- Having a Cheese Off: due to the snow and wanting comfort food, Hanne and I are both making Mac & Cheese and seeing who’s is better. (Mine) #
Yearly archives for 2008
Tweets for 2008-12-15
I'm thankful Thanksgiving is over
I don’t really like neglected my blog, mostly because I scowl at the idea of somehow “wasting” the money I pay to host it. I guess I’ll still hosting it, but not really using it per se. Eh.
Thanksgiving has come and gone, but not without its distinct impression that it left on our collective stomachs. Many people likely had to cut back this year and not have an extravagent holiday, though that wasn’t the case for my family–mostly because we never do an extravagent holiday to begin with. Sure, we do the turkey and the stuffing and the mashed potatoes, but I’ve seen some spreads that have dwarfed ours for as many or fewer people.
Hanne and I decided that we wanted to host Thanksgiving dinner this year, and that worked out much better than I could have anticipated, just like the meal itself. We managed to squeeze seven people around our table with the leaf in, and though we had no room on the table for serving dishes, I don’t think people minded serving themselves in the kitchen. The turkey was perfectly done, the mashed potatoes were creamy and delicious, the two kinds of stuffing both tasted great, and Hanne’s two pies (pumpkin–from scratch–with a layer of crushed hazelnuts on the crust and apple with gruyere baked into the crust) were, in a word, divine. As she was baking them the night before, I kept thinking about the TV show “Pushing Daisies” with the piemaker lead character, and I kept spouting out “The facts were these….” before many comments, ala the narrator of the show. Hanne was already annoyed with me for a variety of reasons, but my girlfriend was baking pie. It was great.
We managed to keep most of the insanity under control by making a lot of things ahead of time so that that span of time between when the turkey is nearing completion and when you actually serve up wasn’t so crazy, but I was sweating by the time I finally sat down to eat with everyone, both from stressing out a bit as well as the quite warm kitchen. My reputation, after all, was on the line.
Thanksgiving also breeds monumental amounts of leftovers, as well, but I think that Hanne and I have managed to keep things under control. The last of the pie was eaten yesterday, the cranberry sauce has maybe one sandwich left to go (though I need to make some more to use up cranberries), the olive appetizers were finished last night, and the remainder of the turkey and most of the stock will get used up tonight in a delicious risotto I have planned: turkey, red and green bell peppers, mushrooms, fennel, and onion. Delicious. That will leave perhaps two cups of stock to deal with, and Hanne wants to use those this weekend to make some ravioli with the squash we also have on hand.
Most of the leftover turkey went towards making a big (and I mean big) batch of turkey chili Sunday night, which while very good (and somewhat spicy) burned the hell out of the room of my mouth. Still, it was worth it. Five kinds of beans, a pound and a half of turkey, lots of stock, collard greens, tomatoes, onion, chili peppers…it turned out much better than I expected. Not that my expectations were low, mind you, but they exceeded them nonetheless. I had it simmer with the lid on for an hour and a half, so by the time it had boiled down and was ready to serve, the turkey was falling apart it was so soft. Last night I used some of that leftover chili and made turkey enchiladas, so at least the meals are cycling around.
We also took care of Hanne’s parents’ (well, technically also hers I suppose) dog Quinn for a week while her parents were back in Plymouth, and that was definitely an interesting time. Having the dog around our (relatively) small apartment was fun, though I will not miss the clackity-clack of her claws on our wood floors all the time. We still have a lot of cleaning to do, and I suspect that this weekend will involve a great deal of that. There are dog hairs everywhere, and there are at least two rooms that are in desperate need of mopping, too.
Other than the craziness that began with Thanksgiving (and won’t let up until after New Year’s), things are going very well. My Christmas beer, which is unfortunately still sitting in a fermenter and is about two weeks past when I should have bottled it, tastes delicious (I sampled it when I moved it to the new fermenter) and should be ready just in time for gift-giving. Also on the topic of beer, I’m knocking off work early today (with the blessings of my supervisors) and attending this year’s Holiday Ale Festival, a tradition that I look forward to with mixed feelings every year. I always enjoy tasting the unique winter beers, but man, it’s so crowded in that tent in Pioneer Square. I hope that by going at 2 PM on a Thursday the lines and crowds with be less than they usually are. There are a number of beers I want to try this year–like every year–and I think I even have some ticklets left over from last year to boot!
On Friday, Hanne and I plan on making the rounds at a couple of brewpubs to try the winter seasonals at both the New Old Lompoc brewpub and well as Laurelwood, both up on NW 23rd, conveniently located just a few blocks from one another. Lompoc has six–count ‘em, six–winter seasonal beers to try, and we’ll kick those off today with the one that’s only available at the Holiday Ale Festival. I dig it when breweries brew a beer especially for a festival.
Work’s going just fine, despite my gloom-and-doom post regarding the possibilities of starting to block various activities from work. As it turned out, the whole discussion was hypothetical and nothing was/will be done about it, but I made my feelings clear on the subject, I think. It’s something I feel very passionate about, clearly. We have a lot of projects upcoming that should really change how the firm operates both on a daily basis as well as on the back-end, and I’m excited about each and every one of them to tell you the truth. I like progress, and while I’ve been reminded that this firm moves at exactly two speeds (slowly and not at all), behind the scenes we have much greater leeway to move at faster speeds as long as the user experience doesn’t change. I’m particularly excited about setting up a new terminal server so that people can work remotely because the one we have needs to be led out back and shot. We’re moving to a mostly virtual server environment at my urging, and it’s pretty cool to see such a major shift in how things operate behind the scenes at my urging.
In short, everything’s just dandy.
Tweets for 2008-11-30
- @beersage Homebrew fresh hop ale now, but moving on to Lazy Boy IPA and Racer 5 IPA next. Tomorrow’s a vertical tasting of The Abyss.
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Tweets for 2008-11-29
- Making turkey stock from the leftover Thanksgiving carnage and looking for a good turkey chili recipe to make tomorrow. #
Tweets for 2008-11-27
- Happy Thanksgiving, all! Cooking breakfast for now, but later comes dressing #2 and the turkey. And lots and lots of cleaning. Lots. #
Tweets for 2008-11-23
- Cooking a masterful dinner of cornish game hens, wild rice, and green beans for Hanne and her Dad. #
Where do you draw the line?
This posting will likely take more time than I have at the moment to write it, so I’ll keep it simple for now and expand upon it later.
My manager and the firm’s executive director brought up earlier today the idea of blocking any instant messaging applications from running on people’s computers. This was raised as part of a discussion about a concern regarding one or two employees who might be spending time using an instant messaging application during work hours, which is against firm policy.
Now, I’m all for rules and policy, but dropping the hammer on the entire firm–by my own admission to enforce policy–goes beyond my comfort level as an IT professional. For one thing, policy is subverted every day by numerous people in the firm when they visit non-work websites during work hours and we do nothing about it. Frankly, I don’t care if someone goes to CNN.com or ESPN.com during the day to look at news, nor do I care if they check their personal email. Whether someone goes to non-work websites is a discussion that needs to happen between an employee and their supervisor only if productivity is affected in my opinion.
Anyway, we had a long discussion today about how yes, it’s policy, but that it gives the image that the firm doesn’t trust us, among other things. It’s a slippery slope from there to blocking websites and monitoring everyone’s (or even worse, staff and not attorneys’) Internet usage to see how they’re spending their day, and I made it clear that’s not the type of work enivornment that I will either support or participate in. I was assured it wouldn’t come to that, but I made sure they knew where my line in the sand is. I’ll enforce firm policy to the extent that it keeps our network and systems safe, but being the productivity policeman is a job for IT.
We decided after two hours of discussion to revisit it tomorrow after some careful thought. I’m going to bounce it off several people to find what they think.
A requiem for a Green Dragon
Well, it appears to be official: the Green Dragon Bistro and Pub where I have parked myself on many an evening in the last year is changing hands (technically, again) and will be fully owned and operated by Rogue Brewing. Now, in and of itself ownership by Rogue is not a bad thing given that I like Rogue’s beer and the pizza at their NW Portland pub is quite good, but their beer and food is super-expensive–$5/pint or more at their locations–and they have no Happy Hour. Yeah, that’s not exactly on the top of my must-have list, but it’s worth mentioning.
On top of that, the people behind the bar, in the kitchen, and even who were going to operate the not-yet-open brewery in the back don’t necessarily have a future here, plus there’s no telling what will happen to the rotating taps, the atmosphere, and the clientelle such as myself who frequent the pub. Lastly, my status as a Founder of the Green Dragon, my giant mug in which I get free beer and a discount on food is likely to go away. I will most certainly get my money back, but that’s not the point. I paid what was then (and still is, as a mater of fact) a significant chunk of money–my entire savings at the time!–to buy into the sort of place that I could see myself frequenting on a regular basis. And I did. And I have. And I may not anymore.
It’s a little frustrating truly expressing the feelings I have over this. After all, it’s just a pub! Places change hands all the time and sometimes things stay the same, other times they change for the better or for the worse. I don’t know what will happen here when the title and name change hands, but I’m thinking this is a glass half empty sort of situation. I’ve read what Rogue wants to do to the place and what they want to keep, but I just don’t know. I’ll have to wait and see. The Green Dragon might come out of this sale being better than before, or it might become a hollow shell of its former self. Only time will tell.
But for now, I sit here with my mug in hand, drinking a pint and honoring the place I’ve come to enjoy spending time in the last year, hopefully not as a wake. Don’t get me wrong–there are plenty of good places to go and grab a pint in this city, but not many of them compete with the Dragon as a public house. I can get beer anywhere. I have several breweries within walking distance of my apartment, and even the new sandwich shop I dig a few blocks away has a single tap, but the 18 rotating taps here, decent food, and people who know my name (most of the time, at least) don’t really compete with too many other places around. The closest to that is Bailey’s Taproom, but they don’t serve any food. And they don’t know my name because they aren’t ten blocks away from my apartment.
This past weekend Hanne was quite the busy beaver and she spent most of the time working while I spent most of my weekend tooling around on my computer, playing games and just generally being happy that my job stops at 4:00 PM on Friday. Not exactly time well spent, but whatever–it was the weekend. Friday night we met my Dad and her Dad up in North Portland at a new beer bar that I’ve been wanting to try. They had a number of taps (eight or ten, something like that), about 100 different bottled beers (or what felt like 100), and a nice selection of Cornish pasties. It was a pretty specialized place, but the beer was great, the atmosphere was great, and if it wasn’t 30 minutes away by public transportation I’d go there more frequently. Hanne and I try and go out on Fridays, and I think we’re going to head to Hopworks Urban Brewery this Friday, which I was at recent for the Fresh Hop “Tastival” with our Dads that Hanne had to miss due to schoolwork. That was an odd day, if I remember it, and I have to say–there are a few blank moments. I remember beer, and walking home, and then to the grocery store, and cooking food, and lots of wine, but a few specifics evade me.
We tried our best to go out on Saturday night instead of cooking a nice dinner and staying in, but we were thwarted at every turn. Our initial plan was to get dinner at Ken’s Artisan Pizza and then catch a showing of WALL-E at the Laurelhurst Theater, but Ken’s had a 45-minute wait and the movie was sold out. We ended up having Tex-Mex at an OK place in the neighborhood, a glass of wine at Noble Rot, and then finished the evening with several episodes of “House.” Except for the going out part, it was exactly like many of our other Saturday nights.
Sunday we did make dinner to make up for Saturday, though, combining bok choy, ginger, carrot, and garlic in soy sauce, wrapping won-ton wrappers around it, and steaming it in my steamer that’s gone unused since I figured out how to make rice on the stove. We also cooked some edamame, which we were horrified to realize we’d never made before despite both of us having the capability of eating meals solely based on soy bean pods coated with salt and pepper. The dumplings had a bit too much ginger, but we’ll fix that next time. The edamame was perfect.
Almost time for another mourning beer.
I elected the President of the United States of America
Having voted in two Presidential elections prior to last Tuesday, I had an average of 0/2. Not good. But I have finally voted for a President who won, and I’m going to go ahead and say that I was primarily responsible for it over the tens of millions of others, just because it makes me feel good.
Sunday night I made what was probably one of the most delicious risottos ever crafted by human hands, or at least of the ones I’ve had. I used homemade chicken stock as the base and the mixture included red and green bell peppers, celery, chicken sausage, onion, shallot, fresh tomatoes, and a small amount of fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. It was sublime. The rice was perfectly al-dente, the veggies soft but not soggy, and the consistency perfect for mopping up with a piece of bread afterwards. It was good comfort food to make up for Saturday night, in which the age old question of “What would happen if I threw a party and no one came?” was finally answered. 20 invitations, 12 RSVPs, five maybes, three attendees. I don’t exactly feel snubbed since everyone who backed out was either sick or out of town, but it was still somewhat annoying and Hanne and I have a lot of food left, including some triple-chocolate cookies that were the baking equivalent of crack. We put those out of their misery pretty fast.
Sunday marked two notable events: the brewing of this year’s Hallebrewjah Christmas ale and the first all-grain batch of beer brewed with grain crushed using my own barley mill. I got a much better crush of the grain this time, and I managed to jump-start the amount of alcohol in my beer as well as likely get a better flavor. The beer was brewed with orange zest, freshly-grated ginger, cinnamon, vanilla, and honey, and it’s a beautiful dark brown color. I expect it will come in around 7.5% alcohol, which is far more than I expected considering that until Sunday, I had yet to break 5.5% alcohol with all grain brewing. The new barley mill really fixed me right up.
On the other hand, I’m happy to know that I can finally make a “big beer” if I so desire.
Yesterday I ordered a turkey for Thanksgiving, and on order for me is a 12-pound Northwest heritage, organic, free-range, antibiotic-free bird that will be deliciously brined and cooked to perfection. Hell, I might even go the extra step and make my own veggie stock with which to brine the bird, but that might be a lot of cooking just to say “I did it!” instead of purchasing $0.99 cans of veggie stock. I ordered the bird from Viande Meats, which is the charcuterie owned b the same people who own and run Simpatica Dining Hall, home of the most delicious Sunday brunch in the Portland area as far as I’m concerned. Their meats (which they cure, smoke, prepare, or whatever it calls for) are always done to perfection, and I’m hoping that getting my meat from them gives me a good base to start with. Granted, I didn’t exactly get a bad turkey last time I roasted one (2006, the first Thanksgiving with Hanne in which we’d onyl been dating for a month), but I’m very hopeful that this one will turn out even better.
One thing that will make the whole process even better is that Hanne and I are hosting Thanksgiving dinner this year, so there will be no shlepping of ingredients over to my Dad’s. No car loads, no driving, and I can drink as much as I want during dinner if I choose to relax that way after what will end up being two solid days of cooking. Our plan is to prepare the core of the meal ourselves (turkey, cranberry sauce, dressing, gravy, etc.) and hav people bring accessories. Hanne’s even going to make both pumpkin and apple pies at my request! We’ll toss some wood in our fireplace (being delivered tomorrow!), and it’ll be a grand old time for everyone.
Time to start looking for recipes.