Man, I meant to write about last weekend sooner, but it got so hot this past week, and I couldn't bear to have my laptop on my lap. But now, with the sun down and the fan aimed at me, I think I can manage.

We've been doing all sorts of fun summer activities lately (I suppose this includes our four nights of porch camping last week, but that was more out of necessity because our bedroom was too hot to sleep in). Last Saturday, after a haircut and a quick visit to the PSU farmers' market for one last box of pie cherries before the season ended, I headed back to SE Portland to catch the Division/Clinton neighborhood parade, which was held as part of the annual street fair.

It was a pretty short parade, but it was fun to watch. The Last Regiment of Syncopated Drummers was at the front of the parade and totally made me want to take up drumming. They were followed by an assortment of people in cars, on bikes, and on foot. I especially liked the fish bike!

Next, we had an excellent lunch at Little T, chatted with Susan and Andrew for a bit, and then walked up Division to check out the rest of the street fair.

The highlight of the fair, for me, were the snow cones. I'd been looking forward to them all morning, and they did not disappoint.

Maybe it was just the hot, hot day, but we weren't that impressed by the street fair in general. There just didn't seem to be much going on compared to the Hawthorne Street Fair (Patrick pointed out that Division has a lower concentration of businesses, so that makes sense). We did have some good ice cream at Pix's ice cream social, but it was super crowded and frantic, and at that point, we just wanted to go home. Next year we'll probably stick to the parade and maybe get some snow cones, and that'll do it.

The Tour de Coops was the same day, and we decided that instead of running around town trying to see everything, we'd just visit a couple of the coops along Division after we checked out the street fair. I convinced Patrick that we should walk to the coops, which were around 70th and Division. In retrospect, it wasn't a great decision--walking 50 blocks in the heat was unpleasant. At least we were smart enough to take the bus back!

We did get to see a few good coops. This Old Dutch style coop was my favorite.

When we bought our Tour de Coops booklet, we also purchased a few raffle tickets, and we were lucky enough to win a fully assembled Garden Ark! Here's one just like it in the designer's backyard, which was part of the tour.

It's a really beautiful coop, but we're not totally sure we'll keep it. We kind of wanted to build our own coop. But it's pretty handy to have a coop ready to go in our garage! It makes it more likely that we'll actually get chickens in the spring, rather than saying we will and then putting it off because we don't have a coop built.

Later on Saturday, we biked over to Meat Cheese Bread, picked up some sandwiches, and headed over to Colonel Summers Park to watch Dirty Dancing (part of the Movies in the Park series). It was great--we had our little sandwich picnic beforehand, plus some free popcorn, and Patrick biked over to Whiffies when they opened and brought us back some fried pies, which were awesome. I had a double chocolate creme pie, and Patrick had the first lemon creme pie ever dispensed from the cart. Cool!

The movie started when the sun went down, and everybody had a good time, cheering on Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey. It was so nice to hang out on our picnic blanket in the cool evening air--just a great way to spend a few hours. Afterwards, we rode our bikes home in the dark, which, I've recently decided, is one of my favorite summertime activities in Portland.

On Sunday, we had a great run along the Eastbank Esplanade before it got too hot (we're up to 54 minutes of running without stopping, as part of the One Hour Runner program--and I'm actually enjoying it). And then I made jam!

During rhubarb season, I'd frozen a few cups of chopped rhubarb so that I could make bluebarb jam when it was blueberry time (how could I resist, with such a clever name?). It turned out pretty well, though I'm not sure that I like rhubarb in jam all that much. But the jam is still plenty nice on toast.

In the afternoon, we headed up to North Portland to see Trek in the Park, a live reenactment of an episode of Star Trek. We're not that into Star Trek, but we really enjoyed it. The actors were great, and the production paid good attention to detail (like having the appropriate sound effects when the imaginary doors opened and closed). I'd definitely go back again if they put on another production.

And then there was a heatwave, and we had no air conditioning, and it pretty much sucked. I spent some time working from the basement, since my office is on the second floor of our house, but our basement smelled funny (Patrick thinks this was because of a dry drain trap). Anyway, we made it, and things have cooled down a little now. Phew!

We spent a good chunk of time yesterday getting our new chicken coop home (we had to rent a pickup truck, since it was too big for our car), which was kind of stressful, since we had to deal with U-haul. But we redeemed the day by biking over to Laurelhurst Theatre to see the new Star Trek movie (this much Star Trek in the span of a few weeks is unheard of for us!), which was fun. We followed it up with a late dinner at Laurelhurst Market, a new restaurant and butcher shop started by Simpatica's founder. I wasn't in the mood for a big piece of meat, so I ordered a few appetizers/sides instead--gazpacho with crab; grilled green beans with pancetta; and peaches with prosciutto and pistachios.

Everything was so good, and I really liked the service and overall atmosphere. I'd definitely like to go there again, but I'm not sure how often we'll get back, since Screen Door is also in the neighborhood. I sure do love Screen Door!

We enjoyed another late night bike ride last night, and another early morning run along the waterfront today. I haven't been a fan of the super sunny, hot days lately, but I'm loving the nights and mornings right now--the air is the perfect temperature and such a welcome relief from our too-warm house. Speaking of which, it's time for bed! I think we'll try sleeping in the dining room tonight--a good compromise between our bedroom (too hot) and the porch (too many bug bites). The only other option is the basement, but it most certainly has a higher concentration of spiders than our porch does.

I went a little crazy at the farmers' market on Wednesday and bought 10 pounds of blueberries. I froze most of them (mixed with a little sugar, which is supposed to preserve their texture better than tray-freezing), and I'm planning on making a batch of jam this weekend.

Today I baked a lemon blueberry buckle (from Rustic Fruit Desserts) with some of the extra berries. I used two loaf pans because we don't have a 9-inch square baking pan (weird!). We've already eaten two thirds of a loaf, and we're in danger of polishing off the remaining third tonight. It's tasty :)

I also bought a couple pounds of pickling cucumbers at the market, and last night I embarked upon a nine-day-long odyssey of pickle-making. I'm making Icicle Pickles (recipe from The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving), which require nine days of soaking in various brines before canning. Fun!

Note to fellow picklers in Portland: At first, I was worried about the lack of pickling spice in the baking section at New Seasons, but it turns out they have it in the bulk spices aisle, which was even better, because I only need a tablespoon or so. Phew!

Today is our one-year Portlandiversary (and house-iversary)! It has been such a great year--I'm so glad we decided to actually move here instead of just talking about it forever. Yay, Portland!

In honor of the occasion, I've started working on a house project that I've been putting off for almost a year now--sewing Roman blinds for our windows. I'm starting with the two highest priority windows--our stairwell (which faces south and heats up the house a lot in the afternoon) and our bedroom (which currently has a bed sheet for a curtain). Hopefully I'll be showing you some before and after pictures soon!

I tried to convince Patrick to order dinner from Belmont Pearl to continue our August 10th tradition, but he's not going for it. We're going to have our favorite lasagna (zucchini and eggplant from Cooks Illustrated) and leftover lemon-blueberry buckle instead. Not such a bad way to celebrate!

P.S. I think it's funny that I described Patches as ugly in that entry from a year ago--now I think she's the prettiest kitty in the neighborhood!

Wow, August is going by so quickly! We're so busy enjoying that summer that I don't have time to write about it. That's probably a good thing. Let's see, what have I been up to? I'll divide this into a couple entries for easier reading.

Preserving

I've gone a little crazy trying to preserve summer produce before it's all gone. I'm getting lots of canning practice, and our cupboard is slowly filling with jars, which is exciting! (All recipes are from The Complete Book of Small Batch Preserving)

After the bluebarb jam, I made spiced honey blueberry jam and fresh fig and strawberry jam. The fig and strawberry is my favorite so far, though they're all tasty. It's kind of appalling how much sugar goes into a batch of jam, but it's also a little thrilling dumping cup after cup into the saucepot. And delicious!

Oh, and if anybody in Portland is wondering, like I was, where to buy liquid pectin--the Urban Farm Store has it (along with all sorts of other handy canning supplies). Yay!

When last we spoke, I had just started brining my nine-day icicle pickles, and they're now all finished and tucked away in jars. It was fun taking care of them for a few minutes every day. The recipe made exactly 4 pints, so I didn't have any leftovers to sample, but they smelled good and pickle-y! Here they are at day 5, and then post-canning. Next time I'm going to try packing the pickles in the jars a little tighter, since they ended up floating to the top.

Baking

We went to a fun barbecue at Susan's on Friday, in honor of Linda and Paul, who were in town for Linda's book signing. It was great meeting them! My contribution to the barbecue was a shiro plum and berry frangipane tart, based on the recipe in Tartine. The fruit kind of got lost when the tart was baked, but it tasted good. My only complaint was that the texture of the sliced almonds distracted from my enjoyment of the tart; next time I'd opt for the more traditional ground almond filling.

I had some extra pastry cream and tart dough left over, so I made mini tartlets topped with blackberries. Yum!

Part of the reason that this past week has been so hectic is that I spent way too much time planning for the Pie-Off on Sunday. I decided early on that I'd enter the CPR category (the three main pie ingredients had to start with the letters C, P, and R), since I enjoy a challenge. I spent a long time making a spreadsheet of all sorts of delicious C, P, and R combinations (the flavor pairing chart in In the Sweet Kitchen came in very handy!) and then narrowing it down based on what's in season and what I could actually imagine baking.

I was originally going to make two pies, but in the end I decided to just make one, for my own mental wellbeing. I ended up going to the PSU farmers' market on Saturday morning, buying a bunch of ripe peaches, and making a double-crust peach pie with candied ginger and rum raisins. I used the peach pie recipe from Baking Illustrated as my base recipe, adding 2T of diced candied ginger and 1/3c of rum-flamed raisins (using the method described in Paris Sweets). I used Shuna's all-butter pie dough instead of the lattice dough that Cook's Illustrated called for. And I sprinkled some big sugar on top, because you know how I like big sugar on my baked goods.

Word has it that about 70 pies were entered in the Pie-Off, which is awesome! There were about a dozen in the CPR category. Judging that many pies took a while, so we occupied ourselves with our picnic lunch (salads #1, #7, and #23 from Mark Bittman's 101 Simple Salads, plus maple-cornmeal drop biscuits and bluebarb jam) and then took a walk around the park's beautiful rose garden.

I ended up taking second place in the CPR category--first place went to a good-looking coconut pineapple rum pie. Oh well, second place isn't bad, and we got to eat lots of pie afterwards. I managed to get a piece of my pie, and it was plenty tasty, which is a relief. I should bake another peach pie just for us, before the season ends.

I feel like the other pie I considered making might have had a better shot at winning, since it was more unusual than peach pie--it was a roasted banana cream pie with chocolate-lined pretzel crust (C = chocolate, P = pretzel, R = roasted banana). But it also would have required more work, and it wouldn't have used seasonal ingredients. I might try making it this winter though--I think it sounds tasty!

Crafts

In crafty news, Linda was in town to promote Crochet Adorned, as I mentioned above. I went to her Powell's event on Thursday, as well as her Yarn Garden event on Saturday. At the Yarn Garden event, she showed us all how to crochet a flower, and it really worked! Very exciting :) I ended up buying her book, because even though I'm not a big crocheter (the last time I crocheted was when I made a granny square afghan for my mom when I was about 12), the compendium of trims and motifs at the back of the book seems like a great reference. And some of her projects are really cute and easy--like the embellished shoes and pretty petals tank top. I might have to break out my crochet hooks sometime soon!

I forgot to mention it at the time, but I went to the Black Sheep Fiber Festival back in June and bought some pretty roving so I could try handspinning. Lee was kind enough to lend me her drop spindle, and I finally got around to trying it out a few weeks ago.

I used my less exciting (scratchy) roving for my practice run, and the yarn turned out lumpy and unpredictable, as I'd expected. It's still pretty cool that you can make yarn from fiber though!

The roving (combined with my very thick spinning technique) only yielded about 9 yards of yarn, and it wasn't soft enough to make something wearable out of it, so I used it to knit a cozy for our mail slot. When we bought the house, it came with a mail slot insert with two knobs, so I just knit a rectangle with two buttonholes for the knobs (looks kind of scary in that picture!), and I sewed it around the insert. Not too exciting, but at least the yarn didn't go to waste.

I have a larger amount of my nice roving, so hopefully when I get around to spinning it, I'll be able to make something a little more useful with it. We'll see...