Sunday Brunch: Blueberry Oat Pancakes and “Salty” Carob Steamed or Salad Kale

Down several blocks on Alberta Street in my new neighborhood is a rather famous Ice Cream Shop called Salt and Straw. There is almost always a line stretching down the sidewalk as people wait to get scoops of their innovative flavors that mix savory and sweet, vegetable and fruit. I’m not one of the people who stands in their line, of course, but the whole concept of combining sweet and savory always appeals to me. One of their flavors, salt with caramel ribbons, reminds me of other treats I’ve seen on the internet.

But it wasn’t Salt and Straw that made me try savory in my carob dressing. It was disorientation and laziness. One night I mistakenly added carob powder to a dish I had mixed up some miso for my anytime sauce in. Oh well, I thought, too late now. But rather than being too late, it ended up being the start of something very interesting.

I’m lucky enough here in Portland as a member of the Alberta Co-op Grocery to be able to buy South River Chickpea Miso in bulk. As a few of my readers have insisted in comments on much earlier posts, it is absolutely the best chickpea miso ever. They weren’t kidding. So now that I have this heavenly stuff in my fridge, I’m happy to find any excuse to experiment with a little dab of it here and a little dab of it there.

This past Sunday morning I knew was going to be a pancake morning. It seems that favorite quote of mine from The Brothers K, “It’s funny, Karamozov, so much grief and then pancakes afterwards,” has become a theme for me this summer. Last week a house got shot at in my new neighborhood, just a couple of blocks from where I now live. Thankfully no one was hurt, and the guns were confiscated. The shooter ran away, eluding the dozens of police on the scene searching for him. There were no sirens, no tazoring, but lots of talk and lots and lots of careful looking.

I was actually out walking a couple of blocks over with two friends from Idaho coming through town. We had stopped a couple of blocks over to visit the vegan, sugar-free and gluten-free goats (yes, you read that right, I got it off the sign on their fence) who live in a front yard complete with a goat house and a ladder they can climb to the roof and look out from.

There is a new baby goat among them, just 3 weeks old, and we were all enchanted, when we heard loud popping sounds. The husband of the couple who owns the goats said, “That wasn’t fireworks.” But his wife and the rest of us thought it surely must have been. So we walked on down the street, heading for the little garden growing from a soil reclamation project of Groundwork Portland that I have taken an interest in. I wanted to show my friends the drawing of a borage blossom I had put up on the bulletin board there, in anticipation of bringing the garden some seeds I had promised at a garden party I attended the previous week.

But when we got to the corner, it was apparent we could not get to the garden, which is just two houses down from where the shooting, not the fireworks, had resounded in the evening air.

So here I am again, eating pancakes to assuage grief, and to remember the circular nature of life, and to try and celebrate how we triumph over such sadnesses. And to keep up my strength, I always eat my morning greens, this time with a little “salty” in their usually sweet morning dressing. I did not think to stage a photograph until it was mostly all eaten, but hopefully this will tempt you enough to try it if you need a little something different for a comforting Sunday brunch.

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Wherever we live, and  perhaps especially in a neighborhood like the Alberta Arts District, where some houses are worth half a million or more, and others hark back to a not-so-distant time when the area was exclusively relegated to poverty, disenfranchisement and the violence that comes with those conditions, there is just no getting away from the tragic and the beautiful being all mixed up together. Perhaps that borage flower and message I drew for the garden was really for the intense tapestry of the whole neighborhood, and for me, too. I was happy to see when I got brave enough to return to the garden that it’s still up on the bulletin board.

The day after the shots were fired, I went to the Safeway near my house to get batteries I had forgotten when Mike took me to another store. In my state of overwhelmed disorientation, I walked right past the batteries, and had to go to the customer service desk to ask where they were. The woman behind the desk must have seen how absolutely lost I was. She was going to give me directions, took one look at me, and just said, “follow me,” kindly leading me right back to where I had walked past all the batteries. Bless her heart. I had hoped to pay cash, not wanting to deal with my newly acquired debit card, and had carefully counted to make sure I had enough. Or so I thought. The store was very busy and I waited in line for a time. As my turn approached, I smiled at the woman behind me.  The cashier asked me if I had a Safeway card. Of course I don’t. The woman behind me said “I do,” and she gave her card to the cashier. “There, ” she said, “you just saved two dollars.”  A few days before as I groped my way toward finding Safeway (not yet knowing it was there), Romeo and I crossed paths with a street person who stopped to ask me what kind of dog Romeo is. I told him. He studied Romeo carefully, looked me in the eye and said, “that dog is an angel.” “Yes, he is,” I said, quite frankly, and smiled in agreement. And then he said, regarding me quite seriously, “You are an angel too. God bless you both. ”

It’s so important to acknowledge how all around me are these seeming “strangers,” in all different colors and walks of life, kindly buoying me up in my confused newness and disorientation. And as I write this, I can’t help but smile how the universe blesses me in the form of this pun: I am finding my “Safe Way” in my new neighborhood through the kindness of these strangers, and many others, too.

And then, of course, there are the goats. They seem to like kale as much as I do, so I save them my stems. And there is the moon, which hangs in the sky and reveals itself in the early morning through my bedroom window like a jewel in an azure ear.

So I try to be brave, and stay focused on being thankful for the kindnesses and pleasures I receive. I am not the only one in this world who gets frightened when her experience of how things are gets suddenly upended. Too many of us humans have to deal with far worse than having our own sense of safety or complacency disturbed. I feel very deeply for those who do suffer so terribly after my tiny brush with what could have been. And for some reason I can’t totally fathom, it does help to eat some pancakes. Dostoeyevski was right.