Whoa, life!

Soooo... obviously, I've been a baaad blogger. But I have a very good reason. Which is this:

I got a job!

Chances are, if you know me well enough to read this, you know this already, either through Facebook or email or something else. But honestly that's my excuse... I got the offer a day after my last post, and ever since then, it's just been a whirlwind of activity, between getting my Oregon driver's license and going to my friend's wedding, to actually starting the job and being told that I got to go on my first business trip the following weekend, to the Solar Decathlon in Washington, DC. Which was pretty awesome. And in between these incredible events, I went to Roloff Farms in Hillsboro, Oregon (as seen on TLC in "Little People, Big World") and I bought a new commuter bike as both my birthday present to myself and my "new job" present. Below are some photos of all of these fun things to hold you over until I actually have something important to say again.

From the wedding in Vermont, our lovely table settings...


...and an action shot of the garter throw.


At Roloff Farms, you can buy all sorts of goodies, including dirt!


Sitting in the "big chair" in the pumpkin patch.


Here's my new bike, Daphne! Darcy, the original bike and deluxe fold-up will be retired except for special occasions and visitors.

Proof that I can use a kitchen when I put my mind to it

Perhaps some of you know about my lack of cooking experience. I did not grow up in a household that did a lot of cooking, so it's not that I don't enjoy doing it, it's just that cooking a meal doesn't come as naturally to me as it might to some people. Also, generally speaking, when someone does something cool in the kitchen, it's rather like magic to me. As all of my former roommates can tell you, I made them each teach me how to make something (whether I retained all of those skills is a different story...)

So I'm now living in a place that has a very large garden with lots of vegetables growing in it. AND, while I was in graduate school, I enacted a policy of not refusing free food; ergo, since I now have access to lots of free vegetables growing in this garden, I have not only picked them but I've been having a good time trying new ways of preparing them. The photo below shows some of the bounty I got from the garden, including Roma and yellow tomatoes, lemon cucumbers (those yellow things at the top left), zucchini, beets, and basil.



One of the more obvious meal solutions was to slice up the tomatoes, add the whole leaf basil, and pour some olive oil and balsamic vinegar on top, with a pinch of salt. Delicious! Another dish was a beet salad that I made with the majority of the beets you see in this photo. To be clear, there are many, many beets.

BUT, I wanted to make something up, so I decided to try a pasta dish, since I had enough basil to make pesto. I will now attempt to write out my recipe in case you would like to try it. I promise it was good!

Auntie Em's Pink Pasta (it has a ring to it, right?)
Makes 3-4 servings
Ingredients:

• 1 cup basil pesto (if you want to make it fresh like I did, combine 2 cups fresh basil, 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil, 1/3 cup pine nuts or walnuts, 3 medium sized garlic cloves - minced, and salt + pepper to taste in a food processor)
• 1 cup chopped zucchini
• 1 cup chopped lemon cucumber (or another light vegetable of your choice; corn would work too)
• 1 cup chopped beets (prepare the beets by boiling or baking, and skin them before chopping)
• 1 cup baby spinach
  
• 2 cups rotini pasta
• 1/2 cup-ish of romano-parmesan cheese blend

Here's a photo of the ingredients I procured from the garden after preparing the beets and basil pesto to get them ready for final cooking (unfortunately we don't grow spinach so I had to get that from a bag):



Boil rotini pasta in salted water until tender to your liking; drain, place into large serving dish, and cover. Set aside.

In a skillet, combine pesto, spinach, zucchini, and cucumber over medium heat and stir. Fry vegetables in pesto until softened and spinach is kind of wilty (like spinach is supposed to look when you fry it in a skillet). When the combination is almost ready, add beets in and stir. The beets have already been cooked, essentially, so they just need to be warmed.

Finally, mix the vegetable-pesto combination in with the pasta in serving dish. And yes, the beets will start to make everything pink (thus the name of the dish). It should look roughly like this:



When everything is all mixed up, dish it out and sprinkle romano-parmesan cheese blend on top and serve. Voila! Delicious pink pasta!



Whew. Bet you never thought you'd find a recipe here, huh? :o)

Things to do in the Pacific Northwest when you're unemployed

...Well I'm not sitting still, that's for sure. It's probably easier if I just show you the pictures and tell you about them, rather than try to explain all of this.

1)My friend Laura came out to the West Coast to help me move my stuff, and also to enjoy some of the sights in and around Portland. First we went to Cannon Beach and saw Haystack Rock:





Here's a photo of one of the spiders that seems to be everywhere out here. Please, someone tell me this thing isn't harmful to humans...


And I saw a dog that I wanted to take home with me...



2)We also took a drive through the Columbia River Gorge to see Multnomah Falls, and later, the Vista House. Very pretty!

These are the falls...


...And this is the Vista House. So named for its amazing view, I would guess.





3) Later, after Laura had left and it rained a bit, I met a slug on the back patio. Look at this size of this dude!



4) And then there's this project that I'm working on: I'm sewing again. I hope this turns out better than the last time I tried to recycle a t-shirt....

Happy 09/09/09!

In honor of the day's awesome date, I decided to do a Wordle, based on my del.icio.us tags. Voila! Happy nine-nine-nine everyone!

Scenes from dusk

I haven't really been that interesting lately. Except for the part where I went down to Southern California - just a few days after the massive Station Fire started eating up the San Gabriel Mountains - to retrieve the majority of my belongings and move them up to Portland. I was trying to come up with a reason to blog, and I found it in a couple of pictures taken from my iPhone.

Observe: this first photo is taken on August 30, as the Station Fire raged just north of Pasadena. It looks like a volcano erupting, no?


...And now take a look at this photo, which was taken from my new bedroom. It's hard to tell (because the iPhone isn't exactly a top-rate camera) but the sun is framed by plants and trees. It's quite a lovely view.


So, yeah. I've definitely experienced a recent change in scenery. Not too bad!

Cheese and fish

I think it's a testament to how much I love cheese that, despite being in Oregon for less than two months, I've been to the Tillamook Cheese Factory twice already. What can I say! It's a wonderful place. And cheese is awesome! So is this picture.



After Tillamook, Abby, Anna and I drove south to the Oregon Aquarium, which is located in an oceanside town called Newport. If you are from Cincinnati and you're reading this, you'll appreciate the irony of the "other" Newport Aquarium. One of the craziest things I saw there was this tank full of anchovy... no big deal, they show up in Caesar salads all the time, right? Well, I have never eaten them and probably never will, because they are fabulously beautiful little creatures. When they swim they open their mouths to eat, revealing multiple thin red gills that contrast wildly against their otherwise silver bodies. I know it's hard to see in this picture, but well done, anchovy!


Funniest exchange of the day at the aquarium:

Me: Did you pet the starfish?!? They were pretty cool.
Anna: No! Did you pet the little sharks?!?
Me: No! Did you pet the sea anemone?!? They grabbed my finger!
Anna: No! Did you pet the stingray?!?
Me: No! Because of Steve Irwin, you know.
(man in background overhears this, starts laughing hysterically...)

An Open Letter to Those Who Oppose Health Care Reform

To those of you who compare Americans of any stripe to Nazis, or compare bills in Congress to that of policies enacted under Hitler in fascist Germany, I give you Barney Frank, and beyond that I'm not wasting any more of my time on you.



To those of you who somehow think that health care is not a "right" that should be offered, nay, mandated, for all Americans, can you please tell me why it's the law that we have to have our cars insured, but not our own bodies?

To those of you who actually believe in "death panels"... are you kidding me?!? What part of "living will" and "end of life planning" translates into "euthanizing grandma", exactly? My bad, the concepts of living wills and end of life planning are probably too complex for you to manage, so hopefully someone will come out with an illustrated version of the bill soon...

To those of you who think that we don't deserve nationwide single-payer healthcare, OK, fine. I don't suppose you think that we should make police officers or soldiers pay for their healthcare, and neither do I. But how about the roughly 2 1/2 million people incarcerated in United States prisons? Should we make them pay for healthcare? As Andy Borowitz puts it:

"So the Lockerbie bomber, Abdel Baset al Megrahi, was sprung from prison so that he could receive medical attention in his native Libya, where he was given a hero's welcome today.

Let's leave aside the hero's welcome part for a moment - there are 47 million uninsured Americans who'd love to get the medical attention part.

So what do you have to do to get health care in 2009 - become an international terrorist? No, actually, every prisoner in US prisons gets it.

Excuse me, I've got to go rob a liquor store."

Mind boggling. Simply mind-boggling. We need health care reform, period. Can you crazies please let the adults handle it this time?