New This Week

I don't really buy nice things for myself because I'm hustling to pay for my mortgage and my lifestyle, but now that I think about it—my lifestyle is a nice thing that I buy for myself. I'm lucky. Life is good. Etc. Etc.

However, I did just acquire this new table/bench set, custom built for my tiny kitchen nook by a talented pal named Brock. Do you know him? A wizard of woodworking; a master of maths, saws, and impact drivers.

So, this table, it's more than nice—it's magnificent. Made from Douglas Fir, or doug fir to the layman. So warm in color, you think it might be warm to touch. I plan to keep it forever and have it always piled high with stuff—like open dog-eared magazines near cream-filled morning coffees, like glasses of wine, like games of dice, like notepads filled with lists, like cutting boards of bread and cheese, like pumpkins being carved with a cookie sheet to save the seeds.

This Time Last Year

This time last year, it was a lot stormier. Remember?

There were torrential downpourings that caused almost-floods in my basement (thanks for helping me bail water, Nick!)—leaves and tree limbs littered the streets.

The days were cooler. There was already an acceptance of fall, an acceptance that longer, darker nights are restorative—that “rest” is allowable, that sitting on the couch under a blanket under a cat is a more-than-fine way to pass an evening, that all the “going” and “doing” you did this summer is somehow JUST NOW catching up with you and maybe that’s why you are suddenly so FUCKING EXHAUSTED every night at 6 o’clock …

My birthday weekend passed in a blur of cake and candles—candles on the cake, and candles for the darkness of a 9-hour power outage in SE Portland on the very eve of my birthday fete at Commonwealth. Remember? We all sat there in the dark, talked, drank wine.

In the early days of October, I cooked a big soup out of tomatoes and potatoes and sage. I dipped toasty bread in. I thought about all the life things that needed doing before 2014 would come barreling through.

And one day, I climbed up Dog Mountain with Tricia and Lisa amidst spooky billows of fog. As we neared the top, the clouds split open and we found ourselves staring straight into the vacuum of space—dark purple faraway mountains cut by silver river waters, the promise of a golden sunset off to the west ... Remember?

I do ... but only cuz I wrote it down.

New Best Ever

Tomatoes-wise, the cherry one has my heart. The sweetest garden morsel in a manageable pebble size—you can put a handful in your mouth, which I often do.

Now is when I tell you about my new cooking jam: the galette. Kinda like a pie, but messier and lazier and incendiarily delicious. The dough, which bakes up all beautiful and buttery, is slapped together in a big bowl. The innards are whatever you want them to be (I did cherry tomatoes, goat cheese, and pan-fried leek). Rolling pin the crust flat, pile wonderful food stuff in the center, and then lovingly fold it all up like a baby in a blanket. It's the oven, really, that does all the work.

But there is freedom to the galette. Fuck the recipes. Make whatever kind you want. Peaches and blueberries? Squash, pine nuts, and pecarino? Yes and yes. It's all good.

Just know that if you have flour/butter/something in season to put inside, then a brilliant meal is always achievable.

Not pretty looking, necessarily—but pretty in your mouth!

Painted Hills Mega Post

We spent last weekend in the wild-lands of East/Central Oregon, splashing in and out of swimming holes on the John Day River, scouting sun-baked fossil beds, and, in general, filling our hearts with fun.

Let's go there for a minute.

Hot and bright by day. A chorus of cricket song at night. Not a single bar of cell-phone reception (vacay-ing in the wilderness shouldn't be tampered with by outside-world contact anyway).

We whipped through round, caramel-colored hills to get there, but on a dirt road a few miles outside camp, plans changed. Plumes of smoke, coloring the air blue. Wild-land fire fighters biding time inside diesel trucks. Helicopters hauling big troughs of water. Mobilization.

We turned and retreated through a blackened landscape and chased the fading light west—later to find a new, downriver campsite by chance, in the dark. Nevertheless, it was a special place.

What I took away from the trip: the image of delicate leaf tendrils pressed into ancient fossil stone, the freedom and quiet of being the only tent in sight, and the strange way it felt to get woken up at night by the haunting sound of coyote howl. I wonder what Lefty thought, curled up out there in the dirt in front of our tent?

A panting dog, and the Painted Hills in the hot wind—exuding deep geologic mysteries.

Reelin' em in, tossing em back.

Stone-cold fossil hunters.

Parched earths of the Precambrian.

Later grams.

Sorry About Your Beer

Oh hi. I've been busy this week coaching Commonwealth Summer Skate Camp, breaking in my bottle of sunscreen, sweating my way through my ankle sock collection, and wearing myself out so well that I'm asleep almost before the light falls.

Now, it's deep summer, as you know, and I thought I'd tell you that I've had a kind of epiphany about beer recently after reading this article about insidious ingredients in stuff like Coors Light and Pabst. We're talking high-fructose corn syrup and genetically modified corn and—get this—fish bladder. Among other things. In the cold beer. That's in my fridge. Right now. Waiting for me. On this hot evening. After I've sweated all day........

I'm scandalized! I think we've all been pretending beer is something it isn't—something pristine and genuine and crisp; something full of good taste and good will. But I don't think we'd love it as deeply if we thought much about what goes into it (at least these big-name brands). We may realize that the aforementioned beers are just okay, maybe even worse than okay (fucking gross, even!) and that in fact we don't need them at all on a hot evening like this one. Just a thought. I dunno. Happy summer!

Coors/Molson statement on GMOs: "Our suppliers cannot guarantee that the corn (maize) products that we also use in brewing are GMO free. A wide variety of foods and beverages in North America contain these same corn (maize) ingredients."

The Huffington Post description of the fish bladder called isinglass that Guinness uses as a clarifying agent: "A form of collagen culled from a dried swim bladder, an internal fish organ that helps regulate buoyancy in water."

Nice!