Her smiling face tempts me to buy Nabisco snacks. (Except "Chicken in a Biscuit", nothing but comedy tempts me to buy that.)

She has a bunch of cookbooks, a magazine, three television programs and branded cookware, appliances and cutlery... none of which I have seen. I only know about her as an Oprah-created media phenomenon.

Kettle is offering the opportunity to mix and match and order just your favorites from the last run of taste tests, so if you really loved the exotic taste of chocolate potato chips you should stock up now.

Five bags for $14.95 seems like a pretty good price.

In our experience as vegetarian cooks, meat has always been easier to give up than cheese. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t conjure up images of flogged turkeys and force fed baby cows in cages. Maybe its because its so goddamned good that attempts at strict veganism have been demolished again and again by reoccurring dreams of sweet salty lactic love…

Whatever the reason, eating and cooking with cheese continues to be a big part of our culinary endeavors. This week we’re introducing a new thread for the Hot Knives blog: “Dairy Pairy,” which will highlight a cheese we think rules — especially when served side by side with an amazing brew. If you ever have a great bottle and want some cheese pairing advice, or vice verse, send us an email (hotknivez@gmail.com) and we’ll send you some options.

A caveat: This section is not meant as an affront to all you vegans out there. As we all know, most cheese isn’t even technically vegetarian, as it is produced using animal obtained rennet. However, we will be focusing on mostly artisinal cheeses from both home and abroad, which, even when rennet is present, are pretty safe bets for cruelty free products. Remember those California Cheese Commission commercials about happy cows making happy cheese in happy California? Think about how blissed out Bessie (Bijou) could be wandering unfenced in the Alps, eating as much clover and sweet high-altitude grass as she wants, or gigantic herds of sheep reared from birth by a single family in La Mancha lazily roaming the Quixotic countryside.

As an exemplar, we decided that the kick-off post for this section would be dedicated to cheeses made with vegetarian rennet, making the product as close in ideology (at least) to veganism as possible. Not only are the sheep, cows or goats that make these cheeses cared for more like family than livestock, their milk isn’t coagulated with the chemically derived innards of their would be kids, calves, or lambs. Thistle flowers, cultured molds, and microscopic mushrooms are the thickeners in these stick-to-your-ribs slices.

So tell us about your favorite suds and we’ll steer you toward some of our favorite curds in a future post here at Digest or better yet, feature the cream of the crop, so to speak, in a veggie cheese din-din for L.A. Ur-ho bloggaz.

A Food-Word Game

While you Pee-towners are slacking off on sleds, some of us reside in above-freezing environs and have to keep the blogroll a burnin’. Here is a parlor game that we’re calling “Exquisite Course” that’s sure to pass the time for anybody stuck in their kitchen, closet or car.

But wait…let’s back it up a second. You see, we at Hot Knives have been scheming for weeks over a concept of postmodern, deconstructionist high fallutin’ vegan fast food recipes we plan to unleash on the world shortly. Think Sprite, as a salad.

However, it dawned on us that we might be getting a twee bit ahead of ourselves. After all you can’t get to postmodernism without hitting a little surrealism, right? In this case we mean a saucy liberation of our unconscious minds through imagination, free food association and weird, guttural wordplay. This game is fun, sure, but it’s also a serious way to stumble upon dream-like dishes of sick proportions. So here’s how you play:

If you’ve played Exquisite Corpse before, you can probably already guess. We happened to try a couple rounds as two people (once bored in a car, once drunk at a bar) but it suits a threesome much better. Simply start at the beginning of the alphabet and have one person kick-off with the first ingredient that comes to mind (“all spice”). A second person adds either another ingredient (“apple”) or a preparation method (“roasted”) and a third player tosses out a larger dish-type (“hummus”) and voile you’ve got “all-spice apple hummus” or whatever. Now, many of them won’t be, well, realistic, but you can imagine how it both passes the time and pushes the proverbial envelope right? Here are two standout rounds that we got too frustrated or drunk to finish...

Round One

Avocado aspic jelly
Banana crisp cereal
Collard greens dolmas
Date-pear compote
Eggplant quiche
Fava beans w/fries in a barley wine and butter sauce
Gravied tomatoes
Hot pickled broccoli
Ice wine shallot vinaigrette
Japanese eggplant caviar
Kream of kale soup
Lemon-lime "Sprite" salad
Macaroni and morel casserole
Nicoise soup
Olive pineapple pilaf
Peanuts (fresh) in butter
Parsnip relish
Quinoa-mint spring rolls
Rice cream
Sake-bomb tempeh w/ coconut mash

Round Two

Ancho-Baratta cheese
Beet chevre
Champagne shoshito shots
Duvel eggplant steak
Endive frittata
Frisee BBQ onion rings
Gravy hummus
Harissa spanokapia
Juniper jelly compote
Kettle parsnip w/ vodka salt

YOUR TURN...

Team Pizza grew from seven to more than a dozen for the northwest tasting which included Hotlips, Old Town Pizza, Pizza Oasis, and Pizza Hut. After the disaster of flavor from the north Portland tasting, there was a general feeling of wary optimism. The pizza from north has been a lot of new places that nearly universally disappointed us, but there was more familiarity with the northwest locations and it felt like the scores should be higher.

We ordered a large cheese pie simultaneously from all four places at 7:36 p.m. The pizza was tasted in the order that it arrived.

Hot Lips

Hot Lips is 22 years old, has five locations, and maintains a well-deserved reputation for sustainable practices. They also bottle their own hot sauce, jalapenos, and soda.

Hot Lips promised 35 minutes and made it in 27:43. After the previous tasting we expected Pizza Hut to arrive first, so it was a pleasant surprise to have the local and eco-friendly Hot Lips be the winner.

Everyone rated the taste on a scale of 1 to 10 and with nearly universal acclaim Hot Lips scored a 6.5/10:

Freddy: "Subtle. Perfect."
Sarah: "A lot of cornmeal on the crust... maybe too much?"
J.John: "Delicious sauce, but not as hot as I want it."

Old Town Pizza

Old Town Pizza is a 32 years old Portland institution. At one time there was an Old Town Pizza in Salem, Seattle, and San Francisco, but only the haunted original survives.

They had promised 45 minutes but made it in just 30:01. Not only that, but they arrived on their signature pizza delivery tricycle! While Old Town was the only pizza that received a perfect ten from one of our tasters, they averaged a 6.16/10.

Daniel: "Tastes like fish."
Ashby: "GARLIC!!! Mega Cheese!"
Steve: "It literally tastes like fish."

Pizza Hut

Pizza Hut is 48 years old and was once owned by PepsiCo, before being spun off with KFC and Taco Bell as part of Tricon, which eventually became YUM! Brands which has more than 34,000 restaurants in more than 100 countries.

There was a mistake made in the Pizza Hut order, which puts it at a severe disadvantage. The person who ordered got their "thin crust" instead of the usual pan style. We have decided to include the results because they tried to order the "regular crust" but they were forced to choose randomly of the branded names of crust.

This was the worst pizza any of us had ever had and the score reflects that. Pizza Hut received only 1.83/10.

Curt: "Like pilot bread with cheese - no spices... bland."
Josh: "Weird. Thin saltine crust... I would never order this."
Daniel: "Bullshit."

Pizza Oasis

Pizza Oasis is over 15 years old and maintains a single location on Burnside.

Personally I had high hopes for Oasis as they are my neighborhood favorite and only five blocks away. They estimated it would take them 45 minutes to an hour to make it those five blocks, and they clocked in at 57:02. That's like taking 12 minutes to walk a single block.

The pizza itself however only did okay, scoring a 5.91/10.

Ashby: "Mature tasting cheese."
Anonymous: "More cheese than you might want."
Meghan: "Sauce was tantalizing but slim. MORE SAUCE GUYS! I WANT MORE! DON'T BE SHY!"

Additional Data

While we primarily judge a delivered cheese pizza on taste and time, there are other valuable numbers to consider. By measuring several slices we determined the average weight of a slice from each pizzeria, and then based on the price determined the cost per ounce.

Conclusion

When in Northwest Portland, there is no reason to ever order Pizza Hut, so it's pretty easy to just dismiss them from this discussion. And it's pretty clear that if you are in their delivery radius you should be ordering Hot Lips. If you have guests in town or want to embrace the "Keep Portland Weird" vibe, then Oldtown with their Pizza-Tricycle is your best bet and while there isn't anything really wrong with Oasis, it just seems that the neighborhood has better things to offer.

Team NorthWest

Thanks to everyone participated in the Northwest Tasting! As there were several unsigned forms, please let me know if you were there and you are not listed below:

Daniel: "Live for pizza rather than die for pizza."
Michael: "No good pizza was ever made in a chair."
Meghan: "Only our individual faith in pizza can keep us free."
Ashby: "Unfortunately, many people do not consider pizza an important item on their daily agenda."
J.John: "Political power grows out of the crust of a pizza."
Adam: "Those who pick the toppings decide everything."
Sarah: "I came, I saw, I conquered."
Steve: "When you have a pizza, all problems start to look like meals."
Mikey: "I would rather have a pizza in front of me than a sandwich behind me."
Curt: "Amateurs talk toppings, professionals talk crust."
Freddy: "The fact that pizza might be used by criminals does not mean it is wrong to have it."
Josh: "Pizza and beer don't waste time — people do."