Cooking and Cleaning

Our friends Deb and Tom visited overnight last night, and it was such an enjoyable visit. Deb and Tom and I were in the band together in high school. Mike and I didn't start dating until after high school, and while we all went to the same school in our small town in southern California (small then, anyway), he wasn't a part of our crowd. Nevertheless, there is a connection between Deb and Mike because their brothers were the best of friends.

They arrived late yesterday afternoon, and we had dinner together and gabbed well into the evening. Then off to bed, breakfast this morning, and they were off again to catch their flight at PDX. It was a perfect visit. Even Smitty got into the act. And Smitty, gentleman that he is took a good dust bath before their arrival. A cat's gotta look his best, you know.

In this picture he's bathing in a mole hill, but he was quite taken with the nice soft dirt in the freshly-tilled vegetable garden. We haven't planted a garden the past two years, and so Smitty hasn't yet had a chance to help us with the planting. I'm sure that will bring a whole new turn to the soil when we try it next spring.

He's already shown us his ready willingness to help when we change the sheets on the bed. 

Here, this looks like a job for a cat.

Um, I think you should know that you have lumps in the bed right here! Just sayin...

Well, will you look at that! It's me, Smitty!

Ok-kayyy. I think that's about all the help I can stand for one change of sheets.

Also the past couple of days I've been experimenting with appetizers. This one for Roasted Butternut Squash Bruschetta with Walnuts and Sage was especially good.

This past spring, I dug up the huge old sage plants (two of them) in my culinary herb bed, and replanted one plant that was a more reasonable size. That's not to say that it won't get too big eventually, but for now it's a good size. And that meant I had lots of tender little baby sage leaves for this appetizer. It was really good and so pure in its ingredients. 

I picked up a butternut squash at the farmer's market last weekend. All you do is peel that sucker, dice it up into 3/4 inch dice, roast it with some olive oil and salt, and then I used a potato masher to mash it together with the minced fresh sage leaves. Then you top it with chopped toasted walnuts (although I already had chopped toasted pecans on hand, so I used those). Then you drizzle it with a few drops of olive oil and honey, and top it with pecorino romano cheese and baby sage leaves. Yummy.

I wasn't able to find pecorino romano cheese when I went to the grocery store, and so I just used romano. Romano cheese is a kind of stinky cheese. In the future I think I'll stick with Parmesan. But this was very good, and I'll make it again. There are some leftovers too that will make a nice little afternoon snack.

Also at the farmer's market this past weekend, I picked up some Braeburn apples to make an apple crisp for Deb and Tom. They were so nice in the crisp. I'm always trying to figure out the best combination of apples, and the Braeburns were perfect by themselves.

And I really love the topping for this crisp. I'm using a recipe that was created by the pastry chef Michelle Vernier, formerly of Portland's own Wildwood restaurant. The restaurant has closed, but the recipe for the crisp was published in the Oregonian newspaper a few years ago, and I snapped it up. It makes a really delicious crisp, and it's very easy to do. We gave it a few seconds in the microwave, and then served it up with vanilla ice cream. Yum. Diet food, no? It's apples! And oatmeal! And ice cream! At my age, that calcium is very important. (Need more diet excuses advice? I'm open for questions.)

So I was up very early this morning. I awakened at 4:30, and try as I might, I could not go back to sleep. I had too much on my mind thinking about getting Deb and Tom out the door to catch their flight, and so I finally got up at 5:30. After they left, I lay down on the couch and slept until late in the morning...much longer than I intended to, but I figure I must have needed the sleep.

The next two days are blissfully void of calendar items. The house is all cleaned up. Don't you love having house guests? If it weren't for house guests, we'd live like pigs all the time. Anyway...that just means, I don't have a thing to do for the next couple of days but sew. And that is what I'm just about to do.

Our weather is still beautiful, but we're expecting a pineapple express this weekend, thanks to Typhoon Phanfone. Brace yourselves. There's going to be a lot of rain.