Harvest

     As summer comes to a close this September, our garden is in it's last great spurt of activity before falling dormant for the winter.  Our plum tree's branches are weighed down with more plums than we can pick, and our kitchen counters are covered with the ripe tomatoes.  This end of season bounty is far more than we could ever hope to eat before it goes bad, so all week we've been making prunes, freezing tomato sauce and plums.  In addition, we need to eat a lot of it now.

     For dinner tonight, I'm making a tomato sauce, with a small fraction of our tomatoes.  For dessert, we're going to put together a plum crisp, which will also use a tiny fraction of our harvest.  Once Dad returns with phizzini fixings and ice cream to go with dessert, we'll be able to eat.

     The meat sauce was excellent, if you have fresh tomatoes, I definitely recommend using them in a sauce.  The plum crisp was good too, though there is some danger from ingesting so many plums.  They tend to move through an intestine at speeds, like, well, plums through an intestine.  The whole meal was a great way to use our garden's bountiful harvest, and there should be some left over for Cyrus next week too.

If It Ain't Fried, It Ain't Cooked

     The first weekend of the school year is upon us.  Yesterday was the Trask Mountain Assault, an intense, muddy, cross-country meet in rural Yamhill County.  Last year, Cyrus ran in the open race, nominally representing Sellwood Middle School, and he planned to do so again this year with two of his friends.  But last week, the second day of school, he realized he had a broken thumb and had a MYS Jazz Band audition the same day, so he couldn't run.  Cyrus has a splint that he has to wear for about 6 weeks. We've taken to calling him Snap. Today was lazier, we took a hike around Mt. Tabor, (the only volcano within city limits in the U.S.) And got down to dinner - fried chicken, watermelon-tomato-feta salad and a green salad with homemade bleu cheese dressing.

          The fried chicken took awhile, allowing plenty of time to make the two salads.  The anticipation made it taste  even better. We might regret it when the paramedics arrive to administer nitroglycerin,  or in the morning when the entire house feels a bit greasy, like the inside of a fast food restaurant. But for tonight it was delicious. As they say in some parts of the world, "If it ain't fried, it ain't cooked."

And We're Back! (Sorry For The Break)

     Well, It looks like we managed to miss all of August again.  Like last year, we've been on the road every Sunday. First we were in Maine, then I was at Cross-Country camp (Cy made dinner, but without me, nobody thought to write.)  The third Sunday of the month found me at work, and Mom, Dad and Cy at the summer swimteam end-of-summer potluck.  Last week we had just gotten back from our backpacking trip in the Gorge, and we got deli sandwiches and rushed off to Trek in the Park, for their last show of the season. Trek in the Park is like Shakespeare in the Park - only it is live actors performing Star Trek episodes.

     But now, it's September, and the impending doom that is the school year has forced us into a more rigid  schedule.  For now though, the weather is still warm, and the sun still shines.  Grilling season.  A hobo pack is currently on the grill, fresh dug potatoes from our garden, onions and carrots.  Waiting in the fridge is a meat I don't think we've ever cooked before.  As it turns out, you can buy whole sardines from the New Seasons meat counter.  And by whole I mean heads, guts, spines, eyeballs whole (brains too).  Six or seven inches long, they smell like, well, sardines.  We covered them in olive oil and salt, enough salt that I think if we leave them there long enough they'll be preserved.  At Mom's behest, I also made watermelon tomato salad, a summer classic.

     The sardines turned out great, though I must admit I'd rather just eat them from a can.  That way you don't have to clean eyeball chunks off of your grill.  The hobo pack was excellent, the potatoes warm and soft, the carrots, like all cooked carrots, sweet.  The watermelon-tomato salad was everything it always is, summery, sweet, and surprising.  An excellent way to end our summer.

I Don't Need To Comment On the Quality of the Burgers. Again.

    Last week, we were AWOL.  I had to lifeguard all day, and I had hoped that Cy would pen the blog.  Sufficed to say, he did not.  He did make dinner though, a picnic, that they took up to the Cathedral Park Jazz Festival, underneath the St. John's Bridge.  Like last summer, these next few weeks, we will be gone a fair bit.

     We're home this week though, and we're going to make the most of it.  This afternoon we went to see The Beasts of the Southern Wild.  Mom cried, which I guess is as good a review as you can get.  Then Cy, Dad and I ran off to the David Douglas High School pool for "swim lessons" with Dennis Baker, an Olympic Trials finalist, and Masters World Record holder.  We got home around five-thirty, and got started on dinner.  Mom had lit the grill for us, and Dad and I went to work on the burgers for tonight's meal.  The burgers take only a few minutes on the grill, and as Dad watched them I prepared the requisite burger toppings.  As a side we've got grilled baby bok choi with romesco sauce and asparagus.
     After more than two-and-a-half years of Sunday Dinner, I don't need to comment on the quality of the burgers again.  The asparagus was excellent, greasy and crunchy with salt, the bok choi was good, though charred and far from great.  We've got a blueberry yogurt pie for dessert, and the Olympics for a finale.  Like whenever we make burgers, nothing spectacular, but still very good.

     Next week we probably won't be posting, though we might have something for you from our first day in Maine.

Stir-Fry (And Stir, And Stir, And Fry, And Fry)

     This weekend was the annual campout at our friend's cabin on Mt. Hood.  Every year, the kids will tromp through the woods on massive games of capture the flag, hide and seek and tag, and the parents sit around the campfire and drink.  They are so wrapped up in their own conversations that when, after a particularly intense game of capture-the-flag, a kid can stumble past the fire, blood dripping down one leg, hair matted with sticks and twigs, a dish towel clutched in their hand.  The parents reaction?  What reaction?  In other words, just like every year.  So, after I drove, and Dad biked home (50 miles), we knew we didn't have the energy for an elaborate tonight.  So we picked out something relatively simple, and good.
     While the beef for this stir-fry marinaded, Dad and I prepped the rest of the stir-fry, blanching broccoli, and chopping up red bell peppers.  Once the beef finished it's marinade, we cooked it in peanut oil, stirring and flinching a lot, the oil spitting it's small painful darts at us.  As with any stir fry, we had to make a mis en place, cook each item, then recreate our mis en place and put everything together and cook it again.  Ultimately though, the work was worth it.

     Like a good stir-fry, this one had more flavors than can be catalogued in a single bite, or many bites for that manner.  Unlike most stir-fries though, this one was
 followed by blueberry pie.  Even though today has been
rather gray, it was a good reminder that it IS summer.

Last Thing We Want

     Yesterday Cy and I had our first swim meet of the season.  While we were crushed by our rivals (and my high school teammates), a better day could not have been picked for jumping into and out of a pool.  It got up to a sweltering 90º (though that's admittedly nowhere near the heat baking the East Coast).  Today has been much the same, though minus the pool.  With that in mind, Cy picked out a meal that wouldn't heat up the house, and would require minimal effort from our heat-addled brains.

     He and Dad mixed up some burgers and kale-carrot salad for us, and then we retreated to the basement, which is ten degrees cooler, and infinitely more comfortable, to eat.  The burgers were quite good, as they always are, though the kale-carrot salad left Cyrus, Dad and I rather alienated, Cyrus having added more cayenne pepper than called for, and more than any person in their right mind would put in a salad of that size.  I stayed away from the salad myself, additional heat being the last thing I, or any of us, want on a day like today.
     To save our laptop--and my brain--from overheating I'm going to leave it at that for today.  Hopefully the national heat wave will have cleared off in a weeks time.

Road-Trip 2012

     The last two weekends we've been out of town, road tripping down the coast to San Francisco, stopping in Coos Bay and the Redwoods.  Yesterday we drove back from San Francisco.  It took us eleven hours fifteen minutes, including breaks.  Lunch was at the Black Bear Diner in Mt. Shasta City, and dinner was at an A&W just off I-5 outside of Albany, Oregon.  Cy'll be back next week with something that will (hopefully) improve upon anything on that A&W's menu.