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!

Thanksgiving 2021

Like last year and thanks once again to COVID, our Thanksgiving this year was subdued, just Annie and me. For weeks, Ann had been asking me to reprise the Thanksgiving lasagna from last year, so I made it once again this year.

The ingredients and method are all outlined in last year's post, so I won't be going into them again here. Once again, it was an awful lot of busy work (spread over three days, although nothing difficult) for a dinner for two people, and still, the reward was worth the effort.

Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes and Ham, Salsa Verde

Mid-morning, we were starting to get hungry and knowing that we would only eat two meals today given the caloric weight of dinner, I decided to make a substantial breakfast to carry us through to dinner. In about five minutes, I whipped up two bowls of scrambled eggs with ham and tomatoes, topped with salsa verde, thanks to the ever-present container of salsa verde in the refrigerator.

Salsa Verde

This salsa is so delicious and so simple that I generally keep a batch in the refrigerator to adorn any dish that needs a little pick-me-up.

1 can of whole tomatillos (14 ounces net wt.), drained
1 bunch of cilantro, stems and all, roughly chopped
1 large clove garlic
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

Add all the ingredients to a blender. Starting on low speed, blend to a smooth sauce. Season to taste with salt.

After breakfast, we started watching Peter Jackson's new Beatles documentary, Get Back, which feels entirely different from the original Let it Be film that I saw decades ago, much happier in tone. As I look 60 years of age straight in the face, I realize that the Beatles really have been a huge part of the soundtrack of my life.

Our watching was interrupted periodically sending and receiving Thanksgiving wishes to and from friends and family. After the movie in the early afternoon, Ann and I got started on our mini celebration with me opening a bottle of Prosecco and Ann setting the table.

Prosecco poured, we got to work on dinner. I had done all the prep on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, leaving only the last-minute items for Thursday. I started by using the drippings from roasting the turkey thighs to make a batch of gravy with double turkey stock. I mixed the gravy with a mixture of pulled neck and thigh meat for one of the layers of the lasagna.

The stock was slightly different this year in that I made a double stock, the first stock made from roasted turkey necks. After picking the meat off the necks and thighs, I roasted the bones and then used them to make a second stock using the first stock instead of water.

Making Roux for Gravy

Turkey layer complete, we then went on to the béchamel layer, making it pretty much like country sausage gravy. I fried up the country sausage that I made on Wednesday (ground pork shoulder, salt, black pepper, red pepper flakes, sage, thyme, garlic) with chopped porcini mushrooms that I rehydrated the day before as well. Then in went a bit of flour and a quart of milk, and voilà, sausage-mushroom béchamel. Or fancy sausage gravy, depending on where you come from.

Meanwhile, we brought a big stockpot of salted water up to a boil and then par-boiled our lasagna noodles for four minutes, many minutes shy of being done. We layered up the lasagna: turkey, herb and vegetable ricotta, béchamel, turkey, béchamel, cornbread crumbles. While it was baking in a 375F oven, 45 minutes covered, 30 minutes uncovered, we opened a bottle of 2016 WillaKenzie Pinot Noir Triple Black Slopes to have with our dinner.

Drake Park and Mirror Pond, Bend, OR

Ann and I so enjoyed our overnight trip to Bend, Oregon a couple of weeks back that we planned a weekend stay this last weekend before Thanksgiving before it becomes tricky to cross the Cascades. We lucked out in that despite the pouring rain in the Willamette Valley, snowfall in the Santiam Pass was only a dusting and the weather on the Bend side was spectacular, if cold. The views of the snow-covered Cascades from Bend, hidden behind cloud cover on our prior visit, were spectacular, reminding us a bit of our time at Grand Teton NP.

Although our primary mission was to get to know the town rather than brewery hop as we did last visit, we added to our collection of breweries while we were there, tasting beers at Three Creeks in Sisters, Immersion, Crux, Bend Brewing, McMenamin's Old St. Francis School, and Cascade Lakes. Most of the time, we spent wandering around Bend, getting a feel for the place, at one point ending up in Drake Park where I shot just a few frames. The light and the reflections off the Mirror Pond, an impoundment of the Deschutes River, could not have been better.

 

Pilot Butte, Bend, OR

We recently made our first visit to Bend, Oregon, in the high desert just east of the Cascades. It was a quick overnight trip in which we visited a number of breweries the first afternoon and explored a little of Bend the following morning.

As we were driving through town visiting breweries, we kept seeing a big hill (a volcano, actually) just east of Highway 97, the road that separates east Bend from west Bend. At the hotel, I found that the volcano is called Pilot Butte and that there is a series of easy trails to the summit. The cinder cone of an extinct volcano rising 500 or so feet above the city, Pilot Butte is now a state park called the Pilot Butte State Scenic Viewpoint.

After our beer-a-thon the evening before, we really needed to get out and stretch our legs, so over breakfast, we decided to walk up to the top before heading out of town back to McMinnville.

Pilot Butte, a Volcanic Cinder Cone

One of the primary motivators for me in taking this walk was that this was my first stay in the high desert of Central Oregon and I really wanted to check out the somewhat alien landscape. I have spent time in west Texas, northern New Mexico, the Sonoran desert in southern Arizona, and the high plains of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Idaho. I was looking forward to seeing how things differ here in Oregon. Something about barren, austere, arid, and harsh open spaces is very attractive to me.

This part of Oregon is populated mainly by western junipers and steppe scrub, which most people refer to generically as sagebrush. In reality, three primary shrubs make up the scrub here: gray rabbitbrush, antelope bitterbrush, and big sagebrush. At this particular location, I saw very little true sagebrush.

Gray Rabbitbrush, Ericameria nauseosa, Blooming

Rabbitbrush Seed Heads

Antelope Bitterbrush, Purshia tridentata, Leaves 

Many people confuse bitterbrush and sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) because both have tri-lobate (tridentata) leaves as you can see in the photo above. But sagebrush, being an artemisia and like the artemisias that people cultivate in their gardens, has wooly, almost blue-green gray leaves. Sagebrush leaves are generally much more elongated than bitterbrush leaves in my experience. Sagebrush, from a distance, looks a lot like lavender.

Yarrow, Achillea millefolium, Grows Everywhere

The vast majority of the trees at Pilot Butte are western juniper, which is expanding in range thanks to our fire suppression efforts. These very thirsty trees, when left unchecked, will outcompete most other species in arid climates. Wildfires used to keep them under control while the more fire-resistant ponderosa pines would survive the flash fires and thrive. Even so, old junipers twist into some very interesting forms in the landscape and are pleasing to look at.

Western Juniper, Juniperus occidentalis, Scrub

Robins were Feeding on Juniper Berries

This particular species of juniper, while immediately recognizable, is not one that I have seen before because its range is limited primarily to central and eastern Oregon. Even more interesting is that I have never seen a mistletoe growing on a conifer before, yet the trees at Pilot Butter are full of hemiparasitic mistletoe.

Juniper Mistletoe, Phoradendron juniperinum

Juniper Mistletoe Close Up

Higher towards the summit of Pilot Butte, there are a few ponderosa pines scattered about randomly. When I first encountered ponderosa pines as a teenager in the southern Rockies, I was told that if you smell the bark, you can get hints of vanilla or butterscotch. I have never been able to get any scent like that, but still these trees are easy to recognize with their long leaves and bark that goes orangey (some people say cinnamon-colored) with enough age (like 90 years).

Distinctive Ponderosa Pine Needles in Bundles of Three

Ponderosa Pine Bark Starting to Go Orange

What soil there is out here in the high desert is really poor. And that, coupled with the natural aridity from being in the Cascade rain shadow, really limits vegetation. The soil changes as you go up the hill, with the bottom being gravelly, parts of the middle being sandy, and towards the top, mostly pyroclastic cinders, none of it really good soil.

Iron-Rich Volcanic Cinders

Visting Pilot Butte was a chance for us to give Grace a short walk. She can no longer handle the long walks, but short ones like this, about 1.8 miles all told, are just manageable. She curled up and passed out in the car when we were done.

The views from the top were pretty interesting, but also obscured by the low cloud cover to the point where we could see none of the big volcanoes of the Cascades. Even so, I was impressed with how many cinder cones and other volcanic structures that I could see in the distance.

Cinder Cone in the Distance

There was little in the way of wildlife on the butte, not surprising because there were a lot of people there walking in the late morning. Moreover, as a land-locked city park, it is cut off from other wildlife habitat. We saw a single chipmunk scurrying with raised tail and a few birds, mainly robins scavenging juniper berries. A Steller's Jay, on the eastern edge of its range in the Cascades, did entertain us with its shrieking and carrying on.

Steller's Jay

Looking Like Eyes, Evidence of a Fire

Quaking Aspen

Pilot Butte is very busy, the most visited state park in Oregon east of the Cascades. It's a really nice urban walk, being surrounded by the city, but it isn't a place for solitude. The trails are easy to find and walk but you won't get much exercise on the less than two mile loop.