Winding Down from the Weekend

Oh my goodness. I have lots of ground to cover. You might want a cup of coffee for this...or not. Maybe you'll just want to scroll to the next blog. If you're still here, I'll tell you what's been going on since Friday...starting with Saturday, when we headed over to Rockaway Beach, Oregon.

To get to Rockaway, one first must drive through Tillamook. That would be the Tillamook of Tillamook Cheese. The first thing you notice driving into Tillamook is the quilt blocks of the Tillamook County Quilt Trail. I've blogged about the quilt block trail before. It seems each time we come here, there are more quilt blocks than before. There's one on the county building:

And on the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum.

And pretty much everywhere you look, you'll see a building or a business sporting its own quilt block. Some of them are very creative. 

It's about ten miles up the coast to Rockaway where we stayed in an RV park uniquely situated right on the beach. There are sea stacks all along the Oregon coast, but these are the stacks that give Rockaway its name.

You can see why we like this park. It's one of the few places we can RV and have a spot with an ocean view. You can see our RV in the image below.

The weather was cloudy and cool most of the weekend, but there were a few sun breaks and NO RAIN, which is always something to celebrate, no matter what time of the year. 

We needed a few things, and so we drove into town and happened on a kite festival. Fun!

It was late in the day when we arrived. I had some chicken pot pies already made up for dinner, and so we relaxed for the remainder of the day.

We weren't sure if fresh seafood would be available on Memorial Day. Rather than take a chance, we headed to the Garibaldi Marina on Sunday to pick up our fresh oysters and steamer clams. Here's a new quilt block I hadn't seen before.

We walked into one of the fresh seafood places and found the objects of our desire right away. 

We picked up a dozen oysters and a 1 1/2 pounds of clams. And that's Monday's dinner right there. We kept them on ice in the refrigerator overnight.

There were lots of fishermen cleaning fish and selling cooked whole crab.

After putting our seafood on ice, we walked down to where the Nehalem River flows into the ocean. The seagulls were sitting in the relatively warm water there.

I saw a quilt in these Adirondack chairs lined up on the beach. What do you think?

And this being the day of our anniversary, we headed north to Cannon Beach to EVOO for dinner and a cooking "show". The weather was nice as we drove north, and we saw some pretty views. Here you can see the clouds spilling over the mountain tops like waterfalls.

Looking in the other direction, I believe this is the tiny town of Wheeler, Oregon.

Here's the restaurant, a small place, but it's also a gift shop and cooking school. Mike found out about it using Yelp, but it's been written up in our local newspaper.

That's Josh, an intern, getting things ready to go while guests are seated.

And here's the menu, explaining what we'll be seeing them make...oh yes, and eating. Don't forget the eating. If you can't see that menu, click on the image to make it larger.

There was one other anniversary there that night, as well as a couple of birthdays. They'd decorated our glasses with a "Happy Anniversary" message.

These are the chef owners, husband and wife team of Bob and Lenore. They were very nice people, and very entertaining as they prepared our meal.

Those are some sugar snap peas and roasted cherry tomatoes to be used in the first course.

That's a slice of roasted prosciutto on top there. It's a risotto surrounded by some richly roasted veggies. Yum.

The next course was a crab souffle served up in a little cornbread cup.

Here Lenore puts some pickled onion and radish over our watercress salads.

And there it is...yum. ("Yum" is the word of the day.) That's a blood orange marmalade at the top of the plate.

Next up was chicken marsala served up for about 20 people, and that was impressive. He first put a rub on the chicken and then gave it a crust on the stove top...six skillets going at the same time.

Then it went into the oven to roast. When it was done, it was served up with some mashed potatoes and some grilled purple asparagus. Repeat after me: Yum.

And since everyone was still hungry (cough), we were served up some chocolate souffles with some strawberry ice cream and an almond brittle. Yes, yum. Here Lenore adds some whipped cream.

While Bob made the almond brittle. If you're wondering how he did that so fast, he poured the liquefied sugar into the pan and put the whole thing over ice. It set up in about ten minutes.

Then he torched the meringue.

And there it is. Ours was served with a candle since we were there to celebrate our anniversary.

Then we rolled on out the door and into our truck for the drive home. 

The next day we drove back north to Cannon Beach. On the way we spied two quilt shops. I'll tell you about those in separate posts. This one is Creative Fabrics in Wheeler. That one wasn't on my quilt shop app, and so I just happened to notice it as we drove by.

This one, Center Diamond Fabric, was in Cannon Beach.

They had this funny little garden growing in their parking lot with these amazing poppies growing right next to the red chard behind. 

On the way home, we stopped off at this lookout. Our daughter Holly's ashes are buried out there on the promontory on the right. It was possible to hike out there at one time, but everything is overgrown now, and the path has become impassable.

We got Smitty out for a walk when we got back to the trailer.

"Have a nice time at the beach...I'm heading for home."

He wasn't a very happy camper this trip. There were too many mans walking on the beach with woofies. We could see boats out on the ocean, and we were pretty sure there were woofies on those boats too. 

Nevertheless, he did sit on the step with Mike and talk about RV stuff with our weekend neighbor.

He has a spiffy new harness.

Gracie came out of the closet a few times. She doesn't mind the trailer. She has her own private bedroom in our closet.

Monday evening, we cooked our fresh seafood. This has become a tradition when we're at the beach. We make Linguine with Clams and Fresh Herbs. It's super simple and light. 

Also our own concoction of grilled oysters that we call Oysters Rockaway.

While we were there, I finished up the whole left side of my latest stitchery. The stitching on this side is more dense than on the right, so I'm thinking it's fair to say that this one is about half done. 

We arrived home yesterday afternoon and went right over to pick up our second CSA share. In this week's share:

I've already made kale chips with the kale. I'm still working on the perfect way to do this, but this batch wasn't bad. The leaves are crunchy like a chip, but the center stems are still chewy. I've decided the best way to eat them is to fold them up until you can pop the whole thing in your mouth. I like the chew, which is a little like eating kale jerky.

And I'm pickling the stems from the turnip greens and the kale in some rice vinegar and a few other things. I saw this idea on Marisa McClellan's website, Food in Jars. She also has a recipe for a turkey meatloaf that will use my bundle of chard.

For dinner last night, I sauteed the turnip greens and beet greens. This is actually quite good. The beet stems are started first to tenderize them a little. I still think they could benefit from blanching. They're a little chewy, but the leaves are very tasty. And don't you know all that fiber will keep things moving along! You know..."things" that shall remain unnamed.

And that brings me up to today. Before I end though, I wanted to show you a couple of little things from Friday. 

For one thing, I added the label to Baby Zevee's quilt and sent that off to her. I left my own name off the label as the quiltmaker. What do you do? It just seemed a little weird to me to put my name on this quilt for a baby whose parents I've never met.

And I promised to let you know about the Lemon Creme Brulee for two I made Friday evening. These were so simple, I could do them in the trailer. You can find the recipe right here. You need some sort of torch to give the topping its nice creme brulee crunch. I happen to have this small one, but you can do this with the big industrial ones. You might even have one in your garage. (Check out the one Bob is using in the image up above.)

Mike is a great fan of creme brulee and of lemon, and so these were really his cup of tea.

And that's all I have to tell you. Today I'm going to try to get organized again. I still need to unpack the trailer, but that won't take long. Then I'm getting a badly-needed perm this afternoon. Things are about to get kind of crazy because we're taking off for a 10-day trip to Whistler, B.C., a week from tomorrow. There's lots to do before then, and so I'm not sure I'll have much time for sewing. I'll actually be happy to get back to my paper piecing, if you can imagine that.

It was a great weekend, and we had a really nice celebration for our 40th. I hope you had a good weekend too.