So last night my family had a small dinner celebration. In planning for dinner, we we wanted a delicious, memorable meal. I had many ideas about where to dine out in Portland, a city that fellow Public Press members justly regard as the culinary mecca of the United States...Pok Pok Thai, Toro Bravo, Nostrana, etc. But in the end, home cooking won out. Not because I'm an Iron Chef, but because we're lucky to have the iPhone of cookware technology: Faithful P2 citizens might remember that last year I constructed a brick oven in my backyard. One summer later, the oven is done, and so it's now harvest time, bounty time...time to reap the rewards of wood fire-roasted meals!

It took about an hour and a half of feeding the oven with oak logs before all the firebricks in the dome transitioned from a soot covered black to a beige. This meant the oven was "white hot" and finally ready for baking pizzas. At 800 degrees it only takes 90 seconds to make bubbly Neapolitan style pizzas. Earlier in the day, I had made a quick pizza dough from scratch using a Mario Batali recipe. We baked two Margherita style pizzas using San Marzano tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and basil plucked from our garden. We then baked two more Yukon gold potato, rosemary, caramelized onion, mozzarella pizzas. Potato on pizza might sound exotic and non traditional but garnished with sea salt this style of pizza is a crowd pleaser among my family and friends. (Ken's Artisan Bakery used to serve this style of pizza) Along with pizza, we fire roasted vegetables from the garden including zucchini, yellow squash, peppers. Drizzled with olive oil, sea salt, and freshly cracked black pepper these vegetables worked up a golden brown char and were amazing to see, smell, and taste. For dessert, we cranked up our Lello gelato maker and in 20 minutes we had amazing sorbet from strawberries we hand picked at Sauvie Island earlier in the summer.

Now just in case you think the food cornucopia stopped here, we made even more goodies. After all, any Neapolitan pizza extravaganza would not be complete without the complement of fine espresso. But not just any espresso...espr  esso made from coffee beans freshly roasted on the spot in our brick oven! We spread Zimbabwe green coffee beans on a baking sheet and fire roasted them at 500 degrees for ten minutes, turning them continuously with a hoe until they all finished cracking and popping and had an oily sheen. Pictorial degree of roast guide at Sweet Marias says our beans ended up somewhere beyond a Vienna roast approaching a Full French-Italian roast. After the beans cooled for about 15 minutes, we ground them up and tamped them into a dense coffee puck for our little Krups espresso machine. After a few minutes black gold was dripping from the spout.

Of course it would have been incredible to just freebase that pure fire roasted espresso right there and then, but how about the synergy of espresso and a biscotti? Not just any biscotti...how about a triple ginger chocolate biscotti baked in a brick oven!!!!??? Yes, my wife rolled out these incredible biscotti logs with embedded candied ginger chunks and chocolate chips. After the first bake in the brick oven, we sliced the uniscotti (sic) logs into individual cookies and then twice (bis) baked the cookies for 15 minutes more. I've never been to Lake Como in Switzerland, but dipping these biscottis into that super fresh, fire roasted espresso and then munching on them was like taking a magic carpet ride to one of the most luxurious indulgent mind-blowing places possible. It was the most amazing bite of cookie ever, capping off the greatest dinner ever!

Brick oven trumps all!