Position fourteen, October 2007 through October 2010

Email: board@cascadepacific.org

Position thirteen, October 2007 through October 2010

Email: board@cascadepacific.org

Position eleven, October 2007 through October 2010

Email: board@cascadepacific.org

I want some.  I want a sandwich.  And pasta.  I want pasta too.

I am wondering if I was a little hasty in declaring that I would allow myself flour and goods made with flour, as long as I made the goods myself.  Hello, it’s summer.  Not exactly oven-on-for-hours weather.  I am a pasta-making novice, but one thing I have discovered is that making pasta is more difficult when it’s warm.  It gets really sticky and turns into a big lump when it comes out of the extruder.  Or, maybe that’s just me.  Either way, I’m eating a lot more cheese and eggs than my cholesterol level is comfortable with because of the lack of bread, pasta, and rice in my life. 

I’m contemplating instituting a “Too Hot” loophole, which would allow me to purchase bread and pasta if the weather is too hot to make my own.  Cheating?  Or preventing an early death-by-cholesterol? 

It looks like I have a few days to work this out, though, since it’s supposed to be cooler and rainy here for the next few days.  Guess I’ll be baking some bread this afternoon when I get home from work! 

We had salmon from the freezer, which wasn’t local, but we had it with local green beans.  The granola was local, as were the cherries we devoured.  The milk, as usual, was from Heidi the cow at Midway Farms.  We had potato tacos, and everything on the tacos was local.  Peaches on our pancakes - local.  About the only things we had all weekend that were not local were the salmon, the flour in the pancakes Andy made, and the Swiss Miss.  Hey, you can’t go camping without hot chocolate! 

In no particular order, here are some of my favorite things from the last few weeks:

1. Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Highly recommend it.

2. Organic strawberries from Midway Farms, grown by Farmer Cynthia’s friend (I think her name is Alice…?). The. Best. Strawberries. Ever. I haven’t tasted strawberries like this since I was in middle school and picked strawberries in the fields east of Lebanon for school clothes money. I have about five flats of these babies in my freezer to enjoy in the coming year!

3. Alsea Acre Feta cheese. Bliss. Can’t get enough of this. Available at the Corvallis Farmers’ Market, and probably other places too.

4. Sungold tomatoes. Before the end of June. Life is good.

5. The lady who sells cherries at the Corvallis Farmers’ Market. Sweet cherries, sweet lady.

6. Well, pretty much everything about the Corvallis Farmers’ Market.

7. Roasted filberts from La Mancha Farms, available at First Alternative. Fresh and delicious. And local! Great on salads. I like them with cottage cheese and halved Sungold cherry tomatoes (Andy thinks it’s gross - he won’t even try it - but I could eat this every day).

8. Fair trade sugar, available in bulk at First Alternative and in small packages at Whole Foods.

9. My new yogurt maker. Andy eats yogurt with his granola and blueberrries every morning, so I thought I’d try making some. I used some Nancy’s as a starter, and it turned out really well. I add some (local) honey and a little (fair trade, but not local) vanilla, and it’s pretty amazing stuff. I’m also pretty fond of my new ice cream maker attachment for my stand mixer. Now I just need to find some ice cream recipes that don’t use a ton of heavy whipping cream. My cholesterol can’t take it.

10. Local and seasonal cookbooks: Simply in Season by Mary Beth Lind and Corvallis author Cathleen Hockman-Wert, The Complete Vegetable Cookbook by Lorraine Bodger, Farmer John’s Cookbook - The Real Dirt on Vegetables by Farmer John Peterson and Angelic Organics, and oddly enough, The New Mayo Clinic Cookbook. I have two or three others in my To Read pile (yes, I keep them on my nightstand and read them before I go to sleep). I’ll add them to my list if I like them.

1.  When your husband has dental surgery, if he wants Kozy Shack tapioca pudding then buying it at the local grocery store makes it local enough for me. 

2.  Eating locally isn’t feasible in every situation - though I hope it someday will be.  I spent last week volunteering in the kitchen at Drift Creek Camp in the Siuslaw National Forest, and their location, the sheer quantity of food they serve, and their tight budget don’t allow for buying food locally at this time.   

3.  When the temperature rises above about 95 degrees, all bets are off.  It was 106 yesterday where I live.  I took my hot and grouchy self down to Home Depot and bought a small air conditioner for my bedroom, and after my husband installed it I took him out to dinner to Red Robin, which is where he wanted to go for a burger and a big beer.  It was 10:00 pm, we were starved, they have air conditioning, and they were open.  (I did shop at a couple of local places for air conditioners before purchasing one at Home Depot, but the local places either didn’t have any air conditioners left or the ones they had were way more than I could afford to spend or even wanted to spend for an item I’ll use fewer than fifteen days a year.)

4.  Fresh tuna is yummy.  When Andy picked me up from camp last Friday, we went into Newport and bought an albacore tuna right off a fishing boat, the Chelsea Rose.  It was reasonably priced ($2.00 per pound!) and soooo fresh.  When we got home, Andy grilled it just plain and it was one of the best things I’ve tasted!  We froze some in portions to grill, and froze the rest to can when the weather is cool enough for that kind of effort.  I’ve never had fresh tuna before - how have I never had fresh tuna before???

5.  Blueberries don’t need to be washed before freezing if they have not been sprayed.  Who knew?  All this time I’ve been washing and drying my blueberries, freezing them on a cookie sheet and then putting them into bags.  Andy and I realized the other day that we can talk about picking blueberries until we’re blue in the face (no pun intended) but the reality is that when it’s this hot it’s just not going to happen.  We picked and froze 25 pounds a couple weeks ago but since we eat them all year, Andy especially, we wanted to get more.  I went to Anderson’s on Highway 99 just outside of Corvallis on Monday and bought 50 pounds of picked blueberries.  The blueberries taste great and are not sprayed.  The quality was really good too.  My puppy Libby benefited from the measly half pint or so of mushy berries that I found - turns out she likes them as much as we do!  The man who sold me the berries and helped me carry them out to my car told me that since they aren’t sprayed, there is no need to wash them before I freeze them - just put them into freezer bags and I’m all set, and if I have to wash them, I should just give them a quick rinse when I take them out of the freezer to use them. 

6.  Cling peaches are yummy.  First peaches of the year - yeah, maybe they’re not as easy to cut up and eat as freestone, but it’s the beginning of July and they are ripe, locally grown peaches and I am in peach heaven.  They go great with blueberries, which I happen to have plenty of. 

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