If you are now one of my Facebook friends, you probably noticed, to your salivary glands' delight, that a preponderance of our posts have to do with food and drink. There are many good restaurants in the Tucson area, and prices are reasonable enough that we can afford to go out frequently. We also enjoy just getting together with friends late in the afternoon. But the main reason we have been eating out so much is that we find ourselves away from the house at lunch time, and lunch time is a great time to have a big meal. Not only is it less expensive than at dinner time, but it's much better for your metabolism to eat during the middle of the day and then lightly in the evening. Okay, so these are all just good excuses.
Living in the Boston area, and particularly in Acton, we have become used to getting the best of the best, both in vegetables and fish. We have slaked our thirst for really fresh vegetables, somewhat, with our finding the local organic garden we talked about in the last post. But finding good, fresh fish has proven to be somewhat elusive.
It's not that the grocery stores don't have a wide variety of fish. They do. And it's not that we can't get the Atlantic species we're used to; I am a big proponent of eating locally, and I would be very happy with good, fresh Pacific fish. And there's the key word: fresh. the majority of fish found in stores is either frozen, previously frozen, or never frozen, but with the sunken eyes that tell you it came off the boat more than a day or two ago. The two exceptions are salmon which, whether it's wild or farm raised, I can only enjoy every so often; and trout. The trout has turned out to be absolutely delicious, and since we have discovered it, we have eaten it about once a week.
(In all of the above I am excluding shrimp, which tends to be frozen and of very good quality whether you live in Boston or Arizona.)
One amusing difference we have found with the trout is that apparently Arizonians, if that is the right term, have much more fragile sensibilities when it comes to knowing the source of their food. In only one store we have been to so far have we seen the actual whole trout; everywhere else they sell either a filet or a headless, tailless body.
And to be fair to the restaurants, we have found two that seem to be able to get fresh fish and cook it properly: Bluefin and Poca Cosa, the latter being an outstanding Mexican/Sonoran style bistro.
We are now exactly 16 days away from closing on our house, and just under three weeks away from departing for our journey back to Acton. I'll save being maudlin for a subsequent post, since now we are too busy taking stock of what we need to do before we leave. We are done with all the shopping that we're going to do now. We have appointments set up with our contractor for the changes that will be made to the house while we are away. We have scheduled a temporary forwarding of mail with the post office from our vacation home to our Acton home. I still have a doctors appointment and a hair appointment. We have a couple of social engagements. We have to move out of our rental villa and into our friend's house for several nights, along with all of the stuff we have bought for the new house which we can't put into the new house until after we close. And we have to sort through all of our clothing and miscellaneous stuff to see what we can ship in order to minimize what we have in the car. Even the car has an appointment at the Volvo dealer; we have put on so many miles it's time for the next regular checkup!
And today is just another wonderful, sunny day here. Bob is out playing golf. We will both be working on our online courses for a couple of hours later. And then we're off to a movie this afternoon with a friend, followed by dinner here at the house with some of the fresh vegetables we picked up yesterday.
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