Author’s Note:  I originally included projects in my previous posts as an incentive to keep me writing on this blog.  It’s felt like these are starting to distract from the post content, so the projects will now be included BELOW the main post content.

The wife and I moved here five years ago from Colorado.  Yes, five years ago, we lived in a state with bigger mountains, higher altitude, and more sunny days.  Of course, it also didn’t have quick access to the ocean, as many deciduous trees, or Blue Star Donuts.

Those differences show the blessing of living in multiple places over a lifetime:  You get to experience what the pluses and minuses are of each place.  What better way to share this with you all than to write a list of five lessons learned from living here in the Pacific Northwest?  Sounds good to me.

So to jump right in:

LESSON 1:  It rains here.  A lot.

People tend to picture Seattle as an extremely rainy city, but it and Portland are pretty darned close in how much rain each gets per year.  Within the five years we’ve been here, there have definitely been variations in annual rainfall, but I will never forget the year we had almost nine straight months of rain and gloom.  Not fun.

On the other hand, all that rain does tell you that the temperatures are pretty mild.  Snowstorms are rare, although they do happen every now and then.  What I don’t really miss is driving on ice and snow; while I do have experience with it, it’s been more fun to not have to deal with it.  And if I really want to experience it again, I’ll finally go check out what Mount Hood is like in the wintertime.

LESSON 2:  People go to the ocean during hot weekends.

As I mentioned at the start of this post, living near Portland, you have pretty quick access to the ocean.  In under two hours, you can go from city life to staring at your choice of publicly accessible coastline.  There’s Haystack Rock, memorable for those of us who watched The Goonies, plus plenty of places to get good seafood.

While I enjoy this access during the less touristy times of the year, ironically I don’t enjoy it during the summer months when it’s typically much nicer to go to the beach.  That’s because you can see the traffic begin to build up, and up, and up around the weekends in summer when the weather gets particularly hot and people want an escape.  Blame it on the concept that you don’t need air conditioning here (lies, dang lies!), blame it on the desire to get to a place with fresher air, or blame it on a culture that feels like you have to leave your town during the weekend to find adventure.  It all amounts to the same:  A flood of people puttering their way along on 26, comfortable waiting in ever-longer lines of cars to get to the ocean.

I have taken to heart the lesson of enjoying the ocean in the few months when you’re guaranteed sunshine.  What I don’t get is why so many people are fine sitting for a long time in their cars to get there, and a long time in their cars to get back, which means less time actually at their destination.  Not my cup of tea.

LESSON 3:  Being a tree-hugging hippie is just fine, and so is being a right-wing conservative.

As I mentioned in this previous post, I grew up in an area where everyone was pretty much of the same appearance and experiences.  Moving around the U.S. for work and working with or experiencing life with people of different backgrounds, ethnicities, and perspectives on life helped to blow up my insular world in the best way possible.  Coming up to the Portland area has helped to take that even one step further with the broad mixture of people that are here.

I’ve met strong feminists, hard-core conservatives, nature lovers, flat-out crazy people, and more.  The amazing thing I’ve observed in most places we’ve gone, though, is that all these people are actually nice to each other.  Sure, there are arguments and people on opposing sides calling bullcrap on each other.  Even with that, though, there’s this general level of respect for your fellow human being, and often a willingness to help out people who are lost or in need.

There are still people who are complete jerks, and people who maintain their prejudices and anger no matter that the world might show them otherwise.  Even with those people, it’s great to live in an area where most people just accept you as you are.

LESSON 4:  Public transport is great here.  And sometimes creepy.

Coming from places where there hasn’t been any public transportation available, TriMet for Portland and the surrounding areas is AWESOME.  There are buses, streetcars, and the MAX line that are all available to get you from one place to another.  For those who need to use bikes to get that last little bit to the home or office, they even have (a few) spaces on the MAX and bus (not sure about the streetcar) to store your bike.

Don’t get me wrong, the lesson about public transport here isn’t strictly a glowing one.  The buses don’t run everywhere I’d like to go, and sometimes the MAX has to slow down or gets stopped because some idiot drove up on the tracks.  There have been incidents of violence on the MAX, too, which is scary.  Even beyond these things, there are definitely people who get on the MAX specifically that you can tell aren’t all with it in their head.  Most don’t really do anything apart from perhaps get too close into your personal space, but between that and the violence you just need to pay attention to what’s going on around you.

LESSON 5:  Plants grow here.  And grow, and grow, and grow.

This ties back all the way to Lesson 1 about how much it rains here.  With all that rain, it’s really easy for plants to grow.  In Colorado, it was like, “OK, I have to really nurture and watch things to ensure that they can grow well.”  After the first couple years in Oregon, that was shot to heck because we found out you don’t really need to do anything to make things grow–they just do.

The apple trees in our backyard are one good example of that.  We didn’t do much except some basic pruning the first year, and those just blossomed like crazy.  Our grapevines also just grew and grew without much TLC.  This year, when the grapevines were really throwing out some grapes, I hesitated to cut the extra growth for fear of damaging the grapes–and then the darned things took off so much they were busting the lines holding them up and getting into all kinds of places they shouldn’t have.  So on top of things growing and growing, this lesson was “If something’s growing too much, don’t be afraid to chop some branches off, because it’ll grow back whether you like it or not.”

Oh, and in case you thought it was only the good stuff that grows a lot, no–moss grows EVERYWHERE during the rainy season.  It’s on sidewalks, other plants, roofs.  I never knew you might need people to come spray your roof to clean plants off until we moved here.

LESSONS FOR OREGON COMPLETED

There you have it, five lessons learned from our time here in Oregon.  Obviously, there’s lots more to living in a place like the Pacific Northwest versus other places, but five’s just fine by me.  Feel free to comment on your lessons learned about where you live; I’d love to hear it!

THIS POST’S PROJECT

There are a lot of people who make muffins, cupcakes, and other similar muffin tin-based items.  It’s one area I’ve rarely ventured in to.  Well, here’s to trying something new.  Rather than starting with some fantastic confection, though, I thought:  Why not just try to make a @!#$ good muffin, and go from there?

With that thought in mind, I turned back to The Cook’s Illustrated Baking Book, and their Bakery-Style Muffins.  The advantage to these is that:

1. I’ve got most of the ingredients on-hand already, and
2. The recipe is really short.

Those two make for a smile on my face right there, given how time-constrained I’ve been lately.  On top of this, the recipe calls out for actually greasing the muffin tin rather than using paper liners–what a novel concept.  Maybe it’s just an engineer’s mindset, but all the paper liners are good for is making your muffin look pretty, and why do I care about that?  I want to eat the muffins, not sit around and stare at how good they look.  Plus, when you try to peel the paper liner off, it rips off part of your muffin with it, and then you’re stuck picking the bits of muffin off the liner or throwing away a (hopefully) tasty treat.  So for this project, these muffins are going to bake naked.

AN OVERVIEW

The recipe really is easy, at least for putting things together.  You have a set of dry ingredients you toss together in a bowl, a set of wet and dry ingredients that go together in the mixer, and then you combine both of them and some yogurt, and bake.  Like most baking, it sounds easy when you look at it at that level.

The reality was that, when you don’t start with all your ingredients laid out, it’s messy.  It took way longer than I wanted it to, and way way longer than the book suggested.  Most of that was because I was trying to work around all the other mess that was in the kitchen from previous holiday baking.  No biggie; it just made added some more time.

BAKING, AND THE RESULTS

Once all the ingredients were put together, it was time to get them in the muffin tin, and put that in the oven.  Here’s how they ended up looking.

They baked great.  So great, in fact, that the muffin tops all merged together and made the pan look more like it had cornbread in it than muffins.  They didn’t slide out of the tin, either, so it was a little bit of prying and scraping to get all the muffins onto a plate.  As I’ve said, muffins aren’t usually my thing, so this had limited success as you can see here.

Yup, some tops were falling off, some sides were falling off, and they looked more square than round.

Still, even though my muffins aren’t going to win any awards for appearance, did they at least taste OK?  According to my testers (meaning the wife and the boys), they were really good.  The wife particularly noted that they had some heft to them, and I like the use of yogurt to add nice flavor and texture.

I wouldn’t consider this project really a victory, but that’s mostly because of my lack of skill more than anything to do with the recipe itself.  That’s the fun of baking, though:  There’s always more to try, and try again.