Old Home Weekend

Back in Winchester, VA, on the north side of the high school, we had a pretty cool neighborhood in the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, a bunch of young couples busy raising families, getting together when we could, drinking wine and beer, listening to music, and just hanging out. And then life happened. I got divorced and moved across town to live with Ann. Chris and Perrin decided to head out west, first to Whitefish MT and then (after Ann and I had decided to retire to the Portland area) to Beaverton OR. Only Billy and Shawn stayed in the old neighborhood.

Now fast forward to 2017 when all our kids are grown and in college or beyond. Ann and I, we packed up and headed for Oregon ourselves, arriving on September 25 and staying temporarily in Yamhill for a couple of months before ultimately settling down in McMinnville. I hadn't seen Chris and Perrin in some years and Ann, though having spoken to Perrin on the phone, had never met her in the flesh. I was looking forward to the whirling vortex of craziness as the two of them got together for the first time. Many of our mutual friends consider the two of them virtual doppelgangers in exuberance and out-there-ness!

Just before we moved, as we were saying our goodbyes, Billy told me that he and Shawn were flying out to Portland the weekend after we arrived. Party time!

Before that, first a little about Chris and Perrin. Chris and I are from the same part of the world: Albemarle County, VA, near Charlottesville. He and I went to junior high school together and played on the same soccer team. Then I moved to Alabama for three years to finish high school before coming back to the University of Virginia, where who should I find living in my very same freshman dorm but Chris?

We lost touch after freshman year as we went our own ways, but fast forward another twenty or so years, after I had moved to Texas, Maryland, the DC metro area, and finally to Winchester, VA some 60 miles west of DC. At this point, I owned the restaurant and a friend told me that she had a friend who made chicken pot pies for her small business who was in need of a commercial kitchen in which to make her pies. So, long story short, I agreed that Perrin could rent my kitchen on Sundays, the one day that it was closed. At this point, I had no idea that she lived just yards away from me, my life being confined totally to the four walls of the restaurant.

Come the first Sunday morning and I am at the restaurant to show her the ropes and give her the key and alarm codes, putzing in my office when I hear the door chime sound. I walk out of the office and looking in the direction of front door, I do a double take in disbelief as I see Chris for the first time in maybe 25 years. At this point, I hadn't put together that he and Perrin had the same last name. And after that "Holy crap!" moment, we reconnected and now we find ourselves both living outside of Portland, Oregon.

So the six of us got together at the end of September at Chris and Perrin's house in Beaverton and pre-gamed it a bit before heading in to Portland to have lunch at Tasty n Alder. It was a circus there as we stuffed ourselves into the tiny bar area with 20 other people and kicked off the day with some decent Bloody Marys. Feeling no pain, we finally got seated after nearly an hour wait and then we proceeded to have an even better time at the table while eating lunch. Servers love tables like ours who come to have a good time and who want to try the entire menu. Our server was a good sport!

Billy, Ann, Shawn, Perrin, and Bloodies

Chris

Shawn, Perrin, and Ann

The Whole Crew with our Server

Lunch concluded mid-afternoon and we made our way back to Beaverton. We had to get back to Yamhill fairly quickly as we had the dogs in the house with no dog sitter. It turns out that Chris and Perrin's daughter Elizabeth, who is a runner in college up in Washington, had a cross-country meet down in Salem south of us the next morning, so we made plans for everyone to meet us at our house in Yamhill on their way back north to Beaverton. Ann and I wanted to take them to one of our favorite wineries in the Willamette Valley, Patton Valley.

Low-Budget Tasting Room,

Excellent Wine

Patton Valley's wines I carried on my restaurant wine list for about 15 years, so I knew them well and was happy to take our friends to see this unpretentious winery up on a hill north and slightly west of Gaston, OR in the very northern reaches of the Willamette Valley. While some wineries in the Valley are now Napa-style multi-million dollars show palaces, Patton Valley's tasting room is a wonderfully utilitarian space devoted to showcasing their excellent wines.

After doing a tasting, we headed outside the tasting room to sit in some Adirondack chairs and look out over the vineyards. It was the middle of harvest, so it was pretty busy in the winery behind us, with trailer loads of grapes arriving for processing.

Sitting out Back, Drinking 10-Acre

Monte and Shotgun, Scaring Starlings

Me and My Harem

It turned out that our visit to Patton Valley coincided with Ann's and my anniversary and these jokers picked up the bill behind my back as an anniversary present. Thank you very much! You are all great friends! But I will pay you back!

Taqueria Guadalajara

We ended up at a new restaurant last night with Billy and Shawn, a restaurant that a bartender at PaveMint had recommended to us a few weeks back. Our dinner plans started at the paella party on Sunday when Shawn, realizing that the next day would be Halloween, asked me what we generally do for Halloween. I told her that we leave the house and go out to eat until the ruckus is all over (that's only partially true: usually I am at work on one of the slowest nights of the year). She thought that was a good idea and asked if we'd like to go to Guadalajara on Monday. And so we all arrived there around 6:30 on Halloween.

I didn't know anything about it really except a couple of people had mentioned that they were trying to do something more upscale than your standard crap-Mex place. The sign out front said "Gourmet Mexican Cuisine," pretty unusual for our market. I took it as a good sign that of the two occupied tables when we arrived, one was an 8-top of Mexican laborers who looked mostly to be eating big bowls of posole. The interior, though sparsely decorated, is much better looking than a typical hole in the wall.

The menu that we were given is markedly different from the run-of-the-mill carbon copy menu that all the other Mexican joints in town serve. It consists of a single page with appetizers and soups in the left column, "rellenos," fillings for tacos, burritos, sopes, and the like in the middle column, and a short list of somewhat unusual entrees on the right. After this was a drink list and the third page was a short wine list, a dozen offerings from a local distributor. Kudos to them for trying to serve wine, though I didn't see any takers.

We started with drinks, a Negra Modelo for me and margaritas all around. The first thing we noticed was that the margaritas came in nice-looking glasses and were clearly made from fresh juice and garnished with a chile seco. Negra is always a good standby beer for me. The menu offered Laughing Dog's Sneaky Pete Imperial IPA, a huge favorite of mine, but at about 10% alcohol and served only in bomber-sized 22-ouncers, it was more than I wanted to bite off on a night where I needed my wits about me to dodge all the trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood.

Negra Modelo, Always Reliable

Nice Margarita, Nice Glass

I'm not one to order chips and salsa, but Ann is and did. They're certainly trying with multicolored chips, but I don't care what color my chips are as long as they are fresh. The salsa was decent with a hint of smokiness, but was desperate for salt, like all the dishes as we would come to find out.

Nice Chip Presentation

Whenever I first eat in a Guadalajaran or Jaliscan restaurant, I will order the torta ahogada to see where the restaurant stacks up on this most traditional of dishes. I was hoping for a traditional bolillo (aka birote) roll for the sandwich but that might be too much to ask out here in the boonies with limited distribution. My sandwich came on a fairly standard torta roll which is really too soft to stand up the drowning that a true ahogada requires; my sandwich was barely wet. I should have asked for it bien ahogada, good and drowned. The pickled onions on top of the sandwich instead of their usual placement off to the side I thought was a nice touch. The extra dipping sauce was killer spicy: I loved it! Bottom line, the torta ahogada, probably the only one you can get in this whole area, was middle of the road. But then, small land wars have been fought over less contentious issues than what constitutes the perfect ahogada. A better roll would help this one.

Torta Ahogada

Billy went for the carnitas, the same meat that was in my ahogada and didn't seem to have any complaints. Shawn got a taco trio of pescado, carnitas, and birria, the Jaliscan goat stew. Ann had the birria in her burrito, which was vast enough for two people. I had a couple of bites and enjoyed it.

Birria Burrito

I'm really glad that someone in Winchester is trying to up the ante in terms of Mexican food, which can be so good, but which has been dumbed down to a paltry shadow of what it should be in most of the US. I can't see any reason that we should not visit them more frequently and do our part to help keep them in business, which is going to be tough in a town and in a segment that everyone has relegated to cheap eats.

Paella

Ann has been talking about me cooking a paella for months. Our last experience in doing paella at the beginning of October was that the weather was brutally hot, so she scheduled it this fall for the end of the month. Naturally, it was the hottest day we have had in a month, topping out at 83 degrees and somewhat uncomfortable in the sun. Fortunately, the gusty winds out of the south made it somewhat bearable.

The Guest of Honor

Once guests started arriving, we could see the telltale darkness on the horizon out west and several of us started looking at the radar to see how bad and how soon the rain would be. How soon? A lot sooner than the predicted 6:30. How bad? Some gusty wind and a bit of rain, not enough to send us inside, the wisteria vines on the arbor giving us enough cover.

Searing the Chicken and Chorizo; Look at the Wind!

Sofrito Cooked, Stock Coming to Boil

Rice About Half Done, Adding Mussels

Mussels Just Open, Shrimp in, Max Flame for Soccarat

With all the wind, I couldn't get the paella done as quickly as usual; the heat was blown off the pan. Such is cooking outdoors over a fire. Of the hundreds of frames I shot, these are all the photos worth looking at and many of these are pretty terrible. I'm afraid I'm not very good with the camera. I was trying to use my 50mm prime lens and I still don't have it figured out. I need to find another strategy for shooting handheld interior shots in low light without resorting to flash. (The little voice is saying, "use the iPhone, idiot!").

Anniversary Paella

In the restaurant business, we celebrate our personal milestones on days off. Work days are for helping others celebrate their milestones. I wish it weren't so, but it is the nature of my occupation. This past Sunday was the day closest to our actual anniversary and to celebrate we invited a dozen or fourteen friends over for tapas, paella, and a case of Tempranillo, which our friends, who are not shy about wine, promptly emptied!



Paella Mixta

We really had a beautiful day and I kicked the hardwood fire off about ten minutes to four in the fire pit out on our patio. At 4:30, I started the chicken, which was followed by the chorizos, the tiny Salvadoran ones called tuzas (gophers), and my mirepoix of red peppers, onions, and hard Spanish chorizo. After this, into the pan with a spoonful of pimentón and my picada (parsley and garlic). Then a gallon of mixed stock (chicken, pork, mussel, and saffron), right up to the bottom of the handle rivets.

Once the stock came to a boil, a kilo and a half of rice went into the pan at 5:00 and was done by 5:25 or so. After 15 minutes of resting under a couple of towels, we all dug in, scraping big hunks of the crunchy socarrat off the bottom of the paellera.

Rear to Front: Chicken Wings, Salvadoran Chorizos, Red Prawns, Mussels

I thought I had lucked out and got some amazing red prawns. They sure look good, but their texture was pasty and the flavor very fishy. Not again for me. They are a new product that I was checking out for my seafood company. No bueno.



Figs, Goat Cheese, Jamón

For starters for our guests while I was out back tending the fire and the paellera, I made two tapas: these halved figs topped with local goat cheese and wrapped in ham. And I threw together some sautéed onions and red peppers from the garden with some thyme and eggs for a tortilla. Finally, as Spaniards will often do for a quick tapa, we raided the pantry for some marinated olives, peppers, and lupini.

Mixed Olives, Peppers, and Lupini



Red Pepper and Onion Tortilla

For wine, I picked a really smooth Tinta de Toro crianza from Finca Sobreño. It's a ripe Tempranillo that tastes of darker fruit, blackberries and cassis, without a lot of aggressive wood and with tame tannins. A great party wine.

A Nice Tempranillo (Tinta de Toro)

Our Wedding: Friends

After the ceremony, it was party on! Boo Snider pulled out his guitar and serenaded us and then played a few tunes. I noticed that he and several other diehard Redskins fans bolted right after this to go catch the game: party poopers!

Boo Sang for Us

Nice Photo of the Old Epiphone Taken by My Father

Watching the Ceremony

Jim and Sandy

Congratulations from an old Friend

Tom and Amanda

Dennis and Dimitri

Dennis Horning in on my Girl!

Mike and Dennis

Mikey

Photographer Extraordinaire with the 500kw Smile

Clowning Around

Ricky and Brittany

Kenny and Mel, Traitors: Bailed Early to Watch Football!

Bill McKenney Holding Court; KO and Photographer Steve Wright

Cake Decorator Donald and Cindy

Terry Relaxing Without the Camera

Kelley, Mark, and Jen

Pretty Smiles

Dewi Armed for Combat

Billy and Shawn

Preston and Myret

Patty Always Hides from the Camera; Stealth Shot of her and Neil