Wine dinner

Last night I attended the wine dinner Tyler helped create. Here's the five-course menu, with an intermezzo, he prepared:


Chilled Plum Bisque
duck prosciutto, grapefruit, basil



Fresh Penn Cove Mussels
lemon goat's milk ricotta ravioli, smoked putanesca, wild watercress, shallots


Rabbit Roulade
Lambs lettuce, mascarpone, roasted peppers, sunchoke flan, sunflower sprouts, pear, truffle oil


Intermezzo
carrot and ginger water



Herb Seared Lamb Saddle
hedgehog mushroom confit, fingerling potatoes, braised endive, beets, lamb jus


Meyer Lemon Tart
pine nut crust

The Madness

It's the most wonderful time of the year — buzzer beaters, Cinderella stories and ruined brackets. When March Madness is here, I'm glued to the television as soon as it starts.

And when No. 9 seed Northern Iowa took out No. 1 Kansas in the second round, I remembered when I first started watching the tournament.

I fell in love with the Madness in sixth grade when I watched the Arizona Wildcats — a No. 4 seed — win it all with Miles Simon leading the charge. I documented the event by cutting out newspaper clippings with headlines stating "Simon says NCAA," and tapping the collection to my bedroom door.

That year, the Wildcats beat Kentucky 84-79 in overtime to win their first national title. Arizona became the first team in the tournament's history to beat three No. 1 seeds on the road to victory. You don't get a much better underdog story than that, and from then on I was hooked.

Any team is beatable on any given day, and that's what makes the tournament so great. Northern Iowa believed this when they beat Kansas, and I hope the Huskies believe when they play West Virginia on Thursday.

Inati Bay

We took a trip to Inati Bay on Monday with Eric. We originally planned to go snowboarding, but the warm weather and the wind convinced us that sailing would be a much more fun activity.

Once we arrived, we took the Small Miracle — the dinghy Steve made — out for a spin. We rowed to shore and explored the yacht club's private beach, found two abandoned vessels, built a fire and beer-boiled brauts. After the feast, we retired back to the boat for cribbage and improvised Cranium.

The next day the wind found us on the way back to Bellingham, and we sailed home in no time at all. It was a good thing Steve was there to help us back into the slip, since the wind created some minor trouble docking that afternoon.

Bloom