Eugene Weekly: Special Features

Gardening
Buggy for Bulbs: Bulbous natives showing up in local markets, plant sales.

Treadmarks
The Week That Was: Greener futures, and a BMW convertible that's here now.

Milkshake cravings hit in the summer, which may be one reason Jamie's was so packed last time we went by. Its chocolate malt is a rich and creamy confection of tradition.

Nostalgia decorates Jamie's with thick brushstrokes. The color scheme and décor is '50s Americana: Shiny red booths and vinyl covered chairs, juke box in the corner. There's even a scooter and sidecar set up in the middle, engineless and worn by many little hands waiting for French fries.

The menu does make a few nods toward modernity: The fries and burgers are cooked in canola oil, almost healthy, and there are veggie burgers (for an additional 75 cents!) and salads available. But meat is king, and this restaurant is the family castle.

Stir it Up, Rusty's Handbuilt, Sara's Tamales
Saturday Market, 8th and Oak St. 686-8885.

Someone in the know pointed me toward Stir it Up, or I may never have found this little Saturday Market treasure. Follow the smells of lemongrass and noodles to the corner to the left and behind the stage.

The Spicy Coconut Soup comes highly recommended: sweet, creamy and zesty, fresh cilantro and crunchy garlic niblins on top, veggies with bamboo shoots and lime leaves floating in the broth. There are also weekly specials and Kung Pao.

A nice accompaniment is a coconut cookie bar from Rusty's Handbuilt. Rusty's is new to the Market, but not to town. Handbuilt ice cream sandwiches have been around for years, and are a pinnacle of decadence in the ice cream coolers of many natural food stores. Order fresh cookie bars or ice cream sandwiches at the booth.

For extra summer flavor, you could also pick up a fruit bowl right next door at Sara's Tamales. The fruit bowls come with a selection of toppings: yogurt, granola, whipped cream. Just to be super international, I ordered one of Sara's veggie tamales too. Wrapped in a green banana leaf, it is like a gift to open. Look inside the masa and you'll find tofu, veggies, even green olives and a plum. Fifteen dollars later, I'm loaded down with enough food to feed the whole extended family!

This week we visited Gramma Dama's. This is a real doughnut shop that has just doughnuts — every different kind — and coffee, juice and pop. Dama's has sprinkle doughnuts, twists, cake, filled doughnuts, bars, apple fritters, and more.

My friend Elle, who is a chocolate EXPERT, tried a chocolate glazed bar and a giant, gooey, very yummy chocolate Pershing. Elle rated her doughnuts a 5 on a scale of 0—5. My mom tasted a glazed Old Fashioned, and she liked its freshness and crispiness. I got a puffy golden Bearclaw to take home to my brother and I could tell it was really good because he was nice to me after he ate it. I tried a glazed Bismarck with nice plump raspberry filling, and I gave it a 4 on my scale of 0—5. The doughnuts cost between 60 and 95 cents apiece.

I like Gramma Dama's because it is a place that specializes in just doughnuts, so you can have a big selection, and also because I remember coming here with my brother to get doughnuts after swimming lessons when I was little. Gramma Dama's is also a good place to sit down and eat your doughnut — it looks like a cutely decorated kitchen.

Leftovers:
New restaurants are popping up like nobody's business. Perugino, a new coffeehouse/art gallery on Willamette, opened its doors. There's another Vietnamese restaurant in town out West 11th. It's called, appropriately enough, The Vietnamese Restaurant. Out of the Fog's space on Lincoln has finally been filled, now it's called Crescent Moon Deli. The diner across from Red Apple, which was once El Rancho, is now Eugene's latest Thai eatery, called Chao Pra Ya Thai Cuisine. More on these places once we get around to eating there!

Correction:
Mona Lizza's birthday deal was incorrect in our last review. It is actually a free dessert and a gift certificate for one free entrée good for your next visit. Happy birthday anyway!

Morsels is a revolving feature that tries to capture the atmosphere as well as the cuisine of some of our favorite places to eat in and around Eugene, along with food news. Suggestions? Call Ben or Marina at 484-0519 or e-mail marina@eugeneweekly.com

Buggy for Bulbs
Bulbous natives showing up in local markets, plant sales.
BY RACHEL FOSTER

Western Oregon has wonderful native bulbs, and many of them adapt well to a life in the garden. Not long ago, I felt uncomfortable recommending them to gardeners because there seemed to be so few local sources for nursery-grown stock. The last thing I'd want is to encourage anyone to go out and plunder wild colonies. Bulbs can, of course, be raised from seed, and moderate seed collection in the wild is still considered acceptable if you take only a small fraction of the seed from any one location. To most of us, however, growing plants from seed (especially plants as slow to develop as bulbs can be) is pretty unfamiliar territory. So I am happy to report that things are changing.

Some bulbous natives are now showing up, in full spring growth, in garden centers and at plant sales. There are also more small nurseries that specialize in growing native plants, and include at least a few bulbs among them. The most convenient place I know of to buy native bulbs in variety is the Lane County Farmers' Market, where Lou Westphal has a stand called, oddly but memorably, Buggy Crazy. He brings plants and bulbs from his place in Lebanon, where he's been propagating natives for more than two decades, mostly for his own amusement. When I said I thought native bulbs used to be hard to find, he smiled dismissively and said "There's always been guys like me messing around with them." So now at least one of those guys is easier to find!

Westphal used to operate a wholesale cut flower business, specializing in hybrid lilies. A few years ago he figured out that he could just as well sell the lily bulbs, and they are easier to handle. In summer his stand is intoxicatingly perfumed with the scent of (non-native) lily flowers, including some of his own hybrids. He brings them to the market to advertise the huge bulbs that will be available in mid-September. There's also a nice selection of native shrubs and perennials, some familiar, some quite special, like the native Clematis columbiana. In July and August, a succession of native bulbs begins to appear, alongside fine colchicum bulbs and some nice, old-fashioned daffodils.

Early in the year you would find trillium here, and the magical little orchid, Calypso, growing in pots. Westphal grows some native true lilies, too. Most of this year's crop is already sold, he says, but he will have some bulbs of Lilium pardalinum this fall. Growing lilies yourself from seed takes years of patience, so if you are interested in adding others to your collection you may want to talk to Westphal about next year's crop. For now, here are a few easy natives to plant this fall:

Fawn lily (Erythronium oreganum) If you don't already have them in your garden, buy some. These early spring bloomers have prettily mottled leaves and downward-facing, cream-colored flowers like little Turks cap lilies, one to each 8-10 inch stem. Adorable and easy in any well-drained soil in light shade, where they can build impressive colonies.

Checker lily (Fritillaria lanceolata) Like fawn lilies, these are indigenous to oak woodland in our area, though less abundant. Somber-flowered and not very showy, they do have a definite charm. The alternate common name, rice lily, derives from countless small white offsets around the bulb.

Camas (Camassia species) This plant that turns damp meadows blue in spring was a mainstay of the Plains Indians' diet. The valley species tolerate wet soil, although they like to dry out a bit in summer. The flowers of Camassia quamash can be violet blue or, as is more common in this area, light blue. The taller C. leichlinii has purple-blue flowers. Westphal also has white ones, and a good pink strain of his own breeding. Sun or light shade.

Brodiaea (Brodiaea species) I love brodiaeas because they bloom so late, in June and July. Westphal sells three or four kinds, including Brodiaea coronaria, with a loose umbel of showy blue-purple flowers; and a good white form of B. hyacinthinus with compact, spherical heads. Brodiaeas do well in meadows where their lax stems have support from the grass and you don't see the fading leaves, but they will get by well enough among low perennials near the edge of a border. They like sun and are excellent for places you don't water much in summer.

The Week That Was
Greener futures, and a BMW convertible that's here now.
BY JIM MOTAVALLI

If you cared about the environment, it was quite a week for the auto industry. In a move that was like wish fulfillment for the world's greens, Ford hinted that it was going to end production of the bloated Ford Excursion, a massive, 19-foot, 10-mpg SUV that the Sierra Club dubbed the "Ford Valdez."

It was poor sales, rather than environmental derision, that played the major role in the Excursion's demise. The Chevrolet Suburban sells 100,000 units a year, and Ford wanted to move 50,000 Excursions, but the middle-class tank sold only a money-losing 15,000 in the first six months of the year. Perhaps the SUV market is over-saturated, or just maybe people are starting to recover from sport-utility fever.

While Ford's scalp was dangling from the environmentalists' belt, General Motors came under fire as well in an "Environmental Defense" report that rated the auto companies for their contribution to global warming. GM was tops with 6.7 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, followed by Ford (5.6 million tons) and DaimlerChrysler (4.1 million tons). Even one of the world's greenest automakers, Toyota, produces two million tons a year, and its contribution is growing.

As if to make up for their internal-combustion sins, the automakers were unusually active on the fuel-cell front last week. GM announced both that it was planning to introduce fuel-cell-powered electric generators by 2005 and that it had won certification for a new high-pressure hydrogen tank that could give fuel-cell cars a range of 300 miles or more. Not to be outdone, Honda said it would start leasing fuel-cell cars to customers in California and Japan as early as this fall, and Nissan said it would have its own car ready by 2003 — two years ahead of schedule.

And yet we remain in a sort of twilight zone where environmentally advanced cars are more talked about and anticipated than they are seen on the nation's highways. Gas-electric hybrids are universally celebrated, but at most 30,000 of them are on the road in the U.S. I still get excited when I see a Toyota Prius or Honda hybrid. That could change dramatically, with some 20 new models coming in the next five years, and J.D. Power and Associates estimating that sales could reach 500,000 annually by 2006. But for now, the cars I get to review are like my father's Oldsmobile with advanced electronics. The tailpipe is certainly the same.

All that said, the Japanese continue to make the most fuel-efficient, low-emission cars on the market. The Europeans produce very economical cars for domestic markets, but it's the heavier, more luxurious and sporty models that come to the U.S. I'd love, for instance, to see the tiny Mercedes-Benz "A" Class cars here, and the two-seater "Smart" cars (87 mpg in diesel form), too.

Instead, we're offered cars like the BMW 325Ci convertible, which the German company is quite right to assume meets American tastes and wallets. Priced around $36,000 with few options (cassette, leather seats, telephone, automatic transmission), the convertible strikes a sweet spot for many of my suburban neighbors. I can't blame them. It's one of the smoothest, most comfortable cars I've ever driven, yet — thanks to very sophisticated suspension — it handles like a far more demanding sports car.

The 325Ci seats four, though the rear passengers lose legroom to the complex automatic top, and offers good luggage space, all the while returning 27 mpg on the highway. With better aerodynamics, fuel economy would improve further.

The 3-Series is BMW's bestseller in the U.S., and I quite concur. The company makes bigger, more expensive cars to impress the Joneses, but the smaller ones offer the best example of form plus function.