Living with Food

It was a good year,” Eva Kosmas Flores notes as she proffers a spoonful of pale honey harvested from the beehives tucked into her front garden’s riot of flowers, herbs, trees, and vegetables. The beauty of ingredients fresh from the garden is central to the life of this cookbook author, food photographer, and educator, whose focus on eating seasonally and appreciating the wildness of food draws scores of readers to her long-running blog, Adventures in Cooking.

A Portland native, Kosmas Flores grew up watching her parents grow the tomatoes and cucumbers that went into the salads at their Greek deli, East Burnside’s dearly departed Foti’s. After nine post-college years living and working in Los Angeles, Kosmas Flores and her husband, Jeremy, returned to Portland seeking a permanent home with plenty of space for nature. They found it in Fairview, a small pocket between Portland and Gresham where wetlands and waterfront parks meet big-box shopping centers. Their 1937 property lies only a handful of yards from a city-spanning thoroughfare, but once inside it’s easy to feel transported back in time. Doors creak warmly, chickens rustle in their coop. The dining-room tableau—a rectangular iron light fixture hangs over a simple wooden table set against hand-plastered walls with dark trim—could have been plucked from a Vermeer painting.

The garden is a sensory buffet where the perfume of roses and dahlias is spiked with the earthy tang of tomato and basil, and the bright scents of raspberry and Meyer lemon mingle with sharp notes of oregano and thyme. “Everything is presented so uniform in size and color on the grocery store’s produce shelves, [so] we tend to miss out on the natural side of food, what comes out when you see it in context,” Kosmas Flores says.

The heart of the house is, as you might expect, the kitchen. A six-burner ILVE stove is bathed in natural light from corner windows; copper cookware and vintage knives hang within arms’ reach; and the white cabinetry is set off by dark reclaimed-wood countertops and open shelves. It’s the perfect backdrop for the unfussy yet delectably photogenic dishes Kosmas Flores conjures from her garden’s bounty. The author of two cookbooks, 2016′s Adventures in Chicken and 2018′s First We Eat: Good Food for Simple Gatherings from My Pacific Northwest Kitchen, Kosmas Flores recently did the photography for Portland chef Gregory Gourdet’s James Beard Award–winning cookbook Everyone’s Table: Global Recipes for Modern Health. From the kitchen, it’s a short walk across the lilac-draped back patio to the detached garage that houses her photo studio.

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When the couple purchased the house in 2014, though, the kitchen was one of several spaces sorely in need of an update. The previous owners were paint enthusiasts: As Kosmas Flores recalls, “Every room was painted a different, bold color—cranberry, bright blue, mint green”—and the wood floors throughout were stained an orangey brown. The pair began a three-part renovation, starting with the kitchen, and did much of the work themselves. Eva embraced the process of plastering the walls, while Jeremy learned to plane wood in order to replace the kitchen countertops with thick reclaimed planks from North Portland’s now-shuttered Salvage Works; he also installed the room’s deep hammered-copper sink.

In the upstairs bedroom, the couple’s contractor built cupboard storage into the deeply pitched eaves and broke through what was previously a dropped ceiling to add more height. A tiny second bedroom became a spacious bathroom with a broad, native-stone sink and a fig tree that curves over the clawfoot tub as though reaching for the pear blossoms outside. The stairway to the second floor opens directly into the bedroom, and Kosmas Flores likens the journey to “walking into a cloud.”

These days, she’s ready to tackle her next adventure in seasonal growing, sustainable living, and land stewardship. Six years ago, she and Jeremy bought 29 acres of clear-cut forest in the Columbia River Gorge and began acquiring permits to build a homestead there. They’re working with a permaculture expert to amend the property’s soil so it can support a vegetable garden, an orchard, and plenty of trees; somewhat less existentially, Kosmas Flores is looking forward to a home where her kitchen and studio can be closer. Like her love of food and gardening, the homestead is a new iteration of what’s always been intrinsic: “It’s going to be a lifelong thing.”

EVA KOSMAS FLORES’S PORTLAND TOP FOUR

• FOR COCKTAILS > Expatriate. “I’m always inspired by the flavor combinations in their drinks menu.”
• FOR CAFFEINE > Portland Cà Phê
• FOR BATH AND BODY PRODUCTS/ GENERAL GOOD VIBES > Seagrape Apothecary
• FOR BREATHING ROOM > The Grotto’s upper park and shrine. “It’s so peaceful up there, and the views of the city are breathtaking.”

This story is part of Nester, Willamette Week’s annual home magazine. It is free and can be found all over Portland beginning Friday, Sept. 22, 2023. Find your free copy at one of the locations noted here, before they all get picked up! Or, order one through our store.