Seared Ahi on Mediterranean Salad

Seared Ahi on Mediterranean Salad

Tuna may be the ultimate fish (though in my book, a big slab of Striped Bass is right up there). And it would be a terrible understatement to say that I am picky about my tuna. At the restaurant, I handled a very great deal of very high quality tuna and so most of what I see at the store is several notches below what I used to serve to my customers. Every now and again, which is to say quite rarely, I see a piece of tuna at the store that looks good enough to bring home. As it did back at the end of March.

How to cook tuna is never in question for me. Like scallops, the less cooked it is, the better. If I am going to cook it at all, I will either briefly sear it or lightly grill it, just trying to cook the outer surface. Given that our weather was really cold, I decided to pan-sear this piece rather than to unbury the grill from its mantle of snow.

Here in lovely Bend, Oregon, spring is still a long ways off (with a bunch of snow in our long-range forecast) and yet I yearn for the warmer days. To help put myself in that frame of mind, I thought a really simple chopped salad might just be the ticket.

My so-called Mediterranean salad is grape tomatoes, cucumbers, thinly-sliced red onions, a touch of minced garlic, Italian parsley, and toasted pine nuts. The "dressing" is a simple squeeze of fresh lemon juice, a drizzle of olive oil, and a pinch of Kosher salt.

It's hard to imagine a better warm weather light dinner, even if it is served with snow on the ground!

Playing in the Kitchen: Chicken "Paprikash"

After many weeks of unpacking, rearranging, and repairing, we finally got our house functional enough to have people over for dinner. Ann invited our friends Kayli, Alyssa, and Alisha over for a Sunday night dinner. These three we met back in McMinnville when they were on the crew at our favorite tap house. They moved to Bend in September and we followed them in February. Kayli is now the AGM at Crux Fermentation Project while Alyssa and Alisha are on the kitchen crew at Worthy Brewing.

Ann and Kayli kibitzed while the rest of us made dinner. Alyssa and Alisha wanted to learn how to cook some Indian dishes, but I really don't yet have the spices that I need to show them any kind of ropes. There appears to be no place out here to score some of the spices that I need for any style of Indian cooking, so that meal is going to have to wait until I take a trip to Portland or Eugene to stock up.

Ann suggested that I make a version of chicken paprikash instead. Fortunately, I have some really good fresh paprika on hand, so that turned out to be a good choice. While I started forty years ago by learning the classic method and ingredients for paprikash, I have modified the dish over the years to make it mine, hence the quotation marks around the word paprikash. 

Chicken "Paprikash" on Egg Noodles

While the three of us were cooking dinner at the stove on the island, we looked up to see Kayli putting make-up on Ann's face. Not sure what was going on there as we were concentrating on cooking, but I can surely say that that is a first for me. Never before have I made dinner while anyone in the kitchen was getting a makeover!

Kayli Doing Ann's Makeup

Tada!

The Kitchen Elves

My Beer Being Photobombed

Traditionally, the chicken for paprikash would be browned in lard before heading for the oven, but it is really difficult, now that I am no longer at the restaurant doing whole-animal butchery, to find any decent fatback or kidney fat that will render into decent lard. So, I've really stopped fighting the fight and just render bacon to start my paprikash. It gives the dish a smoky flavor that while non-traditional is really delicious, especially when I amplify it by using a small amount of pimentón along with Hungarian paprika.

Non-Traditional: Bacon

After rendering the bacon, the next steps are to brown the chicken, remove it from the pan, drain most of the fat off, and cook some yellow onions with a little bit of garlic in the remaining bacon/chicken fat. Once the onions are nice and translucent, add a good amount of paprika (let's say a quarter cup) and a little bit of smoked paprika (perhaps a scant teaspoon). It's important at this point to stir the paprika into the fat extremely well so that it does not clump.

Browning Chicken in Bacon Fat

Browned Chicken Ready for Sauce and the Oven

Once the paprika is well incorporated into the onions, I put the non-traditional bacon back into the pan and add a quart to perhaps a quart and a half of double chicken stock. [To make double chicken stock, I first make a chicken stock, then using the bones from the first stock along with more raw chicken, I pour the first stock over the chicken and make the double stock.] I use a double stock to improve the mouthfeel and texture of the finished sauce, because unlike some people, I do not thicken my sauce with any flour, preferring to let the gelatin in the stock do its magic.

After lightly seasoning the sauce (some will evaporate during braising) and bringing it to a boil, I pour it over the chicken and put the chicken in a moderately hot oven, say 400F, uncovered to finish cooking. Depending on the size of the chicken (I used bone-in thighs), it will take 35 minutes to an hour. We didn't really time the chicken in the oven; we just checked it for liquid level and doneness every 15 minutes or so. It was probably in the oven 45 minutes or so.

Finished Sauce

I would typically make dumplings or spätzle on which to serve the chicken, but in the interest of simplicity, we just cooked some really wide and short, almost square, egg noodles while the chicken was resting after coming out of the oven. After having removed the chicken from the braising sauce, I finished the sauce with about a cup of sour cream and a bit of salt to taste.

To plate, toss the noodles with sauce. Put the chicken over a bed of noodles and top with more sauce.

Spring Grilling: Carne Asada

Here in beautiful Bend, Oregon, spring is starting slowly with the appearance of the first buds on trees and the advent of milder, though still cool, temperatures. The nicer weather has inspired me to get my grill cleaned up and reassembled after the move from McMinnville in February. My goal: to grill the  package of skirt steaks, labelled also in Spanish, arracheras, that I came across at the grocery store.

Tacos de Carne Asada

Skirt steak is not all that common at grocery stores here in the PNW, which is a shame, because it is the perfect cut for carne asada, thin and flavorful. No lie, it is one of my most favorite grilling cuts.

Carne asada, literally grilled meat, with beef being implied, isn't typically a meal in itself, though it can be. The grilled skirt steak is generally chopped and used in other dishes, such as tacos. In norteño culture, carne asada can also mean the event at which the meat is grilled, a barbeque in American terms.

To celebrate the coming of spring and the first barbeque in our new home, I decided to make carne asada tacos with a quick salsa roja, cilantro, raw onion, and a sprinkle of cotija cheese, pictured above.

Arracheras on the Grill

For carne asada, skirt steaks are generally marinated before grilling and a lot of people use a wet marinade. I prefer something simpler, rubbing the steaks with oil, a generous amount of salt, a bit of freshly ground cumin, minced garlic, and finely chopped cilantro stems. I left the steaks in the fridge for 3-4 days to absorb the rub, though this is certainly not necessary. I've never been a big fan of wet marinades on steaks, because I feel that the liquid inhibits the really great grill sear and char that you see in the photo below.

Grilled Skirt Steaks: Carne Asada

I also go against conventional wisdom in grilling my carne asada to medium going on medium well. Convention says that skirt steak is tough and so you want to cook it rather less than more. Having grilled thousands of skirt steaks, I have to disagree. I have found that a tough, stringy steak like a skirt steak is very hard to chew when rare to medium rare. And so I opt for medium to a bit beyond, say medium well.

Recipe: Salsa Roja (Guajillo-Chipotle)

I make all manner of salsas and keep them in the fridge to have on hand whenever I want some. In general, I don't use tomato in my red sauce, but this time, I decided to stretch my supply of dried chiles with a can of tomatoes.

Toasting Stemmed and Seeded Guajillos

Chiles After Toasting and Soaking

Finished Salsa Roja

Following is the recipe I used for this batch of mildly spicy red salsa. You can alter it as you see fit.

4 guajillo chiles, stemmed, toasted, and soaked

4 chipotles en adobo

6 cloves garlic

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar (or lime juice)

1-28 ounce can tomatoes in juice

salt to taste

Remove the stems and seeds from the dried chiles. If you are not certain how spicy the chiles are, you might want to wear gloves while doing this.

Toast the chiles in a dry pan until they start to smell good, but stop before they char. Move them around while toasting so that they do not burn.

Off heat, cover the chiles with water and let them soften. This will take an hour or so.

Drain the chiles and place them along with all the other ingredients in the blender. Blend until smooth. If the salsa is too thick, thin with water. Season to taste with salt.

Bonus Dish: "Steak and Eggs"

When grilling carne asada, it always makes sense to me to make more than I need because the leftovers are really useful for a quick meal. In this case, I made steak and eggs with the largest skirt steak. First, I cooked the leftover onions from the tacos from the night before, then added the diced skirt steak and the leftover cilantro. I just warmed the meat through, trying not to cook it any further.

Reheated Carne Asada with Onion and Cilantro

"Steak and Eggs"

The "steak and eggs" is a bowl of scrambled eggs topped with the reheated carne asada, fresh tomato, salsa verde, pimentón sauce, more cilantro, and a sprinkle of cotija cheese. Recipes for salsa verde and pimentón sauce are here.

Hummus with Sweet and Spicy Carrots

 

Hummus with Sweet and Spicy Carrots

I've got this thing for roasted carrots with dobanjang and honey going on lately. I love the texture and flavors.

Last trip to the store, I bought some chickpeas and some carrots, knowing that Ann wanted to dip carrots into a batch of hummus for a light dinner. But the weather is still cold here in Central Oregon and I wasn't really feeling such summery fare. I thought instead to roast the carrots and serve them still warm out of the oven on a bed of hummus.

Right now, it is just too much effort to come up with a recipe for the two major ingredients here, hummus and the dobanjang honey sauce in which the carrots are tossed. Both of these I make at the drop of hat in the quantities that I want, spiced like I want. It robs my cooking of all spontaneity to measure and to assign a precise ingredient list to such whimsy. In short, codifying a dish robs all my joy. Sorry. Not sorry.

The hummus is chickpeas, lemon juice, pimiento-stuffed manzanilla olives with some brine, garlic, pimentón, salt, a splash each of sriracha and sesame oil, with enough water to smooth it out to a rough paste. I'm not the biggest fan of super smooth hummus. It's great and all that, but I really do prefer more texture.

The sweet and spicy sauce could be made from anything spicy and anything sweet, but this version is about equal parts dobanjang and honey with a touch each of soy sauce and rice vinegar, to add salt and to tame the sweet a bit.

Maybe someday I will get around to codifying these two recipes, especially if I ever decide to write about creative vegan fare.

Recipe: Roasted Potatoes and Asparagus with Salsa Verde

Roasted Potatoes and Asparagus with Salsa Verde

The other day, our store had a big bag of small potatoes on special and we brought one home along with a bundle of asparagus whose price has plummeted with the arrival of spring in a lot of parts of this hemisphere, here excepted. We won't see spring temperatures for a few weeks, but a guy can live vicariously via the produce in the stores, can he not?

I ended up roasting one sheet tray of asparagus and another of the baby potatoes, then mixed the asparagus with some of the potatoes for our dinner. We liked the combination so much that I decided to do it again.

But meanwhile, leftover from this dinner was a small container of roasted potatoes and being a hungry guy, I pulled them out of the fridge for my lunch. Right next to them was a container of recently made salsa verde and I thought, "Self, wouldn't these two be good together?" And I put them together and they were good and I filed that note away for our next roasted potato and asparagus dinner.

And that brings us to dinner last evening, pictured above. While the potatoes and asparagus roasted, I made a batch each of salsa verde and another of my pimentón (smoked paprika) sauce, recipes below. This salsa verde is a new sauce that I started making in the last year; the pimentón sauce, I've been making since before opening the restaurant, some 20-plus years ago.

The combination of vegetables with the bright and spicy green sauce contrasted with the rich and smoky orange paprika sauce was as good as I had imagined it would be. And it made a fantastic dinner on a cold March night, warm, comforting, spicy, smoky, low calorie, lowish fat, and most importantly, delicious.

Recipe: Roasted Potatoes and Asparagus with Salsa Verde

You don't need a formal recipe or fixed amounts to serve this dinner. For entrée-sized portions, for every two people, start with a pound and a half each of baby waxy potatoes and asparagus. This would also make a wonderful side for a grilled steak, in which case, this amount would likely serve four people.

1.5 pounds small waxy potatoes
1.5 pounds asparagus
olive oil
salt and pepper
1/2 cup salsa verde
2 tablespoons pimentón sauce

Preheat your oven to hot, about 400F. Toss the potatoes with olive oil, salt, and pepper and put on a sheet tray. Break off the tough ends of the asparagus and cut the remaining tender stalks to serving size; I cut each stalk into three pieces. Toss with olive oil, salt, and pepper and put on another sheet tray. Place the two sheet trays in the oven and roast the vegetables until done. The asparagus will likely take 20-25 minutes while the potatoes, depending on size, will take 35-45 minutes.

Combine the roasted vegetables with the half cup of salsa verde and toss well. Divide into two serving bowls and drizzle with the pimentón sauce.

Recipe: Salsa Verde

This is a recipe that I have published before, but it's a short one and easier to include it here than to go and chase it down. I mainly like to use fresh vegetables versus canned ones, but this sauce is a great use for canned tomatillos because it avoids you having to cook the tomatillos before making the salsa.

I specify serrano chile in the recipe simply because it is a reliably spicy chile that is available everywhere all year round. In practice, I make the sauce with whatever spicy green chile I happen to have. Last year, it was most frequently Sugar Rush Peach peppers because a friend gave me a plant.

You'll need a good blender to make this sauce. Here's a plug for my venerable VitaMix, veteran of the restaurant kitchen. At one point, we had five of them between the kitchen and the bar at the restaurant. And we probably went through about a dozen of them total over the 15-year life of the restaurant. 

1 28-ounce can whole tomatillos, drained
2-3 large cloves garlic
1 serrano chile, sliced
1 bunch cilantro, roughly chopped
1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt (to taste)

Place all the ingredients in the blender and starting on low speed, gradually increasing the speed as the ingredients liquefy, blend until you achieve a smooth sauce. Season to taste with additional salt, if necessary. Will keep, tightly covered under refrigeration, about a week.

Recipe: Pimentón Sauce

This sauce is such a good flavor enhancer and color booster for a dish that we used to make it by the gallon at the restaurant, about a week's supply. Quantities are approximate in that I never measure exactly. Quality matters: use a great brand of real Pimentón de la Vera from Spain, not some knock-off. And restraint matters: pimentón gets really bitter when used in large amounts, so go easy until you get a feel for how you like it. The following recipe yields about a cup of sauce.

1/2 cup mayonnaise
1 tablespoon Pimentón de la Vera
1/2 cup water
salt to taste

Start by putting the mayonnaise in a bowl and sprinkling the pimentón and a dash of salt over it. Mix thoroughly with a spoon, pressing the pimentón against the bowl as needed to remove any lumps. Mix until the paste is evenly colored throughout. Add water in small amounts, mixing it in well before adding more. Thin the sauce to the consistency that you desire. Season with salt as necessary. Store under refrigeration almost indefinitely. I typically load the sauce into a squirt bottle to make garnishing easy.

Valentine's Day 2022

As forecast last post, I took six weeks off from blogging to get us relocated from McMinnville, OR to Bend, OR, from the rainy and damp Willamette Valley, across the snowy Cascades, to the arid high desert of Central Oregon. We just got moved into our new house over the weekend. The fact that I am sitting here typing this post is a sure sign that we now have a functional office set up. In fact, getting our internet connection was a big fustercluck, Bend Broadband being a monopoly with terrible customer service.

Sitting at our New Bar for Valentine's Dinner

After spending about twelve hours unpacking and storing our kitchen goods, we were able to use our new kitchen for the first time on Valentine's Day. It's probably safe to say that needing to use the kitchen for Valentine's dinner speeded up the unpacking or at least informed the order in which we unpacked boxes. We could have gone out to celebrate, but we've been out a lot over the last week and don't feel all that well eating somewhat poorly. And then there's COVID, which thankfully is on the decline. We're still trying to avoid being indoors.

Those two reasons aside, Valentine's Day is possibly the worst day of the year to go out. Restaurant staffs, both front and back of house, are stressed, and nobody is doing the best work. Having spent a career in the business, I would never recommend to anyone to go out to eat on Valentine's Day. Yet still, I love to celebrate the day with Annie, unlike all those Valentine's Days where she sat home alone while I catered to all the people celebrating with us at the restaurant, only to stagger home like some nearly dead thing. What a terrible Valentine's Day for her, the chef widow! And so we planned a special meal at home, just for the two of us.

In cleaning out our freezer in preparation for moving, I found a couple of filets mignons that inspired Ann to ask me to make steak tartare for Valentine's. And then remembering the fabulous Argentine red shrimp that we had in Alaska, she also asked for a simple dish of pasta, shrimp, garlic, and butter. How easy was that menu planning? So simple, unlike at the restaurant where we were expected to create seven-course, high-end menus of exotic sounding but approachable dishes for our guests, one regular and one vegetarian.

Our home-cooked celebratory meal gave us a brief chance to test drive both the shopping in Bend and our new kitchen. We came from farm country with minimal shopping opportunities and a house with a top-flight kitchen to a new town with ample shopping opportunities and a sub-optimal kitchen. Now having used the new kitchen, I think we're going to have to gut it and start over in the near term. The awkward layout, barely functional storage, and silly downdraft range on a way-too-small island do not augur positively for my affection.

Steak Tartare, Broadley 2010 "Claudia's Choice"

Steak tartare is one of my favorite ways to prepare beef filet, simply because filet has very little character on its own. Although I find the texture a bit too soft for my liking in tartare, adding capers, shallots, salt, pepper, Dijon mustard, olive oil, and egg yolk is a great way to give the very bland beef a bit of fat and flavor.

Ordinarily, I would have served a lemony Chardonnay blanc de blancs sparkling with this dinner, but I just wasn't foresighted enough to have purchased any. Our usual preference in Champagne tends to the more berry flavors of Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, and so that's what we have at the house. And with the moving, buying more wine just to schlep it across the Cascades was a non-starter. As it was, the back of Ann's car was wall-to-wall with cases of wine. Although sparkling would have been my go-to pairing for this dinner, the bottle of 2010 Broadley Pinot Willamette Valley "Claudia's Choice" was  delicious.

Pasta and Shrimp with Garlic Butter

Our main course could not have been any simpler or frankly, better. Our usual diet is low carb, so pasta is a special treat for a special occasion. We were both smitten with Argentine red shrimp up in Alaska this summer when we both tasted them for the first time. These wild-caught shrimp are superbly tender and have a taste much more akin to lobster than typical shrimp. Researching on the internet, Ann found that these shrimp which were unavailable to us in McMinnville are a stock item at the Bend Trader Joe's, a store only dreamed of in McMinnville.

While we were there, we decided to get pasta as well, our nuts-and-bolts grocery store (WinCo) not having a very good selection of brands or cuts. Although our normal instinct would be to make this dish with a long cut, Ann was intrigued by a bag of Trader Joe's brand pasta labeled fusili corti bucati, like little hollow springs. I have had very long versions of this pasta, but never the corti ("cut" or short) version.

I liked the shape well enough, but the pasta itself did not cook very evenly and it was missing that really good al dente bite that I expect of great pasta. Time will tell if this is a one-off or if Trader Joe's brand is only good if we are desperate for pasta.

After several weeks of minimal dining as we packed our kitchen in preparation for the move, and then the few days around the move when we had no kitchen at all, it's great to be back at the range, even if it isn't the most functional!

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!