We're still buying the Portland house, as far as we know. For the past few days, we've been working on gathering the financial documents required by our lender, and Patrick is going to fly back out to Portland for the home inspection, which is scheduled for next Wednesday. We have started a to-do list, and Robbie has been doing a great job of staying on top of everything--he even scheduled the inspections for us. Having a realtor is awesome!

We're still very excited to be buying a house, but now that the offer has been accepted, the pace of things has slowed down a little, and we've had a chance to relax somewhat. We should make sure not to get too complacent though, since we need to start thinking about packing soon! Anyway, here are some non-Portland-related things that I've been meaning to write about:

1. Back at the end of May, we spent an afternoon in Napa with Tree and Andrew. They are members at Merryvale, so they get free wine tastings whenever they want (with two guests allowed). I tried some sips of Patrick's wines, but I still haven't learned to enjoy wine, so mostly I ate the free crackers. At one point, we heard the strains of Bon Jovi's Dead or Alive coming from behind a closed door. I don't know what was going on back there (maybe a game of Rock Band?), but I bet it was fun!

We had a very good lunch on the patio at Go Fish--I had the wakame salad and sushi plate. Yum! Next, we drove over to COPIA and caught the tail end of the art show there. While there, we ran into Jordan, whose husband was participating in the art show. Tree went to school with Jordan, so they spent a little while catching up while Patrick, Andrew, and I admired Jordan's very cute baby, Moses.

We walked around COPIA for a little while, and it looked like it would be a nice place to spend a day. They offer some exciting classes, like cheese-making! Their grounds are really pretty. And they're right next to the Oxbow Public Market, which was just as awesomely delicious as I'd anticipated. First, we got ice cream from Three Twins. I had scoops of both the strawberry and the mint confetti ice creams. The latter was an excellent specimen of mint chocolate chip, and I was tempted to go back and get another scoop. But I restrained myself.

Tree and Andrew stopped by Tillerman Tea and got a cup of really good lemon jasmine iced tea--so good that Patrick and I went back and ordered the same thing for ourselves. The secret is lots of honey. Tree managed to perfect the recipe in her home kitchen, so now we can have her make it for us whenever we visit :)

And finally, we stopped in at the Fatted Calf's new storefront. Oh, I love the Fatted Calf. I wish we lived closer to the farmers' markets that they sell at, since we haven't been able to eat nearly enough of their delicious charcuterie, and now we're moving away. Sigh. Since we didn't have a cooler, we were pretty limited in what we could buy from them. Andrew bought some beef jerky and salami, and I bought some Rancho Gordo beans (I know, beans aren't even a Fatted Calf product, but normally I have to go to the Ferry Market or order online to get Rancho Gordo beans).

2. A couple of weeks ago, we got all dressed up and went to the SF Opera on a Friday night to see Wagner's Das Rheingold. We were going to go out to a fancy dinner beforehand, but in an attempt to save money, we got burritos in San Mateo instead. An excellent pre-opera meal! Apparently we could have also had dinner at the buffet in the basement of the opera house. There was some good people-watching to be done down there. We saw a guy hitting on two buxom young ladies. Who knew that the opera was such a good place to pick up women.

We were way up in the balcony, so it was kind of hard to see what was going on on stage. I really liked the idea of setting the story in early industrial America, and the performance was good, but despite all this, we both fell asleep toward the end. The music was just too slow and soothing. Maybe next time we should try an opera by somebody other than Wagner.

3. Later that same weekend, having obtained both strawberries and rhubarb from our farmers' market, I made a batch of strawberry-rhubarb creme fraiche ice cream. It was based on David Lebowitz's strawberry sour cream ice cream, but I used only 11oz of the strawberry-sugar-kirsch mixture, and then added roasted rhubarb with syrup (inspired by Nigella Lawson's rhubarb ice cream recipe--roast 10oz rhubarb with 1/2c vanilla sugar at 375F for 45 minutes). Right out of the ice cream maker, the texture was disconcertingly light and fluffy, but after an overnight freeze, the texture was normal. The flavor was good, though it's not the best ice cream I've made to date. Not bad though. Here it is garnished with a Miette graham cracker.

4. We continue to eat unremarkable (but pretty healthy) dinners, without much planning on my part. Last weekend, Patrick made some chicken patties (from Nigella's How to Eat) at my request, and we had them with mashed potatoes and frozen corn (time to start cleaning out the freezer). The patties were easy to make (especially if you're not the one making them!) and pretty tasty, if a little boring. They're intended for children, and I think they would be well received by that audience.

5. Presented with mixed summer squash in our box, I made some zucchini fusilli for dinner last week. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't worth the amount of butter involved. Not worth a remake, I'm afraid.

6. Today we decided to take advantage of our proximity to the ocean while we still can, and we spent the afternoon in Pescadero. It was a good day to go to the coast, since Menlo Park apparently broke 100 degrees today, while Pescadero was in the low 80s. Much better!

Pescadero is very small and has limited lunchtime choices, but what they have is good. The line at Duarte's was long, so we decided to enjoy some BBQ at the Pescadero Country Store instead. We grabbed a seat at one of the picnic tables in the store's backyard and ate ribs and a tri-tip sandwich while two amiable guys played guitar for the crowd. It was a good way to spend lunchtime.

After lunch, we checked out a few of the stores along the main street, and then we stopped in at Duarte's for a piece of olallieberry pie a la mode. Very good! We were also given a basket of hot-from-the-oven crusty sourdough bread and butter (I guess every table gets bread, even if they're just having pie), and it was excellent. If I hadn't just eaten ribs, I would've gotten some artichoke soup to go with the bread.

We made a quick stop at the beach (the water was pretty chilly, so we didn't stay long), and then we headed to Harley Farms, which we've been meaning to visit for years. It was a fun visit. We got to see all the goats being fed, and there were even some baby goats to see, because apparently the goats continued foaling (or whatever it's called when goats do it) later than usual this year. We stopped in at the store, sampled some cheese, and then bought a little round of tomato-basil goat cheese for dinner.

We had picked up some garlic-artichoke bread at Norm's Market earlier, and we bought a basket of cheap strawberries at a little farm on the way home. After getting home and napping for a while, we packed up our Pescadero haul and had a picnic in the park behind our apartment. The only thing that would've made it better is if we'd had some salami to go with it! We should really have more picnics. We used to have them so often when we were in grad school.

I think we may have bought a house today! We made an offer on it yesterday, and the seller accepted it this morning, so barring problems with inspections or financing, it'll be ours on July 18. I don't think it has totally sunk in yet :)

We ended up going with the house I mentioned as our top choice from this past weekend's Portland visit. I'm getting more excited about it now that it may actually be ours. There's some work to be done on it, but I enjoy that type of planning and decision-making (not sure if I'll enjoy actually getting the work done though). Here it is--our little yellow maybe-house (click for more pictures):

We were able to get them to knock $19,000 off the asking price, which is great! This is like a third or a fourth of the price of a decent house in the Bay Area, and its location is great (in Hosford-Abernethy, walkable to Clinton and Division Streets). I'm so excited to live in Portland!

Did you know that there is a tattoo parlor in a renovated house only four blocks from our maybe-house? I feel like I should get a celebratory welcome-to-Portland tattoo (Portland is full of people with awesome tattoos after all), but I don't think I actually will. I think buying a house is a big enough commitment for right now :)

I have majorly fallen off of the interesting cooking wagon since our trip to Portland and Bend. We've been eating a lot of salads (nothing wrong with that!). I think this is partially because it is summer, when it's nice to eat light, simple meals, but it's also because I've been distracted by our new summer project--moving to Portland! Yep, we've decided that this is the year that we'll be moving to Portland, no later than September 1 (that's when our apartment lease ends). We're very excited (and also a little bit nervous)! Read all about it below...

When we visited Bend and Portland over Memorial Day weekend, we hadn't yet decided to move to Portland, though we enjoyed our trip very much. Once we got home, we kept thinking about that awesome Craftsman house we'd passed in Hosford-Abernethy, so I looked it up online. It sounded great--it was in our favorite neighborhood, there were raspberries in the garden, and it had been remodeled with lots of green features. And hey, we could actually afford it (barely)! I especially loved the front door; so nice!

Based on a little google detective work, we found out that the house belonged to a prominent green building consultant, specializing in restoring old homes. It seemed pretty awesome to be able to buy a house that he'd restored, on top of everything else. And they just happened to be having an open house on the following Sunday (June 1). One thing led to another, and we ended up buying plane tickets to Portland for that Sunday, arriving that morning and leaving that evening (in retrospect, probably not the most sensible way to begin our homebuying efforts, but at least it got things started).

We flew out as planned on Sunday morning. It was a little surreal to just be going to Portland for the day. Who does that?! We took the bus down to SE Clinton St (a few blocks from the house in question) for lunch at The Press Club. This was about a block away from Broder, where we went for breakfast the previous weekend. We sat down and had some yummy crepes. Mine was filled with egg, prosciutto, spinach, and brie. The crepe itself was pretty thick--more like a pancake--but still very good. It seemed like a nice relaxed place to hang out. We waited around there until 1pm, when the open house started.

We walked over to the house and circled the block a couple times, hesitant to be the only people at the open house. But then we just sucked it up and went in. A nice lady (the realtor, perhaps?) welcomed us and then left us alone to look around. There were some really nice parts, and some parts that were disappointing (a good lesson in not trusting online real estate ads). The main floor had been redone nicely, but there wasn't really an obvious master bedroom--the two rooms on the main floor were really small, and the attic room was too short for a tall guy like Patrick to walk around in. Plus the "granny flat" in the basement wasn't very exciting. We did like the yard and garage/workshop a lot, but we definitely weren't as eager to buy the house after walking through it. Plus the price was at the very top of our range, and it would be hard to afford the mortgage if I ever stopped working (which may very well happen when we have kids).

Spirits dashed just a little, we walked down to the Clinton Corner Cafe, ordered drinks, and sat down to discuss our options. We agreed that we weren't totally sold on the house, and we decided to take a look at other open houses in the neighborhood while we were there (good thing Patrick brought his laptop and the cafe had free wireless!). We walked around and looked at a couple more houses. Only one house (on SE 26th Ave) was actually open, and we were the only couple there at the time, so the realtor was able to walk us through and tell us all about it. It turned out to be a really wonderful house.

It was a 1909 farmhouse-style home, which the owner had just finished renovating using eco-friendly methods (oil-coated hardwood floors, VOC-free paint, marmoleum in the bathroom, dual-flush toilets, etc.). The owner had clearly put a lot of work into making this house nice and preserving its historical character. It had all sorts of exciting features, including a bunch of previously walled-over nooks upstairs, a pretty rose stained glass window in the dining room (as well as an awesome heavy-duty wood and cement table, which was unfortunately not included with the house), bathroom fixtures salvaged from the Governor hotel, and pretty leaded glass in the windows. I was smitten, which (as the Internet tells me) is a bad thing to be when you're looking to buy a house.

Here's some cool wood and glass art in the downstairs bathroom (I need to find out who the owner is so he can tell me where he got all this cool stuff--maybe at the Rebuilding Center?).

The yard, though small, was very nicely arranged, with a new wire and wood fence. It had (among other things) a Japanese maple, blueberry bush, mature rhubarb plant, and a whole bunch of roses, some of which were secreted out of the International Rose Test Garden by a previous owner. And there were two cats living in the basement, who were very sweet (the owner was also living in the basement, so I'm guessing the cats will go away when the house is sold). The owner had built some cool planters faced with corrugated metal, to give a little more garden space. There was also a rain collection barrel, which apparently gets you a discount on your water bill from the city (the metal plate below it is purely decorative--I like it!).

On top of all that, it was $70,000 cheaper than the other house! However, it wasn't totally perfect. The ceiling above the stairs on the second floor was low enough that Patrick had to duck to go down them, so it was inevitable that he would bump his head on it at some point. Also, Patrick is ideally looking for a garage in which to build stuff and work on bikes, and the only space for that in this house was in the basement, so he would have to carry his bike up and down the basement stairs every day if he wanted to store it there. Also, the street it was on was relatively busy for the neighborhood. A bus runs up and down it, and we later found out that it's commonly used as a shortcut between two major streets in the area. So, not perfect.

We headed back to California that evening with a lot to think about. We realized that we hadn't even for-sure decided to move to Portland, yet we were all of a sudden thinking about buying a house there, which seemed pretty backwards. So a few days later, we went out to eat at Cafe Borrone, sat at a table outside, and discussed what we wanted to do. We agreed that we both wanted to try something new and different, and three possible big life changes appealed to us: moving to Portland, having a baby, and/or changing jobs. After much discussion, we decided that we most wanted to move to Portland this year, putting off the baby for a year or two. California is pretty near perfect, but we want to try living someplace else, and this seems like a good time for it.

It was satisfying to have the decision finally made, but also a little scary. I figured that I would have to start looking for a new job in Portland, but just in case, I asked my boss if I could continue working at my current job. I proposed spending three weeks a month working from home in Portland and one week a month back in California, doing the things that I can't do remotely. She talked to the head of our department, and it turned out that they are willing to let me work from Portland, which is great news! I can't believe I get to live in Portland and keep my job. So cool! And Patrick can work remotely for his job as well, which takes a good amount of stress out of this move. I'm sure there will be some hard parts about working remotely, but I'm really glad everything worked out. Plus if it turns out Portland isn't for us, it'll be easier to move back to California (but I think we'll like Portland).

So, it has been an exciting couple of weeks! After deciding that we would be moving this year, we decided to educate ourselves a little more about home-buying, and we found ourselves an awesome realtor (Robbie Ratkai) with Portland's Alternative Realtors. He sent us a bunch of listings in neighborhoods of interest (we're primarily interested in the SE part of Portland, but the NE is appealing too), and we made plans to fly out again this past Saturday (this is getting to be an expensive habit, but we don't expect to fly out again for a while). While we were waiting for Saturday to come, I put together a spreadsheet of homes we were interested in, with points assigned based on proximity to good grocery stores and farmers' markets, good schools, walk score, home features, and price. Fun!

This time, we were a little more relaxed and even-keeled about the whole endeavor. We flew in this past Friday and spent the night at Motel 6 on Powell Blvd. After our excellent stays at Bluebird Guesthouse and Ace Hotel, the Motel 6 was especially underwhelming. The crazy thing is that Bluebird costs less than Motel 6! But Bluebird was booked for the weekend, so we did the best we could.

Powell Blvd., much like Sandy Blvd., is not my favorite part of Portland, but I suppose it's pretty standard for a big city. It's lined with fast food joints, bail bonds offices, and strip clubs. But if you need a cheap place to sleep, it's the place to go. We got to the motel around 12:30am and went to bed, and then around 1:00am, we heard the revving of motorcycle engines getting successively louder. There was a strip club (apparently with an indoor pool, though those reviews don't make it sound too great) next door to the motel, and from the sound of it, a bunch of bikers were meeting in the parking lot, getting ready to go off cruising Portland's streets, I suppose. Thankfully, after about 5 minutes of crazy loud engine revving, they all sped off, and it was blissfully quiet. Ah, sleep!

The next morning, we checked out of the motel and headed up Powell, destined for more pleasant parts of town. We had planned on getting breakfast at Broder again, but when we got there, we realized that we were too early, and the only place in the neighborhood that was open was a little corner coffee shop down the block from Broder (and across the street from The Press Club and two blocks away from the cute little renovated farmhouse we liked on our previous visit). When we went inside, we were greeted by a very nice barista. We got a vanilla steamer and sat by the window watching cyclists and people with dogs pass by on Clinton Street. It was nice, and I could totally picture us living nearby, walking our dogs and riding our bikes past the cafe. (This was all in Hosford-Abernethy, by the way, which, as I said above, is currently my favorite Portland neighborhood and has an excellent neighborhood development association, which I would love to participate in if we end up living there).

While watching people go by, we noticed that SubRosa (a cute little restaurant next door to the Press Club and across the street from the cafe) was open for breakfast already, so we headed over there for breakfast. I had a yummy breakfast burrito--good sustenance for all the house-hunting we had planned for the day. We had arranged for Robbie to pick us up at 10am, and we finished eating a little early, so we went back to the cafe, this time for a chai. The barista offered me a frequent drinker card, since we had already been in twice that day, but I told her we don't live in the area (yet!). A little bit later, Robbie pulled up in his Mazda Protege, and we hopped in to go look at some houses!

Since this was our first time house shopping, I don't have a good frame of reference, but I'm really happy that Robbie is our realtor. He was really knowledgeable and made us feel at ease and gave us lots of helpful advice. We had sent him the list of houses we were interested in, and he had gone through the list, weeded out the ones that had already sold or that he didn't think we'd like (e.g., located in sketchy neighborhoods), which left us with 11 houses to check out.

Our first stop was a house in Creston-Kenilworth, which was a little south of Powell Blvd. It was right next to a park, and the house itself had been redone nicely, but Robbie said it was priced pretty high for the neighborhood it was in. Plus its walk score wasn't that great. One thing that I liked was that the owners had left little notes all over the house advertising good features ("Check out the view from the upstairs windows," "Trader Joe's is just a few blocks away!"). I also really liked the dining room and kitchen--the owners had installed a cute little stove, and the room was nice and sunny.

Next, we visited a house in Hosford-Abernethy, a block away from the one we'd liked on our last visit. This one was on a quieter street, but it wasn't as pretty inside, especially the kitchen! There were four tenants living there, so it was hard to imagine the house without their possessions inside. But the bedrooms were a good size, which seems unusual for homes from the early 1900's, based on the houses we looked at. It had a nice front porch and a detached garage for Patrick's workshop. Our favorite part of the house was that the tenants took their breakfast out to a picnic table in the backyard and ate out there. It seemed like a nice thing to do (I suppose you could do that in most any house though).

Although I'm not smitten with this house, I like it well enough. It's currently our top choice, because it's in the neighborhood we want to live in (which, according to Robbie, doesn't always have homes for sale in our price range), and it has a good basic layout. It also has some nice features, like hardwood floors throughout and pretty leaded glass windows. But it'd need some more interior work before I'd be really excited to live there for 30 years. Part of me wants to hold out and wait until we find the absolute perfect house, but it's pretty likely that that won't happen, since a newly renovated house in this neighborhood would be out of our price range (unless it's a smaller house on a busy street, like the house we liked on our previous visit). Plus, if we buy a nice house and then do some work on it over time, we can ensure that it will be exactly what we want. There's just less instant gratification than with a house that has already been totally redone.

Next, we headed down to Sellwood to check out two houses there. The houses were nice--one had some excellent parquetry on the living room floor, and the other had a little fenced off garden that would be perfect for some chickens. Sellwood seemed like a really nice neighborhood, with a good number of shops and restaurants and quiet, tree-lined streets. Its main drawback is that it's pretty far south of all the places we'd want to go. We want a neighborhood where we can walk, bike, or take public transit pretty much everywhere, and I think if we lived in Sellwood, we might have to drive more frequently. Also, it felt a little too quiet for us. It seems like it might be a good place to move to 10 or so years down the road, but it's not right for us right now. So although the Sellwood houses were both nice, they didn't make the cut.

We headed up to Boise-Eliot next, home to one of my favorite streets in Portland--N. Mississippi. The area is still being gentrified (or "revitalized," if you'd prefer), so the housing situation there is hit or miss. We visited one house that had been recently redone and looked great both inside and out, but there were indications that it might not be so good underneath the new coat of paint. The basement wall was damp in one corner (even though the house had only been on the market for a week), and there were cracks appearing in the brand new living room paint. It's sad, because it really looked nice, but I agree with Patrick that it seemed to be of questionable quality. Also, I don't know if we'd want to live in Boise-Eliot just yet, since there aren't a lot of grocery stores and other basic amenities nearby (but I'm sure more will pop up over time as they develop the area).

Next, we stopped at a couple homes in Alberta, which is in NE Portland and was revitalized starting about 7 years ago. Apparently homes there have been pretty pricey in recent years, but the housing slump has helped bring the prices down to more reasonable levels. The houses we visited there were nice, but they all needed some work, and I'm not as excited about living in Alberta as I am about Hosford-Abernethy. We visited one house whose owner was clearly very creative and had put a lot of work into personalizing his home. There was an art railing that had been featured in a magazine, a built-in bookshelf with card catalog drawers that could be opened from either side of the wall, and a side table made out of a hand from what must have been a gigantic clock. Super cool, but not really our style, and it wouldn't have been easy to undo the work he'd done (plus we wouldn't want to destroy his art). The backyard was totally overgrown (generously described as a meadow in the MLS listing), which actually would have been kind of exciting to tackle, like my own secret garden.

We visited one house in Irvington, a neighborhood that would normally be out of our price range. The front of the house was beautifully redone, with big tall doors opening from the dining room onto the front porch. Totally awesome. Unfortunately, the house was only half redone, and, as the owner pointed out very matter-of-factly, the kitchen was a "total shithole, as even a man with one eye could see." We liked that guy. He was sad, because his project at work had been moved, so he had to sell the house before he had a chance to finish it. It was too bad, because he was doing a great job remodeling it. But the house was already at the top of our price range, so wouldn't be able to afford to do anything else to it, and the kitchen was in really bad shape (not only run down, but also half torn up). Too bad.

We headed back to SE to show Robbie the house on 26th Ave that we had liked on our last visit. He agreed that the interior was really nice, but he emphasized that it was a busy street. The noise levels from traffic on our second visit were definitely higher than on our first (possibly because the bus that runs down the street doesn't run on Sundays, but it does on Saturdays), and he said it was even worse during rush hour. It also didn't seem to have as much bedroom space as some of the other houses we saw. I don't think we'll buy it, which is too bad. Maybe we can find out who the owner is and get him to help us improve whatever house we do buy!

At the last minute, we decided to visit a house in Overlook, which Robbie had originally ruled out because the neighborhood wasn't that great. We decided to go take a look anyway, since it sounded nice, and its proximity to the MAX yellow line seemed like a good deal. As it turned out, Robbie was right--the neighborhood wasn't great. The house was just off a very busy street, only a few steps from a 24-hour adult video store called Fat Cobra (classy), which was across the street from a middle school (double classy). Meh, not great. The house itself was pretty nice, especially the backyard, which had a nice big pine tree and a trellis and a beautiful detached workshop/garden shed in back. The only weird thing about the house was an upstairs room that had some sort of a wet bar attached to the room (like a bathroom with only a sink in it) and a very detailed fairy mural painted on one wall. Huh. I don't know if I'd be able to bring myself to paint over a mural that clearly took so much effort to create!

And so ended our day of house-hunting. It was pretty tiring! Robbie was kind enough to drop us off in the Pearl District so we could grab some lunch and be close to the MAX when it was time to go back to the airport. We agreed that he would keep sending us listings, and we'd think about the houses we'd visited. It was a productive visit.

We had some tasty lunch at Silk (formerly Pho Van, which I went to on our first visit to Portland), and then we split a chocolate-mint cupcake from Cupcake Jones (not as good as Seattle's Cupcake Royale, but I think it was better than the other Portland cupcakery, St. Cupcake. I'd have to eat more cupcakes to be sure though).

We killed some time shopping and sitting around Pearl Bakery, and then we headed toward the MAX stop. Along the way, we encountered an awesome temporary urban meadow in Pioneer Courthouse Square. The square was filled with pots of wildflowers and other plants, destined to be sold off later this month. The effect was striking, and we sat down on the steps and admired the meadow for a while. We saw a foursome of teenage girls steal a bunch of the plants, which made me righteously indignant, but what can you do...

And then we hopped on the MAX and headed back to the airport.

I like Portland. I'm really excited that we'll be living there by the end of summer! Life's going to be pretty hectic for the next few months, but hopefully we'll find time to appreciate what could be our last California summer! (I bet it won't be our last though; we'll probably come back here sooner or later)

As I mentioned earlier, we visited Portland and Bend, Oregon, over Memorial Day weekend. The main impetus behind the trip was that the Decemberists were playing a concert in Bend. This was the only Decemberists show scheduled for the near future (though it turns out they performed at an Obama rally in Portland the previous weekend), so we figured we might as well visit a new place and see the Decemberists perform while we were at it! I had only ever heard favorable things about Bend (both from Sunset and from Oregonian coworkers), so I was excited to see it firsthand.

Thursday, May 22

We flew to Portland after work on Thursday, rented a car, and drove to our favorite affordable place to stay in Portland, Bluebird Guesthouse. Since we were going to go straight to bed that night and then leave first thing in the morning, we weren't too picky about which room we got, and we ended up in the Elliott Smith room in the basement. It had low ceilings and not a lot of light, but it did the job just fine. I liked the carpet! I'd definitely recommend Bluebird if you want to stay in SE Portland and don't mind sharing a bathroom with a few other people. (Sorry, these are all cell phone pictures; our camera wasn't cooperating on this trip)

Friday, May 23

We woke up the next morning and got all packed up. There was a nice but confused old woman staying at Bluebird. She seemed to think that we were backpackers, and she recommended that we hike the Appalachian Trail someday. We thanked her for the advice.

We headed up to Belmont for breakfast at Jace Gace, a waffle and art cafe. The weather was drizzly and gray (it was actually that way most of the time we were there), and the only other people around were construction workers. I liked the decor at Jace Gace--they had cool woodwork on the ceiling (planks ending in a grid of wood blocks of varying heights) and a Jace Gace crest, with a waffle and some leaping stags.

Patrick had an attractive cup of hot chocolate and a traditional Belgian waffle with yogurt and strawberries. I was more in the mood for a savory breakfast, so I had the huevos rancheros waffle, topped with poached eggs, black beans, and salsa. Good stuff.

After breakfast, we left Portland and drove down to Silverton. Along the way, we passed Angel's Table, a German restaurant in Mt. Angel that we'd considered visiting for lunch but that appeared to be closed for good. Mt. Angel was all quaint and looked like an old-timey German village. They had signs up for Oktoberfest. Fun :)

Although it was raining, we drove out to Havenhill Lavender Farm to take a look around. The drive out there was beautiful (green rolling hills and tree-lined gorges), but when we got there it turned out the lavender wasn't really growing yet (makes sense), and there didn't seem to be a store to visit, so we walked around the grounds a little bit in the drizzle and then headed back to Silverton. We'll have to visit again when it's a little later in the year.

Once back in Silverton, we stopped at Rolling Hills Bakery for a quick lunch. I had a cup of silver chili and half a roasted veggie sandwich. I liked the mug that the chili was served in. They had some exciting-looking carrot cake rolls (like cinnamon rolls but with carrots in the dough and cream cheese icing, I think), but we were too full to try one. It was a nice little cafe, and a lot of locals came in for lunch while we were there.

On the way back to our car (which, incidentally, was parked for a very low price--10 cents an hour. The meter wouldn't even take quarters!), I was lured into Stomp by some very cute shoes. The salesgirl there was really nice and easygoing, and I ended up buying a pair of silver flats. They're handmade in Poland by a company called Oleksy, and apparently Stomp is one of two US retailers to carry them. I'm a sucker for hard-to-get items, and the shoes made me happy, so I bought them. Plus, no sales tax!

It was a long but scenic drive over the Cascades to Bend. I was very excited to see little tiny waterfalls right next to the highway as we drove along (I suppose those are the cascades the mountains were named for). Our rental car came with XM radio, and we found a '90s alternative station, which we listened to the rest of the way there, with a brief bluegrass interlude at Patrick's request.

We arrived in Bend a little too early to check into Lara House, so we walked a couple blocks to downtown Bend and got a lemon-marionberry scone at DiLusso Bakery. Bend's downtown is really nice--well-kept historical buildings and lots of good restaurants. It reminded me of Fort Collins.

When it was time, we checked in at the Lara House, which was beautiful and very well-located (near a big park, the river, and downtown). The innkeeper was friendly, and after settling in, we came downstairs for the wine and cheese hour. Unfortunately, I'm bad about introducing myself to people I don't know, so I just grabbed some cheese and crackers and retreated to our room, while Patrick braved the living room for a while longer.

From our room, we had a view of a very nice house across the alley, which had a fence made of skis and a two-story garage. I asked the innkeeper about the garage at breakfast the next day, and she said it was for the family's RV. She also said that the people who own that house owned the Lara House before it was a bed and breakfast.

We walked downtown for dinner at Blacksmith, which was housed in a restored blacksmith's shop. I liked the interior--they had kept the original banged-up and drilled-into beams and brick walls. Our waiters were a little too cheery and fawning, but the food was very good. The only low point in the meal was the Caesar salad, which wasn't very exciting (but I did like the toasted polenta croutons that came with it). Everything else was delicious, and I would love to go there again, because there were tons of things on the menu that sounded good. I had an excellent 24-hour-brined apple cider pork chop with perfect collard greens and smoked cheddar mac and cheese. Patrick had the campfire trout with cowboy caponata ("cowboy" because all of the vegetables were grilled beforehand), beer barley risotto, and a honey nut beurre blanc. He also had the Unami cocktail, which was a savory cocktail with avocado and cucumber (no, that's not a typo--they spell it with an "n" for some reason). Patrick had two, so it must have been good.

Saturday, May 24

Although there were a bunch of good-looking breakfast places in Bend that we wanted to visit, we stayed at Lara House for breakfast on Saturday morning because the innkeeper prepared the whole meal herself, and it was reputed to be delicious. It was delicious indeed, and quite an elaborate spread! We had asparagus-mushroom crepes, roasted potatoes, chicken-apple sausages, fruit, and blueberry-lemon crisp with fresh whipped cream. Wow! The innkeeper makes breakfast every day, keeps the rooms clean (with a little help), buys and arranges flowers, welcomes guests, updates the website, advertises, and plans future breakfasts. I'm impressed! Apparently she was a personal trainer in San Diego, and then she met the owner of the Lara House at a coffee shop, gave him her last business card, and then he called her up a few days later to offer her the job. Life is so unpredictable!

At breakfast, all of the guests sat together, so I had to socialize, and it turned out that we had something in common with everybody there (of course). There was a couple from Portland, two guys from Boise who were there to see the Decemberists, and two cyclists, among others. We spent a long time talking with the couple from Portland about things they like about Portland and whether we should move there.

After gorging ourselves at breakfast (who can resist blueberry crisp with fresh whipped cream for breakfast?), we walked through Drake Park (very expansive and green), over a sweet little footbridge, across the river, past an all-American Little League game, to Hutch's Bikes. I must admit, Bend looks like it would be a great place to raise a family, if only it weren't so isolated and had so few tech employers. It's so tidy and wholesome and outdoorsy!

We both had a little trouble getting used to our rented mountain bikes, as I was used to riding much more upright on my Townie, and Patrick was used to riding more bent over on his road bike. We biked a couple miles on the Deschutes River Trail to see how to get to the Les Schwab Amphitheater for the concert that evening. Next, we biked down to Farewell Bend Park, which was full of informational placards! The trail was a little hard to find in places, but it was a pleasant ride along the river.

Next, we biked to the Victorian Cafe for lunch. They're one of Bend's top restaurants, known for their breakfasts. There was a bit of a wait, so we grabbed a spot on a bench out front, with a good view of a bunch of hipsters (with dogs!). We both ended up having breakfast for lunch, since that's their specialty. Patrick had their almond-biscotti-encrusted French toast, and I had the smoked salmon scramble on asiago-potato pancakes with housemade applesauce and an apple-cinnamon scone. Everything was really good. No wonder all the hipsters go there! I'd definitely want to go there for breakfast a lot if we lived in Bend.

We had spotted a cake shop with a "Grand Opening" sign out front on our ride up to the cafe, so on our way back we stopped in for some cupcakes. It wasn't exactly clear how to get cupcakes (they seemed more like a catering company than a bakery), but we managed to obtain a lemon cupcake with cream cheese frosting, which we took back to the Lara House for our afternoon snack. We took an impromptu nap and then ate our cupcake. What a good way to spend the afternoon.

Our pre-concert dinner was a little stressful, because I realized that the concert started earlier than I'd thought, and our original destination (Deschutes Brewery) had a long wait. So instead we had a quick and unremarkable dinner at Soba Noodle and Rice (I'd actually like a place like that around here, since the food is pretty healthy and affordable, but it didn't make for a very exciting dinner, especially since we were in a rush). After wolfing down our stir-fry, we quickly biked to the amphitheatre. We were able to park our bikes right by the entrance and get right in line. We felt very proud of ourselves when we biked past all the people who had to park their cars far away and walk.

All our rushing was for naught, as the gates weren't even open when we arrived. It was rainy and cold, but we were willing to brave the weather to see the Decemberists. There was an authentic emo kid from Vancouver in line in front of us. He commented that Bend was a little too perfect, like Pleasantville. I can see where he was coming from--it's unusual to have almost everything in town look so nice and well-kept (but there were some areas on the outskirts that were more run-down, so I don't think they built the whole town 5 years ago and fabricated its history).

We hadn't brought an umbrella because we figured they wouldn't be allowed inside, but a bunch of other people had them. People came prepared with tarps, garbage bags, and even a tent! We set down Patrick's waterproof bike jacket, set our picnic blanket on top of that, and then huddled together for warmth. It was pretty miserable for a while. Our pants and socks had gotten wet while we waited in line, so it was hard to warm up. But we were still excited to be there.

The show got started a little late, and Mates of State went on first. We knew a few of their songs, most notably Like U Crazy, because our college friend Drew appears in the music video. It's like he's famous!

And then it was time for the Decemberists! They weren't the main band, so they didn't play for hours, but it was a pretty long set. They played a good mix of songs, including some new stuff from their upcoming album (Valerie Plame is very catchy). It's fun seeing them perform live. At one point, Colin stopped the song and had the crowd do calisthenics to help us warm up, and then later on the Decemberists Family Players re-enacted the founding of Bend (in which Lewis and Clark discovered Bend and gave the Native Americans some blankets, which gave them the chicken pox, and then they died).

The crowd seemed pretty into it, which was good. I had been worried that the majority of people were there for Death Cab for Cutie (the headliner) and wouldn't be very excited about the Decemberists. But it actually seemed like a lot of the people had come specifically for the Decemberists (probably since they haven't been touring, so this was the only chance to see them perform).

I had hoped that they would perform Chimbley Sweep, but we were nearing the end, and no luck. When we got to the last song, Colin told a story about meeting John McCain backstage at the Obama rally the previous weekend, and he said McCain had told him of his hardscrabble childhood. And then he launched into the little prelude that you hear in the video linked above (saying that this was the story John McCain told him about his childhood). And then he started playing Chimbley Sweep, and the crowd went wild. I was happy :)

We stuck around for a few Death Cab songs, but neither of us really knows their music that well, and it continued to be cold and wet, and the sun was setting, so we left. Outside the amphitheatre, we ran into two girls who asked if they could have our tickets. We told them the tickets wouldn't do them any good (no re-entry allowed), but they were going to try to get back in anyway. When we handed over the tickets, Patrick's was soggy and torn in half from all the rain, and the girl who got stuck with that ticket decided she'd say it fell in the toilet. Good plan! I admired their tenacity.

Back at the Lara House, we put on as many warm clothes as possible, and then we walked to the Deschutes Brewery for a second dinner (I was ravenous from all that shivering!). This dinner was much more satisfying. We both had the hamburgers, which are notable because the brewery has a deal with a nearby farmer, in which they feed the cows their spent grain from beermaking, and then they use the cows to make their hamburgers (see this video at 2:20). It's a beautiful circle of life! They were tasty burgers, and the fries were really good. I also had some of their housemade root beer. A very good meal.

Sunday, May 25

Despite my interest in checking out Alpenglow for breakfast, we ended up having breakfast at Lara House again, since it was just too good to pass up. This time, we had a Spanish torta, hashbrowns, fruit, bacon, lemon-ginger scones with lemon curd, and strawberry-rhubarb pie with whipped cream. I had committed to eating less food this time, but I couldn't resist the pie, and I ended up pretty full.

After returning our bikes to Hutch's, it was time to leave Bend. I had wanted to go to Merenda for lunch, but we were too full (and it was only 10:30 in the morning). Next time!

We took a different route back to Portland, via Government Camp. At my request, we drove up to Timberline Lodge for lunch, which ended up being a pretty harrowing drive, as the fog descended and the road became steep and winding. However, we got to the lodge safely, and the views were pretty awesome. It was crazy--all of a sudden the sun came out and we were surrounded by snow and skiers, even though it was the end of May.

We hiked up the driveway to the quaint old lodge, which was apparently used for the exterior shots in The Shining. The interior was all log cabin-y and cozy. It seemed like a nice place to go for a ski weekend, if you're into that kind of thing. We headed over to the Cascade Dining Room and waited an inordinately long time to be seated (it wasn't that they were busy and there was a long wait; the hostess just kept doing other stuff and avoiding eye contact with us for over 5 minutes). If we hadn't just driven 6 miles up a mountain to get there, we probably would've turned around and gone somewhere else to eat.

Once we were seated, the experience got better. Our waitress was nice, and we got to sit next to a window with a good view of the snow and trees. I ordered the hot cocoa, which turned out to be the most over-the-top hot chocolate I've ever had. It was in a giant glass mug, topped with whipped cream and toffee bits and chocolate syrup, if I recall correctly. It was very good, and I would definitely drink hot cocoa by the fireplace every afternoon if I were on vacation at the Timberline Lodge. Our entrees were pretty good. I had a polenta pulled pork strata. I'd say the meal wasn't quite worth the stress of the drive up, but I'm glad we had the experience.

The sun was out for our drive back down, which was nice. We continued on into Portland. The iPhone took us on a rather circuitous route, through depressingly run-down parts of the suburbs skirting Portland. We got to the Ace Hotel a little early, but they let us check in. I was very excited to stay there, but I was a little worried that they would be mean to me because I'm not a hipster. But everybody was pleasant, and I very much enjoyed our stay.

The Ace Hotel isn't for everybody, as the TripAdvisor reviews suggest. I liked it though. The art is different in each room, and our room had a cute wall mural by Trish Grantham painted on top of wallpaper made from pages out of an old history book. There was a clawfoot tub with quality bath products and a very nice soap dish.

The bed had a custom Pendleton blanket with the Ace Hotel deer on it, and the laundry bag was an old mail bag. There was even a hipster mini bar with Dagoba chocolate, Lara bars, stroopwaffles, and Coke with real sugar. The guest book was an old library card catalog filled with notes on index cards. There was a photo booth in the lobby. The public bathroom was papered in player piano reels. So many great details! And I was really happy with the location near the Pearl District and Downtown. My only regret is that we didn't have time to rent the Jorg and Olif bikes (with generator headlights!) at the front desk and bike around the waterfront. If we were looking for a place to stay downtown, I'd happily stay at Ace again.

The parking situation at Ace wasn't ideal (street parking required moving the car every day, and the paid parking lot nearby was pretty pricy), so we decided to return our rental car to the airport and just take public transit around for the few days we would be in Portland. We dropped the car off at the airport and then took the MAX and a bus back into town. The bus we were on took us through some of the seedier parts of town, on Sandy Blvd. We passed a business named the Pirate's Cove, which is a pirate-themed strip club (but it does not have the best strippers in town, apparently). Cool!

We headed straight to Burnside, for dinner at Screen Door. I was so excited to be there, since our attempt to eat there on a previous visit had failed. I was not disappointed. This was one of my favorite Portland meals to date. Part of the charm was the laid-back waitresses (one of whom had a tattoo on her back of The Creation of Adam, but with a naked lady instead of Adam--Eve, I suppose) and the diverse clientele. It just felt like a nice neighborhood restaurant.

And the menu was so exciting! I had trouble deciding what to get, but I finally went with the Screen Door plate (a combo plate--my favorite!) with a yummy salad, kale with white beans, mac and cheese (all browned and delicious on top), and cornbread with honey. The salad and kale both came from their special local/organic menu. This place has all my favorite things! Oh, and I had sweet tea, which was awesome and came with free refills. We split a piece of pineapple-upside-down skillet cake for dessert. I love you, Screen Door!

After dinner, we decided to see a movie (Be Kind Rewind) at the Laurelhurst Theater (only $3/ticket, comfy seats, and beer and donuts for sale--if only every movie theater were like that!). The movie was fun, and the bus came right after we got out of the theater. Back downtown, we made a quick stop at Powells and then walked back to the hotel.

Monday, May 26

On Monday morning, we walked to Bijou Cafe for breakfast. We managed to beat the morning rush just barely (I guess that's the risk you take going to a popular brunch place on Memorial Day). Patrick had the French toast and a small pecan sticky bun (more sticky buns should be that size; if it had been Cinnabon-sized, we would've felt sick after breakfast). I had the most perfectly made omelet ever, with green onions, bacon, and goat cheddar (which was indeed goaty). I don't know how they did it, but the egg blanket was really tender and fluffy. Definitely get an omelet if you go there.

Next, we took the bus up to N. Mississippi, one of my favorite streets in Portland. The bus ride there wasn't that great. As we were pulling away from one of the stops, everybody on the right side of the bus gasped and yelled at the bus driver to stop. It turned out that there was a very drunk man hanging onto the side of the bus, and he almost got run over as it pulled away. But he apparently wasn't too hurt, as he boarded the bus after we stopped and shook off the people who tried to help him. And then he sat there and looked very close to puking (I guess I would be too, if I'd almost been run over by a bus). It was an uncomfortable situation, so Patrick and I got off a little early and walked the rest of the way.

Most of the stores on Mississippi were open despite the holiday, so I stopped at Flutter, Pistils (they had baby chicks!), and The Meadow. This was my first visit to The Meadow, which was a small store full of gourmet salt, chocolate, and flowers. An interesting combination. Patrick had no interest in gourmet salt, so he went to the comic book store instead. The people working there seemed really nice and knowledgeable. I bought some sort of corn nut chocolate bar made by Sahagun. It was pretty tasty, though it took us a while to figure out why the crunchy bits tasted so familiar.

Among the many exciting flowers for sale at The Meadow were gigantic poppies. We'd seen similarly huge poppies in yards around the city that weekend. I had never seen poppies that big! The lady I asked didn't know what kind of poppies they were; she said she bought them at the farmers' market.

Sadly, Gravy was just closing for the day when we got around to thinking about lunch (plus we were still pretty full from breakfast), so instead we grabbed some tasty little tacos and an horchata at Por Que No. I may have committed a breach of Portland etiquette by claiming a table before Patrick placed our order. This is common practice in California (especially at Cafe Borrone during the lunch rush!), but I heard two different women debating with their friends over whether it was morally acceptable to take a table before one's order was placed (I don't think these conversations were directed at me; I just happened to overhear them). Of course, a bunch of other people did the same thing I did, so I don't think my premature table-grabbing was too out of line.

The outside tables were full of hip, young Portland types, including a pale and overly-talkative girl with a large red balloon tied to her chair. Apparently she stole it from a sale display at Mattress World. It attracted a lot of attention from passers by.

After lunch, we decided to go spend some time in Washington Park (a forest right inside the city--I still can't get over how cool that is!). We took the MAX there and then spent a long time trying to find a bathroom at the Washington Park MAX station. The station maps said there was one, but we couldn't figure out how to interpret the maps or how to get into the doors that looked most like they could be bathroom doors. Eventually we gave up and paid $7 each for tickets to the World Forestry Center Discovery Museum, since their bathrooms were for paying customers only. We decided we might as well look around the museum for that much money. It was a pretty lame museum--all about logging. We were dissatisfied. I'd thought it might be worth the money, because the nice old lady at the front desk was telling some other customers (a group of four 30-something men, who probably also just needed to use the bathroom) how much they'd enjoy the museum. Bah! To defray the cost of our tickets, we each used the bathroom twice.

We spent a good amount of time walking around Washington Park, first through the Oregon Vietnam Veterans Memorial. There were quite a few people there, since it was Memorial Day. It was a nice memorial, with the names of the men who died displayed alongside local news items from each year of the war. We walked about 3 miles on the Wildwood trail (not too crowded, but pretty muddy). When we were tired of the forest, we caught the bus downtown (there are a couple of bus stops along the trail). It was so weird--we were in the forest, and then a few minutes later, we were in downtown Portland!

It felt like a good time to go have pearl milk tea at Tea Chai Te on NW 23rd Ave, so we hopped on the streetcar to NW. I had pink grapefruit pearl milk tea, which was pretty good (and unusual!). Then it was back on the streetcar to the Pearl District, where we had dinner at Clyde Common (located on the ground floor of our hotel).

At Clyde Common, we were seated at a long table, facing the street, which made for good people-watching. I had a house-made rosemary-thyme soda, which tasted just like you might imagine. It was a little too herby for me. We started with some awesome focaccia with olive oil and pepper, and then split a salad involving smoked rock fish. We both had delicious pasta dishes for our entrees--mine was bucatini with butter, herbs, and a poached egg on top. I suppose it was just glorified buttered noodles, but it was awesome. We got some tasty spiced chickpeas on the side, and then we split the rhubarb sorbet with rosewater cream and shortbread for dessert. It was all very good, but the focaccia and pasta were outstanding. Best hotel restaurant ever! I'd definitely go there again.

Tuesday, May 27

On Tuesday morning, we took the bus (sitting behind a man who reeked heavily of cigarette smoke and was listening to music on his headphones way too loud; I guess the bus is never all that pleasant) to SE Portland for breakfast at Broder. As we approached, we realized that it was where Henry's used to be. It's sad that Henry's closed. But at least Broder serves breakfast too, and it's just as cute and inviting.

The breakfast menu had all sorts of exciting options. We ended up splitting a plate of abelskiver and a breakfast bord (salami, cheese, hearty bread, rye crisp, lingonberry jam, half a grapefruit, and yogurt with honey and strawberries). The concept of a breakfast bord is very appealing to me--you get a little bit of everything! The abelskiver were tasty, but I had been expecting some sort of delicious puffy cinnamon-sugar donut hole (like we had at Gravy!), and they weren't quite that awesome. Just a case of unreasonable expectations. The breakfast bord was enjoyable though. I'd happily go there again.

We walked around Hosford-Abernethy, idly looking for homes for sale. We stopped in at Seven Corners Cycles, and I was amused to realize that a bike frame (their logo) does indeed have seven corners (Seven Corners is also the name of that part of Hosford-Abernethy). Very clever.

On our walk, we passed a great-looking house for sale for under $500,000 (so cheap compared to the Bay Area!). We sighed because it looked so perfect--great neighborhood, nice Craftsman details, 4 bedrooms, and a big garage workshop! Ah, Portland.

After heading back downtown and checking out of our hotel, we had a little time to kill, so Patrick humored me, and we spent an hour or so looking at some stores I'd wanted to visit. Two of the stores were closed, even though they were supposed to be open (I'm looking at you, English Department and Hunt and Gather), and Cargo wasn't really my style, but I liked Flora. Patrick talked me out of buying a print of a little girl with some garden gnomes, but I did buy the Lotta Jansdotter tote bag I'd had my eye on for a while, on sale no less!

We stopped for lunch at Park Kitchen. I liked it there--the people were friendly, and the food was unique. I had a bottle of Dry rhubarb soda, a bowl of excellent nettle soup with saffron clams and pickled onions, and a so-so pistachio-raisin-pheasant terrine (the roast beef salad would've been better in retrospect, as I heard people at the neighboring table raving about it). Maybe I'm just not a terrine person. The desserts were the best part--I wanted to try every single thing on the dessert menu! Patrick had the violet meringue (more like a big fluffy marshmallow) with a secret truffle center and a side of chocolate mousse. I had the pistachio-black sesame turnover with rosewater ice cream and strawberries. Yum!

Once we were done with lunch, it was time to head for the airport. Sigh. It was a good Oregon visit.

So much to write about (we went to Oregon last weekend to see a concert!), but first a few tidbits from before our Oregon trip.

A couple weeks ago, we had a farmers' market dinner of grilled halibut topped with avocado, grilled asparagus, and jasmine rice. We had a bunch of ginger to use up, so I tried making ginger ale. It was easy to make, but it turned out too gingery for me (and I normally like ginger-flavored things).

For dessert, I used the fortuitously acquired rhubarb I told you about in my last entry to make the strawberry rhubarb crumble pie that Stef recommended. The crust was super easy to make, and it tasted very good (although the texture was not that of your typical pie crust; more like a crisp cookie). The filling turned out a little floury; I might try using arrowroot or tapioca instead of flour next time. I liked the addition of rosewater and spices, and it turned a pretty Barbie pink inside. Good pie!

And finally, totally unrelated to food--a couple weeks ago, Patrick and I were loading bags of Goodwill stuff into the trunk of my car. I heard a buzzing sound, looked up, and discovered that there were three paper wasp nests (still inhabited by wasps) on the underside of my trunk lid (they weren't able to get into the trunk itself, luckily, thanks to the rubber gasket used to seal the trunk). Further investigation revealed another nest in my side-view mirror, behind the mirror glass (Patrick found that one; he's a good detective).

I have been using my car very infrequently (train or bike to work every day), so I guess the wasps thought it would make a good place to live. Patrick and I were not happy with this turn of events. We contemplated a variety of solutions, some rather foolhardy, but we eventually agreed to just call an exterminator and let them deal with it.

Patrick was awesome--he found an exterminator (who had excellent business cards, by the way), scheduled an appointment, and stayed home from work in the morning to meet the guy. Apparently the exterminator just put on gloves, sprayed poison on the nests, and then knocked them off with a stick. Nothing too specialized, but I'm still glad somebody else took care of it for us.

Inspired by this unpleasantness, we're probably going to sell my car, since I hardly ever use it. We can definitely be a one-car household as long as we continue to live near a Caltrain station. I think we'll do just fine with only the Matrix. Exciting!

I like that artichokes can serve as food in one stage of development, and decoration later. I got this excellent specimen at our farmers' market this morning. I remember the first time I saw flowering artichokes--at the community garden behind the Palo Alto Main Library, right after I'd moved here from Boston, before we had jobs. I was so excited that the chokes turned bright purple when they flowered!

I got a good farmers' market haul today--so much so that my shoulders are sore from lugging everything back home (normally Patrick is there to help, but he went on an early-morning bike ride today to beat the heat). I got blueberries, cherries, strawberries, avocados, shelling peas, lettuce, fava greens, beets, asparagus, and rhubarb!

I was initially disappointed, because I didn't see anybody selling rhubarb today, but I noticed that one farmer had a rhubarb sign tucked between his other items, and I asked if he had any left. At first he said he was all out, but then he recanted and said that he actually had a small stash that he'd been saving for someone else, but the guy he was saving it for normally comes earlier, so he sold it to me instead! I hope the guy didn't come by later wanting rhubarb. I'm happy I was able to find some, because now I can make the strawberry-rhubarb pie that Stef recommended. Yay!

We had a fun day in the city today. Our main reason for going was to see the Annie Leibovitz exhibition at the Legion of Honor (running through next Sunday), but I threw in a few other activities while we were up there, since my to-visit list for SF is so long.

First, we stopped at Pizzetta 211 for lunch. Finding parking was frustrating, but once that was out of the way, things went well. It was a very small restaurant, but we got a seat at the counter, where we could watch the pizzas being assembled and baked. Everybody working there seemed real and friendly, and the pizzas were yummy! I had a pizza with sorrel pesto, pancetta, tomatoes, goat cheese, and two farm eggs on top. Good stuff. I kept eyeing the giant bowl of strawberries sitting across the counter from us, and I decided that we would get whatever dessert those strawberries were meant for. It turned out to be a strawberry shortcake, which was very nice, though the pizzas were better.

Next, we drove up the hill, into the fog, to the Legion of Honor, which was an impressive building with beautiful views (somewhat obscured by the fog). The Annie Leibovitz exhibition was full of interesting photographs, though it was kind of hard to see some of them, since there were so many people there. I especially liked her photographs of the White Stripes and Daniel Day Lewis, but all of her work was beautiful and moving. I don't know how she does it!

After the exhibition, we wandered around the rest of the museum, which included more typical museum fare, like oil paintings from a variety of time periods and a display of porcelain art. There were even a couple famous works that I hadn't known were there, like Monet's Water Lilies and one of the copies of Rodin's The Thinker.

The museum tired us both out, and we were tempted to take a nap in our car, but instead we headed down to Hayes Street. We found an awesome parking spot without too much trouble. Yes! Our first stop was at Rare Device, which, as expected, was full of pretty things that I would enjoy owning. I was most tempted by the little hobknobs from Perch, but I managed to leave without buying anything (having Patrick there helped).

Next, I was hoping to visit Bell'occhio, but the windows were papered over, and there was a sign on the door saying that deliveries should be made to a store around the corner, which was also not open. So they seem to be in transition. Maybe I'll be able to catch them next time we're in the area.

We walked back up to Hayes Street so we could make a stop at Miette Confiserie, which was adorable, of course. We managed to make it out with only a couple purchases--two of the most delicious and tender caramels ever, two macarons (one pistachio, one rose geranium), a stack of homemade graham crackers, and a chocolate cupcake with strawberry buttercream frosting. While we were checking out, the girl ringing us up turned to the other girl behind the counter and asked if she had chocolate on her face. That's my kind of store :)

We headed to the little park across the street to enjoy our cupcake. It was delicious, unsurprisingly. While Patrick was eating his half, three dogs on a walk came by and all stopped at his feet at the same time, staring longingly at the cupcake. It was cute.

After a quick stop at Lavish (where, amazingly, I left without buying anything), we headed to Bar Jules for dinner. The decor was nice and simple, all of the waitresses were super cute, and we got a cozy corner table, so we were able to sit next to each other instead of across from each other. It was nice.

We started by sharing the long-cooked fava beans with prosciutto and grilled bread. It was very good, if a little expensive (but I'll happily pay to have other people prepare my fava beans for me, now that I know how much work it takes!). For our entrees, Patrick had the Berkshire pork stew, and I had the yellowfin tuna with beets (excellent), asparagus, hardboiled eggs, and aioli. It was tasty, but I was a little overly full at the end of the meal (I guess a pre-dinner cupcake can do that to you).

We spent the whole meal trying to figure out what our waitress had tattooed on her upper arm (it was obscured by her shirt). It definitely had a forked tail, but it looked like it could be a snail, or a giraffe, or maybe Jabba the Hutt. Given her cute outfit and hair (short bangs and a polka-dotted half apron!), it probably wasn't Jabba. We may never know...I guess we'll just have to go back and ask her.

Man, it has been hot this week! That means the mornings are great for biking to work, but the afternoons aren't so pleasant. On Tuesday, I biked in, and then after work I biked down (streamers flying) to Rick's and met up with Patrick for some pre-softball ice cream. Their ice cream is so good! I had a waffle cone with strawberry ice cream and white chocolate ginger ice cream. Yum!

I also biked to and from work yesterday, since it was Bike to Work Day. This was my third year participating. I'm lucky to have such good coworkers--the same group organizes Bike to Work Day activities every year, which include breakfast with cheeseballs and waffles in the morning and a raffle in the afternoon. I won a bike headlight in this year's raffle (in past years, I scored my favorite bike streamers and some fancy red bike socks!). It looks better than Patrick's hand-me-down bike light, so I'm sure it'll get some use later this year.

Today I decided to take the day off of work and relax, even though work is air-conditioned (excessively so) and home is not. It turns out I made a good choice, since apparently the power was out at work all day, and people without laptops didn't have much to do. So I probably would've ended up turning around and heading home this morning if I'd tried to go to work.

In an attempt to cool down, I made a batch of strawberry sorbet (recipe from The Perfect Scoop). It is such a pretty shade of hot pink, and it tastes like a strawberry popsicle (the real, fruit-containing kind). I still much prefer ice cream (the one-note sweetness of sorbets doesn't really appeal to me; I like my sugar tempered with heavy cream and egg yolks!), but it's good for sorbet.

Appropriate to the recent hot weather, we had grilled hot dogs with sauerkraut last night, along with some grilled broccoli. We got everything delivered in our box--Marin Sun Farms hot dogs, Alvarado St. sprouted wheat buns, and Cultured sauerkraut. All local and healthy--how very Bay Area of us :) However, if we were really dedicated Bay Area hippies, we wouldn't have fired up our grill when it was 90F out. Sorry, Earth!

Prior to our hot dog dinner, we spent a few days eating corn muffins and a clean-out-the-cupboards ham and bean soup with shallots, carrots, lamb's quarters (a type of green), pasta stars, and some Parmesan rinds thrown in for flavor. Unfortunately, I think I added too many cheese rinds, as the Parmesan flavor was a little overpowering. Also, soup isn't very appealing when it's this hot out. I liked the beans that I used in it though--they were pretty to look at both before and after cooking, and they had great texture, like all of Rancho Gordo's beans.

And even earlier this week, we had sesame-orange chicken, roasted red potatoes with green garlic, steamed broccoli, and salad with strawberries and fromage blanc. The chicken was tasty and easy to make. Pretty healthy too. I'd definitely make it again.

Life is good. Yesterday, after spending a week eating pulled pork leftovers, we had a nice, healthy salad for lunch (romaine, balsamic vinaigrette, yummy roasted beets in three different colors, sprouts, sugar snap peas, avocado, and Cowgirl Creamery St. Pat cheese), along with Cowgirl Creamery fromage blanc spread on thin slices of very hearty German bread from Esther's German Bakery (I liked it better now than I did when I spent a month in Germany in high school, but it's still a little too hearty for me). Not pictured: sauteed baby artichokes with bacon and garlic (pretty good, but lots of prep work. I guess that's inevitable when you're dealing with lots of small artichokes). The ingredients came almost exclusively from our box. We're lucky to be able to get such a wonderful variety of local foods delivered right to our door.

We went to Greens for dinner, to celebrate Amanda's birthday. It was just as good as our first visit. We were seated in a cute little nook overlooking the marina. The food was all very good. I think my favorite part of the meal was my appetizer--the spring sampler--which included grilled fava beans (still in the pod) and big meaty Italian bush beans. Yum! After dinner, we went back to Tree and Andrew's place and played Rock Band.

This morning, we went to the farmers' market and bought our first cherries of the season, along with more ranunculas. We spent a good chunk of the day going through our closets and collecting stuff to donate/throw away (our apartment was definitely in need of some spring cleaning), and then we sat on our patio and ate cherries. What a nice way to spend the weekend :)

(Also, our camera magically started working again. Hot dog! Hopefully it will continue to function normally.)

We had a fun day out and about yesterday. After much urging from my boss (who likes to live vicariously through Patrick and me, since we don't have kids and she does), Patrick and I finally got around to riding our bikes across the Golden Gate Bridge (apparently a quintessential SF activity, based on the articles I read about it).

We drove up to Pier 41 with our bikes (though we could've also taken Caltrain to 4th and King and then ridden up the Embarcadero). It was cold and blustery, but we pressed on and rode along the Bay Trail to the bridge. I had printed directions from a few different websites, but they weren't really helpful, and we probably would've gotten lost if we'd been using them. Luckily, Patrick had copied directions from Road Biking in Northern California, which were very thorough, and we made it to the bridge. I had to get off my bike and push it uphill a couple of times. I had been envisioning an easy, carefree ride, but it was tiring and windy and the path was crowded. It got better from there though.

Since it was the weekend, all of the bikes were on the west side of the bridge, and all of the pedestrians were on the east, which was nice. I was still a little worried about riding so close to oncoming bike traffic, but there were no collisions, and we made it across just fine. I stopped to take some pictures on the bridge, but they didn't turn out. When we got to the Sausalito side, we asked a couple to take our picture, and it would've turned out really well if I hadn't closed my eyes! Jeez...

There was a little more uphill riding (or bike-pushing, in my case) on the Sausalito side, and then it was all downhill or flat. The ride into and through Sausalito was pretty, but I was nervous about the parts that didn't have bike lanes. I'm not a very brave bike rider. But I'm glad I did the ride, and I would be willing to do it again someday. It was sunnier and less windy in Sausalito, which was nice.

We biked up to Harbor Drive, to Fish, our lunchtime destination. It came recommended by both Sunset and my boss, so I knew it would be good, and it didn't disappoint. We locked up our bikes out front (yay, bike racks!), right next to a friendly black dog named Pepper. We went inside and perused the menu until they'd officially opened for the day. The building was nice and sunny, with tall ceilings and friendly people taking our orders. I wish we lived closer so we could go there more often!

Fish was cash only and pretty pricey (but worth it, in my mind, as they are all about sustainable, local food, and everything was very tasty), but luckily we had enough cash with us. We split the fish and chips and fish tacos, with grilled fava greens on the side. We also got a little pot of Mighty Leaf earl grey tea to warm us up (even though the sun had come out, it was still a little chilly out on the deck).

We both slightly preferred the fish and chips, but the fish tacos were also really good. It was a happy lunch, with a little girl in a sweet flowered dress running around the deck below us, blowing bubbles. We finished up by splitting a big parfait glass full of butterscotch pudding. Good stuff.

Next, we rode just a block away to Heath Ceramics for their open studio event (luckily, design*sponge had mentioned it a few days earlier). Patrick, not enticed by a factory tour and glaze-your-own tile activities, went off to bike to Stinson Beach and Mt. Tam while I spent a couple of hours at Heath.

I felt a little awkward walking around with my backpack on, especially around all the breakable merchandise, but I still very much enjoyed myself. The store is full of beautiful things--not only Heath items, but also products from other wonderful companies, like Miette, Deadly Squire, and June Taylor. Swoon! Click here for more pictures from Heath.

Good to know for later: Heath carries Weck jars, which are some of the prettiest canning jars around, so if I ever decide to do some canning, Heath is a good source for supplies (although there's probably someplace closer to home that carries Weck as well). Also, if we ever attempt a home tiling project, I totally want to use Heath tiles, though it would probably be expensive. I could at least get accent tiles there. They have such great colors and shapes!

After browsing the store for a while, I went on a guided tour, which was led by none other than one of the current owners of Heath, Robin Petravic (I love what they did with Heath tiles in their home makeover)! Although Heath gives tours every weekend, this tour was special because they had some employees present in the factory to give demos of the different steps. It was really fun seeing how everything works. It also made me want to buy tons of Heath Ceramics products to support such a nice little company, but I limited myself to what would fit in my backpack (at least everything was 15% off during the open studio, and some of the things I bought were seconds, so I didn't spend quite as much as I normally would have).

After the tour, I spent a long time deciding what to buy. I ended up purchasing a modest number of things: one bowl, two mugs, one cup, another bud vase, and six vintage clay buttons (imagining that I could someday use them on some very special knitting projects, but they'll probably just sit in my crafts box forever).

Patrick rolled back into the parking lot just as I was loading my purchases into my backpack. He downed a free turkey dog (Heath goes all out when they host events!), and we ate some Pepperidge Farms Sausalito cookies, which we'd brought with us (part of our vague life goal to eat foods in the places for which they were named--also on our list: Cowgirl Creamery Mt. Tam cheese on Mt. Tam), then we biked back to downtown Sausalito, to the ferry landing. We briefly passed through the Sausalito spring faire, but nothing enticed us to linger. We hung around the ferry stop until the Blue and Gold Fleet ferry arrived, then we wheeled our bikes on board. It was crazy how many people brought bikes on; the whole lower deck was full of bikes sardined head to tail. Most of the bikes were exactly the same, from Blazing Saddles. I'm not sure how the owners found their bikes when we disembarked.

We arrived back at Fisherman's Wharf, loaded up our bikes, and drove on home. It was a good day!

Unfortunately, while taking pictures of my purchases, our camera suddenly went on the fritz, and now it will only take pictures like this one. It's kind of pretty, but not very useful.

So, barring an unexpected recovery, it looks like we're in the market for a new digital camera. We can't decide whether we want to get a tiny, lightweight camera or a fancy digital SLR. I'd like to be able to take really pretty pictures, but I don't know if either of us would really know what to do with a digital SLR if we had one. Plus you can't really slip it into a pocket or purse. But they sure do take nice pictures. Any suggestions?

Our first foray into the world of pulled pork went pretty well. We invited Tree, Andrew, Jacob, and Amanda over for a dinner of pulled pork sandwiches (or Tofurky sausages, in Amanda's case). Here's what we had:

Drinks: Beer and iced tea (made with PG Tips). If I'd realized it was Kentucky Derby day, I would've tried making mint juleps! Also, I would have insisted that everybody wear big hats.

Snacks: Rold Gold honey wheat pretzels, Acme sweet baguette, Cowgirl Creamery Mt. Tam cheese, carrots, hummus.

Meal: Grilled baby artichokes, asparagus, and zucchini; little sandwiches of pulled pork (using two 4lb Boston butt roasts from Dittmers) and bread and butter pickles (yummy! I love sweet pickles) on homebaked rolls (recipe doubled and used to make 18 rolls instead of 2 loaves); creamy coleslaw (with red cabbage--festive!).

Although the grilled artichokes tasted good, they were hard to eat because they were so small. I would try this again with normal-sized artichokes though. The coleslaw turned out well, and I got to use our new food processor to shred the cabbage and carrot, which was thrilling! I took a risk by modifying a loaf bread recipe to make rolls. They turned out pretty well, but a little too dense. I would've liked my rolls a little softer. I'll have to try a different recipe next time. But I'd definitely use the recipe to make loaves instead; it had a nice sweet, rich flavor. I bet it'd be good with jam.

The pulled pork took about 7 hours to cook (plus an overnight spice rub), and it was definitely good, but not as good as my coworker's pulled pork (but he has a smoker and had to wake up earlier than we did to make his). Instead of making my own BBQ sauce, I used sauce from we love jam, which was tasty. However, the pork soaked up the entire jar of BBQ sauce, leaving no extra sauce for sandwiches. More sauce would've been nice.

Dessert: Rice pudding gelato (from The Perfect Scoop) with butterscotch sauce (I used a similar recipe from Shuna's ice cream class, with half Muscovado and half normal brown sugar). My original intent was to have the ice cream topped with Delfina's roasted strawberries, but I must have done something wrong, because even though I took my strawberries out of the oven half an hour early, they still turned out leathery and a little burnt tasting. I'm guessing the problem was that I used a half sheet pan and the syrup cooked down too quickly, but the recipe said a half sheet was okay, so who knows. They weren't fit to serve to guests, so since I had some heavy cream leftover from the ice cream, I decided to make up a batch of butterscotch sauce instead.

The ice cream base tasted awesome before freezing, but I didn't enjoy its texture that much after freezing. The day of the barbecue it was frozen too hard, so it wasn't that pleasant to eat (even though I let it soften for half an hour in the fridge and then 10 minutes at room temperature). Today, when we had leftovers, it softened better, but it was denser than I would've liked because of the rice. I don't think I would make this as ice cream again; however, I would definitely use this recipe to make rice pudding (just skip adding the heavy cream at the end). Yum! The butterscotch, although kind of a strange flavor combination with the rice pudding ice cream, turned out very well and was pretty easy to make. Thanks, Shuna!

I was thinking--it's a little odd that when I look back on this time, I'll just have a record of what we ate. But there's just not much else to tell right now--life is good. We have a routine for the week (softball on Tuesday, The Wire on Wednesday, farmers' market on Sunday), and the only thing that really changes from week to week is what we make in the kitchen. I might as well write about it now, because once we have kids, I'm guessing our meals will get more routine as well. And maybe someday I'll get around to finishing my recipe database, and then all of these entries will be much more useful, and I can actually make some of the good recipes again!

1. Cayenne-rubbed chicken breasts with avocado salsa with brown rice and a salad with kumquats, celery, avocado, and grapefruit. The chicken took much longer than 10 minutes to cook (it always takes longer than the recipe says; I guess they expect the meat to be at room temperature), but it turned out pretty tasty. I used boneless breasts with the skin still on, which probably helped with the flavor and moistness. The avocado salsa definitely made the dish, and it wasn't bad for an easy-to-make meal. The salad was pretty good, if a little on the bitter side because of the grapefruit.

2. Farro salad with prosciutto and asparagus (from Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way) with a little red onion thrown in for good measure; asparagus one day, snow peas with pine nuts and mint the next; pickled carrot sticks; and mint tea with honey (pour boiling water over a handful of mint leaves and let steep for 5 min).

The farro salad was tasty, but I got a little tired of it about halfway through. I think it would be nicer in smaller portions as a side. I liked the combination of snow peas and pine nuts, though it wasn't any better than plain snow peas, in my opinion. The pickled carrots were pretty good, but I probably wouldn't make them again, as I don't think I'm a big pickled-carrot enthusiast.

3. Two weekends ago, I felt ambitious enough to make a nice Saturday breakfast. I tried making knothole eggs (or perhaps I'd rather call them bird's nest eggs. They have so many names--I can't decide!) per the recipe in Marion Cunningham's Breakfast Book. I also fried up a slice of Wooly Pigs bacon so I could fry the toast and eggs in the beautiful bacon fat, and Patrick supremed a tangelo (a recently acquired skill) and drizzled it with honey. I should have known to leave the egg cookery to Patrick; I never get it right. This time I started the eggs too low, and by the time the tops were done, the eggs were overcooked and hardly runny at all. Sad! But I'd definitely like to try this recipe again until I master it. It's a fun way to eat eggs and toast.

The weather was beautiful that weekend, so we biked to Palo Alto for lunch and ate at Coupa Cafe. I had two arepas; my favorite was the special arepa, which had a really nice shredded beef filling with black beans and sour cream. Good stuff! I don't think we had tried their arepas before, which is funny, because the arepas are one of their specialties (Venezuelan coffee is their other specialty, but we aren't coffee-drinkers).

4. That Sunday, I went to our farmers' market, all psyched up to buy stinging nettles and make a white nettle pizza a la Piccino. Heirloom Organics had nettles for sale the prior weekend, but they didn't have them that day, so I bought arugula rabe from them instead (equally fancy and seasonally appropriate, and no danger of painful stinging!). I also bought some super cheap squash blossoms from the stand that always sells beautiful bok choy. I made cornmeal pizza dough, froze half of it after the first rise, and shaped the second half into a 12" pizza, topped with squash blossoms and arugula rabe sauteed with sliced garlic and red pepper flakes; roasted garlic; Bellwether Farms fromage blanc; and Belfiore fresh mozzarella (4oz of each type of cheese). We ate the pizza alongside steamed artichokes and shelling peas.

Although I squeezed the sauteed rabe to get rid of excess water, the pizza still turned out kind of soggy, which was too bad. Despite that, it was really tasty--a very nice combination of flavors. I wish eating that much cheese were healthy, because it sure is delicious!

5. A few days later, I thawed the frozen pizza dough and made a second pizza, this time topped with tomato sauce, sauteed Wooly Pigs bacon, Spring Hill garlic cheese curds, mozzarella, and pickled jalapenos (based closely on this recipe). This was a bacon-heavy meal; alongside the pizza, we ate the last brussels sprouts of the season sauteed with bacon (very tasty!).

After eating a pickled jalapeno straight from the jar, I was afraid this pizza would be too spicy for me, but the cheeses tamed the jalapenos, and it was actually really good! The garlic cheese curds melted very nicely. I was very happy with both pizzas, but I think I liked the white pizza a little bit better.

6. Having delicious leftover dairy products in the house led to yet another unhealthy but tasty meal (that seems to be happening a lot lately; I think it's time to go back to eating a little more healthily). We had asparagus soup (from the Jimtown Cookbook, made with green garlic instead of regular garlic), grilled cheese (made with more garlic cheese curds), and a salad with red butter lettuce, Tracy's balsamic vinaigrette (my go-to dressing), avocado, grapefruit, toasted pine nuts, and snow peas. Planet Organics makes it so easy to eat seasonally appropriate foods, as does our farmers' market. We're lucky!. For dessert, we had strawberries and fromage blanc sweetened with a little vanilla sugar. It was a very good meal. The soup tasted like springtime and was nice and creamy. I think it would be even nicer served in a little teacup!

7. We followed this up with a slightly healthier meal, though there was lots of sour cream involved. Patrick made barley and turkey chili with jalapeno sour cream and amaranth crunch, again from Whole Grains (I really like that book!), and we ate it with corn muffins (sugar halved) and a crazy springtime salad involving lettuce, balsamic vinaigrette, avocado, strawberries, and kiwis.

The chili was very nice, and the toppings made it even better. It did require a decent amount of work though. I think it's worth a remake. The corn muffins were good but not amazing. I like Dorie Greenspan's corniest corn muffins better. The salad, though unorthodox, was tasty.

8. Last weekend we drove over to Morgan Hill to celebrate my grandma's 85th birthday! My mom is living with her right now (long story; the eventual goal is that they will both be living in Atascadero along with my stepdad, but the house there isn't ready yet), and a bunch of my relatives came to visit, which is always fun. I volunteered to bring dessert, and I decided to go with a casual but classy chocolate amaretti torte (from Dorie Greenspan's Baking; similar to this one, but topped with ganache) with toasted almond and candied cherry ice cream (from The Perfect Scoop, of course) on the side.

The torte was really easy to make, and it gave me a good excuse to buy a big food processor (the small one my mom gave us a few years ago works great for most things, but sometimes you need a big one!). The food processor did its job without any problems, and the torte turned out well. The ice cream was a bit soft because I had transported the ice cream maker insert to my grandma's house, and it didn't have enough time to get super cold in her freezer, but it still tasted yummy and complimented the cake well. As my great uncle pointed out, the ice cream was a lot like spumoni, with the chunks of almonds and candied cherry bits. I'd definitely make it again, but that's true of almost every recipe I've tried from Perfect Scoop.

9. I made a highly modified version of Sunset's shrimp and chickpea pasta, using what we could find at the farmers' market. I used snapper instead of shrimp, left out the mushrooms, and added steamed artichoke hearts. On the side, we had steamed spring peas and carrots, and since I'd managed to get my hands (or tongs, I guess) on some nettles at Heirloom Organics that weekend, I made a nettle tisane with strawberries for dessert.

I'm pretty sure the original pasta recipe would have been better, as the snapper wasn't as sweet and flavorful as shrimp would have been. But I didn't like the texture of the chickpeas with pasta, so I probably won't try making it again with shrimp. The peas and carrots were really nice; I love buying a big paper bag of peas at the farmers' market!

The tisane tasted pretty good, but it wasn't worth all the trouble and trepidation. I didn't sting myself at all, which was good, but the first time I tried making it, I discovered a creepy (dead) millipede-looking bug floating in the bowl after I'd steeped the leaves. I was worried it might be poisonous, and we might get sick if we drank the tisane, so I dumped that batch. The second time I tried, I didn't find any bugs, which was good. It was just too stressful a procedure, worrying about getting stung and whether there were any bugs hiding among the greens. I think I'll stick to eating nettles at restaurants.

10. I had a little extra milk and cream to use up from the birthday baking, so I made a half batch of malted milk ice cream. I used my Horlick's malted milk powder, and after a blind taste test, I decided to use Maltesers instead of Whoppers in the ice cream. I couldn't decide which I like better, but Patrick liked the Maltesers better, so that was that. I also made a half batch of Nigella's rhubarb crumble, because I had finally found some rhubarb at the farmers' market after waiting impatiently for many weeks (Happy Quail Farms had a small pile; yay, East Palo Alto!). I took both desserts to Wire Wednesday at Tree and Andrew's place, to share our bounty.

I haven't eaten many rhubarb-centric desserts, so I'm not sure how the crumble compares to others. I thought it smelled a little funny while it was baking, and the finished product, although enjoyable to eat, wasn't better than, say, a blackberry crumble. My favorite dessert of the two was definitely the malted milk ice cream. So good! I love The Perfect Scoop; it is definitely my favorite source for ice cream recipes.

11. Planet Organics was offering sorrel, which I'd never had before, so I decided to make The Green Man's sorrel soup from Jimtown Cookbook. Sorrel definitely has an unusual flavor--like lemon juice. I can't decide if I like it. I enjoyed the soup, but I don't think I'd go out of my way to make it again. I don't think it's the recipe's fault; I think I'm just not a big fan of sorrel. I'm on the fence--I'll have to try it in a few more recipes.

We ate Tracy's favorite lentil salad alongside the soup, topped with Spring Hill feta (which wasn't very crumbly but tasted like feta). It was yummy and pretty easy to put together.

And that brings us up to today. We're making pulled pork for the first time--an all-day event! I'll let you know how it goes, of course...

I rode my bike to work in Mountain View for the first time today. It was a beautiful morning, and I enjoyed myself for the most part. I followed the same route that I used to get to my old building in Palo Alto (taking the Ellen Fletcher Bike Boulevard most of the way), and then I tacked on an additional mile at the end. Unfortunately, the last mile wasn't that great, as it was on busy streets without good bike lanes, but I found a better route on my way home. The good route goes through Shoreline Park, past lots of geese and wild fennel. I got a little lost on my way home, but I think I'll do better next time. The only drawback is that the area tends to smell pretty yucky because of its proximity to the Bay, but I'll take stinky swamplands over dangerous bike-unfriendly streets.

Yay, biking to work! I'm going to try to do it once a week at least. I'll only be able to use my current route through mid-October though; if I want to keep riding after that, I'll have to take the long way around, as the Benjamin Lefkowitz Underpass closes from mid-October through mid-April due to possible flooding of Adobe Creek.

We get free lunch at my work (a very nice perk), and a few weeks ago there were a lot of bruised, ugly bananas leftover from sandwich day, in danger of being thrown out because nobody wanted to eat them. Not wanting to see bananas go to waste, I took home as many as I could carry. I bet I was the only person on Caltrain that day with 16 bananas in their possession!

While discussing what we would do with so many bananas, one of my coworkers mentioned banana ice cream, so the first thing I did was make two batches of David Lebowitz's roasted banana ice cream. Patrick and I ate the first batch with some crumbled florentines on top.

We added some brownie bits to the second batch, and took it over to Tree and Andrew's place for our weekly TV get-together (right now we're watching the first season of The Wire). When I made brownies for my coworker's barbecue, I saved the edges and gooey middle parts that stuck to the knife, and then I added all of those to the churning ice cream when it had about five minutes left. The brownie pieces got pretty pulverized by the churning, but they still tasted good and complimented the banana flavor well.

Since I'm not a big fan of banana-flavored things, this wasn't my favorite ice cream ever, but I liked it well enough, and it was pretty healthy, since it didn't have any cream in it. The rest of the ugly bananas went into the freezer for later, so there will probably be some banana-based baked goods in my future (or a lot of banana smoothies).

Later that same week, I had to use up some whole milk, so I made another David Lebowitz recipe--his butterscotch pudding. I used dark muscovado sugar in the pudding, and although it tasted good, it wasn't as good as chocolate pudding. Maybe I'm just not a huge fan of butterscotch pudding, based on my reaction to this pudding and the Valentine's Day butterscotch pots de creme. Oh, but wait--apparently I had butterscotch pots de creme twice in 2006 (here and here) and enjoyed them very much. Hmm, I'll just have to keep trying.

And here are a couple of recent dinners:

1. Tilapia draped in ham on top of lentils (based on a recipe from How to Eat), broccoli rabe with Asian flavors (incidentally, did you know that "rabe" is just a descriptor meaning that the plant has been allowed to flower? Today we saw arugula rabe and tatsoi rabe at the Heirloom Organics stand at the Menlo Park farmers' market). I had been wanting fish and lentils for a while, and Nigella's description of this dish ("pebbly, oil-wet khaki blackness of the lentils like a cobbled street underneath the cat's-tongue-pink slabs of ham-wrapped fish") convinced me to try it. The prosciutto made the fish much more flavorful, and it went well with the lentils. I was happy with how it turned out. The broccoli rabe was very good as well--the perfect consistency, and just the right amount of bitterness.

2. Sausage with hominy and spinach, steamed artichokes, and strawberries for dessert. We used Four Seasons sausage from Sonoma Sausage (which has a very cute logo). It's an interesting sausage made with veal, pork, apples, raisins, and pistachios. Patrick wasn't a fan, but I liked it. However, I think this recipe would have benefitted from a more assertive sausage, like andouille. The overall meal was good and easy to prepare, though the leftovers weren't quite as good as the original (the hominy seemed to dry out a little on reheating).

3. While Patrick was in Tahoe last weekend, I made a big batch of black bean soup with chipotles (using Rancho Gordo black valentine beans and our leftover frozen ham bone instead of a ham steak). Since it was just me at home, I ate this soup for lunch and dinner both days, but I didn't mind much, because it was yummy. I think I went a little heavy on the chipotles, but other than that, it was really nice. Definitely worth making again. I had it with a salad and some nice, crusty Full Circle whole wheat rolls.

4. Midway through all the soup eating, we had an easy dinner of scrambled eggs with smoked sablefish (from the F/V Anne B at the farmers' market), roasted asparagus, toast, and fruit salad (mango, grapefruit, and kiwi). It wasn't a particularly good dinner, but I wanted to mention it here so I could note that the smoked sablefish was really tasty. I'll have to remember to buy it again sometime (but maybe not have it with eggs next time, as it was kind of a weird flavor combination).

5. We got some nice salmon in our box (apparently salmon is hard to come by these days), so we had a meal of sugar-spiced salmon with Chinese hot mustard (from How to Eat), barely steamed snow peas, brown rice, and clemenquat salad (from Super Natural Cooking).

This was our second time making the clemenquat salad, and we enjoyed it again. We got some excellent tangelos and kumquats in the box, which definitely made the salad. The mustard sauce on the salmon was a little strong for my taste, but other than that, I was really happy with how easy it was to prepare the salmon and how well it turned out. The salmon rub included an interesting combination of spices--ginger, cinnamon, cumin, cayenne, sugar, and mustard powder. I wouldn't want my salmon prepared this way every time, but it was a nice change of pace.

This has been an enjoyable weekend with awesome weather! On Friday, it was supposed to get up to 85F, so Patrick and I both took half days off of work and met up after lunch to enjoy the sun together. We got frozen yogurt at Fraiche, and then we decided that the day would be much better enjoyed by bike rather than in a car, so we drove home, got on our bikes, and rode to the Rodin sculpture garden at Stanford. We spread our picnic blanket out under a tree and lounged around for a few hours, enjoying a chocolate chip cookie and root beer from the Cantor Arts Center Cafe. What a nice way to spend an afternoon.

I made us both lunch and dinner on Saturday, which is unusual (normally I don't plan our meals through the weekend, so we end up going out for lunch or dinner). For lunch, I made pumpkin soup (very much out of season, but I had some cooked and drained pumpkin in the freezer from October, and it seemed like it was time to use it up) and warm Rancho Gordo Borlotti beans with garlic and sage (based on a recipe in How to Eat) with the last of our freezer ham thrown in for good measure. We ate it with some Full Circle cranberry-semolina bread spread with the last of our apricot jam.

The soup didn't look or taste very pumpkiny (probably because I used pumpkin that I'd processed myself, rather than pumpkin out of a can). It was nice enough. The beans were very fine specimens of beanhood, and the ham complimented them nicely, but I wasn't particularly excited to eat them, since they just tasted like beans. The bread and jam were the best parts of the meal. Yum!

After it had cooled down a little on Saturday afternoon, I put on a kerchief (one of the best parts of gardening!) and we spent some time harvesting things from our winter garden in preparation for planting our summer garden today. We pulled up our beets (dinky) and carrots (cute and round), cut the last of our spinach, and harvested a whole lot of fava beans.

We sat out on our front steps and shelled all of the beans. It took a long time, but we ended up with over a pound of shelled beans, and it was nice to just hang out and shell beans together. Plus we got to say hi to a few of our apartment neighbors. Normally nobody in our four-plex really talks to each other. It's too bad, since we'd probably get along with each other (there are two other couples who are about our age, don't have kids, and like gardening and barbecuing). At this point it would be kind of weird for us to suddenly try to get to know our neighbors, like bring over a cake and welcome them to the neighborhood or something. Still, we should really try to be more friendly and less insular.

(Yes, that is caution tape behind Patrick. It makes our driveway look like a crime scene, but it's just there because the driveway started cracking and caving in a little bit from all the heavy rains this spring and from the garbage truck driving over it every week. Our building manager filled it temporarily, but he has to get the owners of the three other four-plexes who share the driveway to agree to pay for fixing it permanently, and I guess it's taking a long time, since the caution tape has been up for months now.)

We ate the carrots straight from the garden (after a quick rinse, of course), and the fava beans, spinach, and beet greens went into our dinner--pasta salad with shrimp, lemon, and greens (modified from this recipe). I substituted fava beans for the chickpeas and added them to the pasta pot about two minutes before the pasta was done, to blanch them a little. I think they would have tasted even better if I'd removed their little white bean jackets (which tend to be somewhat bitter), but I was tired of dealing with fava beans at that point, so I left their jackets on. Most were young enough that it didn't matter.

The pasta salad was fine but not good enough to make again. It would probably have been better with chickpeas instead of favas, as all the fava beans, spinach, and beet greens made it taste a little too green and springlike.

Last night, I put together some boozy baked French toast (using more Full Circle cranberry bread, with Baileys and Triple Sec as our boozes of choice), stuck it in the fridge, and baked it this morning. We prefer French toast done on the griddle, but considering how easy this was, I was happy with it. I like my French toast pretty custardy, and this certainly fit the bill (when I first took it out of the oven, I was afraid it would be soggy, since I could still see some liquid around the bread, but it all soaked in when I let it cool for 5-10 minutes). Patrick likes his French toast a little drier, so this isn't the recipe for him. We had leftovers, so I served it for dessert tonight, calling it bread pudding instead of French toast. It's a very versatile dish :)

Today was another sunny and warm day. While at the farmers' market, we bought a few exciting seedlings from Baia Nicchia. We got three tomato seedlings (Maglia Rosa, Spain, and Austin's Yellow Pear), as well as one for a sweet frying pepper (Puglia, reputed to sell to restaurants for twice as much as any other peppers they grow). I'm excited to see how these turn out! We also stopped by Wegmans and picked up some seedlings (Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes, banana melons, and round French summer squash), as well as seeds for tricolor pole beans and Genovese basil. Once it had cooled down this afternoon, I again donned the kerchief, and we planted everything. We came across quite a few hungry caterpillars in our garden, so hopefully our baby plants won't all get eaten up!

Speaking of our life, we've once again started discussing whether to move to Portland when our apartment lease is up in September. We entertained the idea last year as well, but we decided to wait another year to decide. I've mentioned the possibility to my supervisors at work, because I like them and I don't want to keep things from them. I told them that I'll try to give them two months notice if we decide to move, so that means that we should decide by July 1. That gives us a few months to think about it, but we're having trouble deciding.

Maybe some lists will help. In case I hadn't mentioned it recently, we want to have a baby in one or two years, and ideally we'd like to own a house prior to that, so those are both factors in whether we move or not.

Portland pros: We could afford a nice house there (but then we'd be those asshole Californians who move to other states and drive up housing prices! People in Colorado didn't like Californians because of that, and I bet people in the Pacific NW feel the same way) Portland is a young, environmentally conscious, creative place with great food, public transit, and cute, walkable neighborhoods--pretty much everything we're looking for at this point in our lives Portland feels like it could be home Patrick's Aunt Lorraine lives in Portland for part of the year, and my aunt (Auntie Nance, of the Christmas cookies and secret brownies) will eventually move to Corvallis, so we'll have some family there

Portland cons: We've been spoiled by Bay Area weather--could we handle the gray, drizzly winters? Most of our family members are in CA, so we'd have to travel farther to see them, and when we have kids, it might make things harder We'd have to establish a new life (friends, doctors, jobs, everything!) One important exception--Patrick may be able to keep his current job, as his company has an office in Portland. Also, we may be able to convince Tree and Andrew to move there too, which would be awesome. But we're not banking on that There are not very many medical device/pharma companies in the Portland area, so I might have a hard time finding a job (I might finally get my grad school wish of working in a bakery!). Plus I have a great job right now; what are the chances I'd find an equally wonderful job in Portland? The Portland school system may not be that great (this was based on a conversation with a retired teacher; not sure if it's true) If we move to Portland and then decide we want to move back to California, we may have lost some of our advantage (both in terms of job experience, if I end up taking a non-science job, and in terms of how much money we have in savings)

Bay Area pros: We have comfortable and enjoyable lives here. Things are easy We like our jobs, and if we eventually need to find new ones, we have a better chance of that here than in Portland We have family and friends close by The weather is great, as is the location--we can visit the beach, mountains, or Napa, and enjoy the cultural offerings and restaurants of SF and San Jose (not that we do those things very often)

Bay Area cons: We can't afford a house in the kinds of neighborhoods that we'd enjoy living in (we want to be within walking or biking distance of a nice downtown area and a Caltrain/BART station and not spend hours driving to work each day. Our current apartment location is ideal, but we can't afford a house here--there's a cute little 2-bedroom house across the street from us going for $1.4 million, which is pretty standard for this area) It would be nice to live someplace other than California for part of our lives I don't want to turn into an obnoxious Menlo Park family where the kids drive fancy cars and wear designer clothes and play tennis on the weekends. I suppose we don't have to turn out like that just because we live here, but maybe it would be better for our kids to grow up in more normal surroundings

I don't know; we've got it really good here, but do we want to start a family while we're still renting? I know lots of families do it, but it sure would be nice to have a house and feel like we've put down some roots before we have a baby. It's too bad Portland has so few biotech/pharma jobs. That's the main sticking point--I might have to change my career path a little or a lot if we move there. I don't think I'd mind working at a bakery or bookstore if I can't find a science job, but I'm enjoying what I'm doing right now, and it would take some adjusting if our household income went down a lot. Plus my current employer is willing to be flexible when we're ready to have kids--letting me work part time after my maternity leave is up, if that's what I want to do. If we move to Portland and then decide to have kids soon after, I won't have established myself with an employer, so they may not be as accommodating. But will I even want to work after we have a baby? I don't know. It seems like some moms love staying home with their kids, and some need to go back to work in order to feel useful and fulfilled. I don't know how I'll feel.

Man, I keep going in circles about this decision. We should just decide already instead of being so wishy-washy. I'm glad that we have the luxury of time though. Barring the unexpected, we can take as much time as we want making this decision (though I'm sure our friends and family and employers will get tired of hearing about it). But really, we've got it good if this is the hardest decision we have to make this year. And I'm sure things will work out no matter what we choose to do. After all, my last big life decision requiring a list of pros and cons turned out fine (even though in retrospect, it was pretty stupid to decide to go to grad school across the country from each other).

A few weekends ago, we headed over the East Bay for our third and final performance of the season at Berkeley Rep. We stopped at Poulet for lunch. It reminded me of how JZ Cool used to be before it turned into a wine bar (sigh). I was thrilled to see that they had a three-salad plate (one meat and two veggie salads of your choice, plus a piece of bread). I love choosing from a variety of salads--it feels so virtuous! I went with the classic chicken salad, fruit salad, and the healthy grains salad (quinoa, barley, red and brown lentils, sunflower seeds, and yellow peppers tossed in a tasty vinaigrette). I love grain salads! We split a chocolate chip cookie for dessert.

We parked at the Berkeley Rep, but we were a little early, so we walked around the Saturday Berkeley Farmers' Market, which was great. I had never been to this particular farmers' market, so I was excited to see what it was like. They've got all sorts of good vendors there, including The Fatted Calf, people selling ice cream, and a dour German baker wearing lederhosen! We bought a small bottle of cold apple cider (the man pictured on the cider label was the man who sold us the cider--it's like we met somebody famous!), drank it while walking through the market, and then dropped off the empty bottle with the famous cider man so he could refill it and use it again next week. Pretty cool! We also bought a tiny rice pudding tartlet, which was flaky and delicious. It made me happy :)

Then it was time for the play--Will Eno's Tragedy: A Tragedy. It was a play about four reporters reporting on the fact that the sun failed to rise that morning. I appreciated its commentary on how the news can be so empty and reporters are able to say nothing for hours, but after the first 10 minutes, I was bored and ready for it to be over. I think it was just too artsy for me. It was billed as a biting comedy, but we didn't really find it all that funny. The audience did laugh at times, but I think it was out of discomfort rather than amusement. Maybe that was the point.

My favorite part was about halfway through, when nobody on stage was saying anything (they were all listening to an imaginary sound bite), and an old man in the audience very audibly asked his wife, "How much longer until it's over?" Ouch.

I guess it was inevitable that we didn't like Tragedy--my boss told me that whenever she and her husband go to Berkeley Rep shows, there's always one that's excellent, a couple that are pretty good, and one where you contemplate leaving at intermission. That pretty much sums up our experience this season. Argonautika was awesome, After the Quake was pretty good, and Tragedy left us cold. I'm still glad we got season tickets though. It's good to have a reason to visit Berkeley.

Next, we headed to San Francisco, where we met up with Nat at Toronado. He and Sara were visiting from Chicago for a week. Nat has grown an excellent beard while in Chicago. We sat around and talked for a while, and then Patrick and I headed across the street to Memphis Minnie's, which just happened to be on my long list of restaurants to visit in SF (I don't think we're ever going to get through that list. We don't go up to the city nearly enough).

I had a combo sandwich (I love combos!)--half beef brisket, half sweet pork. There wasn't any sauce on the meat, but there were three sauces to choose from at each table. However, none of the sauces was exactly what I was hoping for. The meat itself was really good--tender and smoky. If we go again, I'll have to bring my own barbecue sauce (I'm sure that's barbecue heresy). I got some unexciting sweet potatoes on the side, but Patrick's collard greens were good--sweet and vinegary. We shared a glass of sweet tea, which was nice. I don't feel the need to go there again, but if we were in the neighborhood, I'd be happy to return.

We headed over to Bi-Rite Creamery for dessert (trying to check as many items off my SF to-visit list as possible every time we're there). It was cold outside and packed inside, but we managed to find a little corner to stand in while eating our ice cream. I had a scoop of mint chip topped with hot fudge. So good! All of their flavors sounded exciting (most were more exotic than mint chip), and they use good, local ingredients, like Straus milk. Right up my alley. I'd definitely like to go there again.

We also walked around Bi-Rite Market, across the street, but it was too crowded, so we didn't spend much time there. I only like browsing at grocery stores when I don't feel like I'm in the way.

That same weekend, the filthiness of our apartment was really getting to me (I like to keep things tidy, but I'm less good about actually cleaning--mopping, vacuuming, etc.). We'd been meaning to clean it for a while, but there was always something more pressing to do. I was finally able to convince Patrick that we should get a cleaning service to come do a thorough spring cleaning. We had discussed it in the past, but we'd been hesitant, since it seems like an unnecessary expense. But things were getting bad, and neither of us was feeling motivated to get out the Barkeeper's Friend and start scrubbing some grout (Patrick offered to do it, because he's awesome, but he had also signed up to do our taxes, and those were more urgent than cleaning). So we called Herrera's (they got good reviews on Yelp), and they were able to come clean our apartment the next day. Wow!

We weren't really sure whether one of us needed to be there while they cleaned, so Patrick worked from home that day. It was so nice to come home from work that day to a clean apartment! I was so happy! I think it was totally worth it (they charged $100 for a deep clean; not sure how much it would be for regular cleanings). Patrick remains unconvinced and would still rather we clean the apartment ourselves. I agree with him in principle, but it sure is nice to have a clean apartment without spending the whole weekend cleaning it. We're lucky to at least have that option.

Last weekend was pretty relaxed. We went to the aforementioned barbecue at my coworker's house, and then we met up with Nat and Sara and some other Stanford friends (and a baby!) at the Dutch Goose. I had never been inside the Dutch Goose. It was loud and dark, but there was some entertaining wall graffiti, and they sold deviled egg platters (we didn't get one, but the table next to ours did), so I can see the appeal.

This weekend, Patrick is in Tahoe with his coworkers, sleeping in a room with weird bear decor, so I had to entertain myself. Yesterday, I had a productive day. I had a haircut scheduled at Juut, so I took advantage of being in downtown Palo Alto and got some frozen yogurt (chocolate-natural swirl with granola!) and walked to Anthropologie to return the Orla Kiely bag I bought last month (I loved it, but it was just too big for me to use every day. Instead I'm going to get a smaller bag in the same pattern). I was glad to be able to return it and stop feeling guilty for spending so much money on something I wasn't using. I really enjoyed spending a few hours walking around downtown Palo Alto, getting things done and enjoying frozen yogurt in the sun. The only thing that would've made it better was if I'd ridden my bike there instead of driving, but I didn't want to have to sling the Orla Kiely bag over my shoulder during the bike ride. Next time...

As I always do when Patrick is gone, I watched as much Law and Order as I could find on TV last night (he thinks it's depressing, so we rarely watch it together). Saturday nights are good for that, since there's a three-hour block of it on NBC. Apart from that, I've been doing my unexciting but comforting weekend activities--planning our meals for the next week and going to the Menlo Park farmers' market. I like our life.

Food post! Most of these dishes were made before our Mammoth and DC trips; I just never got around to posting about them.

1. In order to use up the last of the frozen cherry tomatoes from last summer, I made a batch of hearty Tuscan bean stew from a recent issue of Cook's Illustrated (the cherry tomatoes were very easy to peel after thawing, for future reference). Alongside, we had plates of pears and pecorino cheese, and for dessert we had gingerbread (also from the freezer) with lemon curd. The stew turned out well. The beans (Rancho Gordo runner cannellinis) were just the right texture, and the garlic-rubbed Acme baguette slices were the perfect accompaniment.

2. To use up some frozen bananas, I made a double recipe of Dorie Greenspan's black and white banana loaf (from Baking). When my bananas thawed, they released a lot of liquid, and I decided to add that to the batter along with the bananas, since it was in them to begin with. However, this was a bad choice, as the bread turned out too moist, with a strange dense texture. I'll try to remember to drain the liquid from thawed bananas next time. I pawned the first loaf off on my coworkers, and the second loaf is in our freezer, looking at me resentfully every time I open the freezer door.

3. Continuing the freezer cleanup, I finally made pork buns with some of our frozen char siu. We ate them with broccoli rabe braised with garlic and a simple salad of sliced blood oranges drizzled with honey. A few of the buns turned out underfilled, and the bites that didn't have filling were pretty bland, but the well-filled buns were very nice. This was my first time making pork buns, and I enjoyed the experience, though it was pretty time-consuming.

4. To use up the anchovies leftover from Valentine's Day dinner, I made beef fillet with red wine, anchovies, garlic, and thyme (from Nigella's How to Eat) atop Massa brown rice (from our box!). On the side was fennel braised with thyme and black olives (and more anchovies), from Molly Stevens' All About Braising.

The beef was pretty good, but it tasted a little fishy (maybe I used too many anchovies), and it was a little bit overdone. I may have used the wrong cut of meat; I wasn't really sure what Nigella meant when she called for beef fillet, so I used a top sirloin steak from Marin Sun Farms (also delivered in our box--I love how many local items we can get delivered to our door!). I liked the fennel, but Patrick didn't (not a surprise, since he doesn't like olives, and he's not crazy about fennel).

5. To celebrate the end of a series of painful design control meetings at work (I actually enjoyed them, but the other attendees did not), I made a batch of Dorie Greenspan's Korova cookies (or World Peace Cookies, depending on which cookbook you're looking at). It was definitely a good choice. These cookies were delicious--sandy, chocolatey, and rich--and easy to make. They disappeared quickly.

6. There was still a little char siu left in the freezer, so I made char siu lo mein once again, along with sunchoke-carrot soup. I had been thinking about sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes) for a while, and I decided to finally buy some (delivered in our box, but of course) and see what they were like.

The soup was pretty boring, and I couldn't taste any sunchoke (or could I? Not sure, since I don't really know what they taste like). The lo mein was yummy as before. This time I used pea shoots instead of tatsoi, because that's what I could find at Nak's (plus they looked exciting!). I had a lot of extra pea shoots leftover, and I stir-fried those with oyster sauce and a bunch of Chinese chives for a tasty side the next night.

7. To use up 12 frozen egg whites (leftover from all the ice cream I made in 2007), I made Emily Luchetti's espresso-chocolate chip angel food cake. I like the idea of adding espresso powder to chocolate desserts, even though neither of us likes coffee-flavored things. The espresso powder here mostly underscored the chocolate flavor, as I'd hoped. Normally I don't like angel food cake, but this was very nice. I'd be happy to make it again when we've collected 12 more egg whites.

8. I had been wanting to do a breakfast-for-dinner night, so we had Lorna Sass' sesame-ginger spelt waffles, sliced blood oranges, and spiced chicken apple sausages (from Whole Foods, because I left work too late to get to Dittmer's before they closed; they definitely weren't as good as Dittmer's sausages). The waffles may sound a little unusual (I was excited about all of the crazy ingredients, but I can see how some people might be put off by them), but they were actually really nice. They're hearty from the spelt and sweet from the crystallized ginger. I'd definitely make them again. Like all waffles, they freeze well. I like taking waffle halves to work with me for a mid-morning snack.

9. Next up was another Sass recipe, this time from Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way--oat- and amaranth-crusted ham and cheese quiche, along with roasted asparagus. I made this with a fraction of our massive frozen ham reserves. Normally I like Lorna Sass' recipes, but this one was only okay. The crust, while crackery and slightly sweet as promised, just didn't do it for me.

10. After a span of a few weeks of no cooking at all (because of our weekend trips), we got back into the swing of things with a simple meal: spinach salad (with grapefruit sections, goat cheese, and Tracy's shallot-balsamic vinaigrette with Meyer lemon juice instead of vinegar) and pasta with chicken-green onion sausage, mustard greens, and green garlic. For dessert we had the first strawberries of the year tossed with sugar and mounded on top of toasted pound cake cubes (frozen leftovers from our New Year's fondue dinner). Good dinner! The pasta was a little dry, but it was very nice apart from that.

11. Yesterday we attended a party at my coworker's house. He owns a smoker, and he smoked up 25 lb of pork shoulder from Dittmer's. It was so good! We ate it on hamburger buns with a variety of BBQ sauces. It was a potluck kind of party, so I brought two desserts: Cook's Illustrated classic brownies (half with pecans, half without), and lemon meringue pie.

I have made the brownies before, but this was my first time making lemon meringue pie, and I was really happy with how it turned out. It's not my favorite kind of pie, but I can see its merits, and I certainly enjoyed eating it. I used Meyer lemons instead of regular lemons to make the filling. After I had already started making the filling, I thought maybe I should have reduced the amount of sugar, since Meyer lemons tend to be sweeter than regular lemons, but it turned out fine. I especially liked the crust--it was a normal pie crust coated with graham cracker crumbs. What a good idea! The meringue smelled nice and toasty sweet when it came out of the oven. I would definitely use this recipe again.

12. For dinner tonight, we had omelets (basic approach here) filled with sauteed beet greens, freezer ham, and goat cheese; roasted skinny asparagus; and braised fava beans with bacon. We used eggs from TLC Ranch (from our box), and the yolks were a beautiful yellow, giving very colorful (and yummy) omelets, what with the pink beet greens inside.

The fava bean dish was pretty good, but I couldn't really taste the beans. These were special fava beans, as they were our first harvest from the plants growing outside our apartment. One day we took a close look at them and realized that there were fava beans hiding underneath all those leaves. So exciting! I collected a bowlful this morning, but our bean yield was pretty pitiful. I probably should have waited and picked them when the pods were larger so the beans would have been larger (most of the beans we got were less than a centimeter long). One good thing about picking them small is that the beans were young enough that we didn't have to blanch and peel them.

Last week, I attended a class outside of Washington DC for work, and Patrick came along for fun. We flew out Saturday morning on a direct flight. There were a few in-flight movies to choose from, and I watched Becoming Jane, which made me glad I wasn't Jane Austen. She got screwed over!

We arrived at Dulles, rented a car, and made our way to Arlington, VA. My class was being held at the Westin Arlington Gateway, so we ended up staying there instead of in the city, for convenience. It's a pretty new hotel, and the amenities were nice. It was within walking distance of a Metro stop, which was a definite plus, since we didn't keep our rental car the whole time.

It was pretty late by the time we got in, so we went to the hotel restaurant, Pinzimini, for dinner. It was a fine meal, but it wasn't very exciting. I had bucatini with meat ragu, and we had a coupon for a free dessert, so we took a slice of ricotta cheesecake with caramelized oranges up to our room to enjoy while watching TV in our pajamas. Now that's living!

On Sunday, we met up with Mike, one of Patrick's roommates from grad school, for brunch at Bistrot du Coin in Dupont Circle. I had a tasty smoked salmon omelette, accompanied by fries and a small salad. The French fries were the default breakfast side, and they were very good. I guess they're kind of like hashbrowns; not that strange to have them with breakfast, right?

After brunch, we explored the Dupont Circle Farmers' Market, which we'd noticed when we got off the Metro. It was a sweet little farmers' market, with lots of meat and dairy vendors. It was blustery and cold, so we shared a cup of hot apple cider from one of the stands and sat on the curb watching people walk by. (Incidentally, the jacket I'm wearing in the picture below is the one I was talking about a few posts ago. I'm also wearing the yellow gloves I got in Portland last winter)

One of the farmers had some pretty mushrooms for sale.

Next, we went to Tabletop, a cute little store that my boss recommended I visit. It was full of pretty things that I would enjoy owning--plenty of Orla Kiely and Marimekko items. But I was strong and didn't buy anything.

We took the Metro to the Smithsonian stop to check out the National Mall and some museums, but once we got there it continued to be cold and blustery, and we didn't feel like wandering outside for long. We ran into a St. Patrick's Day parade and stopped briefly to watch some little girls performing an Irish jig. Then we continued on to the National Portrait Gallery, where Stephen Colbert's portrait is displayed by the second floor bathrooms until April 1 (we had heard about it earlier, and then Mike and Harley reminded us about it). His portrait was drawing way bigger crowds than the rest of the portraits.

We were getting hungry, so we decided to have afternoon tea at Teaism. The food looked exciting, but it wasn't actually that enjoyable. There were two kinds of crustless sandwiches (one was cucumber-wasabi, I think, and it packed quite a kick!), a ginger scone that tasted overly eggy, three kinds of shortbread, and unpleasantly bitter chocolate truffles. We washed it all down with a nice pot of Earl Grey (but we couldn't find any milk or cream to add to it). I don't know, maybe we just don't have sophisticated enough palates. I think we could find a better tea service in a fancy hotel. I'm glad we tried it though.

Next, at Erin's recommendation, we ducked into the Botanic Garden to warm up a little. It was downright tropical in there! We didn't have a lot of time to spend there, but we took a quick walk around and enjoyed the flowers and warmth. After that, we headed over to Bethesda and had dinner with Patrick's Uncle Kenny and Aunt Mary. I had never visited that part of his family before, so it was good to finally meet them. We got a little lost on our drive back to Arlington, but the iPhone bailed us out. It definitely came in handy in both Mammoth and Arlington.

Monday was the first day of my class, which turned out to be informative and useful. The course was about design controls, which are regulations put in place by FDA for the medical device industry. It probably doesn't sound exciting, but I'm pretty interested in it, in a work context. I like following the rules, so it's nice that there are jobs out there that involve doing just that.

There were about 60 people in the class, including a substantial number of Europeans, most with stylish eyeware. I sat next to a very nice Swedish guy named Ola, who had great chunky glasses and well-groomed facial hair. There was also an emo Canadian kid who was probably my age. I didn't realize that emo kids liked design controls. He seemed pretty cool, but I was afraid to talk to him. I was actually afraid to talk to most of the people in the class, though I did get to know some of them at lunch and in work groups. I need to work on being more outgoing, even though I don't like networking. Anyway, the class was definitely worthwhile, and I'd recommend it to people who are into that kind of thing.

Monday night, Patrick and I went to Circle Bistro for dinner. The ambiance was pretty good for a hotel restaurant, and the food was tasty, but the service wasn't great. They emphasize local ingredients, and the online menu listed Polyface chicken, which I was excited about after reading The Omnivore's Dilemma. However, there was no Polyface chicken on the menu the night we were there. I was a little disappointed, but the food we had was good all the same.

To start, we were presented with an amuse-bouche (yay!) of goat cheese on a pine nut crust, topped with tomato and fennel. Next, I had the baby carrot soup with ginger, rock shrimp, and cilantro. I followed that with a salad of sauteed wild mushrooms with a bacon vinaigrette, topped with a poached egg. Both soup and salad were yummy. For dessert, we split a milk chocolate and banana pot de creme with banana ice cream and dark chocolate madeleines.

After dinner, we headed back to the hotel and purchased an in-room movie (I think that's my first time getting an in-room movie; it seems so decadent!). I made Patrick watch 27 Dresses with me, and I very much enjoyed it. Katherine Heigl! Patrick is less excited about predictable romantic comedies than I am, but he humored me and watched it anyway. He's a good husband :)

The next night, we once again had dinner at a hotel restaurant--this time at Cityzen in the Mandarin Oriental hotel. It was a really great dining experience (food, service, and ambiance were impressive). It was a pretty expensive meal, but it was worth it, in my opinion. If we were living large, I'd totally want to stay at the Mandarin Oriental and have more meals at Cityzen. It was a classy joint.

We opted for the three-course prix fixe menu instead of the six-course menu. This turned out to be a good choice, as we were very full at the end of our meal. We started out with two amuse-bouches (double yay!). The first was a mushroom croquette, and the second was an egg custard served in a cute little egg-shaped vessel and topped with pepper jelly and chives, I think. Next, we were presented with an assortment of breads: bacon-cheddar, Guinness-rye, and not-very-sour sourdough--as well as pucks of both salted and sweet butters. This was one of those restaurants where there's a server walking around with a box of bread; they don't just plop down a basket of bread at your table (I actually prefer the basket approach, since I feel bad for the bread waiter. It doesn't seem like a very exciting job).

Next up were the appetizers. Feeling adventurous, I went with the tete au cochon, which means pig's head. It consisted of a variety of meats from the head region of the pig, all chopped and rolled up into patties, then fried until golden brown. These patties were served atop artichoke-tea jelly and shaved fennel salad. It may not sound appetizing (I know I had to keep telling myself that it's not any more gross to eat pig head meat than any other part of the pig), but it was actually really good. Patrick went with the duck a l'orange hash (pekin duck confit, caramelized fennel braised salsify, poached kumquat, and sauce maltaise), which was also yummy.

For my entree, I had the rabbit crepinette with spinach, frizzled shoat boudin (apparently a shoat is a baby piggy; I hadn't known what it meant when I ordered it, but I figured it must be something tasty), abalone mushroom, and a creamed spinach profiterole. Patrick had herb-crusted triggerfish with celery root risotto, herb-roasted maitake mushrooms, and roasted chicken jus. I actually wasn't that impressed with the crepinette, but I enjoyed the mushroom and spinach components.

Our entrees were overshadowed by my favorite part of the meal--a box full of tiny, buttery Parker House rolls. Don't they just look so pinchable?! I had read about these and was hoping they'd be part of the meal, and I was so excited when they set the box on our table. Part of my enjoyment was just the novelty of the presentation (plus you know how much I like small versions of things), but they were also just really good rolls.

We received a surprise pre-dessert snack of peanut butter brulee topped with berry sorbet. I enjoyed the two components separately, but together they just tasted like peanut butter and jelly, which isn't my favorite flavor combination (I may be misremembering, but I think I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a Nutrigrain bar every day for lunch in 8th grade, so I'm totally over PB&J). It was a cute idea, but I just wasn't the right audience.

For dessert, Patrick had the grasshopper pie, which wasn't pie at all (it was a square of warm chocolate cake in a mint broth topped with creme fraiche and a fancy "Oreo" cookie). I think Patrick would have preferred an actual piece of grasshopper pie topped with an actual Oreo instead of a deconstructed version, but he says he enjoyed it all the same. I had the crispy Indian pudding (actually three small football-shaped nuggets of crispy pudding instead of one big pudding) with poached winter fruits and honey ice cream. The flavors complimented each other nicely; I especially liked the fruit compote.

The meal ended with a tray of petits fours (I love how at fancy restaurants, a three-course menu has four extra surprise courses!)--a chocolate parallelepiped with a crispy wafer base, a fruit gelee, and a mini caramel macaron. Aww!

Cityzen is definitely a good place to go for a fancy meal in Washington DC. I'm glad we went.

After my class ended late Wednesday morning, we checked out of the hotel and headed to Willow Restaurant for lunch. We had almost gone there for dinner on Monday because they'd advertised free mini Reuben sandwiches for St. Patrick's Day, but I'm glad we didn't. I had half a Reuben sandwich at lunch, and it was disappointing. The corned beef was kind of dried out, and the flavor of the sauerkraut was masked by the cheese. I enjoyed my bowl of French onion soup though, so it wasn't a total bust. I don't know; maybe we went on an off day. My classmates went, and they said their food was really good. I'd say it's worth another visit if we're ever in Arlington again. It was pretty close to the hotel.

While we were at lunch, it started raining pretty heavily, and we got soaked walking from the restaurant to the Ballston Commons mall, where we planned to kill time until we were ready to go to the airport. The mall was pretty lackluster, so we decided to hang out in the Starbucks in our hotel lobby until airport go-time. We hung up our coats to dry and shared a hot chocolate, and then we took the Metro and a bus to the airport and headed home. The in-flight movie was August Rush, which made me cry. As others have mentioned, it definitely had some similarities to Oliver!. Robin Williams was totally Fagin. It was a nice little movie. I like Keri Russell.

I didn't get to spend a whole lot of time sightseeing on our trip (Patrick did a better job, running on the Mall and visiting the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery), but I learned a lot about design controls and ate some good food. Not bad!

Man, it has been a busy couple of weeks! Two weekends ago, we went to Mammoth with some of my coworkers. Most of them were there to ski or snowboard, but after my unpleasant snowboarding experience last year, my main goals were to make waffles and play Rock Band (my coworker had borrowed it from his friend for the weekend).

We got a ride with two of my coworkers (Pete and Justin), and we drove halfway there on Friday night, stopping in Auburn at Ikeda’s for dinner. It was a pretty simple restaurant-market combo. I had a chicken pot pie (good for the price, but I’ve had better), and I stole a few sips of Patrick’s marionberry milkshake (really good!). We spent the night at Pete's family cabin in North Tahoe.

The next morning, we stopped at Woodett’s in Gardnerville for breakfast. It was a pretty standard local diner-type restarant, with mismatched mugs and ceramic moose art adorning the walls. I had a half order of biscuits and gravy, which turned out to be gigantic, but very tasty. Justin was courageous and ordered the Pavement Scraper, which consisted of eggs, potatoes, salsa, and a variety of meat and vegetables (whatever the chef felt like adding) all mixed together. He had to take 2/3 of it with him and finished it over the course of the weekend. Quite a bargain, and he said it tasted good too.

The drive from Tahoe to Mammoth was pretty. We made a little detour outside of Bridgeport to check out the Travertine hot springs. The road there was muddy and snowy and very bumpy, but luckily Pete's truck was big and burly, so we got there just fine. I’d never been to a hot spring before. It’s pretty neat that hot water just comes out of the ground! We didn’t actually get in the hot spring (there was a guy there who didn’t seem to want company, plus Justin was eager to get on the slopes), but we hiked around a little bit and admired the views of the Sierras.

We were the first car to make it to Mammoth (everybody else made the full drive on Saturday instead of breaking it into two days). The house we were renting was cool (204 Rainbow Lane, a modern 4-story building made of concrete and glass), but it stuck out like a sore thumb among all the log-cabin-style homes. It had all sorts of fancy features, like Viking kitchen appliances, big TVs, an elevator (non functional, unfortunately), arcade games, and a humongous shower in the master suite. There were a lot of stainless steel accents, which seemed like a good idea, except the air in Mammoth was so dry that every time somebody touched metal, they got shocked. It was funny the first few times, and then it was just annoying (well, it continued to be funny when it wasn't me getting shocked).

The owners had made some strange decorating choices—it seemed like they’d taken any knick knacks they didn’t want at their house (e.g., Peanuts figurines; a trio of ceramic snowmen, one holding knitting needles) and put them in their Mammoth house instead. There were creepy clown sheets on the bunk beds in the kids’ room, but luckily Patrick and I weren’t in there. Despite the eccentricities, it was a great place to stay, and I’d recommend it to people looking to rent a place in Mammoth.

One of the best things about the house was that it was only two blocks (albeit steep, uphill blocks) to Canyon Lodge and the free gondola to Mammoth Village. I’m a fan of gondolas! Soon after we arrived, Patrick, Justin, and Pete got dressed for their respective snow activities, and we all hiked up the street to the lodge. We were at about 9000 feet altitude, and I was exhausted by the time we made it to the top; I'm glad I didn't have to go snowboarding after that hike to the lodge.

Everybody else went to get their lift tickets, and I hopped on the gondola for a trip to the supermarket (it’s a small town, so the only place to get a decent assortment of groceries is the Vons on Old Mammoth Road). The gondola ride lasted about 7 minutes, and it gave me a good view of the mountains and trees and fancy cabins (including our rental house). There’s a $20 gondola ride up to the top of the mountain, but I was happy with the free ride down to the village. The gondola ride was one of my favorite parts of the weekend. It was so peaceful!

After disembarking from the gondola, I took the free red line bus to Old Mammoth Road. I was very lucky, because Justin lived in Mammoth last winter, so he knew all about their transit system and gave me lots of good tips on where to go and good places to eat (his top restaurant picks agreed well the list I compiled from Chowhound when doing my requisite vacation food research).

Before going to Vons, I stopped at Roberto’s for lunch. Justin had told me to ask for the flour tortilla chips. I did, and they were awesome. More restaurants should serve flour tortilla chips! I also had a machaca burrito (vinegary shredded beef with scrambled eggs). I had never heard of machaca burritos until that weekend, and then I encountered them on three different menus.

Next, I walked up the street to Vons and bought a bunch of groceries for the next morning's group breakfast (I had brought all of the dry ingredients (pre-measured) from home, but I still needed a bunch of dairy products, plus orange juice). I managed to transport everything back home on the bus and gondola, but just barely. My arms were sore the next day.

There were two scruffy snowboard dudes in front of me in the checkout line at Vons, with a cart full of food and sodas. They paid with food stamps, but then they ran into some trouble paying for the non-food items (a whole bunch of toilet paper). Apparently the guy had a card that was supposed to work for non-food items, but it was declined. A store manager was called over, and after about 10 minutes of the guy swiping the card over and over again, I just offered to buy the toilet paper for him. It was only $16, not a big deal (for me at least). Everybody needs toilet paper. He shook my hand, thanked me heartily, and went off to party with all his snowboarding friends. Maybe it was a scam, but I figured that was my good deed for the day.

While I was waiting for the bus in front of Vons, a guy came up to me and asked me if I knew anything fun to do at night in Mammoth. I told him I was just visiting, and we struck up a brief conversation. He was in town with his coworkers, from San Diego (Mammoth seems way more popular with Southern Californians than Northern Californians). He seemed like a nice guy. I was a little wary of talking with him since I'm not used to strangers talking to me, plus his asking about nightlife could've been a pickup line, right? But I made sure to flash my wedding ring at him, and he stopped talking to me when we got on the bus, so it all worked out okay.

Around the time that I got back to the house, the second carload of people showed up. They were supposed to have brought a cable for connecting the Xbox to the TV, but there was some miscommunication, and it wasn’t the right cable (it was for the original Xbox instead of the Xbox 360). We had Rock Band sitting right there, but no way to play it! I was unhappy.

When Patrick got back from snowboarding, we borrowed a car and went in search of the right cable. We stopped at the one Radio Shack in town, but it had closed at 3pm. Next, we went to the Do-it Center (the main hardware store in Mammoth), where we got a cable that we thought might do the trick. With that cable, we ended up being able to get video from the Xbox onto the TV, but not audio. Not so great for Rock Band. I had nearly given up hope when Justin said that his ex-roommate from last year had an Xbox 360. He went over and picked up the cable, and we finally got Rock Band up and running. Yay!

While on our cable hunt, we stopped at Schat’s Bakery for some snacks. I got a loaf of their famous sheepherder’s bread, a loaf of onion-cheese bread, and a box of chocolate-dipped coconut macaroons. The sheepherder’s bread was actually pretty boring—just crusty white bread, but the onion-cheese bread was tasty. The macaroons were good but pretty standard.

Everybody else arrived around dinnertime, and we had pizza and played Rock Band until people went to bed. Most of my coworkers hadn’t played it before, but they took to it quickly, and everybody seemed to have a good time, as I’d hoped.

Sunday morning was our group breakfast, and I had volunteered to make waffles for the second year in a row. I ended up with way too many waffles last year, so this year I reduced my target waffle count, and I went with two types of waffles instead of four (a double recipe of buttermilk and a single recipe of multigrain, giving about 1.5 waffles per person). I gave people a list of optional add-ins: sliced bananas, pecans, crumbled cooked bacon, (frozen) wild blueberries, and mini chocolate chips. The bananas and blueberries were the most popular choices, but they also had a tendency to stick to the waffle maker. Here's a picture of my ill-advised bacon-chocolate-chip waffle. It sounded like a good idea, but it wasn't all that good in practice.

We also had bacon (1.5 lb for 17 people), cardamom citrus fruit salad (recipe doubled), and orange juice (there was no way I was going to squeeze orange juice for that many people, so I went with Tropicana Pure Premium, which won top marks in a Cook's Illustrated tasting). Patrick and my coworker Ryan helped out with the waffle batter prep and bacon cooking while I cooked the waffles. I'm grateful for their help; I couldn't have done it on my own.

The fruit salad was tasty, but it took me about an hour to section all the citrus. The amount of food generated was just right--we ended up with one extra waffle, three pieces of bacon, and a tiny bit of fruit salad left over. How satisfying to make just the right amount of food.

After everybody departed for their various snow activities, I puttered around the house and organized the pantry and refrigerator (previous occupants had left various food items behind, and they weren't very well organized). I'm sure most people would rather be out skiing, but I much preferred to organize the condiments on the refrigerator door (there was mint jelly in there--how unexpected!).

A little later, I took the gondola back to Vons for more eggs and milk, and then I came back home and baked some chocolate cupcakes for Patrick's birthday (using the chocolate-chocolate cupcake recipe from Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours). My intention was to frost and serve them that night, but we were all stuffed after our group taco dinner, so I saved them for the next night.

I had nothing to do with dinner. It was nice to sit around while people prepared food for me. The taco spread was quite impressive. I enjoyed an excellent fish taco with Kathleen's secret fish taco sauce (no longer a secret--it's sour cream mixed with chipotle sauce), cilantro, mango, and cabbage; and a Yucatan beef salad taco (recipe from Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen). And then we played more Rock Band, of course.

On Monday, I slept in and then headed to The Stove for brunch. I had a 2-egg scramble with ortega chiles and cheddar; Grandma's potatoes (thinly sliced potatoes fried up nice and brown); and biscuits with honey and blackberry jam.

It was a very good meal. I wish Patrick could have enjoyed it too, but he was busy cross-country skiing. It was his first time on skis, and he enjoyed it, though I hear he spent some time on the ground.

Next, I made my daily stop at Vons and then headed back to the house to frost the cupcakes and make orange berry muffins (also from Baking) for breakfast the next morning. I was worried about how the cupcakes and muffins would turn out, since I was baking them at such high altitude. I looked to Cook's Illustrated for guidance, but their advice was to try the recipe once and then make adjustments based on the results. I didn't have that luxury, so I just stuck with the original recipes. Both baked goods did fall somewhat, which gave them flat tops (not a big deal), and they turned out a little dry. People still seemed to like them just fine. The cupcakes were especially popular. I really liked how the chocolate frosting/glaze turned out. I would definitely try both recipes again at sea level.

The group that went cross-country skiing had lunch at Angel's, which I'd been hoping to visit. I didn't get to go there on this trip, but Patrick brought me back some yummy ribs and sweet potato fries from lunch, which was sweet of him. And then he made me quesadillas for dinner, because I was tired from all the baking.

A big group of people headed to Hennessey's at 10pm on Monday, because we had seen flyers advertising a Rock Band competition that night--first prize was a $50 bar tab (though we surely would have spent much more than $50 while there). Patrick and I weren't up for a late night, since we had to get up early the next morning to head home, so we stayed at the house and played Rock Band with the other people who hadn't gone to the bar. As it turns out, the event at Hennessey's wasn't really a contest. No prizes were awarded; people just played Rock Band. I'm glad we didn't go; I would have been disappointed that there weren't any prizes. Despite that, I think having Rock Band night is a great idea; more bars should do it!

The next morning, it was time for the long drive back to the Bay Area. Sigh. We stopped in Jackson at Mel and Faye's Diner, where I had a decent BBQ chicken sandwich with yummy onion rings.

Justin had told us about an awesome milkshake place in Redwood City called Milkshake Werks. On our way home, Patrick and I stopped there for a shake--vanilla toffee crunch, I believe. They reputedly make their own ice cream, and it was a very good milkshake. I like that they offer a small size (maybe 10oz?) for when you want a modestly sized milkshake. I'd definitely stop there again if we were in the neighborhood.

So, that's our trip to Mammoth. I suppose I didn't really take advantage of our location, but I definitely enjoyed myself. I made waffles, played lots of Rock Band, and rode the gondola six times! That's my kind of vacation :)

Happy Pi Day!

(Strawberry rhubarb and apple streusel pie in front of the fountain at Cafe Borrone, picture taken and pie consumed less than an hour ago. Taken with Patrick's new iPhone!)

I have lots of things to write about, including our weekend in Mammoth, but we're off to Washington DC for five days so I can learn about Design Control for work (Patrick will be doing fun stuff while I'm in class). We'll get back to normal life next week...

I appear to be almost a month behind in writing about our meals! I doubt these posts are of interest to anybody other than me, but I have a dream of someday writing a recipe database that summarizes all of these posts, so I won't have to think about what to make for dinner. We'll see if that ever happens...

1. Smoked paprika roasted chicken on a bed of root vegetables (a mixed bag from Heirloom Organics, which included pale yellow chiogga beets, purple-top turnips, a watermelon radish, black radishes, and some mystery roots) with couscous. This meal didn't turn out very well. Some of the roots didn't cook enough (that's what I get for trying to roast radishes, but the sign at Heirloom Organics said they could all be roasted!). The chicken was tasty but not amazing (the skin looked pretty good, but we don't typically eat chicken skin).

2. To use up the frozen cherry tomatoes from last summer, I made pasta with roasted cherry tomato sauce (minus the basil, since it's not in season). This was easy to make and tasty. I bet it would have been even better with basil. Definitely worth a remake if we want an easy dinner in the summer.

3. For Valentine's Day, we cooked dinner together (awww). We started with some very nice steamed artichokes with mayonnaise/butter (depending on the eater). I didn't think artichokes were in season, but Planet Organics was promoting them, and they were nice and meaty. Normally we eat artichokes right out of the steamer, but this time we chilled them overnight, which may have improved our experience as well. I think we prefer cold/room temperature artichokes to burn-your-tongue-hot artichokes.

Next up was pan-seared filet mignon with Madeira pan sauce and Jimtown Yukon gold potato gratin with caramelized onion, goat cheese, and chives. I was a little worried about the anchovies in the steak's pan sauce, but they were undetectable, and the sauce was very nice. The steaks were grass-fed beef (from Marin Sun Farms), and they weren't as tender as I'd hoped, but I'm willing to give up a little tenderness and fat in order to support our local cow farmers. Sadly, I overpeppered the potato gratin, but I really liked it other than that. I used a mandoline to cut the potatoes, and the texture of the potatoes was really nice. This is worth making again, for a special occasion (it requires quite a bit of effort).

And for dessert, we had butterscotch pots de creme. They were a little undercooked (my mistake), but they were very tasty. The combination of fancy brown sugars definitely made the dish. Even though they were yummy, I wasn't as excited about them as I would be about, say, chocolate pudding. I don't feel the need to make them again, but I'm not sorry I tried them.

4. The next day, along with the leftover potato gratin, we had some insane smoked pork chops from Dittmer's, with boring applesauce on the side. I wasn't prepared for the richness and intensity of these chops, so I had the butcher cut them pretty thick (he cut them from a big slab of pork), and they were just too much. It was like eating five hot dogs. I prefer the Fatted Calf's more understated smoked chops. But I still love Dittmer's!

5. That Saturday, we went to my grandma's house, where my mom and her sisters were congregating for the weekend. It's always fun to get together with everybody, and my cousin even made it out (I haven't seen her in ten years!). My contribution to our brunch gathering was chocolate chip sour cream coffee cake. The tops of some of the chocolate chips singed (next time I'd push them down into the batter a little bit), but otherwise this turned out really well. Very moist, and way too easy to eat. It was even better the next day. Yum!

6. We're having Patrick's family over for Easter brunch this year, and I'd considered making a ham for the meal (Patrick has since managed to talk me out of this). I decided to make a practice ham, since I've never dealt with ham before. I had bookmarked a couple recipes for cola-glazed ham (two from Nigella Lawson's books and one from the Jimtown Cookbook), and I ended up using the Jimtown recipe because it was the least confusing (but they were all confusing; there are too many choices when it comes to ham--city vs. country, bone-in vs. boneless, shank end vs. butt end). I ended up getting a 11lb bone-in shank-end cured (city) ham from Dittmer's. This yielded enough ham for two nights of plain ham, one night of ham and brie sandwiches (see below), 4 nights of black-eyed pea salad, and 2 lb of diced ham, which I froze. Phew! I also got 3/4c ham broth and a ham bone out of the deal, which I've frozen to use when making beans or soup.

Per Nigella's Feast recipe, I saved the cooking liquid and boiled up some cabbage in it. Not bad! The ham turned out well, but the glaze wasn't as good as on a HoneyBaked Ham (I know some people don't like a shell of brown sugar on their ham, but I sure do!). I'll have to keep trying recipes.

7. As I mentioned above, I made ham and brie sandwiches with the leftover ham. The recipe is in the Jimtown Cookbook, and it involves baguettes spread with a mixture of butter and Mendocino hot and sweet mustard (which I was able to obtain through Planet Organics and later found at Draegers), then layered with ham, brie, and lettuce. I reduced the amount of butter by half because it just seemed extravagant, and the mustard was too strong for me. I bet if I'd used the full amount of butter, I would have liked the sandwiches better, but that's just too unhealthy, what with all the brie oozing all over the place (I think I'm getting an idea of why I've gained weight recently!). The sandwiches were good, even though the mustard burned my sinuses. We had a little roasted romanesco broccoli on the side, which was very nice.

8. The next incarnation of our ham leftovers was in Jimtown's black-eyed pea, ham, and wild rice salad with mustard maple dressing. I used shallots instead of red onion, and we had previously frozen Stars gingerbread with lemon curd for dessert (yum!). The beans and wild rice smelled unpleasantly earthy when they were cooking, but the finished salad was a very nice combination of flavors and textures, and a good use of leftover ham. Patrick wasn't wild about it, though he seemed to warm up to it over the four days we had it for dinner. I'd probably make this again if we ever have pounds of ham leftovers to use up.

9. I guess I'd been reading too many Nigella cookbooks, because I really wanted to make something involving malted milk powder. I decided I wanted Horlick's malted milk powder in particular, and after some searching online (and fruitless calls to Indian groceries), I found out that it can be bought for cheap at 99 Ranch Market. Yay! I used it to make malted milk waffles for our Sunday breakfast a few weekends ago (recipe from Waffles, which isn't a very exciting cookbook). I've been wanting to make malted waffles ever since our mild Treebones disappointment back in August. The waffles were nice enough, but I couldn't really taste any malt flavor.

Okay, that's halfway through my food backlog. Enough for now. Good night!

Although it has been rainy, I've enjoyed myself. Sunday before last, I walked to the farmers' market in the drizzly gray, and on my way there, I spotted a rainbow! There weren't many farmers there because of the weather, but the man with the good citrus was there, and he sold me more cara cara navel oranges (they're a cross between a grapefruit and an orange--very good!). I headed back home, ate one, and decided that I needed to buy even more so they'd last us for the whole week. I convinced Patrick to come with me this time (good practice for Portland, being out in the rain), and we headed back to the market for oranges, baby beets, and a giganto pomelo (this is my second time trying one, and I just don't find them that exciting, apart from their impressive size).

We passed a little girl at the market splashing around in pink rain boots and a rain coat, who shouted, "I love this weather!" Me too--I was in such a strangely good mood given the murky skies. I would have been even happier if I'd had proper rain boots on. My socks got all soggy, which is never fun, though it did make it more enjoyable to come home and put on dry clothes and make some hot cocoa. I like springtime :)

Speaking of rain boots, I have considered buying some, now that I walk to the train station almost daily as part of my new commute. (I suppose I haven't mentioned it here--my company moved to Mountain View, and I'm now able to take Caltrain to work, supplemented by a Google shuttle on the Mountain View end of things. It makes me feel so happy and virtuous, passing the gridlocked freeway traffic and gas stations with their super high prices. Plus I like seeing the same people every day on the train and shuttle; maybe someday I'll say hi to them) I tried a few pairs from Zappos, but none of them were really perfect.

These green apple boots are super cute and cheap, but I'm afraid I already have too many cute items that can't be worn at the same time (recent acquisitions include wrist warmers and an expensive but awesome Orla Kiely bag; these are just too much when worn with my favorite mauve baby doll jacket from Tulle). I run the risk of looking weird if I add any more colorful items to my outerwear collection. I need more boring stuff.

Though I haven't been able to find the right rain boots, I did have some luck finding new shoes. I got another pair of Palladium Kassels because I love them so, some sensible work shoes (very comfy!), and a pair of super-cute patent leather T-strap shoes that make me excited for skirt season!

This past weekend, I bought my first pair of expensive jeans (or, as Macy's would have it, "status denim," but that makes me not want to buy them. I don't want to be trendy; I just want jeans that fit me right). I ended up getting a pair of Joe's Jeans - Provocateur Lulu. I was having trouble finding jeans that weren't way too long (intended to be worn with high heels, I suppose), but the Provocateurs were the perfect length for me, and (as the saleslady assured me) they make my tush look good. What more can you ask for? I'd wear them every day if I could. I think I'll get my money's worth.

And now it's time to stop spending so much money! I guess my wardrobe just needed some sprucing up for spring.

You may recall that I spent much of 2006 dieting, and I finally reached my goal in October. After that, I stopped dieting because it was no fun, and, unsurprisingly, I gained back a little over half the weight. I'm not too bothered by it (though I'd like my weight to stop going up any farther). When my company moved to Mountain View in mid-January, I changed my whole morning routine and started including exercise every morning (since I could no longer go to the gym next to my old building, and I wasn't going there very often anyway). On MWF, I do various Turbo Jam DVDs, and on TTh I do strength training with resistance bands (thanks, Linda). I've been sticking with it for over a month, and I hope I'm able to keep at it.

As mentioned above, I've also been commuting to work via train most days, which involves a total of 25 minutes of walking, which is supposed to be good for me, right? And I'm doing yoga at work once or twice a week! Given all that, I should be super healthy now. Except that I'm hungrier from the exercising, which means that I eat more. I've actually gained a couple pounds since I started all this extra activity, and it's not muscle mass (my scale says so). Oh well, it's better than being inactive. And I think all the exercising does make me feel better.

As part of my campaign to be healthier, I'm trying to eat oatmeal for breakfast most weekdays, and I've started taking omega-3 fish oil supplements (both inspired by Stef). I bought a 1.5 qt slow cooker so that I could make steel-cut oatmeal overnight, and I love it. It's so easy! A batch makes about 4 servings, and the leftovers microwave nicely on subsequent mornings. The only problem is that I get hungrier sooner when I eat oatmeal instead of cold cereal. Isn't oatmeal supposed to stick to my ribs?

I've tried a bunch of different oatmeal recipes in the crockpot so far, most from Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker. Here's a rundown:

1. Plain Steel-Cut Oats (NYMSC) - This is just 1c oats in 4c water. I used McCann's steel-cut Irish oats. It turned out good and creamy. I like my oatmeal with a little brown sugar, walnuts or pecans, dried blueberries (another Stef idea put into practice), and some milk. I also like it with a pat of butter, but that kind of negates the positive effects of the oatmeal.
2. Cinnamon-Pear Oatmeal (NYMSC) - Made with thick-cut Snowqualmie Falls rolled oats. This turned out very good, super creamy with a little sweetness.
3. Hot Oatmeal and Rice (NYMSC) - This used half oats (I used a mixture of steel-cut and rolled) and half brown rice. It was okay, but not as good as the first two. The chewiness of the rice was kind of nice though.
4. Old-Fashioned Oatmeal (NYMSC) - I used Snowqualmie oatmeal for this recipe. It turned out very creamy and was enjoyable.
5. Maple Oatmeal with Dried Fruit and Sweet Spices (NYMSC) - This was too cinammony, but it smelled really good. I might try it again, reducing the amount of spices.
6. Creamy Oatmeal with Dried Fruit - The full recipe was a little too much for the 1.5 qt slow cooker (I had to remove ~1c of liquid so that it wouldn't overflow), but it still turned out nice and creamy. It was tangy, but sweet enough that I didn't need to add any sugar. It was pretty good, but not good enough to eat every day.
7. Mike's Oatmeal Everyone Loves to Eat (recipe in a locked Livejournal entry; I hope you don't mind me paraphrasing it here, Mike) - Adapted for the crockpot, I used 1c steel-cut oats, 4c water, 1/4t cinnamon, 1/4t cardamom, 1/8t nutmeg, 1/4t salt, and a handful of dried blueberries. This turned out very nicely, and I've made it quite a few times. I think this will be my go-to oatmeal recipe, minus the berries (I prefer my dried fruit added after cooking). Thanks, Mike!
8. Malted Oatmeal with Barley - I made this one up because I had recently obtained some malt powder (more on that in my cooking update) and I had a little bit of pearled barley to use up. I combined 1/2c steel-cut oats, 1/2c pearled barley, 4c water, Mike's spices, and 1T malt powder. This turned out pretty well. The barley gave it a nice chew and nuttiness, and the malt flavor was pleasant, if a little subtle. I'd make it again if I had more barley to use up.
9. I've also made oatmeal substituting fruit juice (either prune juice or cranberry juice cocktail) for some of the water. I did this mainly in an attempt to use up the juice, not because I thought it would turn out well. It didn't turn out that badly, but I like oatmeal made with plain water better. The juice-based oatmeals are too tangy, and not in a good way.

Yep, I like my new morning routine, even though I have to get up 45 minutes earlier. I pick out my clothes the night before (which seems to have helped me break the habit of throwing together any old outfit even if I know it doesn't really match), then in the morning I exercise, shower, eat my oatmeal, walk to the train station, take the train to Mountain View, and take the shuttle the rest of the way to work. It takes a while, but I find it relaxing. I like being a train commuter!

The weather was beautiful this weekend! We managed to spend a decent amount of time outdoors, but we also watched two submarine movies (Das Boot and The Hunt for Red October), which seems kind of at odds with the nice weather. Man, Das Boot has a real downer of an ending!

We spent some time cleaning up our apartment this weekend, inspired by the sunlight and fresh air. It would be nice to spend a whole weekend really doing a good job of cleaning and organizing, but there's too much other fun stuff to do instead. I've considered hiring somebody to come by and clean the apartment once a month, since neither of us enjoys cleaning, but it's hard to justify the expense when we could do it ourselves. Except that we don't clean as often as we should, so maybe it would be better to have somebody else do it.

Anyway, I've got some food to tell you about...

1. In an effort to have a healthy dinner and eat more fish, I made salmon steaks with fennel (from Moosewood Low-Fat Favorites) with jasmine rice and roasted green cauliflower. The cauliflower was nice, but the fish wasn't at all exciting. At least it was healthy!

We got the salmon from Planet Organics, along with the bacon and chuck roast mentioned below. They have a system involving ice packs and insulated bubble wrap, which successfully kept our perishables cool until we got home. How convenient, especially since Planet Organics sells Marin Sun Farms beef, which isn't available at Draegers.

2. Next up was a very wintery meal that ended up being pretty disappointing, possibly because of modifications I made to the recipe (that seems to happen a lot!). I made beef goulash with dumplings (using Marin Sun Farms chuck roast!), but I modified it so I could make it in our crockpot. I reduced the amount of broth (3 cups for a 4lb roast), and after the deglazing step, I put everything in the crock, refrigerated it overnight, then cooked it on low for 10 hours the next day. When I got home from work, I added the dumpling batter and then cooked on high for 30 more minutes. I didn't want to buy spicy Hungarian paprika, so I used an inauthentic combination of smoked paprika and chipotle chili powder instead.

The main problem with the goulash was that the meat was dry, which was almost certainly because I cooked it for so long in the crockpot (couldn't really be avoided unless I'd come home from work early to turn off the crock pot). However, the flavor of the goulash wasn't very exciting either. This could have been because of my spice substitution, but it's also possible we're just not fans of goulash. The dumplings were light and fluffy as promised, which somewhat redeemed the meal. We've got four more servings in the freezer for a later date, but we're not particularly looking forward to it.

In addition to the goulash, we had brussels sprouts, kale, and bacon, which turned out well. I used the special Wooly Pigs shoulder bacon that I mentioned in my last post, and I was so pleased with how it turned out. The bacon was perfectly sweet and spicy, and thickly cut so that it stayed nice and chewy after cooking. I'm so pleased with it! If we make this dish again, I might add some toasted pine nuts.

3. Last Saturday morning, I was faced with a lone ripe banana in the fruit bowl, so I made pancakes with bananas and granola (Trader Joe's pecan praline granola), a combination of two recipe variations in one of my newest cookbook acquisitions, The Breakfast Book. The pancakes turned out well. The banana bits were very good--sweet and caramelized. I bet they would've been even better if I'd fried the pancakes in butter instead of cooking spray. The granola wasn't super noticeable, but it added a pleasant nubbliness to the pancakes. These pancakes, with bananas, granola, or both, are definitely worth making again. I'm excited about this cookbook!

4. Last weekend's lunch featured more Wooly Pigs bacon, this time as part of a roasted parsnip soup with bacon. We ate the soup with leftover sprouts and greens and Vital Vittles 3-seed bread (our current freezer bread of choice). The soup was sweet and parsnippy, and the bacon made it extra special. It was a good meal.

5. Patrick made our favorite chili for Tree and Andrew's Superbowl party, and I made spiced cocktail nuts (from Tartine) and black-bottom mini cupcakes.

The cocktail nuts had a nice little kick to them, but they weren't quite what I'm looking for. I want something sweeter. The black-bottom cupcakes were yummy, though last year's cream cheese brownies were better. Still, I would happily eat lots more of these little cupcakes if they magically appeared in front of me. I especially liked the addition of the chocolate chunks to the cream cheese topping.

The chili was good, though it seemed saltier than I remembered. Maybe my tastebuds have become wimpier. I'll probably use less salt next time. It's still some damn good chili though. We ate the leftovers for dinner with sour cream, cheddar, and green onions on top. I made Dorie Greenspan's corniest corn muffins to go with the chili, substituting sour cream for the buttermilk, since we had some on hand. The muffins were very nice--a little gritty (in a good way), slightly sweet, and pleasantly fluffy. I'd definitely make them again.

6. We had a little bit of sour cream, green onions, and cheddar left over, so on Friday night we made duck soft tacos with corn and blood orange salsa (no tortilla-frying for me), with a little stir-fried baby bok choy on the side (and a very colorful blood orange garnish). I think this was our first time cooking with duck, and it turned out really well--the spice rub complimented the duck nicely, and the tacos were yummy. My only complaint is that duck is pretty expensive, but the tacos only used one duck breast, so the meal wasn't too pricey.

7. I never got a chance to make gingerbread during all the holiday baking this year, so I made a batch yesterday. Although the Cook's Illustrated gingerbread recipe is pretty much perfect, this time I tried the gingerbread recipe from Classic Stars Desserts, just to make sure it wasn't even better. It's a tough call; they're both really good, but I think the Cook's Illustrated recipe is slightly better.

The original Stars recipe called for topping the gingerbread with warm apples and a sabayon, but I topped ours with a little butter lemon cheese (similar to lemon curd) that Amanda brought back for us from England. It's so yummy, I'd be happy to just eat it straight out of the jar, but it also compliments the gingerbread very nicely. This dessert makes me happy :)

Yay, winter food!

1. Curried lentils with sweet potatoes and spinach, roasted brown rice pilaf scented with leeks (from Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way). I changed up the lentil recipe a little bit based on what we had on hand, using lemon instead of lime and spinach from our garden instead of chard. The lentils were good--very flavorful. The pilaf was fluffy with a nice buttery flavor. A good relatively healthy meal.

2. We bought Dungeness crab for the second time in a week (gotta take advantage of crab season!). This time it was a whole cooked crab from the friendly fisherpeople at the Menlo Park farmers' market. I removed the meat from the crab one night (based on these instructions), made crab cakes and tartar sauce the next night, and made crab cake sandwiches (with roasted root vegetables) on the final night.

The crab cake and tartar sauce recipes were from our newly acquired Jimtown Store Cookbook (similar recipe here), and we were very happy with how they turned out. I used green onions instead of yellow onions, and I used original Puffins cereal instead of cornflakes because Trader Joe's didn't have any cornflakes. The substitions worked just fine. For the sandwiches, I spread tartar sauce on cracked wheat sourdough rolls (from Trader Joe's) and topped with a crab cake and some arugula. Yum! It took a lot of prep work, but it was worth the effort.

3. We had a large butternut squash hanging out in the kitchen, so Patrick made Tracy's coconut-ginger butternut squash soup, and we ate it with sourdough rolls and orange and arugula salad. I was a little generous with the feta in the salad (I doubt Cooking Light would approve), which made it better. The salad wasn't worth making again, but it wasn't bad. Once again, the soup seemed to improve after sitting overnight.

4. Patrick and I both enjoyed our most recent meal, classic baked chicken, braised leeks with bacon and thyme (from Molly Stevens' All About Braising), quick-cooked collard greens with garlic and red pepper flakes (using a little bacon fat instead of the olive oil), and sweet sweet potatoes. The chicken was tasty and easy to make, the greens and sweet potatoes were yummy as always, and the leeks were silky and bacony delicious (Patrick was less effusive about them; he declared them "fine").

We have been alternating between weekly produce deliveries from Organic Express and Planet Organics, trying to figure out which service we like more. I want to like Planet Organics better, because they seem more locally focused (with more information on where the produce is coming from), and they have a wider range of exciting non-produce items to choose from (I'm very much looking forward to getting some Wooly Berkshire Shoulder Bacon as part of our delivery tomorrow!). However, both services seem hit-or-miss when it comes to produce quality. I guess that's just the way things are; they can't predict whether apples will be duds or not. Yeah, I think it's time to end our relationship with Organic Express and become full-time Planet Organics customers.