First CSA a Hit So Far

I only learned about CSA's (Community Supported Agriculture) this year. They are beyond plentiful in Eugene, with I think something like 40-60 providers. We signed up for a fall CSA with Groundwork Organics. What this is, is a weekly delivery of locally, and with our choice, organically grown produce. In the spring we will likely sign up for multiple of them, with potentially one doing dairy and/or meat as well. Anyway, it's been really great so far. They provide a bunch of things that we wouldn't usually buy, or in some cases, have never even heard of!

We've had I think 3 deliveries now. Each week we've gotten 1-2 pounds of lettuce/greens (lots of spinach, field greens), a bunch or three of carrots, and then things like parsnips, beets, dill, Italian parsley, watercress, squash, potatos, onions, arugala, garlic, leeks, and more. The apples we got last week are the most flavorful apples I've had in a long time (they were "Liberty" apples I believe).

The delivery we got today included leeks, red potatos, and dill, with a recipe to go along with it (they always include recipes). It also included "Delicata squash" (roughly 8-10" long, white with green veins, and tubular, maybe 4" in diameter), with a recipe, and we'll try that out. I don't think we've bought salad greens at the market for a month due to this, which is great.

We've tried several things we have either never had, or needed to go find recipes to figure out what to do with it, etc. (the roasted parsnips were yummy). We used a bunch of the salad greens, carrots, etc. tonight, and I roasted up 4 heads of garlic as well.

I can't wait to see what the next one brings us, as well as what we sign up for in the spring (when the real CSA season occurs).

Eugene Restaurant Review: Marché

I had been told that Eugene had a lot of great restaurants. We've been here for a few months now, and I hadn't really felt that Eugene had lived up to that, in fact, I'd been fairly disappointed so far. Tonight changed that in a big way. My wife, parents, and I had dinner at Marché.  

Dinner was superb!  All of us thoroughly enjoyed it.  The atmosphere was great - clean, crisp, yet warm, and relatively casual.  We had reservations and were seated promptly at a nice corner table.  Our waitress was great, and was helpful with the wine choices.  She knew the wines on their list quite well, as well as knew California vs. Oregon characteristic differences and other points that helped.  

We started off with some great cocktails, and placed our order:

• My mom: Heirloom tomato and goat cheese salad, side of chard to split with my dad, and the fresh, Chinook salmon.
• My dad: Heirloom tomato and goat cheese salad, and the pork chops.
• My wife: Trio of bruschetta for appetizer, and then she went for the heirloom tomato salad, side of onion rings, and side of beans with bleu cheese, for her entrée.
• Myself: Breaded/fried oysters, and the duck.

First off, the heirloom tomato salad was absolutely outstanding, all of us couldn't stop raving.  The tomatoes were perfect, the goat cheese was outstanding, and at the proper temperature, and the light dressing was killer (so good we asked how they made it, and plan to try to reproduce it at home :)  I ate a chunk of my wife's salad, and again, just stellar.

The fried oysters were ok, and are something sort of unusual for me anyway.  I think slightly lacking in flavor, but honestly, with all the other awesome food we had, it was fine, and we ate them all.

As for the entree's, all of them were excellent.  My mom loved her salmon, and I tried the pork which was very good - very juicy and tender, so often restaurants dry out pork, but not at all in this case.  Also, the grilled peaches that went with it were a really great match, and a nice change from the the more typical apples.  

The duck I had was hands down the best duck I've had in as long as I can recall.  I don't order duck all that often, but had it recently in the Bay area, and it was pretty average on that occasion.  The duck came sliced, rare, with a extremely tasty crust around the edges, and in the most wonderful sauce!  Everyone was going nuts for the sauce, and in fact, we had them bring a little extra bowl for dipping the onion rings, as we found that a great combo :)  The sauce was the perfect amount too - by no means swimming in it, but also, enough to coat some of the potatoes and chard.

Speaking of chard, yes, we had a lot, given two of our entrees came with it, and we had two sides.  It was so darn good though that we ate nearly all of it, and took the remainder home.  Perfectly cooked, great seasoning, oh, just so good.  I wish I had more room, as I'd have finished it off.

Finally, we managed to save enough room to have some dessert.  My dad and I split the cheese plate, and my wife had the creme brulee.  First, thank you Marché for not putting berries in the creme brulee!  Very good.  The cheese plate had a small serving of the same goat cheese used on the heirloom tomato salad, and a Camembert I particularly liked.  Given the intent for this to be a dessert for one person, it was a good portion, but since we split it, I'd probably have liked to have one more cheese (not that our stomachs needed it!).  We also had some espresso.

The food was so good, I almost forgot we had wine.  Aside from a glass of malbec we sent back (and indeed, the waitress had told us it wasn't the best), the cab was good.  We had wound up going with just wine by the glass, as honestly, their wine prices are quite high - even by California standards.  They had a fair number of good wines, but with cocktails, and the prices of the wine, we just decided to skip it.  I guess that would be about my only knock.  Aside from that, outstanding.  Definitely the best meal I've had in Eugene, and Marché gets my vote as the best restaurant in town (that I've been to so far anyway). I would highly recommend it.

Update: I also posted this review here on Yelp. I'm finding Yelp more useful for restaurant reviews than say Eugene Weekly's food thing.

Ultimate Espresso

The other day I talked with Michael at Wandering Goat in Eugene for a while. We'd had some discussions in email, and I headed down to buy some Chupacabra beans from them, and say hi. I did that, but we also talked quite a while about espresso, machines, and grinders. He gave me some great tips.

First, Wandering Goat is my favorite choice of coffee beans right now. They are also simply an awesome company that is well comitted to organic, fair trade coffee, as well as super environmental preparation (their roaster is the only one of its kind in the Pacific Northwest, producing I think they said 80% less biproduct/polutants, etc.). The shop is also cool. It's a little off the beaten path, but in downtown (on Madison between 2nd and 4th). And, I had a truly, truly, superb macchiato there yesterday (and yes, the real kind, not that abomination Starbucks makes).

I've been wanting to get a serious espresso machine, that is not a super-auto like I have now. I have the best super auto at the moment, but you just can't tweak it further, and they don't generate the same pressure levels as a semi-auto. I had been eyeing an Rancilio Silvia, but Michael turned me on to the Expobar Brewtus II, which in checking appears to be the absolute finest home machine on the planet (and the only one with a double boiler). As he mentioned, your abilities will not exceed this machine. It ain't cheap, although it's less than my super auto! But then you factor in a grinder.

I have an ok grinder, but was eyeing a Mazzer Mini. He suggested getting a Mazzer Super Jolly instead of the mini, and said to check eBay (or eBay Tagex). It's awesome, because you can pick up a Super Jolly, normally a $1000 grinder, for like $250, and then buy new burr heads for it for $50. So, that's a $1000 grinder for $300. I just checked and there are two Super Jolly's up there right now. Also, you can put the Mini's bean holder on a Super Jolly to cut down on size, but still have the larger burr heads of the Super Jolly.

Eugene (Oregon) People are So Nice!

It's really interesting to see how different people are here in Eugene/Oregon. Everyone is so nice and friendly. It's quite different than California. After my flight home from the Bay area on Thursday, I talked to three people at some length, while getting off the plane, walking over to baggage, waiting for bags, etc.

Rich was also a CA transplant, and had in fact come from the same place as we had. We talked for quite some time about kids, his grandkids, golf (and the crazy Bandon, OR golf scene and real estate situation), etc.

After talking to Rich, I talked to Karen who is the director of emergency services for the Red Cross (for 7 counties here). She mentioned the kids ID event that was happening this weekend, which is great, as we'll go do that.

Prior to Rich and Karen, at the end of my flight I talked to the man sitting next to me (he slept during the flight, and I worked). He has a crazy job, where he works on construction projects in Vegas (currently on the Venetian plaza). He is in Vegas for 6 weeks, then home for 5 days, then back - all the time. He's been doing this for 15 years! He loves Oregon, and has grown very tired of Vegas (where I believe he said there is now a shooting every 8 hours!).

Yesterday I also talked to one of my neighbors, Dino, who I hadn't met yet. He's the owner/builder of one of the houses next to us. Good guy, and he took some time out to talk about some house stuff. For example, after I saw his outdoor fireplace (which I'd love!), he talked about how we could do that on our deck, costs, options, etc. It wasn't a sales pitch (wouldn't be something he, as the "builder", would do anyway), just nice neighborly chatter.

What struck me about these folks was simply has easy going, nice, friendly, etc. they were. The conversations simply flowed with no effort. Sure I've had talks like this with people in CA (you'd hope so given I grew up there, and have lived there all but 5 years of my life). But it's just different. You can "feel" the difference. At times it's also weird. I think we've grown used to being sometimes suspicious, guarded with our kids, etc. So we're learning the more pleasant openness of the Oregon culture.

Eugene After First Week

We've been living in Eugene for a week now. We're still in the midst of unpacking and getting back to every day life, but things are going well so far.

This morning, I woke up to see it was raining, and I was psyched! Yes, I'm weird like that :) It had begun to clear up some by about mid morning, and we headed to opening day of the farmer's market, where it didn't rain on us at all. We bought some veggies, salsa, bread, etc. The kids were restless, so we headed off to lunch.

Lunch was at a grill at the Oakway Center. Then we hung out in the courtyard for a while while the kids played, and Xander specifically enjoyed getting rained on. Then it was off to a park back in our neighborhood. We were at the park until 4pm, the whole time it was sunny. Finally, headed home to move a bit of furniture around and then make dinner. Had a tasty Mexican spread. After dinner it seemed hot, and I realized it had gotten up to 77 in the house, with all the sun streaming in. Opened some windows, which was a great bit of fresh air, and enjoyed the rest of the evening.

Looking back on the week, a few other notes:

• Market of Choice is my favorite market in town, but it sure seems expensive. We'll have to see. The place is gorgeous (doesn't hurt that the closest one to us is brand new and very nicely done). It's similar to say an Andronicos, or maybe an aspiring Whole Foods, etc. Great cheese selection (yea!), cool cafe with fresh pizzas, good meat selection and quality, big spread of produce, lots of organic, etc.
  
• Bicycles are a VERY common way to travel around town here in Eugene, which is something I love. I'm now investigating a town bike. I'm likely going to go with a Niner, and use it both as a town bike, as well as an alternative mtb.
• Our dryer is still not hooked up. When it was delivered, the house didn't have the special vent attachment for the house, so they couldn't finish it. Then, once we had that, on Sears second trip out, they couldn't seem to plug in this vent attachment (which I've since managed to get in, but it was tricky indeed), nor did they have the right power cord (which I've since purchased and wired up). Now the real trick is to figure out how to get the vent hose attached, and be able to climb out of the space without having to use a real excess of vent tubing. Sears comes again on Monday, so we'll see.

It's Comcastic!

Well, I hope it will be Comcastic! Ordered up new phone, cable TV, and Internet service all in one with Comcast today, for our new house in Eugene. Yep, that's phone over cable. They had the fastest net service in the area (8MBit down, 784k up). We have a cable modem now, and have had really good luck with it, so I hope that continues.

The cable will include HD, and we have two of the new TiVo Series 3 HD units on the way from Amazon. Comcast will give us four cable cards (two per box) to put in them. Pretty cool, although more for my wife than me, as I barely watch TV these days.

The phone is pretty good too. It includes unlimited local and long distance calling, and 12 features (stuff like voice mail, call forwarding, etc.). All of this, setup for two rooms, etc, etc., is $130/month ($15 of that is for the 3 extra cable cards - they give you one for free). Seems fairly good, although if you did a lot of long distance calling this would probably start to pay off pretty well. Our cable modem now costs me $68/month (this is for the "residential router" package, which means I can "legally" (i.e. I don't violate the ToS) put a router and as many computers as I want behind it), my phone typically costs $45, and our DirecTV (with Tivo) costs about $70/month. So, that's $183, and thus I figure we're saving about $58/month (minus some, as the $130 through Comcast doesn't include the Tivo service).

Moving to Eugene, Oregon

We (my wife, kids, and I) will be moving to Eugene, Oregon in a couple months (probably in April). We signed the counter-offer on a house today, so hopefully escrow goes well, and we'll own it in March. We're pretty excited, but nervous of course as well. We don't know anyone there. My wife's parents and brother and his family will move later this year (no commune jokes please!). Looking forward to it though. It was a move completely by choice, and I will continue to work for Adobe from there (from the home office).

We spent last Saturday driving around with our real estate agent, and wound up still loving a house we'd seen back in October, which had recently had the price dropped, so we went for it. I have a map showing our drive and various waypoints up on Discover Machine. I recently got a GPS unit, so used it on the drive, which was really quite handy. I put a waypoint in for every house we went in to, as well as lunch spot, and so on. It was cool to look at the overall route afterwards and see where all we went from a 10,000 foot type of view. I uploaded my data from my GPS into Google Earth Plus, and then saved a KML file out, which can be uploaded to Discover Machine (a site done in Rails :).

This will of course be a very convenient location for RailsConf later this year, as well as cool conferences like OSCON.

Moving to Eugene, Oregon?

My wife, kids, and I have been thinking about moving for a while now. We can't stand the heat here in Rocklin, CA, and have been wanting a different kind of town - less strip malls, more outdoor and healthy living oriented culture, better coffee ;-) and so on. We're now planning to move to Eugene next year, which is relatively shocking to me. I had thought we'd pick Bend or Portland, and was fairly biased against Eugene, but then being thorough, went to visit last week. We wound up liking it quite a lot. Also, we went into 10 houses with a realator and liked a lot of them, and it's reasonably priced (by CA standards).

The main downside from my perspective so far, is that the startup and tech culture is relatively minimal, Portland being quite superior. But, I have a ton of experience working remotely (did so for 6 years for multiple employers), so know it can work. Mainly I'd just miss the energy of being colocated with your other startup cohorts. For the time being I'd simply plan to work remotely in my existing job.

All in all, quite exciting. We've even found a house we love, so the question now becomes whether we go for that, and own two houses until we can move and sell ours, or wait a bit. Might be a crazy next few months.