New Year's Eve: Latke Board

New Year's Eve 2025 is right at the top of my list of most memorable year-end celebrations. And for all the wrong reasons. Somehow, I picked up a nasty case of food poisoning, and by the time that midnight rolled around, I had all the classic symptoms.

The cautious drive home down the slippery butte in the icy and misting rain-fog-snow mess was excruciating as I fought back wave after wave of gut wrenching nausea. I finally got to sleep around 0300 and when I awoke the next morning, I had strained the ribs on my right side. Fun times.

I should have known something was up earlier; I did not even feel like taking photos which is uncharacteristic.

Small Potato Latkes for NYE Caviar

We made plans with Rob and Dyce to have caviar and Champagne at their house to ring in the new year. All of us really like caviar and I happen to like latkes with my caviar, although the more I think about it, really great potato chips are fantastic and so much easier. In any case, a couple years ago, I came up with an idea for New Year's along the lines of a charcuterie board: a latke board. I had never heard of or seen anyone doing any such thing, but when I typed the phrase into my handy dandy search engine, up popped thousands of photos of people who beat me to the punch.

This reminds me that there is little truly original thought in cooking; dishes are built from a long lineage of precursors. Long ago in my restaurant days, a line cook from another restaurant angrily confronted me outside my restaurant, accusing me of stealing a dish from the menu at his restaurant. As busy as I was, I did not have the time or the energy to look at another restaurant's menu, let alone steal a dish.

I believe that it might have been some kind of beet and goat cheese salad. Because people have been putting beets and goat cheese as long as there have been beets and goat cheese, I am certain that it was not original to either the young cook's restaurant or mine. It was on thousands of menus long before our two.

In any case, my latke board idea reminds me that two people can come up with the same idea independently. My idea was to make several different kinds of latkes, a few pickles, and a few spreads, all of which would work with caviar.

Shallot Pickles and Cucumber Pickles Curing

My Latke Board
Potato, Celery Root, and Sweet Potato Latkes
Cucumber, Shallot, and Cornichon Pickles
Smoked Trout Mousse, Saffron Aïoli, Horseradish-Dill Sour Cream
Smoked Salmon and Caper Mousse

If you can name a root vegetable, I have made latkes from it, and likely fries and chips, or for you Brits, chips and crisps. Of the three vegetables that I picked for this latke board, potatoes will always be the best, but celery root latkes are equally phenomenal. The little sugar in sweet potato latkes is interesting, but makes the latkes want to stick to the pan and want to burn before they are done. Reducing the heat is necessary for making sweet potato latkes.

Latkes with smoked trout mousse was a regular feature of the lunch menu at the restaurant for many years, probably a decade. Ultimately, I believe it was a series of fad diets that did them in. For many years, the ladies who lunch would not order anything fried, no matter how tasty. In any case, apparently I had a reputation for making latkes, as the following cute "diploma" will attest. My oldest daughter, then but a tiny girl, awarded me a "specialty in making potato pancakes." How cute is this!?!

Chef's Diploma with
Specialty in Making Potato Pancakes

For caviar for the restaurant, I always bought from Browne Trading Company in Maine. I still buy from them, but the retail prices are a shock after paying wholesale for decades. Rob bought caviar from a company that is new to me, OM. Their ossetra and Browne's Siberian Supreme malossol were the best of the bunch.

We All Bought Caviar

Potato Chips, Best Vehicle for Caviar

Being the designated driver, I could only but sip a little of the delicious Champagne on offer at Rob and Dyce's. I managed to photograph the two that we bought so that I could remember them. The Gonet-Médeville is a lovely blanc de noirs. The André Clouet "Chalky" looks pretty gimmicky in its white wrap, but it is a fine 100% Chardonnay blanc de blancs. I like it, but I like many others better.

Here's hoping that 2026 proves better than New Year's Eve's inauspicious start.

New Year's Eve 2024: Mushroom Galette

As is our tradition, we spend New Year's Eve at home or with friends rather than going out to celebrate. We no longer have the desire to stay up late or to be on the roads with a bunch of drunk drivers. And having to be at the restaurant until the crack of dawn each New Year's, I suppose that I am still avoiding New Year's Eve like the plague some 7 or 8 years after I closed the restaurant.

Once upon a time in McMinnville, I made some crostini of wild mushrooms and Taleggio cheese that Ann cannot get out of her mind. It seems that whenever we want to celebrate, she remembers the flavors of that simple appetizer. From that memory, somehow we got to a mushroom and leek galette topped with two flavorful cheeses, one rather more pungent and one with a bit of blue veining.

Mushroom and Leek Galette

I cheated. I used commercial puff pastry that I rolled out into a big rectangle and topped with mushroom and leek ragoût. Then I rolled the edges over like a country tart and topped the mushroom mixture with thinly sliced cheese, followed by a good grating of pecorino romano. After a simple egg wash on the edges of the galette, it went into a very hot oven and baked until brown.

Leek and Mushroom Ragoût

The ragoût is terribly simple. I sweated two leeks in butter, then added three fresh mushrooms: wild chanterelles and domestic oysters and shiitakes. Once these started shrinking down and cooking, I added chopped rehydrated porcini and the highly flavored water in which I soaked them overnight. After about 15 minutes on the heat, the whole became a thick ragoût suitable for topping a pastry crust.

Grand Cru Guiborat Blanc de Blancs Champagne

We were able to get our hands on a bottle of Guiborat Champagne, a blanc de blancs. Although we enjoy all styles of Champagne, we really love crisp and high acid 100% Chardonnay bottlings such as this, especially with rich and fatty food.

And another year is in the books. Our neighbors were only too happy to remind us of this as they continued with the big fireworks mortars until after 3am. So much for getting to be early and getting some good sleep.

Paccheri Pie, Step-by-Step

Ann and I love pasta; it is one of our absolute favorite foods and our go-to any time that we want comfort food. At some point in the past year or so, Ann had spied a photo of paccheri baked in a springform pan and we resolved to make it during the holiday, ordering in paccheri, a cut that is not available locally here in the food desert that is Central Oregon.

Paccheri Pie

Paccheri, pronounced like "packery," is a pasta from the south of Italy, from Campania, the region whose capital is Naples, birthplace of Ann's biological parents. How fitting for her that we should be using this pasta! Paccheri is similar to a really fat and thick rigatoni, albeit not quite as long as rigatoni but much wider in diameter with thicker walls.

Specifically, we bought paccheri lisce, the smooth version (as opposed to rigati, "ridged" or millerighe, "thousand ridged") from a new-to-me pasta maker called Marulo. Marulo hails from the Torre Annuziata neighborhood of Naples, situated right at Pompei.

This pasta is wickedly expensive, running about $13 for 500g at retail; wholesale is about half of this, but I no longer need wholesale quantities of anything to feed the two of us. However, it may be the best quality commercial dried pasta that I have ever eaten and for a special occasion, worth every penny.

As an aside, how can a leading brand of pasta in Italy be that crap that Barilla makes? Granted, Barilla in the States is made in the States, and Barilla in Italy is made in Italy, but still...I guess there is no accounting for taste in either country.

One reason that I love paccheri so much is that I love pasta with bite–keep your wimpy capelli d'angelo and the like. Give me a thick toothy pasta any day. Ditto for Ann.

Paccheri is new to us at home, but I used to cook it from time-to-time at the restaurant, but rarely and mainly for staff meals. We were never trying to compete with our good friends at the neighboring Italian restaurant. (But, hey, they're northerners and what do they know about paccheri, eh?). So, can I help it if one of our best selling entrees in the final couple of years was triofe al pesto with pulled beef shortrib, my homage to Liguria? Or that we made gnocchi damn near every day?

We planned to make our paccheri pie for friends in the week between Christmas and New Year's, but that plan evaporated on account of illness. Instead, Ann and I assembled and baked the pie on New Year's Eve just for the two of us, after our plans to celebrate New Year's Eve with Rob and Dyce also went up in smoke, again because of illness.

Following is a recipe for enough beef ragù and ingredients to make at 25cm (nominally 10") springform pan of paccheri, sufficient to feed 6-8 people.

Beef Ragù

Making beef ragù is a labor of love. The preparation is simple, but it takes time. In this case, the sauce took roughly eight and a half hours, but only 30 minutes of that was active preparation and searing. The other eight hours saw the ragù cook slowly on the stovetop until the meat fell apart. This is a perfect dish to put in a slow cooker and forget. If you do use a slow cooker, you'll need to remove the lid in the last hour or two of cooking to reduce the liquid in the sauce.

For beef, I used flatiron from the chuck, a cut that will take longer to fall apart than others, but whose flavor is unmatched. Besides chuck, you can use any flavorful braising cut that you like such as short ribs, shank, or neck. I wanted to use short ribs, but they're almost impossible to find here in town.

You're probably best served by making the ragù a day or two in advance of cooking the paccheri pie, especially because it is easier to stuff the paccheri with stiff, cold sauce rather than loose, liquid sauce.

As for any sauce that is going to reduce, season the sauce after it has reduced so that you do not oversalt it. Cook until the sauce is very thick; you really do not want a lot of liquid to leak out of the paccheri pie while it is baking.

The following recipe yields about two liters of sauce.

3 pounds beef shoulder, shank, short ribs, or other braising cut, in 1-inch cubes
4 ounces guanciale, diced
1 large onion, finely diced
1 large carrot, finely diced
1 large stalk celery, finely diced
4 large cloves garlic, finely minced
1 sprig rosemary
1 tablespoon dried basil
8 fluid ounces (1 cup) dry red wine
8 fluid ounces (1 cup) milk, cream, or half and half

1 28-ounce can diced tomatoes with their juice
salt to taste

Debone and Dice Beef into 1"/2.5cm Cubes

Working in Batches, Brown the Beef and the Guanciale

Browned Beef and Guanciale

Mise en Place: Onion, Celery, Carrot, Garlic, Guanciale, Rosemary

Sweat the Vegetables in the Pan After Meat is Browned
Add Basil, Garlic, and Rosemary; Scrape All Brown Bits from Pan

Deglaze Vegetables with Red Wine;
Add Meat, Tomatoes, and Milk;
Scrape Any Brown Bits off the Bottom of the Pan

Cook at a Simmer Until Beef Shreds Easily and Sauce is Thick;
Add Water as Necessary and Stir as Needed

Paccheri Pie

The assembly of the paccheri pie is easy. You'll need a 25cm (10") springform pan and a sheet tray to catch any sauce that leaks out while baking. Par-cook the paccheri in boiling salted water until just about done. These cooked for about 18 minutes and would have taken about 20 to be fully al dente and ready to eat. Stand the pasta on end in the cheese-coated mold and stuff them with sauce.

You'll find that cold sauce works better than warm sauce and that your fingers are the best tool for stuffing the pasta. Spread a layer of cheese over the top. Don't be shy with the cheese; it is the glue that holds the pie together. Bake in a moderate oven (350F) until nicely browned.

After the pie bakes, let it cool for a few minutes before running a spatula around the edges and unmolding it. A pie this size will feed six easily and eight with a substantial side dish.

500g paccheri

pan spray or olive oil

1/2 cup grated pecorino

2 liters beef ragù

8 ounces (250g) grated mozzarella

Paccheri Lisce, Boil in Salted Water Until Almost Done

Coat the Springform with Oil or Pan Spray and Grated Cheese

Arrange Par-Cooked Paccheri in the Mold

Stuff the Paccheri Tightly with Sauce

Cover the Top with Grated Mozzarella

Ready to Bake

Bake in a Moderate Oven Until Well Browned, About an Hour

This paccheri pie turned out to be a really fun dish to make and to eat and it seems like a great dish for company in that you can make it in advance and throw it in the oven at the last minute so that it can cook while you are mingling with your guests.

New Year's Eve 2021

It almost seems like yesterday that I was sitting here in the office writing about what a shit-show 2020 was and yet here I am again talking about the year that was 2021. Like last year, it was just the two of us for New Year's Eve, home alone thanks to COVID. I made salmon cakes from some of the silver salmon we caught in Alaska. We paired that with awesome Champagne and were asleep well before were were awakened at midnight by the locals and their fireworks.

New Year's Dinner: Salmon Cakes

We had hoped to have put the pandemic behind us in 2021. COVID was in a full-on rampage the first part of the year, peaking about May 1, with things relaxing towards June, the end of pandemic restrictions seemingly in sight. At that point, we booked and squeezed in an Alaskan vacation the end of July and beginning of August, not knowing that the delta variant of COVID would be ramping up even as we were away from home. After it peaked in early September, we felt safe to resume going out again in early October, only to have the omicron variant start kicking the world's butt at year end. So yeah, I have no hopes that 2022 will be any different. I've given up on wondering when life will get back to some semblance of normal.

The tail end of 2021 has been a blur for Ann and me, witnessed by the dearth of blog posts on my part, and has gone a wholly unpredictable direction for us. If you had told me a year ago that we would be where we are today, I would have thought you crazy. And yet here we are.

From the end of October, a rough timeline will suffice to show where we are and how we got here.

October 28: On a lark, after our dog Charlie died, we visited Bend, Oregon with our dog Grace, to see some friends who had relocated there and just to get out of McMinnville. We loved our briefest of brief visit to Bend and I summarized the trip as "we may have found our tribe."

November 9: I found a real estate agent in Bend; I wasn't joking about finding our tribe. All Ann and I have been able to talk about is how Bend seems to align with where we want to live, now that I no longer need to be in close proximity to the Oregon wine industry for employment. I checked in with our financial manager to determine what kind of monthly income we can take from our portfolio, because that will drive what price house we can buy. Bend is one of the most desirable places to live on the West Coast and real estate is commensurately expensive.

November 19-21: We decided, just before Thanksgiving and the major snows coming to the Cascades, to go back to Bend, this time for two nights, with two goals. We wanted to scout the town for neighborhoods in which to live and also to put some due diligence behind our gut feel that Bend might be right for us. We spent half a day touring all four quadrants of the city, before meeting with a real estate agent the first evening. The following morning, having narrowed in on an area to focus our search, we drove through every subdivision in our target area to get a feel for houses in the SW part of town. Mentally, I set of goal of moving during the spring to early summer.

November 23-25: Hurrying back from Bend to get ready for Thanksgiving, I started in on the three-day prep for our Thanksgiving lasagne, which was possibly even better than the one I made last year. Taking a break from prepping, I started looking into financing for our move while Ann started looking at properties for sale in Bend.

November 27: Holy crap! Ann found her house; it has just come back on the market after being taken off, relisted at a lower price. She was certain about the house from the get-to; I can't make up my mind like that sight unseen, but it seemed to tick 8 and a half boxes out of 10 for me without looking at it in person. We started making inquiries, but it seemed premature to me. We haven't seen the house and we will need to sell our house to use the equity as a downpayment on the Bend house, a minor detail, much sarcasm intended. Moreover, our agent has gone to Costa Rica for the next three weeks. Ann is deterred by no obstacle.

December 2-5: My girls flew into PDX from Philly at 10:30pm on December 2 and we went to fetch them. It was December 3 by the time we got home. In the midst of having a great time with the two of them, we went back and forth with our Bend real estate agent and loan guy, gazillions of texts, phone calls, and emails. We also met with a local real estate agent to talk about putting our house on the market. We set a target date to list our house just before Christmas and talk about what we need to do to stage the house for sale. I started by attacking the outside, pressure washing the unsightly algae and moss off all our patios and walks, the inevitable result of our rainy season here in the Willamette Valley. I would have much rather spent the time with my girls, whom I had not seen since pre-COVID 2018.

December 5: The girls must return home on an early morning flight from PDX. Knowing that Ann would be in New York for eight days starting on the 6th, we decided that it was now or never. After making the 90-minute drive to PDX, we drove 3.5 hours to Bend, had lunch and a beer, and walked through the house. On the long drive back home, Ann waxed poetic about the house. Given that we still needed to sell our house, I did not see how we could find ourselves in a position to make an offer before the Bend house came off the market.

December 6: I headed back to PDX to drop Ann at a hotel; her flight was at oh-dark-thirty the following morning and I am not one to spend two or three hours in rush hour traffic trying to get there. She had long planned to visit her great aunt on Long Island and to help celebrate her 94th birthday. The timing of her trip proved to be suboptimal, much sarcasm implied.

December 6-9: Having located a house in Bend that we wanted to purchase, we found that our timeline collapsed on itself. No longer would our house get listed just before Christmas, but ASAP. For four straight days, I worked 16 hours a day to clean and stage the house, as well as to pack a lot of the smaller items that I removed during staging. The house, day by day, started to look fabulous, which it needed to be by December 8 when the photographer showed up. Ann admonished me to not work so hard during our phone conversations. I ended up promising her that the house would be sold before she returned from New York and restating that time was of the essence. Somebody at the real estate office jumped the gun and put a for sale sign in our yard on the 8th, causing much consternation among our neighbors before we could break the news to them. 

December 9: In late afternoon, the photographer delivered some amazing photos and the house was listed at about dinner time. I continued to scrub and pack. I hoped that I could pack and clean more on the 10th as well and the weather seemed to cooperate. We were in the midst of a Pineapple Express coming off the Pacific, vast torrents of rain slashing almost horizontally in the 30+ mph winds. During the day, the showings for the 11th started to book.

December 11-12: The first visitor in the door indicated that she would be making an offer, and sure enough, very late in the day, the above-asking-price offer came in. That ultimately scared away all the showings for the 12th and we accepted the contract about noon on the 12th. Meanwhile, with Ann in New York, our Bend agent in Costa Rica, and the sellers of the Bend house in Mississippi and Louisiana respectively, we made an offer on the 11th and accepted the sellers' counter on the 12th. What did we do before the internet and DocuSign? That was a hell of a weekend, buying and selling a house on the same day! I was exhausted.

December 13: I made yet another trip to PDX, this time to fetch Ann. I didn't even say "I told you so" about the house selling while she was away.

December 18-19: Donald and Terry came down from Seattle and we went wine tasting with them out on Ribbon Ridge at Trisaetum, followed by dinner at Recipe in Newberg where we had a phenomenal 2014 McKinlay Pinot. On the 19th, they came over for a quasi-Christmas dinner for which Ann made a delicious sun-dried tomato and chicken pasta. Much wine was drunk in an effort to lighten up the cellar a bit for moving! We planned to tell the guys that we were moving on the 18th at dinner, but Donald saw our house listed on MLS on the 9th. He has his fingers on the pulse of McMinnville real estate because he and Terry are looking into where they want to retire to. Somewhere near us has always seemed to be their plan and here we are throwing a wrench into that plan.

December 20: After a week of packing at a steady rate and selling off excess furniture (our house is set to close on January 13), we headed back to the airport to get Carter, who is coming in until the 26th to visit during his break from the Army. It did not feel very Christmasy in that we decided not to unpack all the Christmas decorations just to pack them right away. While Christmas was very much anticlimactic, it was so great to have Carter here for it.

December 28: Our house in McMinnville is set to close on January 13 and the house in Bend is to close on January 21. The big catch for us is that in this hyper-competitive real estate market, we had to offer the seller in Bend a rent-back option through the end of February. Because he is on holiday until sometime in early January back east, he cannot even start packing and thinking about moving until then. As the days tick by with no definitive word on a move-out date from him, it seems clear that there is a high likelihood that he will be in the house into February and we are staring temporary housing and storing our belongings right in the face. Fortunately, we were able to arrive at a deal with our buyer in which we will rent back from her until the end of February, although it meant that we will convey our beloved island work table to her as part of the deal. We're sad about that, but finally the breakneck pace of packing slowed and we were able to plan for and enjoy our final New Year's Eve in our house, even though it means navigating stacks of boxes of our goods, trying to find a place to sit.

So, on New Year's Day 2022, we find ourselves in a position we could not have imagined even 90 days ago. In the span of just seven weeks, we have uprooted our lives in McMinnville to relocate to Bend. We have done some crazy things in our lives, but this may top them all.

We have loved our time in McMinnville, but we are really looking forward excitedly to the new adventure in Bend. Truly, we have some awesome neighbors whom we are sad to leave behind and without a doubt, we are going to miss our current house with its outstanding gardens and outdoor living spaces. Proximity to wineries, sure, we are going to miss from time to time, but truth be told, we have evolved more into brewery people and Bend is built largely around breweries.

For us and our lifestyle, Bend offers us the ability to live within an easy drive (or walk or bike or snowshoe) of amazing outdoor activities. McMinnville is a very long way from any really decent hiking and backpacking. Dogs are a huge part of our lives and Bend is the single most dog friendly place we've ever been.

We are four-season people as well and frankly, we miss winter and snow. In McMinnville, we have two seasons, wet and construction. Not that the rain really bothers us, but being in an area that abounds in snow sport activities is key.

And while McMinnville is a small urban area in the midst of farm country, it doesn't offer much in the way of dining or shopping opportunities. Living in an area where it takes a 45-minute drive to visit Costco or buy a bottle of fish sauce, we so look forward to living in a town that has a Costco, Chef Store, World Market, and Trader Joe's. And though transplants and visitors from San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle find the restaurant offerings in Bend a little scanty, the selection looks amazing to the two of us relocating from farm country.

We're very excited by the prospect of what 2022 will bring. This may be my last post for a very good while, until we get the move behind us. Happy New Year!

New Year's 2020

2020 in Review

Many have characterized 2020 as a horrible year and one that they are glad to see in the rearview mirror. While it was certainly the most memorable year of my life and one that changed my life totally and irrevocably, I cannot say that 2020 was all for the bad.

Ann's Take on 2020

Given the extraordinary nature of the year, it would be easy to focus on the bad: living through a contentious presidential impeachment, rethinking our lives in the face of a global pandemic, going stir crazy being holed up at home, finding empty supermarket shelves at the onset of the COVID quarantine, losing my job, having a president who encouraged racial and social division, canceling our long-delayed vacation, enduring a presidential election cycle unlike any other, suffering the death of Ann's mother and attending her funeral by watching an empty church on the internet, coping with our dog's cancer diagnosis, barricading ourselves indoors with towels under the doors for just over two weeks because of massive forest fires, and seeing riots in major cities exceeding what we saw in 1968.

While that is a lot on the negative side of the balance sheet, lest you think that 2020 was a total shit show, the positive side is not negligible and potentially tips the scales to the good:

• The loss of my job was exactly the impetus that I needed to retire. To be honest, I was scared of pulling that trigger myself both for financial reasons (committing to a thin fixed income) and for personal reasons (my sense of self has always been bound to my work). Financially, we've learned to live on our adjusted income and emotionally, I'm used to being retired now, though it took several months to divorce myself from feeling that I needed some external purpose in my life.

• The pandemic that caused us to wear masks everywhere and to worry about social distancing also forced us to quarantine at home. As a result, Ann and I spent a lot of time together for the very first time in our marriage. It has proved to be wonderful.

• Our pharmaceutical companies undertook truly heroic efforts to deploy a COVID vaccine, efforts that are just now starting to come to fruition. Just as heroically, our amazing healthcare providers risked and continue to risk their personal safety to care for the ill. As a world, we now have first-hand experience in tackling the next global epidemic. I hope our politicians will have learned from this.

• Our three kids are well. Carter jumped through significant hoops, some COVID-imposed, to enlist in the Army and now has discovered a path forward for himself. Although it is early days for him, he seems to be thriving. The girls, Ellie and Lillie, despite both working in medicine and having daily contact with patients, are healthy. We are proud of all of them, but are equally glad that we do not have to go to work daily as do they.

• Being retired and being isolated at home gave me the time and motivation to tackle all those house and yard projects that have been on the someday list.  The yard and the house have never looked better. Ann's vision for the interior is coming along beautifully. She is a talented decorator and her results are impressive.

• Time at home and closure of restaurants has brought me back into the kitchen. After three years away from the restaurant and cooking simple post-work meals only begrudgingly, I am re-finding my love of cooking and I am finally delighting in cooking all those things that make my wife happy. 

• Likewise, I have missed writing for many years. It is my therapy. The time to sit and organize my thoughts is a bonus born of this epidemic.

• Finally, all this cooking and the drinking to combat the quarantine blues caused us both to put on a lot of weight, like a lot of people. But at year end, we find ourselves down a combined fifty or so pounds, our clothes fit (I had to get a new, smaller wedding ring), and we are walking a lot. We're not in super cardio-shape because our local terrain in the valley is flat, but we're way better off than in the first months of quarantine.

On balance then, 2020 was not as horrible as many feel it to be. Moreover, if 2020 has done nothing else, it has made me think about how well off we really are and how thankful we should be for the small things in our lives that we too often take for granted. I am:

• thankful that we no longer own a restaurant and have to worry about keeping it open and keeping the employees paid so that they can pay their bills. Several of our favorite places have closed permanently and tragically there are more to come. My heart goes out to all.

• thankful that we no longer have school-aged children that we need to educate safely and responsibly. I cannot imagine juggling home schooling and trying to work for a living.

• thankful that we had the financial ability to retire rather than face job-hunting in this environment. So many people are so much worse off.

• thankful that we have a strong marriage that has only gotten stronger during the epidemic. I am quite sure that it has had the opposite effect on many marriages.

All this said, I am really hoping that with the roll-out of the COVID vaccine that 2021 sees a return more towards what we consider normal. I am not so naïve as to think that our 2019 normal will be our normal going forward, but I hope that we make good strides on moving away from 2020 normal. The thing that I first want to do after all this virus mess is said and done is to go sit with Ann at a bar with a cheeseburger and a beer, talking to any and all at the bar. That's not such a big ask, is it?

New Year's Eve

Early in the day, we went to our local park for a five-mile hike, knowing that we were going to eat badly on New Year's Day. 

We did not plan much for New Year's Eve other than opening a bottle of Champagne and having a nice piece of fish for dinner. Earlier in the day when we went to Newberg to pick up the caviar that we ordered for celebratory Egg's Benedict on New Year's Day, we also picked up a stellar portion of wild Steelhead Trout. The side from which our piece came was huge (I'd guess that fish was 10+ pounds) and resplendent with its pink stripe and black dots. I pan seared it and it was delicious.

Marc Hébrart Premier Cru Champagne with our Steelhead Trout

With our fish, we had a very sexy Marc Hébrart Champage, a cuvée called "Mes Favorites." Delicious raspberry notes from Pinot Noir made this one of the best Champagnes that I have ever tasted and I've tasted a lot.

We ended up heading to bed early, though I stayed up until after midnight, the first half an hour of the new year spent comforting Grace who was terrified of the neighbors' fireworks. It would have been a great year to have held a quiet get together with some of our neighbors to toast the new year, but alas, we start 2021 with the same social distancing to which we had become inured in 2020.

New Year's Day

While we made no plans for New Year's Eve, we had been planning a special Pacific Northwest eggs Benedict for brunch the next day, a Benedict fashioned of toasted crumpets, smoked salmon, halibut, poached eggs, hollandaise, and white sturgeon caviar. All three fishes are native to our rivers and seas here in Oregon.

Ann Set the Table While I Cooked

We opened a bottle of grand cru grower Champagne for brunch, this one more lemony from being 50% Chardonnay and 50% Pinot Noir. It did not suck, but it was not in the same class as the premier cru Marc Hébrart from the evening before. It always amuses me when a premier cru (a lesser cru than grand cru) outperforms a grand cru. Of course, the grand cru was only two-thirds the price of the premier cru, so the market is under no illusions as to which is better.

Hollandaise Set Up

Making hollandaise is a classic kitchen task that every chef should master. In French cuisine, hollandaise is one of the five mother sauces upon which almost all other classic sauces are built. A good rule of thumb for home use is that four egg yolks and a tablespoon of fresh lemon juice will incorporate and thicken a quarter of a pound of melted butter, enough for 4-8 healthy portions.

I made a 2-yolk batch, a very difficult task because the volume is so small that it is so easy to overcook and curdle the sauce. A much bigger volume gives you a lot more leeway with the temperature. I had to watch the sauce like a hawk while dribbling butter into the egg yolks over a pan of boiling water. Most of the time, I had the bowl on the cold counter to keep the heat in check. If you're just learning, start with a big batch of hollandaise.

Pacific Northwest Eggs Benedict

Making this eggs benedict at home is a tricky proposition in that the halibut, the poached eggs, and the hollandaise are all last minute (what we chefs call à la minute) items that vie for a single cook's attention. In a restaurant, we would have at least three cooks involved in this dish: one poaching the eggs, one making the hollandaise, and one cooking the fish. And if labor is no object, you really want a fourth person doing the plate-up and calling for each ingredient as necessary.

At home, I toasted and plated the crumpets and smoked salmon while the halibut was cooking. I held the halibut warm between two domed plates while I made the hollandaise. As soon as the hollandaise was done, I dropped the eggs in the water bath. Then I started plating the halibut, pulled the eggs out of the water, rewhisked the hollandaise, and finished the plate-up. That's a lot of cooking with precise timing for a lone cook.

Farmed White Sturgeon Malossol Caviar

Out here on the West Coast, we have a much better selection of domestic caviar than on the East Coast. I wish we had this selection during my restaurant days. Back then, I never served any endangered or overfished fish, always seeking more environmentally friendly wild-caught species. The same thing went for caviar, except that for caviar, I preferred eggs from farm-raised sturgeon rather than endangered wild populations. Our domestic white sturgeon caviar can be really outstanding. At home, I still insist on caviar from sustainable operations that do not harm wild fish populations.

I prefer malossol caviar because it is less salty than regular caviar (you can hide a lot of sins behind salt, too). I remember the word малосоль from my Russian classes in college, a combination of мало ("light" or "a little") and соль ("salt").

Ann's No-Knead Olive Bread

Olive-Pecorino Focaccia

Continuing our "bad" New Year's eating spree, Ann had put up a bowl of her no-knead bread dough flavored with Kalamata olives and pecorino romano cheese the evening before. This is really significant in that we have been eating almost no simple carbs such as bread since August. For dinner on New Year's Day, I shaped the dough into a focaccia and baked it. We were going to have it with cheese and Pinot Noir, but we were wined out after the bottle of Champagne at brunch and really not hungry enough after the big brunch to want cheese along with the bread. If the truth be told, we really just craved the bread!

And so 2021 is now off and running. May it treat us all better than 2020.

New Year's Eve: Miller Woods

Ann and I are walking a lot these days, but there are only so many routes through our side of town and they are getting boring. Although we yearn for the days of weekly far afield and mountainous hikes, neither of us feel comfortable in leaving our old Chuck dog for that long. So we make do walking the neighborhoods near to home. For a change of pace, on New Year's Eve, Ann suggested that we head just three miles west of town into the hills to Miller Woods, a local park with a 4.5-mile loop trail.

It felt wonderful to get out and walk during a temporary break between rain showers. Although the track was extremely muddy in places, it felt good to walk on uneven ground and go up and down hills, something we do not have on the sidewalks around home.

Oregon White Oak

Moss and Lichens on a Big Leaf Maple

Black Tail Doe

One of the big draws for me at Miller Woods is the wide variety of ecosystems in such a compact area. We had traversed a pasture and then an oak savannah before entering a planted section of Douglas fir. As we worked our way down a hill towards a bridge across a stream, I started seeing very fresh deer tracks in the sloppy mud, so fresh that they had not yet filled in with water. The tracks were heading down the trail the same direction as we were and as I lifted my head from examining the tracks, I could see a doe in the trail about fifteen yards ahead of us.

We followed her slowly for perhaps 150 yards. She would stop and check us out every few yards. Finally, she turned off down the hill into the sword ferns on a fairly distinct game trail. She never did spook. Looking up the hillside following along the game trail, we spied yet another doe browsing in the ferns under the firs. We have plenty of deer near the house too and we see them frequently on our walks, but seeing them out in the woods always seems special to us.

Douglas' Squirrel

As we moved down the trail from the doe, moving through a low section of old growth forest of ancient Doug firs and western red cedar, a male Pileated Woodpecker called from about thirty feet up the side of a fir. We spotted the noisy bird fairly quickly before it glided off towards the creek looking like a miniature pterodactyl. Pileateds prefer old growth for dead snags and older trees in which they can excavate their nest holes, so we don't see them in town much, unlike back in Winchester where they were a common site among the mature sycamores in town and along the Shenandoah River. I believe that this is the first Pileated that I have seen in Oregon.

Just as the woodpecker flew away, a pair of tiny squirrels came racing sixty or seventy feet down a large fir and then proceeded to chase each other through the underbrush and up another tree. I thought they were Red Squirrels, the common tiny squirrel of eastern coniferous forests. When I went to look up the Red Squirrel range map later in the day, I found that they come into Oregon only in the far northeast corner of the state over by Idaho. Our tiny squirrel of coniferous forests is the Douglas Squirrel.

Ann Watching the Stream Fall Over the Rocks

What Ann Was Looking At

A Very Old Douglas Fir

Low Oregon Grape, Mahonia nervosa

Mahonias are common out here in Oregon, so common that the Tall Oregon Grape is the state flower. I haven't seen any of the tall variety at Miller Woods, but there are several patches of M. nervosa, most often abutting old growth stands of trees. By contrast, most of the undergrowth under the planted Douglas firs is the domain of the sword ferns. But no matter what the undergrowth, wherever it was thick we would hear, but rarely see, what I have called Winter Wrens all my life.

It's quite amusing to me after having looked up the Red Squirrel range map to see that it doesn't live here to have looked up the Winter Wren to see that it too does not live here. At some point recently (2010, in fact), the Winter Wren was split into three species, our Pacific Wren, the Winter Wren back east, and the European Wren that I have seen in England and Ireland. By whatever name, they are noisy tiny scurriers of the underbrush that you could easily think were mice.

Dead Fir Draped in Moss

Red-Breasted Nuthatch

There is a lot of bird life at Miller Woods and once in the woods proper we were serenaded not only by the ever-present and ubiquitous Pacific Wrens, but also mixed flocks of winter birds: both kinglets, chickadees, creepers, and nuthatches. We were walking from an old growth area to a more open transition zone when we came across a little blue-gray bundle of fluff right in the middle of the trail.

Naturally, we went immediately to see if the bird were dead or alive and we could see from a couple of feet away that it was breathing, but it let us approach to within inches, as if it were stunned. But within a few seconds, it flew off down the trail ten feet, landed for a moment, and then flew up onto the trunk of a small western hemlock and looked down at us from its upside down perch.

It's really nice to have this delightful park so close to the house. And in winter, it is not very crowded and a good place to get out from being holed up in the house since April.

New Year's Eve at Home

Why would you want to spend New Year's Eve at home?

Considering I have worked the prior 15 New Year's Eves as the chef and owner of a restaurant, the answer to that question ought to be obvious! If I never see the inside of a restaurant on New Year's Eve, that will be just fine with me. And of course, Annie was over the moon to have me at home. So we headed to the grocery store to see what we could find. I was in a seafood mood, but there's no good seafood in any grocery store around here. The best we could do was to grab a pound of Dungeness crab, wicked expensive and to my East Coast-born and -bred palate, not as tasty as blue crab. So I decided to do a crab risotto.

While standing in the store, Annie started describing an appetizer that she wanted, "something with mushrooms, gooey, and sexy!" Instantly I flashed on a mushroom crostino, so we got some dried porcini, some fresh shiitakes, and a small piece of funky Taleggio cheese to finish the mushrooms with.

Pashey Sparkling by Trisaetum

Leeks and Shiitakes

Porcini, Shiitake, Leek, and Taleggio Crostini

Who's Happy?

Risotto in the Works with Pancetta

Mise: Pancetta, Goat Cheese, Crab, and Chives

Dungeness Crab Risotto with Pancetta, Chives, and Goat Cheese