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To get to [livejournal.com profile] serenity_valley and [livejournal.com profile] str8ontilmornin's perfect Craftsman bungalow for dinner last night, I drove from my admittedly very-cool inner-city neighborhood, up onto the bluff looking out over the river and the shipyards and the vastness of Forest Park on the other side, to their very-cool neighborhood near the St Johns Bridge.

It was a perfect Portland day: sunny and warm with a light breeze, and it was Saturday. The river was glassy, the hills were that almost-black forest green, and traffic in the bike lane that runs all the way along Rosa Parks and Willamette Boulevards was pretty lively.



There's a tour of the house first. Meticulous and loving refinishing of all the old 1920's woodwork, and a general-but-not-slavish adherence to what is best in the Craftsman style. A library room lined with glass-doored bookcases and filled with two armchairs where, seriously, I could set the most wonderful romantic scene in a novel. I got a look at their new computers (so, so envious!).

Then we went outside. They have this backyard, [livejournal.com profile] serenity_valley and [livejournal.com profile] str8ontilmornin. It's kind of a bowl, which they excavated themselves by hand, surrounded on one side by a curvy retaining wall, which they built themselves, and on the other by the house, and sheltered over with the most elegantly pruned maple and apple trees. In the arms of this enclosure they have a table for four. From the screen porch wafts music from their stellar iTunes collection. There's a scent of woodsmoke in the air from the grill.

The sun is heading into the West Hills as we sit over glasses of ale and little plates of cheeses and dried cherries and almonds, and [livejournal.com profile] str8ontilmornin's handmade bread. [livejournal.com profile] str8ontilmornin is a chef. He teaches baking and pastry at the culinary college. So when I say handmade bread, I mean this perfectly textured, crusty, richly yeasty loaf that he slices wafer-thin not just as a prop to cheese, but a complement.

We nibble. We chat. I ate at least half the loaf of bread and most of the brie. After a while, the sun is down and dusk is upon us, and the rows of little citronella candles along the retaining walls are flickering, and the string of white fairy lights among the apples overhead is casting a pleasant glow over the table. They bring out the dinner.

Let me tell you about the perfection of the dinner. Salad of bitter arugula, purple cabbage, fennel and Rainier cherries in a light vinaigrette. Pork chops, approximately an inch and a half thick, marinated for a very long time in something white-winey, I think, lightly coated in herbs and sea-salt and cooked in the smoky wood-fired grill until one second after the pink is gone, sliced into thin rectangles of perfection arranged just-so on the plate. An artistically-twisted mound of angel-hair pasta, cooked not a moment longer than it should be, in a tomato-based sauce that had clearly been simmering for at least a day, and that did not run anywhere on the plate, but only permeated the pasta. A glass of Bordeaux (my humble contribution). More conversation.

The night grew dark, the temperature slowly declined from the mid 80s to the mid 60s. We got our jackets. We took a little stroll around the garden. We talked and talked.

Then came dessert. I mentioned that [livejournal.com profile] str8ontilmornin is a pastry chef, right? Fresh Oregon blueberry sorbet and opera cake. A triangle of opera cake, that he made, coated with ganache, layered with coffee and chocolate buttercream and more ganache. My piece had the treble clef on it in white chocolate.

More conversation--about sustainable housing and politics and what it's like to teach baking and pastry, and where to go on the Oregon coast for a great getaway-not-that-you-need-one-when-you-live-like-this, and Twitter, and the internet, and how the world is changing and our corporate overlords possibly don't understand this. Glowy lights, flickering candle-torches, black coffee. Slow, easy winding down to the end of the evening. Departure with hopes and plans to do it again.



That's is how to do Saturday night in Portland. I wish everyone could experience it because seriously, life just doesn't get much better than this.
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darkemeralds: A round magical sigil of mysterious meaning, in bright colors with black outlines. A pen nib is suggested by the intersection of the cryptic forms. (Default)
darkemeralds

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