mlk jr day, christmas revisited

here's another out of order post. this is from martin luther king jr weekend, when all us portland family members met fyo for the first time. it was christmas, part 2.
we had roast beef with a red wine demi-glaze, roasted root vegetables, horseradish mashed potatoes, butter lettuce and radicchio salad with fennel, cara cara oranges and tarragon vinaigrette and jeffrey's famous herb rolls.

st patricks day

troy made breakfast sausage again. this batch was the best ever. it was equal parts ground chicken, turkey and pork with shredded apple, sage, oats and maple and i'm sure more, but i don't know what other than magic.
we also had soda bread and jam and dubliner cheese.
troy put a leprechaun on my coffee mug, reclining in a rather fetching pose.

then for dinner, we had to make corned beef with potatoes, parnips, carrots and cabbage. and serve it with horseradish sauce and cold dark beer. i mean, that's the point of st patricks day, right?

mmm, tortilla soup

i like soup. recently, i made tortilla soup with chicken, kidney beans, chard and pasilla peppers. yum!

on the way home

we'd had some outstanding fish in port townsend: mussels the first night, salmon bought directly from the fisherman on his boat. but we hadn't yet had fish & chips.
we stopped at sea j's for lunch on the way out of town. as you can likely tell from the mouthwatering photo, the clam chowder and fish (fresh cod) & chips were outstanding. even the coleslaw was pretty good.
there are six community tables at sea j's and when you walk in the door, you are basically walking right into someone's lunch. the waitresses all ignored us as we stood there wondering if we were just supposed to sit or what. finally a fellow having lunch with his young daughter took pity on us ignorant out-of-towners and waved us over to join his table. one bite of that fresh, tender, crispy fish and we knew it was well-worth the intial awkwardness.

eating in port townsend, with martha & david

so this timeline is getting all funky because i just remembered that i had some pictures from our eating in port townsend. on this night, it was snowing. troy and i spent a little time in the hot tub and then came in and had a incredible sparkling red wine (matha has some amazing wines) with fromage blanc from the mount townsend creamery, red pepper jelly and landjager.

then for dinner, we had braised chicken with a mustard sauce, mashed potatoes and chard with a fantastic oregon pinot noir.

we love eating and visiting with martha and david.

a good salad

well, i can't wait for spring. but in the meantime, we had a good salad recently. i love salad.
this one had butter lettuce, blood oranges, fennel, avocado and radicchio with a creamy tarragon vinaigrette.

craving bouillabaisse something fierce

i think it was when we started driving along the puget sound; the salty fresh smell of the ocean. i started craving bouillabaisse something fierce. we looked for it in port townsend, but troy can't eat shrimp (so sad!) and we couldn't be sure that we were getting shrimp-free fish soup.

we ate lots of seafood on that trip, but no bouillabaisse. when we got home, we knew we had to make some. we watched julia make it, and then headed out to get some fish.

we made the broth with last year's garden tomatoes that we'd slow roasted, fennel, leeks, saffron, orange, basil, garlic and olive oil. i think. we added a couple kinds of fish. one was a dover sole and i forget what the other was. and clams and mussels.

it was luminous.

march family dinner

we're starting a family dinner tradition; every month, the angeline, toth/nelson, and linden famlies trade off hosting family dinner. we hosted in march. i only got one picture of in the makings, and none of the finished meal and eating, but i did get one of tila wearing a saucepan lid as a hat. he's cooking, you see. he's making lemon.

for dinner, we had braised chicken and wild mushrooms with leeks from our garden, rice with saffron and lemon, and carrots and parnsips with rosemary and maple.

a good breakfast

it was a couple weeks ago now, but we finally opened our christmas present from the nelson/toth family: homemade avar. amazing! for breakfast, we had grapefruit--that mom brought us back from palm springs, fresh picked from trees there-- and from our port townsend trip, whole wheat sourdough (the real kind, made from starter) from the bakery there with fromage blanc from mount townsend creamery and that delicious avar.