Memorial Day Weekend

I hope everyone had a great Memorial Day Weekend. We ended up staying close to home and spent some time relaxing. Jeff of course made some wonderful food over the weekend. Friday night he made Pork and Chorizo Burgers with Green-Chile Mayo along with some Cucumber Lemonade. The burgers were delicious. We had our friend Pascal over for dinner on Saturday night and we had the burgers again.



Sunday night for dinner we had Upside Down Apple French Toast. We got the recipe from a Tyler Florence episode on Food Network. The French Toast was very good and we can't wait to make it again.

Repper Background

I just saw the website Repper on Lifehacker. It's lets you create abstract backgrounds from your photos, so I had to make one of Jamie and myself. Here's my favorite one so far. :)



I also updated our blog background with another pattern I created using this webtool.

Seattle

A few weeks ago, my sister Lisa was in Seattle for a work conference and so I decided to drive up and visit her for a few days. We had a great time in the city. We walked down to Pike's Place, shopped at H&M, and ate at Ivar's Fish Bar. It was also fun to see what goes on behind the scenes at a Stampin-Up conference. Although it was a fast trip, I had a blast. Here are some pictures. Most of these are ones that Lisa took, she is better about taking pictures than I am.

From Collages

New Food Weekend

So we got a new issue of Bon Appetit this week and so I (Jeff) decided to go a little crazy with some new recipes. I picked three different recipes to try out. We made two of them on Friday night and one more today. Yesterday, was the Caeser Potato Salad with Sugar Snap Peas and Sausage, Fontina, and Bell Pepper Strata. They both turned out really well and are super tasty. The only improvement we need to make is to pick some younger peas for the potato salad. The strata was really good and flavorful. Here are a couple of photos of our efforts.



The only photo of the potato salad is plated with the strata, I (Jeff) need to work on my plating, but it's going to end up in my belly anyways. :)


Today I made the nectarine-blackberry crisp, well I used frozen peaches, since they didn't have nectarines at New Seasons. It was different than the crisps my mom makes and it has a custard that bakes with the fruit. The custard wasn't as hard as I thought it might be and I was really happy with the results.


The next thing I need to work on is picking recipes that Jamie can enjoy. She's a little bit lactose intolerant and all of these had some dairy in the recipe. Oh well, I'll keep trying.

All the recipes can be found in the June issue of Bon Appetit, they weren't online as of this post.

Easter Dinner

I love that Jeff likes to cook and he is dang good at it too. For Easter dinner he made Pork Chops with Leeks in Mustard Sauce. He also made some roasted tomatoes. Dinner was delicious. Jeff's note: I got the pork recipe from the May issue of Bon Appetit and the tomatoes from watching 5 Ingredients on FoodTV.

San Antonio

Earlier this month we had the opportunity to go down to San Antonio and visit Jeff's sister Cathie, her husband Jared and their cute daughter Lily. They were great tour guides, they took us to fun places and we had some great Texas food. It was a short trip, but we had so much fun spending time with them and we can't wait to go back. Here are some pictures.



They took us to a great BBQ place called Rudy's. It was delicious.






We visited the Alamo and the Riverwalk. We have some video of the boat cruise along the Riverwalk, but we'll have to post it later.


Cathie and Lily

Columbia River Gorge Cruise

About a month ago Jeff and I took a cruise up the Columbia River Gorge to Cascade Locks. The Sternwheeler ship is an authentic replica of the ships that cruised the Gorge in the 1800's. We were able to do some great sightseeing and learn about the Lewis and Clark expedition. It took us 10 hours to arrive at Cascade Locks by ship. Once we got to our destination we then boarded a bus that drove us home to Portland and that trip only took an hour. On the ship we had breakfast, lunch, dessert and a snack. We really enjoyed the food. The only downside about the cruise was the weather, it rained the whole day, but we still had a wonderful time.



I thought it was really cool to see how the bridges would move and lift so the ship could pass through. Here are some pictures of that.

From Collages

From Collages

One part of the trip that I thought was very interesting was going through the Bonneville Dam and Lock. Here's a series of pictures taken as the ship enters the lock and the water rises. When the water rises high enough so the ship can float out of the lock, the gate opens.

From Collages

Here's a selection of some other photos from the trip. It was a long day and we were beat afterwards, but left feeling good about the day and we think we'd like to do this again sometime in the future.