Red, white and blue dishes feted in this blog have ranged from subtle blueberry-strawberry salsa and watermelon-feta salad to the truly thematic. Think pie assembled as an American flag and cake bedecked like Old Glory. While the latter takes some effort, the former requires a bit of imagination to associate with Fourth of July. For […]
Another camping trip under our belts has left me craving fresh vegetables. After a weeklong campout featuring fairly diverse meals last month, my husband wanted a simpler format this time while staying in a campground lacking services of any kind. Enter the meat-bun format, as I’ve dubbed it. About the only saving grace is hummus, […]
Watching my kids’ jubilation over cherries in our yard, I can’t help but feel a pang for the apricot tree that passed on before they were born. The tree was gnarled and bent but every few years produced a riot of pink flowers and the most delicious fruit I’d ever tasted. Spindly to start with, […]
Cherries just starting to redden on our tree this week put me in mind of last year’s crop — still reposing in my freezer. As I admonished my sons to wait a few more days for the fruit to really ripen, I vowed in the interim to use up last year’s cherries, followed by last […]
Appetites sated on sausages, burgers, even kale salad after a week of camping, we couldn’t bypass a meal of mussels. The bivalves were a featured dish at a Hood River brew pub, our pit stop on the journey home. We’d gotten our fill of little lake fish, referenced in this blog’s previous post. But mild, […]
Eating well in the outdoors elicited the past couple of posts to this blog, as well as my most recent column in the Mail Tribune’s food section. Read next week’s installment for a few more of my family’s campout favorites. There’s often the chance, though, that any one of these meals — carefully planned, prepped […]
Consider the first food you ever speared on a stick and perched over a campfire. Chances are it was a marshmallow or hot dog. While most of us tend to outgrow an affection for sticky blobs of scorched sugar (until we introduce our own kids), our tastes for meat-in-tube-form grow up. Good-quality sausages — Andouille, […]
Campout cuisine constituted my most recent column for the weekly food section. While the piece focused on fried rice, I also gave tips for preparing foods ahead of time that can be laid away in the freezer and transported frozen to a campsite. Largely because of its sturdiness and relevance at any meal, polenta is […]
The garden is starting to show promise after long months of little edible yields. Peas, artichokes, radishes and rhubarb all are coming on in quantities large enough to constitute a meal. And still announcing its relevance with a few new spears every day is the asparagus patch. Although it’s slowed down a bit in the […]
Asparagus recipes had no sooner popped up on this blog than the weekly food section proclaimed it was time for peas. True, the season for the two, when both are fresh and locally grown, do overlap a bit. And that window in Southern Oregon is typically June, when latecomer asparagus and the earliest peas are […]