June 3- June's Skillet Spaghetti... gone wrong... or did it?
Or how Gram helped me invent the world's most perfect food for teenagers, by accident!

Day 3 of "30 Days of June" and I'm already tired!


I like this recipe because you cook the noodles with the sauce, which makes the pasta tastier.

Recipe:
1 lb. ground beef
1 c. chopped onion
3-4 garlic cloves (I added a few for good measure)
8 oz. can tomato sauce
6 oz. can tomato paste
1 1/2 c. water
1 pint tomato juice

2 tsp. chili powder
1 1/2 tsp. salt
dashof pepper
1 tsp. sugar
1 tsp. oregano
7-8 oz package of elbow pasta (not spaghetti, like the recipe book says, unless you want a teenage-friendly food that's blob-like... which is what I ended up with)
onion and green pepper rings
Parmesan cheese

In an electric frypan, (or a large pot) combine beef, onion, garlic, tomato sauce, paste and juice; the water, sugar and spices. Cover and bring to a boil. Reduce heat. Simmer 30 minutes. Add elbow pasta, stir to seperate and simmer till pasta is tender. Stir frequently! Add onion and pepper runfs the last 5 minutes. Sprinkle Parmesan cheese to the top!

Guess What!!? I discovered the perfect dish for teens: Grandma's Skillet Spaghetti gone wrong. Here's why. I was trying to make a lovely classic spaghetti dish for a group of four adults and two teens, but what turned out instead was like something out of the movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes Really!



Okay, so maybe Gram was trying to inject a little humor into my latest episode of "Granddaughter Tries to Channel Dead Grandmother's Cooking Prowess," but I tell you, the whole thing was a bit horrifying at moments.

Here's the deal: Her recipe called for SPAGHETTI with the word (ELBOW) in parenthesis. I remember standing in the pasta aisle of the store and thinking... "Surely Gram wouldn't write Spaghetti if she really meant elbow pasta??" So I opted for spaghetti noodles.

It wasn't until I started dumping noodles south in the saucy pot and watching them hang onto each other like frightened skinny people in a tidal wave, that I realized Gram had probably meant Elbow pasta.



My two friends who cheered me on when cooking, who were a bit older, in their 50's, said, "You know they used to call every pasta spaghetti, that's just what they did, they didn't have a 100 varieties like spinach bowtie to choose from, so she probably did mean elbow."

But it was too late, my perfect tasting sauce was filled with half-cooked spaghetti clumping together. And THIS WAS THE MAIN COURSE! The table was set and I was freaking out, thinking, "there's no way I'm serving this stuff!"

Joanne encoarged me and so did a new friend named Catherine, who's a whiz in the kitchen. She said, "Add some more liquid, stir, and just WAIT... it will be okay!"


Cathy, who bakes Huckleberry pies in a single bound. Love her for keeping me sane during the Attack of the Killer Spaghetti Crisis!

She kept telling me to "wait," A lesson that I have a hard time with. I'm soo impatient!



So I waited, waited and waited, adding more tomato sauce. What we wound up with was spaghetti on steroids: a muscular mass of noodles and sauce which didn't look so pretty, but actually tasted yummy like gourmet Chef Boyaredee and which the teenagers and men lapped up like hungry dogs.


Here's the cute little family, the Schultices, who I cooked spaghetti.... er, pasta for.

JUNE 2- June's Angel Thumbprint Cookies

Today, my sister Cara June Raymond (named after Grandma) uses coconut once again to whip up Gram's cookies - I'm starting to think June had a thing for coconut!


Recipe:
1 c. butter
1 1/2 c. brown sugar
4 eggs
1 cup milk
2 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp almond flavoring
4 c. flour
slightly beaten egg whites

Cream butter and sugar. Add egg yolks and beat well. Add milk, flour, flavorings, Chill 15 minutes.Divide dough into pieces the size of walnuts. Roll into a ball, dip into egg white and then roll in coconut. Dent in the center of each cookie after placing on a cookie sheet. Put 1 tsp. jelly in each center. Bake at 375 for 25 minutes.

CHEF OF THE DAY: Cara Skoy Raymond and kids. (Can I just say my sister's fresh ingredients put me to shame! Look at that jug of fresh Jersey cow milk!)


As told by Cara Raymond:

If there is one thing I remember about Grandma June's cooking is that she paid attention to the details, she looked at cooking as an art, and at a gathering for a special occasion, every detail from the table settings to the temperature of the food was considered, and timed to perfection!

It always tasted soo good, even as a little girl I wanted to cook just like her when I grew up because she had a love of food, and the people she made it for where kings when they sat at her table.

In keeping with grandma's detail-oriented cooking, I made sure the ingredients I used were fresh, and of the finest quality.



The flour I used is from a local mill, that prides itself with the quality.

The butter-rich milk was freshly milked yesterday from my neighbor's jersey cow.

The butter in the recipe was home spun from the Jersey's cream. And the jam is homemade cherry I canned last year after I picked and pitted cherries with my kids.

My children liked the process it took to separate the yolks from the whites. They had fun rolling the dough and dipping it in the whites and then in the coconut


Then pressing a hole in the cookies for the jam.


Their favorite part was licking the beaters.



It was fun sharing Grandma June's recipe with the kids and talking about how much she loved cooking! But the best part was eating the cookies!

30 days of JUNE!
...or my family's way of inviting our Grandma La June into our kitchens, through cooking her dishes!

DAY ONE: LA JUNE'S TROPICAL WALDORF SALAD


This is recipe #1 in a series of recipes this month from my Grandmother La June's cookbook, Plain and Fancy Cooking.

Recipe:
1/2 cup of coconut
1/2 cup of nuts (I used toasted almond pieces)
1/3 cup mayo
1/2 cup whipped cream (whipped with a bit of almond extract (that was my addition) and a few pinches of sugar)
1 cup celery
1 red apple
1 yellow apple
2 banannas
1 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp lemon juice (I would used fresh)

Cut up the apples and celery, add the nuts and coconut.

Mix the (fluffy) whipped cream, the mayo, the sugar and the lemon juice.
Add it to the salad. Add sliced bananas right before you serve it!

I love this cool combo- mayo and whipped cream:



The simplicity of two apples:



Yum! Delicious Waldorf Salad!

30 DAYS OF JUNE!

La June is my grandmother and this month, my family and I plan to cook as many of her dishes from her well-loved cookbook as possible! Here's my story:


A few month back, while weathering one of Oregon's most sunless winters and with a severe case of post-break-up blues, I was moving some boxes I'd been storing in a friend's garage when something tumbled from the box and BAM! hit the concrete floor of the garage. Glass shattered, then something unexpected happened. The heady smell of summer roses floated up, permeating the garage. I knew immediately what I'd broken: an old-fashioned glass bottle of rose water that once belonged to my Grandmother La June. I'd been saving it for a rainy day --- just hadn't realized I would use it up in one BIG WAY on one February afternoon.



Being the somewhat superstitious girl I am, I immediately thought: "Ahhhh, grandma's here... and she's trying to send me a message." Now before you go thinking I'm looney, let me add that I'm a Mormon-- a faith that believes Heaven is always close (in fact right here on earth, just in another dimension...), and that loved ones come back on occassion to help us make it through this crazy life.


Here's a photo of my Gram when she was young.

I knew my Grandmother La June, with her flair for drama, would be especially audacious in her attempts to reach her posterity to and let them know she was watching over them. So I caught myself telling a friend, "I think grandma is here!"


But this is how I remember her!

When alive, it was grandma who always set an extra plate at the table in case an angel wanted to join us. Her communication with the "other side" is well-documented in my family, and though some of my relatives viewed it as bizarre, I counted it as one of her spiritual gifts.

But the day in the garage, her message seemed obvious; here it was: "It's okay, Jenie dear, things break, but life is still full of sweetness! Don't fret!"


In life, gramma was a bit of a mystery to me. A strong and angular Norweigian woman with impeccable taste and an endless supply of talent. I'm the tom-boy grandaughter, more comfortable wearing sneakers, casting around a fishing rod or digging in the dirt, but gramma was the embodiment of feminity (though she did love to garden!) What I inherit was her talent for music, writing and an incurable love of cooking. What got lost somewhere in that passage of DNA was gram's sense of order and her meticulousness in the kitchen. I'm a disaster when I cook!

I'd watched grandmother cook several times. She was not one of those affable grannies who will praise all your attempts at cooking, she had been a professonal chef and knew how things "ought" to be cooked. One time, my job, simple as it sounded, to mash potatoes, had not been up to snuff. I remember her pointing out that I needed to remove those stray potato skins I had left floating brown in that sea of beautiful white spuds.

Well, onto the intent of this blog post.... using the moment of breaking a bottle of rose water as an impetus, I've chosen to invite my gram into my life and kitchen (and the lives of my relatives) this month by opening up her cookbook "Plain and Simple Cooking by La June" and cooking some of her favorite recipes!

Grand Moments at the Oregon Truffle Festival
By Jenie Skoy

A few weeks ago, I feasted on Oregon truffles at the Oregon Truffle Festival in the Willamette Valley: the damp, ferny, mossy region in Oregon famous for sweet, rosy pinot noir and mysterious truffles!



Willamette Valley Vineyards hosted a "truffle dog training seminar" (the only event of its kind in North America, say the organizers!) and 18 truffle hunters and their canines spent a weekend in truffle training in forests where truffles lay.


Here's a video of Martha and her Dog Saylor!

Dog owners were able to observe the handling and training of skilled truffle dogs, and to introduce their dog to the scent of both Oregon and French black truffles. This two-day event began in the classroom, with lectures on canine scent detection and fundamentals of scent training then ended in a forest seeded with truffle spores!

I wonder how, after these dogs have gotten a whiff (and taste) of truffles, they'll ever be satisfied with dog bones again!!

Compared with Europe, Oregon's truffle industry is young and undiscovered.

"Secrecy pervades the world of truffles and is a part of their mystique, but it has not served Oregon’s truffles well, as secrecy precludes development of the knowledge necessary to bring the real potential of the Oregon truffles to market. Simple details like how to choose and handle a truffle to tease out its grandeur are known to only a few harvesters and chefs." says the Oregon Truffle Festival Website

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Above is loveable Finn, a Lagatto Romagnola, the breed with sharp senses known for their truffle hunting acumen. His owner, Holly, adopted him from the Dordogna region in France famous for wine, truffles and truffle hunting. Finn dug up the truffles, but had a problem giving them up. "His biggest problem is that he eats the truffles!" said Holly.



Digging up Oregon's White Gold! Willamette Valley Vineyard's winemaker Don Crank was in the forest to help truffle hunters.


These Oregon white truffles were dug up by a cute cocker spaniel puppy at Willamette Valley Vineyards.


This cute German Shepard dog, Sahalie, or "Holly" for short, or what her owner called her: "Turd Bird," was one of the best truffle hunters in the forest that day, in part because her owner runs a obedience school in Oregon City and she was so well-behaved.



Saylor , above, takes a moment to pause between truffle hunting. At this point, she was more interested in the roasted chicken in her owner's pocket!



This scene felt a little Red Riding Hood-ish with the wolf-like dog and young girl in a magical forest filled with truffles!



After the truffle hunting, we met in the dining room at Willamette Valley Vineyards for a truffle-infused lunch cooked up by executive chef at Timberline Lodge, Jason Stoller Smith.





Sinclair Philips, owner of Sooke Harbour House on Vancouver Island has a childlike fascination with truffles. Look at how his eyes light up!


Sinclair is a Slow Food Convivium leader in the Northwest. His soup will just have to wait until he's finished photographing a handful of black truffles.


Here's Sinclair talking up Willamette Valley Vineyard's wine at the dinner!

A few hundred dollars worth of these addictive fungi!

Artist, photographer and truffle sniffer, Douglas Gayeton, was in our neighborhood to research ideas for his book Lexicon of Sustainability






The perfect Oregon dish! Jason Stoller Smith, executive chef at Timberline Lodge cooked up this delicious Oregon lamb with black truffle stuffed lamb breast, black truffle parsnip puree with rootbeer and truffle gelees and chervil and grape gremolata.



Imagine our joy when they passed around whole truffles and grater!

FYI: Next week, Rex Pickett, the author of “Sideways,” the book that helped fuel the popularity of pinot noir wines will be in Portland to talk about his new book, “Vertical" in which characters Miles and Jack head to Oregon to taste some wines at vineyards like Van Duzer. Here's a link to Sideways

Stay tuned for PART TWO of my Oregon Truffle adventure, plus videos of the truffle dog training!


Cheryl Crumbley, marketing director of Lane County's United Way smells bing cherries in her glass of Willamette Valley Vineyard's pinot noir at the Grand Truffle Dinner in Eugene last month.

Cascade Baking Company is rolling in the green-- and yellow!

One bakery in Salem Oregon is feeling the love for the Oregon Ducks today and making bank with green and yellow bread to celebrate today's BCS Championship game in Arizona. Cascade Baking Company say's they'll make 100 loaves for U of O fans today. GO DUCKS!

Here's a video of some of the bakers cooking up their special bread for the game!






Cascade Baking Company makes non-alien like looking bread too (unlike the green and yellow bread in the photos above.) They make some wonderful artisan breads. One loaf is made with wheat grown in the Willamette Valley grown at Stalford Seed Farmers in Tangent.

It's an oddity that the wet Willamette Valley is able to grow wheat for bread flour, Stalford Seed Farms in one of the first farms to grow this special bread wheat able to withstand the wet. It's been boon for bakers who want to bypass commodity wheat and keep the "LOCAL" label on their bread.



The wheat is milled in Brownsville, Oregon and is courser than other wheat.