Of Peaches and Fish

It was a long time getting to Sunday this week, given that we were open for dinner 6 nights this week instead of the usual 5. And given that I had to go pick Carter up at school at nearly midnight after dinner service on Saturday. So Sunday was a sleep-in kind of morning. Even the dogs didn't start their usual milling around until around 8am. Ann and I finally roused ourselves around 9am and I immediately got to work in the yard to finish some things that just had to be done before we left at noon to get to Ann and Tom's for a barbeque. Ann busied herself making some awesome locally roasted Black Dog coffee and baking another of her wonderful loaves of bread.

Baby Peaches, After Thinning

Our tender veg are all now set out in the garden beds (tomatoes, peppers, squashes, cucumbers, basils, etc). And I got some annuals seeded in the long bed against the fence: cosmos and a couple varieties of sunflowers. But what needed most doing was thinning the peaches. Just like dropping fruit on grape vines to make more concentrated wine, dropping fruit on stone crops increases size and flavor intensity of the remaining fruit. And for peach trees in particular, they want to produce way more fruit than they can support, so removing excess fruit is vital if you don't want broken branches everywhere. But it does make me sad to see all that fruit on the ground. We have pickled these baby peaches before, but I have no time for it this year.



Makes Me Sad

Bringing this post back to fish, after working in the yard, Ann, Carter, and I drove over to Tom and Ann's in Capon Bridge, WV, not 30 minutes from the house for a cook out. I brought the guests of honor for the grill, two snappers and three branzini. Ann brought bread. Tom and Annie supplied everything else. Lunch at Tom and Ann's is a long, leisurely affair, with many courses spread out over several hours.



The Guests of Honor

We started with Tom grilling slices of my Ann's roasted garlic rosemary bread (which is freaking awesome) that we spread with Tom's wonderful chicken liver mousse with a port jelly on top.



Awesome Roasted Garlic-Rosemary Bread

Tom's Great Chicken Liver Mousse with Port Jelly

Then on to several skewers of  wonderful shrimp. The turbinado sugar that Tom put in the marinade gave the shrimp a little sweetness and helped them color on the grill. I think they were delicious: Carter camped himself in front of the plate and destroyed them!

Showing off on the Big Green Egg

Food Porn

More of Same; Carter ate 90% of These Shrimp



Tom's Back Yard Does Not Suck

After the shrimps came a salad that I have been hearing about for years now:  red lettuce, green lettuce, curly endive, radicchio, green onions, prosciutto, cheese, toasted pine nuts, pickled red onions, and a warm balsamic vinaigrette. Really good.

And a Little Salad Before the Fish

The fish are slashed and rubbed with salt and olive oil and stuffed with basil stems, cilantro stems, and slices of key lime.



Ready for Action

Yum! Grilled Fish Garnished with Basil, Cilantro, and Key Lime Slices

Grilled Asparagus with Feta

And the rogue's gallery of dead soldiers:

 

Check out These Two!

Finally, cheese for dessert while we watched Robin Williams and Nathan Lane in Bird Cage for the 40th time each. These cheeses may all look similar, but they are very different. From upper left to lower right, the four blond paste cheeses are: Pleasant Ridge Reserve, Cabot's clothbound Cheddar, Kirkham's farmhouse Lancashire, and Lincolnshire Poacher. The blue, which is one of the more outstanding blues that I have ever eaten is Bayley Hazen blue. I thought that the Pleasant Ridge Reserve was the best American cheese I had ever tasted, until I tasted the Bayley Hazen blue. That stuff is ridiculous!
 

Incredible Cheeses, American and British

Mother's Day 2013

I asked Ann some days ago what she wanted to eat for Mother's Day dinner and she had to think about it for a little while. She hasn't been feeling all that great of late and so I wanted to make sure that she would be up to eating whatever I made. She emailed me a recipe for a smoked salmon, asparagus, and lemon pasta that appealed to her and so I planned to make something similar.

We planned to spend this Sunday at home, an increasing rarity. With it being the dreaded trifecta weekend at the restaurant (Mother's Day, two high school proms, and Shenandoah University graduation), we were swamped and we knew we would be swamped for months in advance. This weekend is historically about our frost date too and is the weekend that we typically set out our tender plants, tomatoes, peppers, basils, and the like. So we planned nothing except a lazy day of gardening and sitting on the patio.

And a good thing too. After getting home very late and going to bed later still, I awoke in a zombie-like state. Actually, awoke is the wrong phrasing. I was awakened is more to the point: the dogs decided it was time to get up and the brown one nuzzled me until I got out of bed and took them out. Black-and-white just whined. Ann made coffee while I lay on the sofa and finally, I got myself motivated and outside, cup of delicious coffee in hand, about 10am.

Proud Mama

Year Five for the Wisteria



New Calibrachoa Hanging Baskets

Ann Might Have Found an Orphan Digitalis to Bring Home

This Salvia is Stunning

We managed to weed a lot and plant some new perennials, but ended up not planting the vegetable beds. The National Weather Service has issued a frost advisory for Monday night. Of course. Oh well, better safe than sorry.

Wildflowers for Ann on Mother's Day

After gardening all that I could or wanted to garden, we took avantage of the sunny cool weather to sit out and have a glass of Albariño, our last bottle of 2011. What a great, light, crisp, and lemony wine, perfect for patio drinking!

Albariño! Love this Wine Outdoors!

While we were outside, I picked one of the few remaining leeks, planted at this time last year. What a beautiful specimen this guy is!

Leek from the Garden; Big as the Chair!

Pasta Mise

And then once inside, I started on a 15-minute dinner, all I was up to after getting killed all week at the restaurant. The ingredients for the pasta from the blanched asparagus clockwise are lemon thyme, heavy cream, smoked bluefish, lemon zest, leek, pappardelle, and sliced shallots. I've done dozens of riffs on this pasta at the restaurant over the years, mostly with smoked salmon, but I just happen to have some awesome smoked bluefish on hand right now.

Happy Mother's Day, Ann!

Honeymoon: Three Doors Down, SE Portland OR and Heading Home

Saturday May 4, SE Portland OR

After munchies with beer at noon on Saturday and so-so cart food later in the afternoon, it was finally around 8:45pm that we got somewhat hungry. For our final meal in Portland, Ann wanted a simple plate of pasta so we searched the web for the closest reasonable sounding Italian joint, which proved to be at Hawthorne and 37th, called Three Doors Down.

As an aside, how nice is it to go out somewhat late and still have lots of restaurants open? Living in small town Winchester VA, we are done with our dinner service by 9pm even at the end of June when the days are the longest of the year.

That said, I judged the crowd to be slow and asked our server about it. In Portland as in Winchester, it seems you cannot compete with Mother Nature. Because it was one of the first beautiful weekends of the year, so many were people out of town at the beach or otherwise enjoying the gorgeous weather and grilling out.

We commandeered a table out on the sidewalk and people-watched for a while with a bottle of Brick House Gamay Noir, which tasted exactly as Gamay should taste. If you told me I was drinking Beaujolais, I wouldn't have argued with you. But really, I don't know enough about New World Gamay to understand how it differs from Beaujolais.


Ribbon Ridge Gamay

Because we weren't super hungry, we ordered a couple appetizers followed by a plate of pasta. Both our starters were good. First up was a large slab of grilled bread spread with goat cheese and topped with arugula and duck confit. Yep, it was every bit as good as you might imagine, though an informed palate might be wishing it had some of our house-cured duck confit on it. There's no hiding the extra flavor that ours develops over the three-month curing process.

Duck Confit, Arugula, and Goat Cheese

Next up was a board of burrata topped with tapenade, some so-called jamón ibérico, and flatbread. We enjoyed this plate, but two things confuse me. First, look at the mash up of ingredients from at least three different cultures. How does this make intellectual sense? Second, look hard at the jamón ibérico. Really, if you're going to spend that kind of money on some of the world's best ham, are you then going to cut it thick and then partially cook it?

"Jamón Ibérico", Burrata, Tapenade, and Flatbread

By the time we finished our appetizers and the server delivered our plates (they split our pasta for us; kind of them, but they needn't have) of house-made ricotta cavatelli bolognese, it was really dark out on the sidewalk. Our server had brought us a candle earlier in the evening, but it was way too gusty to keep it lit, so Ann downloaded a candle app on her iPhone and set it to flickering.

I must say that the cavatelli was deftly made and deftly sauced but was desperate for salt. And doesn't anyone make true bolognese with shredded meat anymore? Really, you're going to the trouble to make cavatelli, but you won't do the same for your meat sauce?

In the end, it was a really nice low key dinner that we shared on our final night in Portland. We were very comfortable and enjoyed sitting and talking and watching the street parade. If I lived in Portland, I think I would like this place a lot.

Sunday May 5

Sunday the 5th is a day I would like to forget. I forced myself up at 0600 local time, trying to wean myself off Pacific time to help with the transition back to work on Monday morning. In retrospect, maybe this was a bad idea. We skipped breakfast at the B&B and hurried to return our rental car and get through security to catch our early morning flight to SFO. I managed to set off the millimeter wave scanner again: I'm simply too tall for the little booth. When I looked at the monitor, it had alerted right on the top of my head, the usual location, so I got my (lack of) hair patted down. All the TSA agents here were very friendly, unlike at Dulles, and the tiny guy doing the pat down started chuckling when I had to bend down so that he could reach the top of my head.

It proved that all that hurrying was for naught. Because of weather and because of weekend runway closures at SFO for federally-mandated safety improvements, our plane was over two hours late arriving at PDX. Our plane arrived at PDX *after* we were supposed to depart SFO for Dulles; how's that for late? The flight crews were bitching too: they have to deal with runway closures all the time and naturally, the brunt of passenger fall-out lands mostly on their shoulders. And their layovers are impacted as well. The whole situation is screwed up.

The weather continued brilliantly nice and we had awesome views of Mount Hood from the tarmac while we sat at PDX and the rest of the major Cascades peaks: Ranier, St. Helens with its flat top, Adams, and the Three Sisters down near Bend once we got airborne. We also saw Shasta and the peaks in California before weather closed in a few minutes out of SFO.

Mt. Hood from the Tarmac at PDX

We managed to get re-booked on a flight out of SFO that departed not 20 minutes after we landed (and need I mention that our inbound flight sat on the ground waiting in SFO waiting for a gate to open?). When we got to the Washington departure gate, mercifully only about four gates from our arrival gate, the monitor above the gate read "Delayed - Awaiting Inbound Aircraft"), which confused me because there was a plane at the gate. The plane had just arrived and so we stood around for about 45 minutes while they turned it around, giving me time to nip over to the concession just behind us and grab some power bars and a couple sandwiches. At this point, we had been going all day without food.

"Delayed:" Just What Every Traveler Wants to See

Once we boarded, we had to sit at the gate for about 20 minutes before ground control would give us permission to join the long line of jets waiting to take off. We were about an hour on the plane on the ground before we finally got underway to DC and with weather ahead of us, we were unable to take the most direct route in. We finally arrived at just after 1am and by the time we got our car, got home, and got the dogs walked, it was 3am. Waking up just three hours later to go to work was a doozy!

This is the final post in the Honeymoon series. We had a wonderful time at the Oregon coast, in the Willamette Valley, and in Portland proper, along with some of the most fantastic weather ever to grace the first week in May in that area. What an amazing trip!

Honeymoon: BridgePort Brewing and Portland Food Carts

Saturday May 4, NW and SW Portland OR

BridgePort Brewing

After touring the incredible farmer's market at Portland State University, we decided to grab a beer and check out the food cart scene, not necessarily in that order. Because we were already in SW, we drove over to the food truck pod at 10th and Alder SW, the one that we had driven by on our way into town and scouted the offerings. Because it was still before noon, a lot of the carts weren't open, but Ann and I each picked a cart to sample later in the afternoon.

Bridgeport: Still Great Beer

We decided to make a beer detour for a while until the food carts got fully ramped up, so we drove a few short blocks up to NW to BridgePort Brewing for drinks and appetizers. I spent a lot of time drinking IPAs and Blue Herons at Bridgeport when I was making regular visits to Portland back in the 1980s. The beer was very good back then and I am happy to report that the beer remains good to this day.

Since then, I have moved up in style from pale ales to imperial pale ales and I really enjoyed the first pint of Hop Czar, a big hop monster of a beer. Me like. After this pint, our server tasted me on a couple of other beers (including the Kingpin Double Red Ale) that he thought I would like as well, but I ended up having another Hop Czar. After you start with a hop monster, it is hard to go backwards.


Ann's "Margarita"

While Ann was off in the restroom, I ordered her a Summer Squeeze Bright Ale, but she wasn't much of a fan: her taste runs mainly to straightforward lightly hopped lagers, Mexican or Asian. So she ordered a pinkish Margarita that looked pretty good. I didn't taste it but it seems like she enjoyed it. I'm totally drawing a blank on what was in it.

At this point, it was about 1 pm and we decided to get a little bit to eat while we were there. And it turns out that they have pretty decent food; in any case, it way exceeded my expectations (which are admittedly pretty low when it comes to brewpubs). We ordered a Mediterranean Plate and an order of warm soft pretzels.


Mediterranean Plate: Decent Brewpub Food

The Mediterranean Plate was pretty tasty even if the pita was a bit odd. I don't believe I have ever seen a whole white pita docked so that it wouldn't rise. It wasn't bad, just odd. On the plate was hummus, a quinoa "tabouleh" that was kind of fun, olives with feta, and a so-called "Moroccan carrot-walnut pate." This appears to me to be a riff on halwa and I liked it because it wasn't sweet.


Pretzels, Quintessential Beer Drinking Food

The pretzels came with a Kingpin Ale-Honey Mustard and a Porter-Cheddar spread. I liked the honey mustard but I didn't get much cheese flavor out of the cheddar spread.

[Note: The iconic BridgePort Brewery founded by Willamette Valley icon Dick Ponzi and Oregon's second craft brewery finally closed in 2019 after years of mismanagement by new ownership. I really miss the great nights there back in the day.]

Portland Food Carts

On our way back to our B&B in SE, we stopped back by 10th and Alder SW to grab a couple of things from the food trucks there. I will say in advance that I think we struck out here. The food we got was not great and not what we expected of the vibrant cart scene. Clearly, we chose poorly. It happens; not often, but it happens.


Click to Read the Fine Print on the Downtown Sign

Ann Chose a Fancy Burger from Sideshow

The Sideshow cart has pretty good reviews for their fries and poutine, but it was the window sign that got Ann's attention. She loves a good burger and was seduced by the Fancy Burger at the Sideshow food cart. Reading that description, what foodie wouldn't want to try the burger? The burger was really meh. Really meh. Super, super average. Meh.

I fared about equally well with a porchetta sandwich at The People's Pig. I am a big porchetta fan and if I do say so myself, I make kick-ass porchetta. I always like to taste other people's versions though, just to widen my frame of reference. Sadly, the People's Pig porchetta might as well have been a smoked pork shoulder sandwich. It had a good smoky flavor, which most porchetta does not, but who can fault a guy for throwing some smoke to a pig? My porchetta is cured for several days in a great fennel, rosemary, and garlic rub. This, this had no flavor other than smoked pork. Which would have been fine chopped with a good bit of East Carolina sauce. But to call it porchetta is something of a crime.


Porchetta? Who Can Resist?

How about So-So Pork Sandwiches?

Love Me Some Pig. Pig Didn't Love Me Back

Honeymoon: Portland Farmers Market @ PSU

Saturday May 4, SW Portland OR

When I am traveling (or I should say, before restaurant when I used to travel) I love to spend time at local markets and the Portland Farmers Market at Portland State University is consistently ranked by those who rank farmers markets in the top ten in the country. Naturally the PSU market was first on our list of things to do and see after breakfast. It turned out to be a great way to start the last day of our trip.

Having spent our first night in Portland proper, at 9 am we went downstairs to the dining room to have a communal breakfast with the other two couples staying at the B&B, one from Chicago and the other a hippie couple from Ann Arbor. We were the youngest ones at the table by 15 or 20 years. We got to meet our hosts Jason and Ann at breakfast as well, when they brought out platters of spinach frittata, made in part with eggs from the back yard.

There was also some kind of cured pork product, in long strips that were uniformly lean and pink; I never got the chance to ask what it was. Each of us had a bowl of fruit as well and there was a plate full of muffins in the center of the table, but I didn't taste them, not being a big sweets fan, but they certainly looked good.

Right after breakfast, we took off to the market and as we got close, we couldn't find any parking. Maybe the locals know where to park, but we were several blocks away on the street before we found anything resembling a free spot. As we made our way there, I sure wasn't prepared for the size and diversity of the market that we found. It is a vast market with up to 200 vendors of produce, mushrooms, meat, seafood, charcuterie, bread and baked goods, cheese and dairy products, honey, ready to eat food, and value-added products such as sauces and condiments. I've never seen anything like it, not even in Europe, especially with thousands of shoppers at any given time crowding the walkways and making it difficult to move.

Judging from the market managers and conversations with vendors, there seem to be a ton of rules and regulations, but at the end of the day, it is a producer-only market. One consequence of these rules and the pervasive hyperenviroconsciousness is that although there are stations for refilling water bottles, there is no place at the market where you can buy a bottle of water. So on our way out of the market, we stopped in to a little corner market for a bottle of water. Naturally, there were shelves and shelves of bongs, bowls, and hookahs of every size and description. Toto, we surely aren't any Kansas any longer!