Preparing a meal is perhaps the quickest and most effective way to give someone a sense of place. Eric showed up at the Greyhound station on a redeye bus, so I sent him to the Coast for the day. He’d already offered to buy steaks, but I upped the ante by sending him to a favorite seafood shop on the bayfront in Newport. He returned with fresh halibut, scallops and crab meat in a bag of crushed ice, plus a bottle of pinot noir from a local vineyard. We added asparagus, scallions and fish sticks for Bailey and the result was quite nice.

We then headed to the Cascades for a couple days of hiking and fishing the Deschutes. We didn’t land any trout large enough to grill on the fire, but we were fortunate enough to pass a stand in Sisters selling salmon jerky and fresh blue chanterelle mushrooms, which I’d never tried before. We cooked them in oil on a camp stove and ate them with of Painted Hills beef tenderloin filets next to the cerulean blue of the Metolius River burbling and hidden in the darkness just beyond the propane lantern light. The chanterelles were, if anything, cleaner and more earthy in taste than their pale cousins, and they glistened black in the camp light. We drank Black Butte Porter in the shadow of the actual Black Butte, reminding me of why Oregon is perhaps the best place in the world for beer.

Eric is an avid traveller, eater and Anthony Bourdain fan, the sort of fellow to snap photos of what he eats, wherever he happens to be in the world. When someone visit’s it fine (and easy) to take him to your favorite restaurant, but I think that cooking something local is even more effective. And when your guest snaps a photo of what you prepared together, then you know you’ve had at least some measure of success.

And if Eric decides to return to sample some more of Oregon’s offerings, we’ll know we’ve made a lasting impression.

But instead we’ve been holding a little German film festival. None of that oppressive Herzog stuff, but rather surprisingly light fare. We watched Goodbye Lenin!, Lives of Others and Mostly Martha. Lives of Others was a bit intense, but still ultimately uplifting. No dark chaos theory here.

Even though Lives was a brilliant film, Martha was perhaps my favorite. This is because I’m a sucker for movies about food. In this film, Martha is a chef who doesn’t eat and needs to learn how, along with the other important things in life, like how to raise a kid and be a lover. I think it has easily cracked my top five food film list, up there with Ratatouille, and Big Night, plus the aggregate of all of those great food scenes in the Coppola films.

This got me thinking about why food plays such a vital part in so many films. The best scenes take place in kitchens, restaurants or even cowboy campfires. Of course don’t forget the cafeteria food fight in Animal House. Capturing the spirit of food in a film is difficult given the fact that we can’t smell or taste what’s going on. Presentation is always part of a great meal, but it’s these other two senses that are critical to the process of enjoying food. It’s hard to get that across in a visual medium. But great films manage to make that happen.

Mostly Martha operates like a routine romantic comedy throwing in that tried and true vehicle–the orphaned kid who shows up on your doorstep. But despite the conventions, and despite its German Lifetime Network soundtrack, it is a brilliant food film. It opens with a narration by a chef in her psychiatrist’s office offering a description that is guaranteed to start your belly growling. And in a moving scene where the orphaned girl who hasn’t eaten since her mother’s death is coaxed into eating a plate of spaghetti, you’ll be in tears and then make a run to the fridge. I’ve made my own attempt to write a great food film with my script Vintage. It’s ostensibly about wine, but wine is only so much fermented grape juice without food and conversation, which is the point of the screenplay. I don’t have the audacity to include it in this list of classics, it’s merely my humble attempt to get the essence of a meal onto the screen.

So thumbs up for Martha and now it’s time to get back to work.