Week 1

 For my senior capstone project, I am working with Kai Gamboa, Cai Fernandez-Powell, and Rishi Alluri. Together, we are creating an experience centred around food. Our project mainly consists of two main aspects -- visiting and eating at restaurants native to Portland, and learning how to cook more complete meals. I wanted to do this because Portland is a city is known for its food and restaurants, but I feel like there are so many places I haven't been to or tried even though I've lived here my entire life. Hopefully, we can make an impact on our Catlin community by letting people know in detail about restaurants they may never have heard of. I also think that this project is a great way to connect with our city and support small businesses that have faced difficult times during the pandemic.

I also want to learn to cook more of a variety of foods before I go to college. Cooking is a skill that everyone should learn to at least a basic degree, and I want to be as prepared as I can be before I start living independently and have only myself to rely on for meals. Our cooking documentation might also give people ideas for new things that they might want to cook on their own.

Three goals for our project: Broaden and improve my cooking skills, learn more about the food industry in Portland, and learn about what goes into food critiquing.

For our first week, our food theme was Mediterranean. On Tuesday, we ate at an Italian restaurant in downtown Portland called Grassa. We ordered 4 meals and shared them so that we each got to taste different things. We ordered: radiatore (beef and pork bolonegse, pancetta, pecorino), spaghetti carbonara (bucatini, pancetta, pecorino), rigatoni, and spaghetti marinara:

Out of all four meals, we collectively thought that the carbonara was our favorite, though they were all very good. So, for our first day of cooking, we decided to make our own spaghetti carbonara. We used a recipe from "The Oregonian Cookbook", keeping in line with our theme of food native to Portland and Oregon. Here are some photos documenting our process: