NWBL is hungry, thanks to Liz Crain. We want her to take us on an eating tour of Portland, hitting all the markets and carts and cafes she writes about in her new book, Food Lover’s Guide to Portland (Sasquatch) and then we want to sit on her front porch sipping rosé while she prepares a light summer meal. Try her blog. It will have this effect on you—this hungry but not hungry for the ordinary foods in your cupboard. Hungry for Hood strawberries and summer salad with stuffed/fried hardboiled egg, anchovies, olives and a lemony mustard vinegrette and homemade cherry wine.

Crain writes about Pacific Northwest food and drink for various print and online publications. She is also an editor at Hawthorne Books. We asked her a few questions.

Your book promises to help me find all that is delicious in Portland. Will you pick three delicious foods I can find there this summer and tell me where to find them? Sure, there are so many to choose from but here are a few . . . Although the menu changes constantly at Evoe, the griddled and salted padron peppers are killer. If they’re on the menu get a plate. They leave the stems on so you can pick them up and pop them in your mouth and only about every tenth is spicy. You never know which one it’ll be.

Get out to Kruger Farms on Sauvie Island on any Thursday night in the summer to check out their outdoor concert series and drink a pint or two of Captured By Porches‘ Two Cats Kolsch from their mobile public house. The Two Kats is light, crisp and refreshing but still has impressive hops. Perfect summer session beer.

Grab some Jorinji Miso at New Seasons Market, Limbo or loads of other ethnic markets and shops around town that carry it and either prepare it in someone’s kitchen or take it home as a PDX edible souvenir. I do all sorts of things with Jorinji’s Miso but I think my favorite is a simple lime, miso, oil vinaigrette that I make. It’s really good on a summer salad with strong greens like chicories or arugula thrown in along with some chopped fresh herbs. It stands up to the flavor. I love all the different types of their miso too — white, red, dark red, chickpea and then some.

Describe your perfect Portland summer meal. I grab a bottle of our homemade hard cider out of the fridge and pour a couple glasses for my boyfriend and myself. He starts making his fish tacos while I get all the toppings and sides prepped. I open some spicy homemade blackened salsa and sour cream, and chop the cabbage, cilantro, onions and sometimes cheese. We make our plates and eat on the front porch.

What do you think it is about Portland that makes it this nexus of local and organic and hipster? Location and a strong by-your-bootstraps ethic are really important. The Willamette Valley is so fertile and all of the surrounding growing regions in the state offer a ton of diversity — bison, horseradish, wasabi, crawfish, kiwi, wine grapes and so much more all thrive here. It also doesn’t hurt that Portland is affordable, artistic, and close to so many other great food/drink spots—Vancouver B.C, Seattle, Northern California, Washington and Oregon wine country. There’s some magic here too though that you just can’t put your finger on. I love Portland more and more every year.

Will you recommend a couple of books you read in researching your book? Katy Calcott’s The Food Lover’s Guide to Seattle and Patricia Wells’ The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris.

What are some of your favorite food memoirs? Delights and Prejudices by James Beard, The Gastronomical Me by M.F.K. Fisher, Toast by Nigel Slater, Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen by Jacques Pepin, My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food by Judith Jones.

How about some of your favorite cookbooks? The Joy of Pickling by Linda Ziedrich, Dungeness Crab and Blackberry Cobbler by Janie Hibler, The Silver Spoon by Phaidon Press, Vij’s by Vikram Vij and Meeru Dhawala, The Spicy Food Lover’s Bible by Dave DeWitt and Nancy Gerlach, Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child et al, Chez Panisse Fruit by Alice Waters to name just a few. It’s hard to pick favorites.

Can you introduce us to a book about food that we might not have heard of? Edible Wild Plants: Wild Food from Dirt to Plate by John Kallas. John lives a hop, skip and jump away from me in North Portland and I love his work and writing. The book just came out this summer.

What do you use more for recipes these days, cookbooks or laptop? Cookbooks. No competition there for me.

Do you prefer your cookbooks pristine or are they crusted and splattered? Cookbooks are the only type of book that I write in. At the back of most of my cookbooks — the ones that I care about — I write down my favorite recipes along with notes and page numbers. So I sort of make my own index with things to remember about the recipes. All of the cookbooks that I love get weathered and worn.