OPB’s “Superabundant” explores the stories behind the foods of the Pacific Northwest with videos, articles and this weekly newsletter. Every week, Heather Arndt Anderson, a Portland-based culinary historian, food writer and ecologist, highlights different aspects of the region’s food ecosystem. This week she offers a recipe for gingery noodle soup with pork meatballs.

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This might sound cliche, but as a fourth-generation Oregonian, this time of year always makes me think of Lewis and Clark, making their way down the Mighty Columbia.

I don’t know about you, but I find it a great comfort to hear ducks and geese squonking overhead, and to know that two centuries ago, the aural wallpaper of their migration in these selfsame skies was being witnessed by the Corps of Discovery — and driving them all up the cotdang wall.

“I could not Sleep for the noise kept by the Swans, Geese, white & black brant, Ducks &c. on a opposit base, & Sand hill Crane, they were emensely numerous and their noise horrid,” Clark grumpily scrawled into his journal the morning of Nov. 5, 1805. In retaliation (probably), the Corps’ hunters took out about a dozen of the fowl. “We are all wet Cold and disagreeable.”

Welcome to the Great Northwest, fellas! Call me Peppermint Petty, but it warms me in my schadenfreude to know that the November blahs have always kind of made people miserable around here. At least we have warm, brothy meals to soothe us — by the time Lewis and Clark’s party made it to Oregon, they’d long run out of their supply of portable soup. Do you know what that is? Read on to find out!

Not such a nutty idea, actually

A $2 million federal grant was awarded to ecologists at the University of Oregon to test the effects of adding crushed basalt and native wildflowers to hazelnut orchards. The soil amendments and cover crop are expected to benefit water retention and promote a healthy soil microbiome in the orchards, as well as making it easier to harvest the nuts.

Watch the Soils episode of “Superabundant”

Mislabeled salmon spawns investigation

Sushi lovers, beware: a new study published in PLOS ONE reveals that some Washington sushi restaurants are fraudulently selling farmed salmon as wild-caught in order to hike up prices. The study’s authors conducted DNA analysis on salmon samples from 52 sushi restaurants and 67 grocery stores in Seattle and found that 32.3% of the restaurants’ salmon had been specifically mislabeled as wild-caught when it was farmed, and 38.7% of the samples were labeled with the wrong species (11.1% of grocery stores made this error but none mislabeled farmed salmon as wild-caught).

A bunch of bull

A rancher outside Wallowa is the proud owner of the largest herd of longhorn cattle west of Texas, reports the Wallowa County Chieftain, but it isn’t the first — in 1837, Ewing Young drove a herd of 800 longhorns from Mexico to the Oregon Territory in order to end the Hudson Bay Company’s monopoly on cattle. Young’s Willamette Cattle Company made him so rich that when he died, Oregon’s first provisional government had to be established to divide his heirless estate. The longhorn cattle eventually increased in numbers and began to escape, running in terrifying, semi-feral herds of 15 to 20. “[O]f course they were a real menace, especially to anyone afoot,” recalled one old-timer in 1939.

You deserve a little treat

Snack Fest PDX is this weekend (Nov. 15-17)! There’ll be a staggering array of good eats — everything from hot sauces to churros will be on offer. It’s free to enter, but you can also buy tickets for exclusive events.

Bitter is better

The Culinary Breeding Network sure knows how to throw a party. In partnership with Chicory Week, this year’s Sagra del Radicchio will be another celebration of one of the prettiest winter vegetables to grace markets — and one that farmers and crop scientists are continuing to improve right here in the Northwest. Mark your calendars for Dec. 8 and be sure to grab tickets early, as they usually sell out fast.

Now that we’re getting less than 10 hours of daylight, the backyard hens have slowed down on their laying and will be freeloading until about March or so (unless I decide to put a light in their coop, which I’ve never done).

The rest of the garden is similarly tucking in for the winter, so all but one vegetable bed is being retired for the year. One bed still has kale, blood sorrel, Greek cress and radicchio (a couple of the Rosso di Verona seeds I picked up at last year’s Sagra actually grew!), and I still have tons of cold-hardy herbs like oregano, winter savory, sage, thyme, rosemary and chervil. Never underestimate herbs’ ability to make the humblest of dishes sing!

Local cranberries are in season — they freeze beautifully, so it’s worth grabbing a bag now to make your own cranberry sauce for holiday meals (even if everyone knows the ridges make the canned version taste better). The usual cool-season suspects like winter squashes, chicories and crucifers continue to be the highlights of the produce aisle.

I’ve been hitting the cheese pretty hard lately, especially since persimmons, quinces, apples and pears are at their peak — a nutty Gouda is an ideal match for any of these fruits, but it’s really hard to go wrong with a smoky cave-aged blue or a sharp and crumbly white cheddar (those little cheese crystals go straight to my dopamine receptors).

Lately, in the “Superabundant” kitchen

✨ I had a few quinces kicking around so I spent a few hours simmering them into a thick dulce de membrillo, or quince paste. Two quinces made more of the stuff than I expected, so I scraped it into cute little sandbakkel tins to set. If only I had a set of cotognata molds!

✨ Of all the Portland restaurants I’ve mourned to see shutter, Fujin is probably at the top of the list. I ate there so much that I was on a first name basis with the owners and watched their son grow up in the restaurant dining room. The dishes I still crave 10 years later are the tofu with black bean sauce and the garlicky green beans, so I gave it a shot in my own kitchen. I think I got pretty close! Maybe next I’ll try to master their fried eggplant.

✨ Once in a while I get very Teutonic yearnings for Braunschweiger (aka liverwurst), but I rarely need to eat an entire chub of it so I slice it, layer it with wax paper and stash it in the freezer for when the hankering strikes. I had some with buttered, toasted rye and pickled red onions. It’s also delicious mixed with mayonnaise and a little Maggi sauce to use as a banh mi spread.

Recipe: Gingery noodle soup with pork-mushroom meatballs

If there’s anything that really taught me how to cook, it was living near a Chinese grocery store when I was broke.

When I was a college student, I was living off free muffins and bagels I could bring home from the coffee shop where I worked on weekends, supplemented with groceries from the Chinese market in my neighborhood. The tofu, seitan, rice, noodles, vegetables and seasonings were so much cheaper at Spring Market than Safeway or Fred Meyer, allowing me to cook healthy and affordable meals. More importantly, international markets allowed me to try novel ingredients, cooking techniques and new-to-me dishes when I couldn’t afford to eat out.

I may no longer struggle to pay for groceries, but around 400,000 Oregonians still experience food insecurity today. Food prices continue to rise with inflation (and price-gouging), and Chinese tariffs proposed by the incoming administration will likely exacerbate the problem, according to economists. Your trips to the Asian supermarket are about to get a lot more expensive, so stock up on dried shiitakes and chili crisp while you can!

Tariffs won’t just affect shoppers — they’ll also have a major impact on generations of wheat farmers in the Pacific Northwest. Stretching back to the 1890s, there’s been basically an Oregon-to-China wheat pipeline that still exists today — not only is Columbia River is still the largest wheat shipping conduit in America (Oregon ships 90% of its wheat overseas), but China remains the single largest consumer of American crops. In 2023, China imported $34.05 billion of agricultural products from the United States.

Though it would be a few thousand years between the invention of noodles in China and the advent of instant ramen in Japan, the idea to make a dehydrated broth falls somewhere in the middle. As expeditions around the Pacific became more routine in the 1700s, a new staple ingredient emerged in the form of “pocket soup,” which was basically bone broth cooked down to hard, plastic-like sheets that could be broken up and dissolved in hot water. The Corps of Discovery brought 193 pounds of the stuff on their expedition, but had already burned through their supply long before they reached the Northwest. That’s too bad — whether it’s made with noodles and meatballs or salmon and wapato tubers, a nice bowl of soup makes a Northwest November a little more bearable.

Nowadays, most of the Chinese-style noodles I use are manufactured in California, but I still have a hard time finding Asian greens that aren’t imported from overseas. If you’re so inclined, you can certainly make your own noodles and grow your own greens (it’s the season!). The meatballs are the star here — they’re perfect as is, but would make excellent wontons too. Serves 4

Note: if you can’t find Chinese celery, feel free to use regular celery instead. You won’t get the delicious leafy parts, but it’ll still be good. If you don’t like celery, leave it out!

Ingredients

Meatballs

1 dried shiitake mushroom

2 dried wood ear mushrooms (aka kikurage)

1 pound ground pork, turkey or chicken

3 water chestnuts, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, minced

1 tablespoon minced ginger

1 scallion, finely sliced

1 egg

1 tablespoon dark soy sauce

2 tablespoons cornstarch

1 teaspoon ground white pepper

A few pinches of MSG

Soup

2 quarts (8 cups) chicken broth

3 tablespoons minced ginger (the yield from a 2-inch piece)

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 tablespoon light soy sauce

1 tablespoon dark soy sauce

1 tablespoon Shaoxing wine

1 teaspoon sesame oil

1 teaspoon ground white pepper

A few pinches of MSG

3 ribs Chinese celery (or 1 rib regular celery)

4 small bok choy, quartered lengthwise and rinsed well

1 pound fresh Chinese egg noodles (Lucky KT brand is good)

2 scallions, finely sliced

Instructions

1. Soak the dried mushrooms in hot water until they soften up, about 15 minutes. Drain and finely chop them, then add them to the remaining meatball ingredients. Mix well and set aside to let the mixture rest while you make the soup.
2. Bring the chicken broth to a low boil and add the ginger, garlic, soy sauces, Shaoxing wine, sesame oil, pepper and MSG. Cut off and reserve the leafy part of the Chinese celery, then finely slice the stalks and add them to the soup. Let the soup simmer until the garlic and celery are tender, about 15 to 20 minutes.
3. While the soup is simmering, divide the meatball mixture and form 12 meatballs (it’s easier if you oil your hands first). Add the meatballs to the soup and cook for 15 minutes.
4. While the meatballs are cooking, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the bok choy and cook for about 30 seconds, then remove them with a slotted spoon to a bowl of ice water (this will ensure the bok choy is tender-crisp and bright green).
5. Cook the noodles according to the instructions on the package — fresh, thin egg noodles only take about 15 seconds to cook, and need to be rinsed in cold water to stop them from becoming gummy and clumping together. Drain and divide the cooked noodles among your soup bowls.
6. Add the leafy part of the Chinese celery to the soup to let it cook for a minute, taste the broth and add salt as needed. Ladle the soup and meatballs over the noodles, then top the bowls with the blanched bok choy and scallions.

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