Pok Pok, the Thai roadside shack in southeast Portland, has grown a house. Specifically, it has expanded into the basement of owner Andy Ricker’s house, adjacent to the shack. (Thankfully, the shack is still operating.) The new restaurant is called the Whiskey Soda Lounge, and it serves an expanded menu, including one of my favorite dishes, waterfall beef (*neua nam tok*), a spicy and sour beef salad with herbs and rice powder.

The Whiskey’s beef salad is the best I’ve ever had. It’s an encyclopedia of Thai salad best practices, fully spicy and sour and loaded with fresh mint and cilantro. After you’ve eaten all of the tender grilled hanger steak, there’s plenty of dressing left behind for continued scavenging with sticky rice. (Laurie, Iris, and I each ate a whole sticky rice container.)

More information, including the full menu, at their web site.

The other night I made pasta with cream sauce, and while we were eating it, I realized it was a real restaurant kitchen dish. I don’t mean it was awesomely delicious, although it was pretty tasty, but that it was the sort of thing I imagine you’d make if you were set loose in a restaurant kitchen, the sort of thing a line cook might make for himself if the boss isn’t around, using moderately luxurious ingredients, stock, and many kinds of fat.

I actually made the same recipe twice in the last week, by request. These were the components the first time:

* penne
* slab bacon
* olive oil
* leeks
* cremini mushrooms
* thyme
* white wine
* Worcestershire sauce (I was working loosely off a recipe from Biba Caggiano’s Italy al Dente, and I trust that if Biba sauce to put Worcestershire sauce in, it’ll be good)
* chicken stock
* cream
* Parmigiano
* butter

The second time around I had chanterelles from Foraged and Found, so it went like this:

* penne
* slab bacon
* shallots
* chanterelles
* thyme
* white wine
* veal stock
* cream
* Parmigiano
* butter

(The veal stock was from Sea Breeze Farm. I didn’t make it. For that matter, the chicken stock was Better Than Bouillon.)

I think the original recipe called for endive, pancetta, and no mushrooms. Anyway, whatever you have on hand, you can make creamy noodles in less than an hour, and it’s one of those no-brainpower recipes where you can rock out while cooking and probably not cut your thumb off.

Cut the bacon into dice. Crisp it up in a large saute pan. Remove it, leave the fat, and add a little olive oil if the pan looks dry. Saute the vegetables, working in batches if you’re using mushrooms, which need the pan to themselves if they’re going to brown. Add the thyme and the reserved bacon, along with a dash of Worcestershire and half a cup of wine. Reduce until the liquid is almost gone. Add 1/4 cup cream and 1/2 cup stock and simmer while you cook a pound of pasta. Drain the pasta and add it to the sauce along with the Parmigiano and a tablespoon of butter. Heat together in the pan and serve in warmed big bowls.

After you do this once, it will be automatic. If you ever find yourself locked in a restaurant kitchen after-hours, now you know what to do.

So, I thought this was going to be a great idea that would cement my reputation as a guy who has great ideas, but it turned out to be just a good idea, so I’m posting it on my blog. (The great ideas are sold to a shadowy gang of patent strongmen.)

It started when I read something in a recent food magazine about a tasty-sounding oatmeal topping. Which magazine? I have no idea. What was the topping? Beats me. I couldn’t find it again. I thought so hard about oatmeal toppings that toasted oatmeal-scented smoke was rising from my head, and then I had a breakthrough.

A few years ago my mom was bringing bacon candy to every party. Bacon candy is bacon glazed with brown sugar and, optionally, nuts. I didn’t like it. I don’t want sweet bacon. But I do put brown sugar on my oatmeal, so I thought: what if I made candied bacon bits and sprinkled them on oatmeal?

This morning I finally got around to it. I sliced some thick rashers of Bavarian Meats bacon, sprinkled them with brown sugar, and put them in the oven. While the bacon simmered in its bed of syrup, I made a pot of steel-cut oats. When everything was done, I diced the bacon and sprinkled it on top. I put Iris’s bacon on the side, because she’s not big on toppings.

As I said, it was good but not great. I was hoping for crunchy, super-bacony bits, but they were chewy and got mostly lost in the oats. I might give it another shot, but if anyone else wants to take this idea and run with it, there’s a shadowy gang I could introduce you to.

The other night I made one of our favorite recipes, potato galette. Laurie said, “Okay, but that’s just potatoes and cheese. That’s not really dinner.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll get some ham.” I bought a slice of Hempler’s ham. Iris absolutely loves ham. On the way home, I thought, “Hmm. Ham is not really dinner, either.” So I stopped for a cup of coffee at Caffe Ladro. I was going to make redeye gravy.

Redeye gravy is something I’d read about but never tried. In Pig Perfect, Peter Kaminsky talks about working his way through a country ham, cooking a couple of slices at a time and making redeye gravy. As far as I can tell, redeye gravy may have a bit of flour or pepper or brown sugar added, but it’s basically just coffee used to deglaze your ham-frying pan.

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but country ham is also something I’ve read about but never tried. You see plenty of prosciutto and serrano ham in Seattle sold by the slice, but not Southern country ham. I’ve heard you can get Smithfield ham, which Kaminsky says is not particularly good, in Chinese groceries, but I haven’t seen it–not that I’ve particularly remembered to look.

Anyway, back to my city ham and gravy. I browned the ham in a skillet and deglazed with coffee, into which I sprinkled a pinch of brown sugar and cayenne.

I tasted the gravy. I’m not sure what I expected. It tasted like vaguely spicy coffee. Then I poured some on my ham. Bingo. The bitterness of the coffee cuts the sweetness of the ham cure. There’s some more ham in the fridge. I’m thinking ahead to snacktime already.

It was easy to identify the most annoying thing in the kitchen. There was a perfect spot in the cabinet above the stove for the flour, but no room anywhere for the sugar. Every time I needed even a teaspoon of sugar, I had to go to the Ivar shelving unit in the dining room and grab it. Of course, I could have used a sugar bowl, but I didn’t know where to store that, either, and wouldn’t have been able to decide on the threshold past which I’d have to reach for the large container. (Could I measure 1/2 cup out of the bowl? Would that be wrong?)

Enter Modular Mates.

Modular Mates are a long-running Tupperware item. They’re long, rounded-rectangular containers with tight-fitting lids, available in about a dozen sizes. I measured my cupboard and ordered two of the largest, which would barely fit. One holds five pounds of flour, the other around 7½ pounds of sugar.

They’re not a perfect solution: it’s a little harder to scoop the ingredients out because the container opening is narrower, and the sugar is pretty heavy. Probably I should have bought a shorter container for the sugar. And they weren’t cheap–the two pieces cost me about $30 on eBay and would have been more like $40 from tupperware.com.

But it’s all worth it to have sugar in the kitchen.

The real problem is that now some other issue is going to bubble to the top and become my number one kitchen annoyance. It might be the fact that all the spices (other than pepper) are also on the Ivar. Has anyone tried one of those horizontal magnetic spice racks? I saw them at Bed Bath and Beyond and am wondering whether I should put cumin on the side of the fridge, or whether it would end up spilled on a daily basis.

Actually, my number one kitchen annoyance right this second is that the power is out, presumably due to last night’s windstorm. So Iris and I will be having a raw-food breakfast. By which I mean Life cereal.