The Start of Thirteen

Well, we found ourselves a new apartment in December….and a great one at that.  I told you, things really do work out in time.

The place is in Northeast Portland, in an area that I didn’t really know too much about but am seriously diggin.

These are our new neighbors, we’ve named them Aflack and Af-black.   The ones below are the ladies, they also live right behind us.  Yes, our apartment has ducks and chickens, and no, I’m not kidding.  This is Portland, after all.

We moved into the apartment officially on Christmas Eve.

Funny story about that though.  I was so concerned with getting all of our stuff to the new place by the holiday that I completely spaced calling the gas and electric companies to switch them to our name.  Luckily the electric company was nice enough to keep our electricity on, but I can’t say the same for the gas company.  Christmas morning, as we attempted to make pancakes, we quickly learned that our stove wasn’t working and neither was our heat.  It was pretty pitiful, actually, because we had planned on spending the day quietly unpacking in our new place, eating and drinking wine, only two of which were feasible at this point but didn’t seem too appealing without the accompaniment of the third.  So, we scrambled to find restaurants that happened to be open.

This isn’t a picture of our Christmas brunch, but rather my favorite brunch cafe I’ve experienced in Portland, called SweeDeeDee.  My good buddy Rebekah took me one day.  It’s freaking adorable and highly, highly recommended.  Tim and I ate something sort of similar on Christmas morning, after much angst and desperation.

This is more indicative of what our Christmas day looked like. F YOU, IKEA DRESSER! Lesson learned…be prepared for the holidays, because NOTHING is open! But more importantly, never buy Ikea furniture ever again.

On the bright side of the holidays, I received these two bad boys as a gift from my parents this year, soooooo rad (love youuuu).
But back to my new apartment…a fridge is a very integral part of a house!  It’s important to me that mine shows some character.  As you can see, lots of fun stickers and photos from adventures as of late as well as lives past.  The dirty dishes and clutter in the background, also a kitchen staple of mine.

Captured by Porches Brewery, Emma brew.  It was consumed on a rock by the Willamette river on July 4th. I kept the bottle, obviously.

This tree lives right across the street.  It get cold sometimes, especially in the wintertime, so naturally some lovely Portlandian knitted it a sweater.

I like squash, especially those of the butternut and delicata breeds. The butternut went into the dish in the next photo, an odd creation of mine that was pretty tasty.

And the delicata, that went into this quiche I made earlier today.

That there’s my new stove.  It  is perfect and adorable, I’m kind of obsessed with it.

That and my cast-iron skillet.

You can make pretty much anything with it, like the other day when I decided to make a pear compote.

And these are just a few more pics of the new place.

A while back, I made potato samosas with mango persimmon chutney for the Iron Chef:Persimmon competition. I didn’t win, again, but it was a super fun project and that’s pretty much all that matters to me in the end (sort of).  I have the recipe lying around in a journal somewhere, maybe eventually I’ll get to posting it on here….na, probably not but please inquire if your curiosity strikes.

 

And lastly, I leave you with a few photos of our adventures to Mt. Hood, one of the coolest parts about living in Portland.  Not only snowboarding in a sweet spot an hour and a half away, but NIGHT SKIING! It’s nice to know that life goes on (and snowboarding still exists) outside of Aspen….and it’s fantastic.

A happy new years to you, maybe it be the best one yet.