Strawberry weekend

Fred's parents came up to Portland last Wednesday and stayed with us through the weekend. We had a great time. It's strawberry season here, and we made the best of it. On Saturday morning we went to the Beaverton farmers market-one of my favorite things to do in the summer. We bought a flat of Hood strawberries, and Sylvia and I made strawberry and strawberry-rhubarb jam while Fred and his dad put together an automatic sprinkler system for the crops on our patio.
We used a different kind of pectin that allows for less sugar since the berries were so sweet on their own. Maybe that's why the jam separated. I'm going to spin it as "fruit on the top" jam. It still tastes great, and I guess that's all that really matters.

Saturday night I finally got to try my hand at pie in a jar. I used the pie crust recipe from this book with all butter instead of butter and shortening. The recipe uses orange juice instead of water for liquid and has turned out nicely every time I've made it. The mini-pies turned out great as well. We filled them with some fresh strawberries, extra jam that didn't get canned, and cornstarch.


On Sunday afternoon we went to the International Rose Test Garden in Portland. It was a beautiful afternoon, and a great time to go see the roses.


On the way home we stopped at another one of my favorite places for another strawberry treat-made even better by buy-one-get-one-free coupons.


Later, we all pitched in and grilled up an excellent dinner--grilled cheeseburgers, grilled veggies, and roasted potatoes. Afterward, Sylvia and I had to try just one more strawberry recipe.


This one turned out to be the best of all. It's the best fruit crisp I've ever made-and quite possibly one of the best desserts. It has a strawberry and rhubarb filling with rosemary and cinnamon and an oatmeal/multigrain cereal topping. The rosemary in the filling isn't overpowering, and it makes the whole dessert taste unbelievably good. If you decide to try this one yourself, we did cut back the butter in the topping from 1/2 to 1/3 cup and it still tasted great.

Fred's parents left this morning, and we're are probably going to spend the rest of the week getting ready for our PDX-LA-St. Louis wedding extravaganza coming up. I think we're both in vacation mode and will be ready to head out of here on Friday.

Good eats

Our weekend ended up not being quite as lazy as I thought it would. We'd noticed that the paint in our bathroom on the wall and ceiling above the shower was cracked. We didn't think too much of it because we wanted to repaint in there anyway. Fred took Friday off, and when he started scraping the cracked areas, a lot more paint/wall texture came off than we had expected. Fred did most of the work on Friday, but we both spent a good part of Saturday finishing scraping and washing down the walls. We made a trip to the paint store, and are now prepared to prime the scraped spots, re-texture the walls, prime the whole room, and then paint. We're aiming to have all of this finished before Fred's parents come to visit next week, because we've taken over the guest bathroom until we finish ours.

I did get time on Sunday to do some baking. I made these garlic parsley flatbreads to go with the Greek lamb pilaf from this month's Cooking Light. Both recipes turned out really well.


In case anyone would like to try her (or his) hand at them, I adapted the recipe from my favorite cookbook. Here's the recipe I used:

2 c. white bread flour
1 1/2 c. white whole wheat flour
1 pkg. rapid-rise yeast
1 tsp. salt
1 1/2 c. warm water
1/4 c. olive oil (plus a few tablespoons for the tops)
2-3 cloves garlic
handful of parsley

Combine the flour, yeast, and salt in a bowl. Pour in the water and olive oil, and mix to make a firm dough (add more flour if necessary). Either knead by hand or with a stand mixer until smooth and elastic (about 5-10 minutes). Form the dough into a ball, and place in an oiled bowl, turning the dough so the whole ball is oiled. Cover with a tea towel and let rise until doubled, about half an hour.

When the dough has risen, punch it down, and let it rest for about 10 minutes. Meanwhile, finely chop the parsley and garlic cloves together until they almost make a paste (I suppose you could use a food processor). Transfer the parsley and garlic into a small bowl and add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, to make about 1/2 cup.

Split the dough into eight balls. Flatten each of the balls into a 6-inch wide disc (about 1/2-inch thick). Cover with a towel and let rise for about 25 minutes. When they've risen, poke the tops of the breads to dimple them, and then spread about 1 tablespoon of the parsley mixture over the tops.

Bake in a preheated 400 degree oven for about 20 minutes, after which the breads should be nice and brown on top, but still soft inside. Sprinkle the breads with salt and serve.

Pie in a jar

I think I may have just found what I'm going to do this weekend--make pie in a jar. Fred laughed pretty hard when I showed him the site and told him I thought it was the best idea ever. I bet he wouldn't laugh if I had my own jar of delicious pie and he didn't have one for himself.

There's something wrong with this picture...

Ah, late spring in the Willamette Valley. The picture above is blurry and probably unnecessary, but I wanted some photographic proof. This is the clock to our "weather station". In case you can't make it out, it's 54 degrees outside tonight--which has been pretty much the case all week. As a consequence, it's a chilly 65 degrees in our house. I'm sure we could remedy that by turning the heat on, but that seems pretty silly since it's already June. I'm ready for some sun. If we can't get it here, we're at least headed for some (hopefully) sunnier locations later this month.

Aside from the weather, we've been well but busy (Fred more so than me), and I spent my first day in the field in a very long time on Tuesday. It turned out to be an 8 hour round trip for about 3 hours of work, but it was a nice break from the office. I'm looking forward to a lazy weekend at home. Who knows, maybe we'll finally get our upside down tomato plant planted.