lovingly gnash, and your mind should empty of all trouble and dissatisfaction. The apples are not mushy, they hold their bodies slightly stiff against the crust. The cinnamon and brown sugar play nice with the tartness of the apples. Nobody is being a bully, and all the members in the chorus of the pie sing in harmony.

I have yet to taste such a pie at a restaurant. The perfect pie for my mouth, in my 19 years of experience in the pie area, has always come from my hands. The apples are too often mushy or too artificially sweet. The crust is either too doughy or too plain or too sweet or just not right.
Since pie is apparently the new trend in the foodie universe, I figure it’s time to share some of my brilliance in pie creation. What follows is a meditation on my pie making method.

Though frozen store-bough pie crusts are handy, they take away from the sensual experience that pie-eating can be. I start with two cold sticks of butter, and cube them delicately and swiftly, as I feel the butter’s eagerness to meet flour and mingle with sugar (only a few tablespoons) and salt (a little more than you’d think is necessary). I dump the cubes into the flour waiting with bated breath, and immediately begin to massage the butter into the flour. Though literally I pinch (with my hands, duh) the cubes of butter to distribute them amongst the dry mixture, it is with the mindset needed to give a good massage. The dangers of gluten build-up that can produce a horrid chewy crust force are very sly, and to avoid them I must become one with the forming dough.

When the butter is spread in pea sized pieces, I force myself to break away from my creation and let it rest in a ball in a frigid setting. The separation is unnerving, but the time apart is a perfect time to prepare the apples.
A lot of the apple component to apple pie is left up to the apples. Tarter varieties are better, because they hold their own against the dense sugar and the oppressive oven. Apart from mixing what seems like a good amount of brown and white sugars, vanilla extract and cinnamon to complement the peeled and sliced fresh tart apples, you are at the mercy of your fruit source. Granny Smiths all the way.

Back to crust land. After a meaningful separation where longing has strengthened the yearning in my heart for quality pie, I tenderly separate the dough ball into two balls on a floured, cold surface. I roll the balls carefully out into roundish circles. The first roll is always a failure. The second must always suffice, because otherwise the horrid chewy crust infection will plague the pie.

From here on out, everything has to be done with attention and sympathetic hands. Throwing a pie together is impossible. It must be assembled wish consideration for the composition of the different elements. Before the top layer of crust is allowed to snuggle up with the pyramid of apples and the bottom crust, a few little pieces of butter strewn around at random, and a sprinkling of corn starch over all the apples are the last touches needed for a shot at the perfect pie.

Pie is so much more welcoming and comforting than a cupcake. Apart from skinny women, and small children, who looks good eating a cupcake? No one. There’s always the awkward decision of how to deal with the icing. You inevitably stick your neck out like a chicken and peck, dangerously biting in close proximity to your hand.

Who looks good eating pie? Everyone. There’s no confusion about how to start. It’s not hiding behind any cutesy details. A good pie is pure, wholesome, organic love. The pie trend should trend on to eternity, so the less exceptional pies out there (of which there are many) will be forced to upgrade themselves. It’s all about the pie mindset of consideration for all components and simple rustic goodness.

Breakfast has a special little nook in my soul. The familiar smell of frying fatty batter in fatty butter triggers endorphins to start coursing through my veins like I’ve just run a marathon. It’s almost a waste to put breakfast in the morning, when so often I’m not fully conscious and up to appreciating the beauties of the world. The obvious solution is breakfast for dinner, or brinner, or dineakfast. But so many restaurants and so many conventional minds won’t let me have it this way. Well, conformists, I’ve found a place that accepts my stomach and its wishes just the way it is.

On a wintery Thursday night, my tummy was tumbling and mumbling and couldn’t quite agree with my brain about what to do to numb the rumbling. Luckily, another hungry body found me and told me about this place we had to go to, because she had a card for some free waffles there. Immediately Pixar’s Donkey (from Shrek) was in my brain and his unabashed enthusiasm for waffles was within me. We biked at a speed like lightning to Off the Waffle.

I got the waffle dubbed the H-Bomb and it made my mind blow up a little bit. The waffle itself was pure pleasure, a marbled authentic maple color with every single little hole in tact. The outside was not crisp, but resilient. And the inside was fluffy like a waffle should be, but the fluff was so dense that every mouthful melted slowly in my mouth, like cotton candy does in magic-fairy-happy-land.

On top of my waffle, pieces of crisp apple were strewn across like fallen dominoes. They were held up by the buoyant dough and held down by a slice of Havarti cheese, melted to perfection so that it became a cozy blanket encompassing the sleeping slices of apple. Atop the creamy Havarti, a dusting of cinnamon made everything go beyond hedonistic pleasures and into the realm of pure bliss.

Dinner shouldn’t be such a prude about not inviting breakfast to join the party. Off the Waffle gets it.

Location:

2540 Willamette St.

Eugene, OR 97405

Hours:

Sun-Thurs 7am-8pm

Fri-Sat 7am-11pm

From the creatures of Mucho’s Gusto and Le Fina Taqueria comes another delicious concept of a restaurant, this time in the form of a 50′s Burger joint.

Just down the street from campus on 13th and Pearl sits a brightly lit restaurant.

If you pay close enough attention on the outside you will realize that the mural painted on the outer building that surrounds the restaurant matches the checkered tile flooring inside.

The menu is simple yet vast with the combinations of items you can achieve with the perfect order.

They offer garlic fries to substitute, rings too. Chili on the side…chili on your burger, chili on your fries, oh yeah chili on your hot dog….chili tops just about everything you can think of, and I don’t think its a bad thing.

Lots of toppings for your burger that is served on home baked egg rolls that are grilled prior to serving. Bacon, caramelized onions, mushrooms, a mushonion combo, bacon. And alll kinds of cheese, American, cheddar, Swiss, blue cheese, even pepper-jack.

The fries are hand cut and double fried in 100% canola oil. Oh yeah the beef is all organic and vegetarian fed and stuff for you animal people. You can even substitute your patty for a veggie if that’s your thing.

So besides having burgers, they have hot dogs as well, and chili in a bowl or cup. Its served with melted cheese, onions, green onion and a dolop of sour cream.

Don’t forget the shakes and ice cream with mix-in’s either.

It blew me away that the same people that can make us mexican slop can aslo craft such a lovely and delicious burger.
Go Dickies!!

There’s another story just beyond the amazing waffles. The two sons are trying to start a movement for the spread of bartering. They want to create a social networking website, a hybrid of facebook and craigslist, for bartering where one person post what they are looking for and what they can offer. People can search databases and see what’s going on in their community.

So go to Off the Waffle and check the shit out!