Peaches En Regalia

Is it just that I always order any dish that uses fresh peaches, or do Portland chefs have a soft spot for this succulent summer delight?

In the past week alone, I've enjoyed three delectable peach dishes, two savory and one sweet.

Last Friday I visited Toro Bravo with my friend Peter who lives in Spain, so he could tell me how Toro Bravo's tapas stack up to the genuine article. After a good look at the menu and a taste of three or four dishes, he declared Toro Bravo's fare to be a lot more sophisticated than what he gets in Madrid--it's more like what you'd get in Barcelona. Of course he saw a few items you wouldn't find in Spain at all, like grilled corn with a red pepper sauce...

But I digress from peaches. One of our dishes at Toro Bravo was pork rillettes, served in a little bowl alongside roasted ripe peaches and some housemade grain mustard. Last time I went, this dish was served with red-wine braised cherries, and I'll bet that was good, too. But the peach version, served atop toasted baguette slices, was just plain heaven. The duck-peach-mustard trio replicated Remy's semi-psychedelic vision of what happens when the right ingredients collide, in fact.

(Who's Remy, you ask? He's the rat in the latest Pixar movie, Ratatouille. Great, now I'm identifying with an animated rodent....)

Peach delight number two came on Saturday night, when it was just too hot to even look at a stove. Instead, we drove to Lauro Mediterranean Kitchen. When I saw the appetizer of roasted peach stuffed with goat cheese and wrapped with pancetta and served with arugula. I completely forgot I'd eaten peaches the night before.

Again, yum! The dish arrived with not one but two whole roasted peaches, neatly cut in half, pitted, and filled with fresh soft goat cheese. Full disclosure--the peach I ate was really not ripe, and it took my steak knife to cut it up. And yet it was surprisingly delicious, with a spicy tartness that I couldn't separate from whatever spices were added to it--fresh tellicherry pepper, maybe. And the arugula... I boxed up the other peach and ate it last night. After no more than a minute in the microwave, it revived perfectly. Four days in the fridge had brought the peach and pancetta even more in harmony. I do think this peach was riper than the first one, though.

Finally, Tuesday night was a very special occasion, a welcoming dinner for Randall Grahm, founder of California's Bonny Doon wines. He's chosen Portland as headquarters for his new Pacific Northwest enterprise, Pacific Rim Winemakers, which will produce mostly Riesling from Washington grapes. (Putting his new staff in Portland was a lifestyle decision--they didn't want to live in Eastern Washington or Seattle...in fact the new venture's corporate office is in the same building as the Chesterfield and Rocket in inner East Portland, how's that for Coolsville?).

They held the Pacific Rim dinner in the teahouse at the Portland Classical Chinese Garden, and the meal, catered mostly by Sungari Pearl, was designed to complement Pacific Rim's latest Riesling releases. You're thinking, peaches in Chinese food? No. To match Pacific Rim's Vin de Glaciere (a Riesling dessert wine), we devoured some peach custard tarts from Ken's Artisan Bakery. Sliced mandoline-thin and perfectly ripe with the barest hint of a sugar glaze, the peaches were the very definition of summer.

And now, another digression. Outside the teahouse, Chinese musicians played flutes in a very well attended concert in one of Portland's most beautiful enclosed public spaces, on one of the most beautiful evenings of the year. The Classical Chinese Garden has become a local treasure, and I intend to go back there before the autumn rains descend.