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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (July 21, 2018)
Page 4C East Oregonian EAT, DRINK & EXPLORE Saturday, July 21, 2018 COOKING ON DEADLINE An hour of meal prep on Sunday sets you up for a yummy week AP Photo/John Minchillo Shane Juhl, owner and proprietor of Toxic Brew Co., poses for a photograph at his taproom located in the Oregon District, Tuesday in Dayton, Ohio. After experiencing its best days in the first half of the 20th century, Dayton is reinventing itself with impressive results. Minor-league baseball, a riverside park and a cluster of craft beer pubs are helping revitalize a downtown that had become frayed around the edges. Wright Brothers’ hometown rises again thanks to baseball and beer By MITCH STACY Associated Press DAYTON, Ohio (AP) — When I was growing up in greater Dayton, Ohio, in the 1960s and ‘70s, the city already had been to the top of prosperity hill and was coasting down the other side. Early 20th century Day- ton was a metropolis that hummed with innovation and commerce. Popula- tion topped out in 1960 at just over 260,000. After that, the city gradually lost families to the suburbs and others left as manufactur- ing declined and jobs evap- orated. Downtown retail operations moved out as the population shifted. By the time I left in the early 1980s, Dayton — and downtown especially — was frayed around the edges. Moving back to Ohio after three decades away, I returned to Dayton and found plenty of good stuff. There was a minor-league ballpark downtown, a lovely riverfront park, peo- ple out enjoying themselves and a burgeoning craft-beer culture. Craft beer! The place had become kind of cool. Understand, the econ- omy here will never again be what it was when mul- tiple General Motors plants provided thousands of jobs, and National Cash Regis- ter stood as a proud symbol of grand homegrown com- merce (the company took its headquarters and 1,250 jobs to Atlanta in 2009). Some parts of the city still reflect the malaise, and opi- oids in this region repre- sent a serious public health problem. But efforts to diversify Dayton, trumpet its rich his- tory and make it a cleaner, brighter, more interesting place are working. The city spruced up the Great Miami riverfront, creating a family friendly downtown park. An old rail- road freight house was con- verted into a popular pub- lic market. The city scored a minor-league baseball team — the Class-A Day- ton Dragons — and put up a fan-friendly, 7,200-seat stadium. Fifth Third Field has sold out every single game since it opened in 2000 — the longest streak in any professional sport. The ballpark draws crowds even though the Cincinnati Reds, a Major League Baseball team, play just 55 miles away. “Certainly this side of downtown wasn’t doing really well, and that started to change around the time of the ballpark opening,” said AP Photo/John Minchillo, File In this May 17 file photo, visitors and period re-enactors gather beside the Mem- phis Belle, a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, on its first day of public exhibition at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. Alan F. Pippenger, whose venerable family business, the Requarth Lumber Co., is situated just beyond the left-field foul pole of Fifth Third Field. The Requarth building has been there so long that the Wright Broth- ers visited to buy lumber for their early flying machines. When Pippenger came back to Dayton to take over the company in 1985, one of the only places to get lunch was the basement snack bar of the Sears store down the street. There are way more choices now. And more people around. New restaurants and bars have opened up around the ballpark. Closed factories and warehouses have been converted to sleek apart- ments that are snapped up as fast they’re built. Con- struction equipment down- town has become a famil- iar sight. Dayton also boasts a res- ident philharmonic orches- tra, 2,300-seat downtown performing arts center and a nationally recognized art museum. Not bad for metro area with just around 800,000 people, including 140,000 in the city itself. Here are five more rea- sons why Dayton is a hap- pening place: THE WRIGHT STUFF The city’s favorite sons are Wilbur and Orville Wright, who built the first airplane in their bicy- cle shop and, after mak- ing the initial powered flight in December 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Car- olina, came home to Day- ton to work the bugs out. A memorial stands at Huff- man Prairie, where they made flights in 1904-05 and really learned to con- trol the plane. Don’t get us started on claims that any- where else is the “birthplace of flight.” AP Photo/John Minchillo, File In this March 2017, file photo, Providence’s Jalen Lind- sey (21) and Southern California’s Chimezie Metu (4) vie for the opening tipoff of a First Four game of the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament in Dayton, Ohio. music. MORE AIRPLANES The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force is one of the greatest museums in the country and a stop on the “Dayton Aviation Trail,” which includes many of the Wright sites. The museum attracts about a million vis- itors a year and has on dis- play such national treasures as a Wright 1909 Flyer, the Air Force One that brought President John F. Kennedy’s body back from Dallas, and the newly restored World War II bomber “Memphis Belle.” THE OREGON DISTRICT The center of residential life in Dayton’s formative years, the historic Oregon District has some lovingly preserved buildings and homes. Fifth Street now is a hipster haven, lined with bars and restaurants and a great place to see live GOOD BEER Craft beer has become the next big thing, with at least a half-dozen bars/ restaurants and four brewer- ies opening within a mile of each other near Fifth Third Field, part of the Dayton Ale Trail. Besides sublime local brews, many of the places have excellent eats. FIRST FOUR March Madness begins every year with great fan- fare in Dayton. First Four play-in games of the NCAA Tournament have brought the national spotlight to the city for the past 18 years. The event is well-supported locally as eight potential Cinderellas play at Univer- sity of Dayton Arena for the chance to break into the big dance. The second night of this year’s First Four set a new attendance record for the event. Sarah E. Crowder/Katie Workman via AP This November 2016 photo provided by Katie Work- man shows food being prepped for a meal in New York. One hour of meal prep on Sunday can make life easier and more delicious all week long. By KATIE WORKMAN Associated Press What if you had a prep cook in your kitchen? A sous chef who made sure that all of the slicing and dicing and mincing and zesting was done for you, so that when it came time to make dinner, all you had to do was wash your hands and start cooking? Most of us aren’t going to get this in our lifetimes. But what if we took an hour on Sunday evening to be our own prep cooks, and make life easier all week long? Yes, you can buy many of these items pre-cut — but since they’ve been cut days before, even as you take them from their bags, you can see some brown- ing or dryness or aging. When you prep the ingre- dients yourself, you have a better shot at a longer shelf life, and you know exactly how fresh they are. If you are a meal plan- ner, already aware of which recipes you plan to make for the week, then identify the ingredients that can be prepped ahead of time, add them to your shopping list and get them into recipe-ready shape. But if you aren’t quite sure what you are making, then you can still be your own best friend by prep- ping a bunch of ingredi- ents you likely will call into duty. If you have a food pro- cessor, this task just got easier, as you can pulse everything up, small batches of one ingredient at a time, and have your- self an arsenal of prepped ingredients at the ready. Keep all of your prepped items in tightly sealed con- tainers in the fridge. Here are some sug- gestions: ingredients that make frequent appear- ances in my kitchen. But you’ll determine the ingre- dients you most often use. MINCED GARLIC: This will last for up to a week in the fridge, and mincing it yourself is much better than buying a jar of pre-minced. MINCED SHAL- LOTS: If you don’t cook with shallots, please reconsider. They are a bit of a cross between onions and garlic, but they have a mild sweetness as well. Use about half the amount in any recipe that calls for onions, and twice as much if you are subbing them for garlic. Shallots are perfect in vinaigrettes. CHOPPED OR SLIV- ERED ONIONS: How nice to get any onion-in- duced crying out of the way in one fell swoop. I usually sliver one onion and chop a couple. BIG CARROTS PEELED AND CUT INTO STICKS: Keep- ing them as sticks means you can munch on them throughout the week, or if you need them chopped for a recipe later, you are halfway there. CITRUS ZEST AND JUICE (LEMON, LIME AND/OR ORANGE): Use a grater (a Micro- plane is good) to remove the brightly colored outer layer of your citrus fruit and store that in a tiny bag or container. Then juice the fruit and strain the juice into a container. Both items will lend a welcome bit of brightness and fresh- ness to recipes of all kinds, from soups to sauces to salad dressings. BROCCOLI OR CAULIFLOWER FLO- RETS: You might simply roast or saute these later in the week, or use them in stir-fries or soups, or lightly steam them and use in pastas and salads. CHOPPED PARS- LEY: Useful in dishes and as a finishing bit of fresh herbiness on all sorts of foods, especially hearty stewed and braised ones. Other fresh herbs are less sturdy, and to get a head start on those just pull the leaves off, fold them into a slightly damp paper towel, and store them whole. If you chop them they will blacken in a day or two. COOKED CRUM- BLED BACON (DON’T JUDGE ME): A little con- tainer of this is like gold, perfect to top off a soup, add to potato or pasta sal- ads, stir into a frittata — there are more ways to use cooked, crumbled bacon than can be mentioned in a few sentences! GRATED CHEESES: Yes, you can buy some pre-grated cheese, and you should definitely do that, but sometimes you want to grate your own Parme- san, or you need a grated cheese that’s not as easy to find, like fontina. Week to week, your list of pre-cut foods will vary. Sometimes it might be sliced radishes or cubed butternut squash or chopped celery. It depends what recipes are in the forecast, and also what ingredients are in the fridge and begging to be used. So, next Sunday, pour yourself a glass of wine or make a mug of tea, put on some music and pay it forward. Your Wednesday self will thank your Sun- day self shortly. Follow us on Facebook!
