The Boys are Back in Town

With apologies to Thin Lizzy, the boys are finally back in town, having moved back from Boulder after a short stay there. We were devastated when they decided to move while we were away in Italy in the fall and we are ecstatic that they missed Bend so much that they have decided to return.

Naturally, to celebrate their return, we had them to dinner. For this dinner, Ann wanted me to do pasta with ragù bolognese and she wanted to make garlic bread, especially because Rob loves garlic bread.

The Three Musketeers

Kitchen Elf Extraordinaire!

Spying a bin of small tomatoes on the counter where I leave them to ripen sparked an idea for a simple appetizer, mini-Capreses on skewers. Nothing could be simpler than skewering tomatoes, basil leaves, and bocconcini and drizzling them with a bit of pesto thinned with olive oil.

Caprese Skewers

We waffled on making a traditional lasagne (I should have, damn it!) but I let Ann convince me that I should just used boxed pasta rather than rolling out a sfoglia and cutting it into big sheets for lasagne. We ended up with par-cooked mezzo rigatoni (from Giuseppe Cocco) mixed with ragù and a bit of ricotta, topped with mozzarella and baked until golden brown. It was good, but not great and certainly not in the same league as lasagne.

Baked Mezzo Rigatoni and Ragù Bolognese

Ann wanted to make garlic bread as a surprise for Rob, whose predilection for this delicious carb we noticed in Santa Fe. She concocts a mixture of butter, mayonnaise, granulated garlic, fresh garlic, and a bit of Italian parsley and slathers obscene amounts on a split loaf of excellent bread. After it browns under the broiler, it is absolutely irresistible and makes the house smell amazing. I can gain weight just by looking at photos of it.

Ann's Crazy Good Garlic Bread

After kibbitzing for an hour or so and catching up with the boys and their move back to town, we relocated to the dining room and finished up the evening with a couple bottles of delicious Langhe Nebbiolo.

Kitchen Basics: Crostini

If you serve a lot of appetizers as we do when entertaining, you're often looking for finger foods that don't require utensils to eat so that people can nosh and chat more easily. For us, this often means small bites on either crackers or crispy toasts that we call crostini. I prefer crostini to crackers and so I make them somewhat frequently. They take time, but they're easy enough to make and you can make them in advance and store them in a closed container for a few days. We made them by the hundreds at the restaurant using the technique in the photo-essay below. The timings mentioned are for an oven at 350F.

Crostini, Perfect for Appetizers

Slice a Great Baguette to a Thick 1/4", 6-7mm
Bias Cut Gives a More Interesting Shape

Lay on Sheet Tray and Drizzle with Olive Oil

Flip and Drizzle the Other Side

Sprinkle with Salt

Top with a Second Sheet Tray
This Keeps the Crostini from Warping

Flip After 15 Minutes in a 350F Oven
This Lets the Steam Out

Flip After 10 More Minutes

And Again After 10 More Minutes

After a Final 10 Minutes
Cool and Store in a Covered Container

Lament for a Sandwich

In rereading the words I wrote below, I'm not sure that the title word "lament" is exactly correct. It may be that the more precise word might be "rant" though that word implies some amount of anger. I don't feel anger, but rather sadness, so perhaps I am lamenting after all.

A good sandwich, that most simple and pleasing of foods, is in my experience apparently a difficult thing to find, maybe not unicorn rare, but only slightly more commonly found. A sandwich is such a simple creation that it should be possible to find a good one almost anywhere. Not so, at least in our part of the world. Ann and I, we've given up on finding a reliably decent sandwich in Bend, Oregon.

As far as we have tasted, there are no outstanding delis or sandwich shops here in town. At least, the ones we have tried have left us wanting for the quality of sandwich that we expect. Clearly, we are in the minority in town, because time and again, acquaintances and web reviewers alike recommend to us the same places and while some are better than others, not a one of them is demonstrably a paragon of sandwich-making.

Maybe the simplicity of a sandwich is its downfall. After all, in a dish with very few ingredients, each must shine: there is no room to hide subpar ingredients or technique. A great sandwich really comes down to just two things, two very simple things: attention to detail in sourcing excellent ingredients and attention to detail in preparing them in a caring manner.

Entire Loaf Italian Cold Cut Sandwich, Feeds 4-6 People

What's really amazing and saddening to us is that creating a great sandwich is really easy to do. That is, we do it at home. Out of necessity, sadly. And if we can do it at home, certainly sandwich shops can do it as well, if not better than we can.

The really sad aspect of this dearth of great sandwiches is that delis and restaurants have all the advantages over us home cooks when it comes to making great sandwiches. They have access to great quality breads or even can make their own. They don't have to rely on pre-packaged deli meats, instead being able to slice their meats as needed or for the day. Some places even cure some of their own meats: I used to make my own pastrami at my restaurant, from first class meat and spiced the way I like it. Clear advantage to the deli over the home cook.

What I, as a retired chef, don't understand is why restaurants will not put the effort in to make a great sandwich. Is it because in a tourist town they have all the business they can handle? Is it because they don't care? Or is it because they are ignorant about what makes a great sandwich? Is it because a sandwich is too pedestrian to put effort into? Maybe the feeling is if customers don't care enough, a mediocre product is just fine?

Or is it because they don't think they can put out a top-quality product and still make a profit? As a restaurateur, I can certainly understand the last question, but being retired from the business, I no longer have a handle on the food, rent, insurance, licensing, and labor costs that drive the profit equation. But my restaurant consultant gut tells me that this is not the case: a great sandwich can be a profitable offering and a top-quality sandwich will drive volume sales.

To illustrate the care necessary to make a great sandwich, let's walk through making an outstanding Italian cold cut sandwich. It's not inexpensive to make, but it is what I expect, not the very lame examples that I have had at several places all over town.

A Single Serving

Select Great Bread. For a sandwich, select a loaf with a nice crisp crust and a soft, airy crumb. The crust cannot be so thick or so crunchy that it is hard to eat, however, or the bread so dense that the bread to filling ratio is off. I would love to be able to find such bread in single sandwich portions, but no longer being in the trade, I cannot. But I can still find great large loaves, thus, I make one large sandwich from an entire loaf and slice individual portions from it. Shout out to the Village Baker whose Italian-style striata loaf is one of the very best in town.

Source Top Quality Cold Cuts. I really like a good mix of flavors and textures and I find that four different types of cold cuts is just about perfect. I like the mix that I used for this sandwich: silky prosciutto di Parma, unctuous mortadella, smoky bresaola, and for the soppressata, I really like a spicy Calabrese. Great meats are not cheap, but you don't need a lot to make a great sandwich.

Select a Great Cheese. While I like provolone, a nice aged and dry one, I really adore thinly sliced fresh mozzarella on an Italian cold cut sandwich. An 8-ounce ball of good fresh cow's milk mozzarella  sliced very thinly is plenty for this whole-loaf sandwich. I would save the expensive and decadent bufala for something other than a sandwich.

Other Garnishes. For me, I like one of either fresh tomato slices or roasted red peppers. Both would make the sandwich too sloppy for my liking. We usually end up with roasted red peppers because tomatoes are rarely in season in Oregon and let's face it, Oregon does not grow as good tomatoes as hotter climates with long growing seasons. Furthermore, shipping ripe tomatoes from such locales is a losing proposition; great tomatoes do not travel. In my book, it is better to omit tomatoes than to use sub-par tomatoes, something that is lost on most restaurants. Also mandatory for me are a great leaf lettuce, thinly sliced red onions, and if available, fresh basil leaves.

Prep the Red Onions. Onion is critical for an Italian cold cut sandwich. Not only does it offer a slightly crunchy texture, its real purpose is to supply a bit of acidity to balance the fat of the cold cuts and cheese. Slice a red onion into very thin rings. If you don't have the knife skills for this, use a benriner slicer. Rub the onions gently in your hands with a bit of Kosher salt and place them in a non-reactive bowl. Cover with water and let stand five minutes. Drain off the water and cover them again for another five minutes. Squeeze out the water and the onions are ready for use. This process tones down some of the very aggressive onion qualities and makes them sweeter and much more palatable on a sandwich.

Prep a Tangy Dressing. A good vinegary dressing is essential to help counterbalance the fat of the meats and cheese. It's not possible to make a good Italian cold cut sandwich of the quality that I demand without making a decent dressing, which is neither hard, nor time consuming. I start with a couple tablespoons of red wine vinegar in a bowl, to which I add a mashed filet of anchovy, a pinch of salt, a teaspoon of dried oregano, a half a teaspoon of dried basil, and a tiny dab of a good mustard. After whisking this together with a fork, I start adding about 6 tablespoons of great extra virgin olive oil dribble by dribble, bringing the dressing together with the fork.

Toast the Bread. After slicing the loaf in half, put it on a sheet tray and drizzle it lightly with a little extra virgin olive oil. Then it goes under the broiler (here is where I really miss having a commercial salamander) until it lightly browns around the edges with maybe a hint of browning in the center. You want the bread warm with crispy edges, but you don't really want to toast it hard as the next step is to put dressing on the bread and you want that dressing to soak in a bit, difficult to do if the bread is highly toasted.

Dress the Bread. Spoon the dressing over both halves of the bread and spread it lightly but evenly with the back of the spoon. You want fairly even coverage without soaking any part of the bread.

Build the Sandwich. Lay all the ingredients on the base of the loaf and then put the lid on. I built the sandwich thus: roasted red peppers, destemmed leaf lettuce, prosciutto, mortadella, calabrese, bresaola, fresh tender basil leaves, red onions, and then fresh mozzarella. Another area where many restaurants miss the mark: I think it is important to season the roasted red peppers (or tomatoes) and the mozzarella with a little salt and pepper while building the sandwich.

I know this is a lot of words about making a simple sandwich, but this is a good description of what is necessary to build a great sandwich. And none of it is difficult which leads me right back to the initial question. Why cannot we find a great sandwich in Bend?

Easter 2022

It's been a long time since we held an Easter dinner. In fact, I don't recall having cooked a nice Easter meal since 2017, the year that my mother died and the year that we decided to pull up stakes and move across the country from Virginia to Oregon.

We didn't really find a tribe to celebrate with in McMinnville in 2018 and 2019 and then COVID obliterated the opportunity in both 2020 and 2021. Things have changed in 2022. Since moving to Bend in February, we have not only found a receptive group of friends, but thankfully COVID has relented, at least for the time being. It wouldn't surprise me, however, to be re-reading this post in a few months, once again in lockdown. It wouldn't surprise me at all, so it is now or never to celebrate.

For this particular celebration, I thought I'd go back to my roots and classic schooling to do some really simple French bistro-style food for dinner, starting with a classic terrine maison, then onto dinner with lamb chops, a green peppercorn sauce, asparagus, and pommes Anna. Although the food is simple, the devil is in the details.

John and Heidi in the Spirit!

Shanda Brought Ann Beautiful Sunflowers

Pregaming it at the Kitchen Island

Cocktails

Tom and Shanda arrived within minutes of John and Heidi and we got our cocktail on. For events like this, I prefer to spend my time visiting with friends rather than tending bar, so I generally make one or two cocktails in advance. Ann picked the cocktails this time: a classic Crusta and a cocktail that I worked out involving Mezcal and Maraschino. I don't have a name for the latter cocktail, but I really enjoyed it, so I may come up with a name at some point.

Cocktails, Awaiting Guests

Cheers! Santé! Skol!

The Crusta, pregenitor of the Sidecar, comprises Cognac, lemon juice, simple syrup, triple sec, orange bitters, and Maraschino, stirred on ice, strained up into a stemmed glass with a sugared rim, and garnished with a lemon twist. Classically, I've seen the drink served in a coupe lined with a wide slice of lemon peel around the bowl, but I didn't have enough lemons for that. 

The Mezcal cocktail is all about a smoky profile. It starts with high-quality muddled Maraschino cherries, a bit of syrup from the cherries, a little Maraschino liqueur, lime juice, and a low-end Joven Mezcal. Save the good Mezcal for drinking neat! It is served at room temperature, strained up into a stemmed glass rimmed with smoked salt and garnished with a cherry. It is not at all sweet and the Maraschino adds a floral character to the smoky Mezcal.

Appetizers

Terrine, Cheese, Pickles, Bread, Mustard

What's more French bistro than cheese and charcuterie? For appetizers with our cocktails, I made a terrine and some pickles, and Ann made a delightful loaf of bread. We bought a hunk of Sawtooth cheese, a washed rind raw cow's milk cheese similar to Muenster, from Cascadia Creamery in Trout Lake, Washington, across the Columbia River about three hours north of us.

The terrine is ground pork garnished with ham, pork fat, pistachios, green peppercorns, porcini mushrooms, and dried cherries. I would usually use pork liver in the terrine, but being brand new to Bend, I have no idea where to source good pork liver and moreover, I like to take guests' temperature on liver before I serve it to them.

Ann's Boule

Pommes Anna

Invented in Paris in the 1800s, pommes Anna is one of those classic dishes in the French culinary pantheon, a layered cake of potato slices, butter, and salt, browned on the stovetop and baked to doneness. Although it is surely out of favor in the 21st century, I like it for a party because it is impressive to look at, meltingly delicious, and best of all, because it cooks in the oven, I can spend my time with guests while it cooks. I think that it is such a wonderful dish that is in danger of being forgotten that I trained all my sous chefs in how to make it so that they can pass it down to their crews. 

Slicing Yellow Potatoes Old School
on the Mandoline

Pommes Anna, Pre-Slicing

To make pommes Anna, you should slice potatoes thinly, about 1/8 inch or 3mm. To do so, I use my old-school French stainless steel mandoline, pictured above. I don't use it much any more, but it used to get a workout at the restaurant. This is probably my third or fourth one, several having been destroyed by the rigors of the restaurant kitchen.

If you are looking for something just to make this dish, I would not recommend that you spend $200 on a classic mandoline. A cheap Japanese benriner or even a knife will work just fine to slice the potatoes, as much as I do love the heft of the old-school hunk of French stainless steel. 

The choice of potato is up to you. Starchy russet potatoes hold together better and brown better, but the texture is drier and way less sexy. Waxy potatoes, such as the Yukon Golds that I used for this one, don't hold together or brown as well, but my God, is the texture ever sublimely sexy! I would say choose starchy potatoes until you have a few pommes Anna under your belt and are comfortable with the technique, then switch to waxy potatoes.

To bake the potato cake, you will need a heavy, fairly straight-sided, oven-proof pan. I use my antique Griswold #8 cast iron frying pan. The company that makes my copper pans, Mauviel, actually still makes a $500 copper pan just for making pommes Anna, entirely overkill! If you don't have a cast iron pan, maybe this dish will convince you to get one at a thrift shop near you.

My frying pan holds about five pounds of potatoes, so I sliced five pounds of Yukon golds in the afternoon before guests arrived. One of the good things about waxy potatoes is that they don't really oxidize all that much (as compared to say russets which brown while you are peeling them) and can be prepped well in advance.

I assembled the gâteau just as we were finishing our appetizers, by arranging the potato slices in pretty rings, doused with clarified butter and sprinkled with salt every layer. I always build up the center higher than the edges because the center will sink, yielding an uneven cake. The first step is to build the cake on the stove top over medium heat. Then you cover it with foil, weight it with a very heavy pan, and bake it covered for about 25 minutes in a really hot oven, say 450F. Finally it gets uncovered and baked until it is cooked through and nicely colored, say another 25 minutes.

When it went into the oven for the initial covered bake, I went outside and fired the grill to preheat in anticipation of grilling lamb chops and asparagus for dinner. Grace, who is making her final Easter appearance with us (she has only days to live), watched the proceedings outside from the comfort of the dining room rug, looking through the French doors to the patio where all the action was.

Queen of the Dining Room

Easter Dinner

Dinner was a really simple affair. Along with the pommes Anna, we had grilled lamb chops and grilled asparagus paired with a northern Rhône, a Crozes-Hermitage rouge, always my go-to wine for lamb.

As for all simple cooking, the devil is in the details and in the quality of the ingredients. I marinated the lamb chops in red wine, garlic, rosemary, and black pepper for three days before hand. The marinade, I strained and reduced, then finished with Dijon mustard, shallots, green peppercorns, glace de viande, a splash of heavy cream, and at the end, a little cold butter swirled in, to make a refined flourless sauce poivrade for the lamb.

I found some beautiful large asparagus at the market, it being the height of asparagus season. For home cooking, I snap the stems off where they will break, assuring that they will be tender. But because this was for a special occasion, I cut the stalks all to the same length and then peeled the tough outer skin off them. If you are going to peel asparagus, you really should invest in a serrated edge peeler which will make your life so much simpler. For thick asparagus headed for the grill, I like to blanch them first. Otherwise, you risk charring the outside on the hot grill before they can cook through.

Almost Ready to Feast, Filling Water Glasses
and Lighting Candles

Pommes Anna and Grilled Asparagus

Lamb Chops: The Main Attraction

For dessert, Ann dipped cannoli shells into chocolate and made a filling of ricotta, tiny chocolate chips, and lemon zest. She also made the excess dipping chocolate into bark sprinkled with salt and toasted pistachios. Along with those, I opened a 1991 Quinta do Vesuvio Port that I bought on futures 30 years ago. At it's current state of evolution, it tastes like a warm marionberry pie and blackberry syrup.

1991 Quinta do Vesuvio Port

It really was great to get in the kitchen and cook some real food for a change, although the pile of dirty dishes at the end is always a bit of a bummer! John, Heidi, Tom, and Shanda, many thanks for your great company and for sharing a meal with us in our new home!

Valentine's Day: Raspberry, Chocolate, Blood Orange Bread Pudding

I'm pretty new to the whole Valentine's Day thing. When I was in the restaurant business, it was easily our busiest time of the year. Imagine doing a month's worth of business in a one- or two-day stretch, each table being sat twice a night and served seven courses! It took a week before Valentine's Day to prep for the special menu and it took a week after to recuperate. Besides never being home for Valentine's Day, I was also a zombie. It is still a wonder to me that Ann stuck by me through all that.

This year, I wanted to do something special to surprise her. Because of COVID, going out is not an option. But realistically, because I was in the business and know how stressed restaurants are under the crush of business, I would never go out for Valentine's dinner anyway. Still, I cook dinner every night and so cooking dinner would not really be special. I opted instead to make a special brunch.

Raspberry, Chocolate, Blood Orange Bread Pudding

What was different is that for brunch I made something totally out of left field. We don't eat sweets, fruit aside, and our diet is very low in simple carbs. So naturally, I made a Raspberry, Chocolate, Blood Orange Bread Pudding because that would be the absolute last thing that she would expect from me. And I made it under Ann's nose. She didn't know anything about it until about 45 minutes into its baking when it started to perfume the house. I served it with blood orange segments on top to help cut the sweetness.

A Jam Bread Pudding

This bread pudding was inspired by my mother's mother. When I would visit my grandmother during college breaks, she would sometimes smear slices of white bread with butter and jam and shingle them in the bottom of a pan. She would then pour a custard over the bread and a few minutes later, a bread pudding would emerge from her oven.

The challah-based savory bread pudding that I made for New Year's Brunch cemented for me that soft breads such as the store-bought white loaf bread that my grandmother used do not make great bread puddings. A good bread pudding needs a hearty bread with a good crust. A lot of the charm of a great bread pudding is the contrast of the soft interior with a crunchy crust, something you do not get from indifferent bread.

I bought a good quality focaccia for this bread pudding. I used focaccia because it is the depth of my pan and so I could expose the focaccia crust through the top of the pudding. Assembling the bread pudding on the QT was something of a challenge. Each time Ann would leave the room, I would do a bit more: slicing the bread, spreading raspberry jam on each slice, chopping a block of chocolate, making the orange-vanilla custard base, putting all the ingredients together, and "hiding" the pudding in plain sight in the back of the refrigerator.

I made a quart of custard base: a quart of 2% milk, a splash of vanilla extract, the zest of one blood orange, five eggs, and a scant half a cup of sugar. Initially, the pudding took about half the custard, the remainder of which I put in the refrigerator and used to top off the pudding before I went to bed the night before. In all, the pudding took about 3-1/2 cups of custard base.

Valentine's morning while Ann was brushing her teeth, I put the pudding in the oven. She had no idea what was going on until it was just about done and started making the house smell great.

Mimosa, Crossword, and Ed-Made Valentine's Day Card

It's our morning ritual to have our coffee along with a crossword puzzle from the Sunday New York Times. I left a Valentine's card on the table where we do our crosswords. I always make Ann a card (having never felt that buying a card from the store expresses anything about me except that I was lazy) and this year was no different.

When Ann was upstairs printing the crossword puzzle, I brought in the bird condo that you see in the photo below as another surprise for her. She had expressed interest in having one (along with explicit instructions: "the center has to be red") some weeks ago and I demurred, having already a very long list of woodworking projects on my list.

As I was working on those other projects, I took time and converted scrap lumber to the bird condo for her. It now adorns our back gate.

Bird Condo Above Our Back Gate

Once the bread pudding came out of the oven, I made us some mimosas and we sat down to splurge for Valentine's brunch. As good as this bread pudding was, I'd rather have had a savory bread pudding. Note to self.

Savory Bread Pudding: Shiitake, Leek, and Goat Cheese

Way back in the Thanksgiving time frame, Ann expressed a desire to have a savory bread pudding for Christmas Day brunch, by way of celebrating. We haven't been eating many simple carbs at all since August and the bread pudding would be a rare treat. I proposed making one with shiitakes, leeks, and goat cheese and she agreed, further asking if I could make it with challah. So I made a loaf of challah and assembled the bread pudding on Christmas Eve, baking it in early afternoon on Christmas Day.

Savory Bread Pudding: Shiitake, Leek, and Goat Cheese

I really love doing dishes like this for brunch because I can assemble everything the night before, leaving only to pull it out of the refrigerator and put it in the oven the next day.

Starting the Flavorings: Leeks and Shiitakes

Cooking the Leeks and Shiitakes with Thyme

I started by cooking sliced leeks and shiitakes with a bit of thyme. Thyme is one of my favorite herbs and I think it pairs extremely well with shiitakes.

Measuring the Bread

When making any kind of bread pudding, I always use the baking pan to measure the bread. I keep cutting cubes until the pan is full. That way, there's no guessing. Because challah is so soft, I cut it into very large cubes so that it will not fall apart when I add the custard. I prefer to use more substantial bread for bread puddings. When using bread with more body and a tougher crust, I would cut it much smaller.

You can use any bread you like. For example, I have made bread pudding with croissants and my grandmother used to smear store-bought white bread with butter and jam and shingle (overlap) the whole slices of smeared bread the length of her baking dish.

Dry Ingredients Before Mixing with Custard

Bread Pudding Ready to Bake or Refrigerate

The custard for bread pudding can be flavored or unflavored. In the restaurant days, I would infuse the cream for the custard with garlic, herbs, spices, and dried mushrooms, among other flavorings. For this bread pudding, I did not want to take that extra step, mainly because I had just made the challah and spent three days making French onion soup for Christmas Eve Dinner. Also, I wanted to reduce the fat in the custard by using low fat milk rather than the 40% heavy cream that I used to use at the restaurant.

A decent rule of thumb is that each egg will set one cup of liquid, so each quart of liquid requires four eggs. I always use five eggs. It's always a good idea to know how much custard volume you need for the size pan you will be using. A full shallow hotel pan will take a gallon (plus 20 eggs), a half hotel will take a half gallon (plus 10 eggs), and this 9x9 pan will take a quart (plus 5 eggs).

At the restaurant, in addition to making large puddings, we used to bake bread puddings in individual molds, in which case, we'd fill each mold full of bread and then ladle custard into the mold until the mold was full.

This 9x9 pan contains, in addition in addition to the bread and custard, a leek, a half a pound of shiitakes stemmed and sliced, and four ounces of fresh goat cheese.

 

Bread Pudding Coming Out of the Oven

Baking bread puddings is a simple matter of putting them uncovered in a moderate oven (350F) and waiting for them to set up and brown on top to the degree that you want. A bread pudding of this depth will take about 90 minutes, a good bit longer than many people expect. A full hotel pan of bread pudding is going to take about two hours to set in the center and brown. If you're wanting to eat your bread pudding while it is still warm, you'll probably want it to cool for 20 minutes before you cut it so that it has a chance to solidify a bit. All this is by way of saying that you should allow plenty of time to cook and cool your bread pudding before you want to eat it.

Prosecco: A Great Match for Goat Cheese

The slightly acidic flavor of the goat cheese in the bread pudding seems to go incredibly well with Prosecco, so we put a bottle in the refrigerator and had a glass while the pudding was in the oven and another glass with the pudding.

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.