CT Viet + Thai Bistro (Asian food)
February 29, 2012
- Restaurant website
- Location: Portland/Beaverton
- Price to lavishly dine 2: $24
“…if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with…”
–Dorothy Gale
Queen Bee is a Vietnamese restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, where they serve a crispy, succulent eggroll that I’m still dreaming about, 10 years after the last bite vanished down my grateful gullet. Every so often I catch myself wishing I didn’t have to go all the way back to DC for another.
So tonight I discovered that I really DON’T need to look any further than my own back yard. A few blocks down the road there’s a typical suburban strip mall with a little Vietnamese place that does eggrolls. Beautiful eggrolls and salad rolls and stuff I can’t possibly pronounce.
It’s called CT Viet + Thai Bistro, and my friend Sharon and I had dinner there tonight, almost by accident. We’d planned to have a quick bite at the neighborhood Japanese place next door, but on a whim tried this place. It was pretty much love at first bite.
The last time I walked past, maybe 18 months ago, it was a none-too-clean Hawaiian food joint, with syrupy meat dishes so sweet they gagged at a hundred paces. The new guy who has it now degreased the place and tore everything out. Then he filled it with soothing color, added comfortable tables and real art on the walls…and started cooking.
Boy, can he cook. This is his fourth restaurant (the other three were in Atlanta), and I can say with some confidence that he’s got it down to a science.
He asked us to trust him, recommended we share two dishes–Bun Dac Biet and Pad Woonsen–family style. The pad merged fresh vegetables with glass noodles and a lot of spice and was delicious. The Bun Dac was a mixed grill of all sorts of meat tidbits, eggroll chunks, vermicelli and a light, tangy sauce. Both were delightful; I couldn’t decide which was my favorite but probably leaned toward the Bun Dac.
Since it was our first time, the chef gave us a free slice of mango mousse cake, which looked like cheesecake but turned out to be beautifully flavored and extremely light on the palate. It was more than enough for two and, at $3, a bargain.
There was more food than we could handle, washed down with fragrant quaffs of jasmine tea. I don’t generally do doggy bags–something about staring last night’s dinner in the face leaves me faintly queasy–but tonight I did.
The staff didn’t rush us, although we closed the place down and then some. The chef kindly marked up a take-out menu (yay! they do takeout!) to show which dishes we’d ordered and which he’d recommend on our next visit.
Total bill was $12 apiece, about half what I’d expect to pay down in the Pearl. Apparently staying in my own backyard pays off.
Offerings on the deck
February 27, 2012
Lordeee, it’s a gorgeous day.
It’s early Saturday morning, the rain has stopped and the fast-moving clouds scoot past the sun, freeing slanty-gold morning light. The backyard’s full of it, and a fat grey squirrel hops the rails to drink from Emelia’s offering bowl.
Emelia, the daughter of my friend Carol and a delightful melange of brains, beauty, sophistication and ten year-old girl, has turned my back deck into some kind of religious shrine. [Read more]
Tall blonde
February 24, 2012
“Hey, I’d like a Tall Blonde,” he said, snickering, “And that one with the ponytail looks pretty good. Just wrap her up and I’ll take her to go.”
Back at the espresso machine, the barristas rolled their eyes. “Yeah, like that’s the first time I’ve heard THAT,” one said.
I eyed them quizzically, and my barrista buddy explained.
Coldworking small castings, Part I
February 22, 2012
Q: Is there a better (faster, cheaper) way to coldwork small glass sculptures?
A: Yep
A BeCon or two ago, Richard Whiteley, head of the Canberra glass school, said that glasswork fresh from the kiln was only half finished; coldwork was necessary to take it the rest of the way.
Ouch.
I happen to agree, but as much as I love HAVING coldworked, I hate DOING coldwork and seem to be on a neverending quest to avoid it. Right now I’m testing a bunch of machines to see if they can automate the finishing process for small cast glass sculptures, like pendants.
Casa Naranja
February 16, 2012
- Restaurant website
- Location: Northside Portland
- Price to dine 2: $30 or so, depending
Sometimes you want to be treated like a king (or even better, like Lady Gaga). Sometimes you just want a quick burger. And sometimes you just want to go where everybody knows your name.
Casa Naranja is like that, even if they don’t know your name.
Cutting remarks (cutting glass with a tile saw)
February 13, 2012
It’s all in the way you slice it. And the way you slice it is, apparently, profoundly affected by a good blade.
Check any glassmaker’s forum and you’ll probably find someone with glass cutting issues, usually stemming from a tile saw that’s more like a Cuisinart than a slicer. I don’t claim any special expertise at this stuff, but I do have a decades-old, cheap, badly made, out-of-true tilesaw that reliably cuts amazingly thin murrini cane* slices.
Shown below, top to bottom, for example: A piece of thin (2mm) Bullseye Gold Purple, a piece of 3mm Bullseye Marigold Yellow…and then a series of pattern bar slices I’ve tried at various thicknesses. The thinnest (fifth from the top) is 1.5mm thick.
I do this a lot. So I must be doing something right…right?
Influentiality
February 4, 2012
“WOW!” we said, almost simultaneously, “I didn’t know he had work in Traver Gallery!”
My friend Becky and I were up in Tacoma, visiting the (what else) glass museum and as usual stopped at Traver for a peek. We saw the work of a good friend in the window and, tickled, went inside to check it out.
Surprise! It was actually the work of another respected glass artist.
Rest easy, Ernie
January 31, 2012
Ernie Monstrocat has gone, and my heart is breaking more than a little bit.
For those of you who read about Ernie, here or on Brenda Griffith’s blog, you know he was a special, special cat. He came to me almost by accident, as a foster kitty, and turned out to be a social maven of monumental proportions. (As well as a digital jinx.)
During Ernie’s stay with me he attracted more worshippers than the PTL Club, who’d show up with forbidden treats like bacon. Hamburgers. Shrimp cocktail. Canned tuna clutched in grubby little kidpaws.
You’d never have guessed Ernie’s real history. It would have taken a very special cat to survive all that, much less thrive, but that’s what Ernie was.
When it came time for Ernie to find a permanent home, I almost didn’t let it happen–if I hadn’t known that Brenda, Jessie and Dave were waiting at the other end, Ernie would have never gotten out of the house. Waiting in the airport for his flight to be called was one of the harder things I’ve done.
But they were there, they gave Ernie his own little girl, rabbit, dogs and bacon, and from the sounds of it he lived the life of, well, Ernie, until the very end. It came on suddenly, turned out to be metastatic cancer…and Ernie was gone. Just like that.
Thank you, Brenda, for taking such good care of my friend.
Glass resources update
January 7, 2012
Hey, folks;
I’m in the process of updating my enormous casting resources page and I need your help.
I’m adding new categories such as adhesives & sealants, coldworking and casting instruction (and I mean REAL, intensive glass casting classes). I’m also checking old listings and making sure they work.
My dozen best iPad business apps
December 30, 2011
Izzy the ‘Pad is the first computing device I’ve ever slept with.
Literally. I hate to say it, but she’s pretty much changed the way I do stuff. That red leather thing growing out of my left arm? That’s Izzy, in her snazzy red case, and embarrassingly enough, she’s rarely more than a couple of feet away, even at night.
It’s been almost 8 months since Izzy and I got together, and in that time she’s taken over a lot of functions I normally do on a desktop, laptop, TV screen (or on paper). Apple’s made an excellent chameleon out of the iPad 2; find the right app(s), download them for a nominal fee, and Izzy changes roles in a heartbeat.
So when someone asks me about my favorite iPad apps, I respond with “favorite for WHAT?” Business? Entertainment? Art? with business, i.e., USEFUL iPad apps. These are my favorites right now (since the last time I did this), not necessarily in order of importance, and they’re all available in the iPad App Store.