We've packed a lot into the last few weeks. This weekend we went to the Tower Grove farmers' market (basil, strawberries, and pain au chocolate), worked on the yard A LOT both days, missed out on a patio set on Craigslist (dang it), and I went a Rehabber's Club tour of some recently finished properties and works-in-progress in our neighborhood (also on the tour was a woman who was head of the student Senate when I was at Mizzou...very strange). Also, we cooked! A lot! Lemon-basil chicken with orzo and asparagus, waffles and bacon, grilled porkchops and potatoes, curried chicken-mango salad (for a work potluck tomorrow), and vanilla pound cake.
The garden is starting to take off. Here are the two big beds this morning:
(Porkchop and Keetah are also in the photo. See if you can find them.)
Porkchop's potatoes-in-a-trashcan experiment is also going well:
Wow, I am hitting a wall of tiredness, so I have to hurry the rest of this post.
Our biggest excitement of the month was flying out to Portland to see our friend Kathy before she moves to Peru (she leaves very, very soon!). While we were there, our friend Sabrina flew out from New York for the reunion trip (Kathy, Sabrina, and Porkchop were all MFA students at Wisconsin together...I was a tag-along).
Portland was beautiful and the company was fantastic! I haven't smiled and laughed so much in a long time. Oh, and our accommodations were vintage midcentury modern - truly fantastic.
In addition to spending a couple of hours in Powell's and hitting the PSU farmers' market, we went to the beach:
(Sabrina taking Kathy's photo.)
And we took a drive just east of Portland along the Columbia River Gorge. Pretty and pretty windy:
Along the scenic road, we stopped at quite a few waterfalls. All spectacular in their own way. This one is Bridal Veil Falls:
The whole area was covered in moss - very neat! And soft.
The day trip culminated at a fish hatchery where we saw a 10-foot, 70-something year-old sturgeon. It was huge!
Other highlights of the trip include eating crazy-good french fries and poutine at Potato Champion, and the world's best waffles at Waffle Window.
Seriously, you can't go to Portland without hitting the Waffle Window. It shares a kitchen with a larger cafe, but WW itself is just a little half door around the corner from the main cafe. You order your waffle at the window, and then there's a special section in the cafe where you can eat.
The waffles are spectacular. Sabrina and I both had the huckleberry waffle - a fluffy waffle coated in pearl sugar and topped with huckleberry jam and syrup, whipped cream, and lemon panna cotta. The panna cotta really made the waffle - yum, yum, yum! I also enjoyed tasting Porkchop's waffle topped with ham, gruyere cheese, and maple syrup.
We loved seeing Kathy and Sabrina again, and we hope the next visit isn't so far away (okay, Porkchop saw Kathy last year, but I hadn't seen Kathy in a few years, and I hadn't seen Sabrina since 2005!).
Okay, I'm tired and I have to check my laundry. Have a great week!
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