Portland: Keepin’ it Weird

I’ll get straight to business.

Upon arriving in Portland we immeadiately made our way to the famed Voodoo Doughnut.  We got the following dozen (descriptions lifted from their website):

• A doughnut has no name: Raised yeast doughnut with chocolate frosting, rice krispies and peanut butter!
• Chuckles: Raised yeast doughnut with chocolate frosting dipped in mocha powder and topped with peanuts and caramel & chocolate drizzle.
• Mexican hot chocolate: Chocolate Cake doughnut dusted in cinnamon sugar and cayenne pepper!
• Old Dirty Bastard: Raised yeast doughnut with chocolate frosting, Oreo’s™ and peanut butter!
• Portland Cream: Raised yeast doughnut filled with Bavarian cream. Topped with chocolate and two eyeballs, representing the vision of our great city.
• Triple Chocolate Penetration: Chocolate cake doughnut with chocolate frosting and coco puffs.
• Ain’t that a Peach Fritter: Peach fritter topped with cream cheese frosting with pink and orange sprinkles!
• 2 Voodoo dolls: Raised yeast doughnut filled with raspberry jelly topped with chocolate frosting and a pretzel stake! (characteristics of Voodoo Dolls are all different)
• Cock-n-balls: Cock-n-balls shaped raised yeast doughnut triple filled with Bavarian cream and topped with chocolate frosting!
• Marshall Mathers doughnut: Plain cake doughnut with vanilla frosting and mini M&M’s ™!
• Powdered sugar jelly: Raised yeast shell filled with Lemon jelly and dusted with powdered sugar!

For a random Wednesday mid-afternoon, there was an impressive line out the door. Luckily, it moved quickly with each person carrying their pink box of treasured goods out with them. Is it really was a Portland craze, or is it the result of Anthony Bourdain’s Pacific Northwest episode of No Reservations (how we’d heard of them)? Apparently, they were the ones to start the maple bacon doughnut trend!

Picking favorites is hard. I particularly enjoyed the Portland Creme (love that cream + chocolate + eyeballs = representation of the city, hehe), A doughnut has no name (GOT reference, peanut butter, and crunch—what more could you want?), the jelly doughnut (light and lemony!), and Mexican Hot Chocolate (tasty, sweet heat!). Gotta give a shout out to the signature Voodoo doll doughnut too, that raspberry jelly was delicious and the concept is ADORABLE. All the doughnuts were sickly sweet, yet somehow still scrumptious. For as long as you can handle pure sugar and carbs.

A quick walk around and the self-labeled “weird” vibe becomes apparent. It’s like Venice beach moved in with the original hipsters. A yelper answered the question “What’s Portland’s signature dish” with a single-word response: “Condescension.”

We didn’t feel any condescension in our short day there, thankfully.

Instead we just walked around and absorbed the weird. A guy with a cart literally walked into Jon at a corner, honking a rubber horn multiple times as a means of asking him to move to the side. Bicycles abounded, as did random artistic structures around the city. Rather than food trucks lining up in the streets, they have a more permanent look to them, clustered together in lots, facing out to the sidewalk/street, and having actual addresses.

Portland is surrounded by waterways and has many bridges. Land of ports. The relationship with this and the name “Portland” didn’t occur to me until we were there.

So our immediate motivation for going to Portland, was really to benefit from Oregon’s 0% sales tax and our need for a new Macbook. In case you were worried by my lack of posts lately, the drought is now over! We tried to love the Microsoft Surface, but the OS was still weird for me to get used to again, after so many years of mac use. Windows has constant need for updates and lacks stability without them. Plus it was just doing some funky things.

Side note: If you ever find yourself in Portland, there are lots called “smartpark” which offer cheap parking rates ($1.60/hour for first 2 hours). Too bad we discovered them after we parked in a more expensive lot.

On to more interesting things. Like Kachka, the Russian restaurant that serves infused vodka. We tried their horseradish. It was very horseradish-y, to be expected, but just a little overwhelming seeing as horseradish and vodka are both very pungent. It didn’t smooth out though.

But fear not! We ordered dumplings galore, and they were all fantastic. And the fried pies were proof that every culture has empanadas =)