A Visit With Mom and Dad

My parents drove into town Wednesday, July 10 and stayed until Monday, July 15. I was able to take half of Thursday and all of Friday off work, which was great! This is my first summer working full time, and I'm telling you, it can be rough at times. :) Whitworth's Annual Institute of Ministry was also happening the Wednesday and Thursday my parents were in town. The evening worship services are free and open to the public, so my parents and I enjoyed two wonderful worship services. The preacher, Carolyn Gordon, was fantastic! I can't wait until the podcasts are up on the Whitworth website, so I can listen to her sermons from Monday and Tuesday evenings, too. If you get a chance, listen to them. You'll be challenged, encouraged, and amused.

Wednesday and Thursday, my parents and I did some fun things, like hosted an ice cream social with some of my parents' friends from college, enjoyed ice cream at Doyle's Ice Cream Parlor where my mom and her friend used to take boys in college and make them drink a monster shake (which they still have!), and enjoyed an enchilada dinner with three of my housemates. My mom calls this the ice cream vacation because we had ice cream every day. Part of this is because I'm making good use of my new ice cream maker. The other part is that all three of us just really, really love ice cream!

On Friday, we embarked on our big day trip to Canada. We've all been to Canada a number of times, but not since I've been in Spokane. The drive up there is a mere three hours through some gorgeous countryside. We left at 7:30 AM on Friday morning, and our first stop was to eat muffins and look at the Pend Orielle river at an overlook. Our second stop was at Sweet Creek Falls, which turned out to be this beautiful, Columbia-River-Gorge-like waterfall:

 

Our crossing into Canada was easy and quick. About 10 minutes into Canada, I burst into laughter. Like tears-rolling-down-my-face laughter. It was all because of my dad's behavior with the Canadian border guard. He made us look so suspicious! My dad took my laughter graciously. Here's the grand Canadian flag:

 

Our end destination was the city of Nelson, British Columbia. The picture below is just a tiny view of the mountains and beauty surrounding Nelson. We started off at the Visitor Center where we had the pleasure of talking with a delightful young woman who's a student in Geography at "U Vic" (University of Victoria). She gave us some great advice. With her help, we had lunch at a beautiful little park, walked along the waterfront, got milkshakes, and visited an eclectic coffeeshop. My dad decided to hike to Pulpit Rock across the bridge you see in the background in the photo. While he hiked, my mom and I sat in the park at the waterfront. She read, I wrote in my journal, and we both people watched. It was a great spot to observe families. The main center of town has some major hippie influence, so it was nice to see a different side of the city. Being in a different country made me think about nationality. There didn't seem to be any difference between the people we were observing and us except that they say "Eh" and prounouce "ou" differently. Does nationality even matter? I didn't come to any conclusions, but it's interesting to think about.

We left Nelson around 4:30 or 5 and decided to take a little detour to Crawford State Park back in Washington. We drove 12 miles to get there only to find that the park was closed. Fortunately, we serendipitously turned off onto a side road and found a lovely campground by a river that had big picnic tables. We had great food (old favorites like chicken salad and pasta salad) and enjoyed sitting in the peaceful campground. Here's the pasta salad:

 

They might hate this picture, but I think it's hilarious. :) We were feeling pretty tired on the road back and went to sleep practically right after getting home around 9 PM.

On the road out to Crawford State Park, we saw three beaver dams in the water. It was awesome! We didn't see any beavers, but I guessed it was because they were inside their dams eating toast and kippers (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe anyone?).

On Saturday, we met my friend Margy at Petit Chat bakery. It was delightful to talk with Margy and enjoy pastries together. After that, we drove up to Green Bluff to (as you can see) pick cherries! We picked exactly enough pie cherries for a batch of sour cherry jam. The picture below is my mom showing my housemate Pam and me how to pit cherries with a paper clip. So easy! We also picked Rainier and Bing cherries, all from Cherry Hill Orchard, whose owners go to my church. After Cherry Hill, we walked around Eleven Acres Farm and chatted with the farmer and enjoyed the new microbrewery at another farm. It was lovely to be relaxed at Green Bluff. I'm usually on a mission and fail to enjoy the process of picking food that farmers have so carefully cultivated.

 

On Saturday afternoon, we had some down time and then enjoyed raspberry lemonade with Dottie, my college mentor and friend. Saturday evening we enjoyed a steak dinner with broccoli, watermelon, and this delicious orzo "risotto" from one of Mark Bittman's cookbooks. My coworker mentioned a couple weeks ago that she broiled steak and loved how it turned out. My dad loves steak, so I used the last $20 of my June grocery budget to buy two quality New York strip steaks from Egger's. We were not disappointed. The broiling method worked wonderfully and the meal was delicious. 

 

On Sunday, we had a big waffle breakfast with cherry compote, went to church, hung out in the afternoon, and went up to church again for a concert and hot dog dinner. Oh yeah, and we also cleaned the ice that had been building up in my chest freezer. That was quite the process! In the end, it was pretty easy, but I was so glad my mom and dad helped me out. I would never have had the gumption to clean it on my own. Everything's all neat and tidy in the freezer now and is being filled as we speak with fresh raspberries. 

 

On Sunday night, I brought out all the leftovers from all our meals and found that we each had enough left for meals for another week. It was such a pleasure to make meals for my parents. Foolishly, every meal I made for them except two were new recipes. It could be unfortunate that every new recipe I tried worked out splendidly. :) I discovered soba noodles and liked them so much, I'm going to make another soda noodle dish tonight with zucchini, cabbage, and green onions (from my garden!).

 

After breakfast together on Monday morning, my parents drove back to Portland, and I drove to work. It was a lovely weekend together. I'm so grateful for my parents' companionship. 

My Garden, Year Two

This is the second year my college mentor has given me space in her vegetable garden for a garden of my own. This year, I was much more savvy in my planning, so I'm expecting (and praying!) to have a better harvest than last year. We're off to a good start! I thought I'd post some pictures of my garden here to get you oriented to what I've planted. It's always fun to have pictures from the beginning of a garden and I'll be sure to post more when the garden is in full production in August/September. Here are two views of my garden:

 

The picture above shows all the plants expect my tomatoes and one cucumber. In this main part of the garden, I planted potatoes (front left corner), beans, tomatoes, a cucumber, carrots (which I had to replant once), peas, basil, rosemary, chives and green onions. I also planted marigolds, hollyhocks, cosmos and zinnias because I love having fresh flowers. I have a couple volunteer plants from last year that sprung up, including dill, calendula (a flower), snapdragons, a nasturtium, and parsley. As I was weeding today, I pulled up tons of baby hollyhocks and snapdragons that had re-seeded themselves. :) Here's a couple close-ups from the garden:

 

Dottie, my college mentor, and I also decided to try experimenting with straw bale gardening this year. Straw bale gardening was invented as a way to garden successfully even with poor soil. The Mohrlangs have an empty lot next to their house that will be the future home of a Whitworth professor when he gets around to building a house on the lot. In the meantime, he let us use his property for our straw bales. I decided to plant tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini and a pepper plant in my straw bales. Here's hoping they thrive! The first picture below is our whole straw bale garden. Dottie's bales have dirt on top of the whole bale while mine just have dirt directly around the plant:

 

A Romanian Rainbow pepper plant:

 

This is a view down the row of bales. You can see a Siletz tomato in the foreground, then a Black Krim tomato, a couple zucchini plants, and English cucumbers at the very end. I also planted two Sun Gold tomato plants given to me by a co-worker, and a lemon cucumber plant.



I love having a garden. I like thinking about God giving Adam the job of stewarding the earth in the Garden of Eden. Gardening is labor intensive (if my sore back after weeding is any indication), but it's also freeing to dig my hands into the dirt after a week of sitting at a desk in front of a computer. It's good to use my hands instead of my head and my whole body instead of just my fingers. Pray with me that my garden grows and that I can be generous with the fruit it bears!

Have you planted a garden this summer? What did you plant?

The Week in Review

Last week, I bought something really cool at Costco:

We had a June birthday celebration at work this week, so I made this (Peanut Butter Ice Cream with Peanut Butter Cups):

 

With these:

The verdict? Delicious! I can't wait to make more batches of ice cream throughout the summer. It will be my go-to dessert. It was fun to share my first-ever batch with my co-workers, as they all have a hearty appreciation of food. This was the first fun thing of the week that I'm going to share with you.

The second fun thing was "cooking" a meal for 25 people on Friday night. My co-worker Emily has been involved in the start of a new college ministry in town that's being spearheaded by several current Whitworth students. Every Friday night, Thrive (the name of the ministry) meets in a church building downtown for dinner, worship, a message, and small group discussion. Because Thrive is just getting off the ground, they don't have the funds to provide dinner every week, so they've been soliciting help from friends and members of local churches. I had extra tithe money from housesitting in May, so I volunteered to make dinner for this week's Thrive gathering.

The catch is that the church building, which used to be an art gallery, has no sink, stove, or oven, so the meals prepared for Thrive need to be creative. Fortunately, God has provided me with many opportunities to coordinate food for bigger groups, so it didn't take me long to come up with a menu: cold, sliced ham from Egger's Meats, bread from Costco (multigrain and rosemary olive oil), and carrots and sliced cucumbers with Sabra hummus. No dinner would be complete without dessert, so I made vegan/gluten free cookies (made with bananas, peanut butter, and oats for substance) and a chocolate sheet cake with peanut butter frosting. Every day this week, I've been preparing some part of the meal, so packing up and transporting the meal downtown on Friday was a breeze. Here it is all packed up and ready to go:

 

I was nervous about the evening and how it would all come together, so I asked my parents and several friends to pray about it. The biggest thing was that the two people I knew weren't going to be there. Providentially, Emily connected me with her friend Anneliese, who was going to be leading Thrive that evening. When I was driving downtown looking for parking, I passed the building the first time and when I came back around, a car was leaving the spot right in front of the building. Praise the Lord! The other miraculous thing was that I didn't get a parking ticket, as I only had enough change for an hour of my time. :)

 

It was a piece of cake (hehe) to set up the meal. Anneliese, her friend Amanda, and I had time to pray for the evening before it started. People trickled in steadily until 6:15, and I enjoyed talking with handful of people. The meal came off splendidly. There was enough for all and a manageable amount of leftovers. Actually, I had almost the whole cake left which was disappointing until I tried it when I was back home. I'm telling you, it is delicious!

 



You might be surprised to know that the vegan/gluten free cookies were also good. The leftovers are in my freezer, ready to emerge at some fortuitous occasion.

Speaking of fortuitous occasions, the third thing I want to share with you about the week is that I finally saw a LIVE MOOSE!

 

My family has been to all the prime moose spots in the United States--Yellowstone, Vermont, Maine, Yosemite--and we never saw a live moose. My church hosted a bike ride on the Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes today through the beautiful lakes of northern Idaho. As my housemate Pam and I were riding along, we saw the moose chowing down across the lake. It was awesome! The ride itself was also lovely. Here are some pictures from the trail that entirely fail to capture the beauty we witnessed:

 



And that's a wrap! Have a blessed Father's Day tomorrow!

Summer Fun in Photos

I've been doing research at work about how the Olive Tree blog could be more effective . The nice thing is that the research will benefit this blog, too. I hope you still have some faith in me as a blogger and are looking forward to the good things to come. :)

My friend Heidi had a blog post with pictures from her various summer adventures. They say imitation is the highest form of flattery, right? So here's my post of Fun Summer Photos.

Over Memorial Day weekend, my family and several friends of the family enjoyed time at my uncle's beach house in Lincoln City, Oregon. My dad, friend Rachel, and I went on a hike that unfortunately ended in a broken arm for my dad. I just realized that my dad's looking off to the side in the top picture. Hmm...not sure what he's looking at! :)

Two weeks later, I drove back home to see Julie graduate from high school. I'm so proud of her; she's a compassionate, smart, and fun young woman. At the end of August, my family will pile into our Mazda van and drive her down to Azusa Pacific University in the Los Angeles area. Fun! Pray that we can all fit in the car along with Julie's stuff.

My housemates Rachel and Taylor biked 38 miles from Spokane to Coeur d'Alene in June. Super intense, right? What did I do? Read Harry Potter at a coffee shop where my friend works, drank strawberry lemonade, ate this peanut butter brownie, and picked them up in downtown Coeur d'Alene. Super intense? Not really, but I sure had fun!

My parents came to Spokane from July 6-14. We had a wonderful week together. I planned to bless them when they were here, but instead I found myself super-abundantly blessed by them. We made this Cherry Clafouti for dessert one night. Delicious!

Some dear friends from Partners International and I biked a portion of the Centenniel Trail in Spokane Valley on Saturday, July 21. Afterward we enjoyed a picnic, cherry pit spitting contest, and the turtles around this waterfall. Ya gotta love summer!

Last Sunday, my small group from church enjoyed a day on the Pend Oreille River about an hour north of Spokane. It was beautiful. We even saw two eagles flying when we were on the boat...amazing!

Unfortunately, my two lovely housemates, Taylor and Rachel, are moving out in the coming week. We had a wonderful day yesterday at Green Bluff, eating lunch together, visiting the Petit Chat bakery and spending an hour in Jim and Janie Edwards' garden. Here's a couple photos from our day together: