Meet Okra

After months of searching nearby shelters, rescues, and craigslist we finally found our perfect puppy. He's 7 weeks old and a mix of black labrador retriever and German wirehaired pointer. We drove up to Olympia, WA to pick him up (and missed Shawn and Kevin sorely while we drove though OlyWa).

After an entire day being toted around in the van and only managing to paint the inside of his crate with excrement once, Okra (after a thorough cleaning; thanks for the hose Lida!) has made it home. He seems to be much more partial to grunting and sneezing than to barking, which we like. The video that follows is from last night when we got back to Newport.

Puppies are notoriously hard to take photos of because they never stay still. Here's a couple of our best attempts.

Summer Rocks: Post 2

Summer has finally begun for Matt. 3 hours post-MCAT and he's already asleep. I think that bodes well.

Summer Rocks: Post 1

I love berry season. I love walking through a forest on a warm day and smelling the blackberry blossoms, thimbleberries, and salmon berries.
And I love strawberries.

The wild coastal strawberries are just starting to come out and they are very small, like 1cm in length, at their biggest. And munching those wild strawberries got me itching for large, juicy, valley strawberries. So I went and picked some 15 pints today, yumm!

In other kitchen news, Günter now has his very own cast iron skillet.
Stay tuned for new recipes.

Clammin'

Memorial Day weekend is usually a time to get out of town and avoid the hordes of tourists that show up in Newport. They clog the streets (ok, one street), and make cycling around town dangerous. Granted, they also enable our small coastal town to exist by bringing in much needed appetites and shopping habits. Anyway, we stayed home and took advantage of the negative low tides by clamming in the Yaquina Bay.

Day One we met Vero at the beach directly in front of our house at 6am. We wandered around the surf looking for razor clams, which we had no idea how to find. After about an hour of jealously eyeing our fellow clammers who were nearing their catch limit, I ran out of patience and suggested we head to the mudflats where Matt and I have had extensive training seeking and finding clams of a dozen species. So, we drove 8 miles upstream to dig for soft shell clams, Mya arenaria, which are somewhat of a delicacy along the Atlantic coast.

Day Two we drove a mile or so up the bay and dug for gaper clams. After about an hour of digging up and crushing a half dozen gapers, Matt and I perfected our technique and dug up several whole clams, and two enormous ones. I hear they can live up to 20 years. I estimate these were at least 5 years old! We were pretty stoked.

It took us over an hour to prep the clams, Matt strung them up by their necks outside so we could stretch out the meat. I guess the necks can be pretty tough, and these "old boys" were extremely strong.
We cut, cleaned, and cooked them. Then I made a pretty awesome non-dairy clam chowder with all the bits. mmmm.