1. Great news. Debbie arrived safely in Eugene this evening after a visit to Hannah in Salem. Debbie will pick up substitute teaching jobs this week and next week in Eugene and then, should she do some subbing next year, she won't have to go through the paces she had to go through this spring in order to be on the list of available teachers. Her visit to Salem made me happy. Debbie texted me a picture of Harriet Potter, Hannah's adopted street dog from India, and Harriet looks great. Harriet was a great companion of ours for a short period of time in Greenbelt, MD as she was being transported from India to Portland, OR and stayed with us for a few days.
2. Carol engineered this afternoon's family dinner and assigned me to make a fruit salad. I got it in my head that balsamic vinegar would enhance a fruit salad's flavor and went to the World Wide Web in search of recipes that confirmed my intuition. I found one and, after a trip to Yoke's, I cut up some apple, a couple of small nectarines, and strawberries. I put this fruit in a bowl and added blueberries. To the fruit I added the juice of one and a half lemons, some balsamic vinegar, and honey. I mixed it all up and added chopped mint leaves. I put some of the salad in a little bowl and added cinnamon to my sample. I liked it. So, I added cinnamon to the fruit salad, mixed it all up again, and it was ready to take over to Paul and Carol's.
3. Today's family dinner was one of my favorites of all time. We started with canned cocktails -- I enjoyed a gin and tonic -- and crackers and cheese. After munching and sipping for a bit, the main even got underway.
Christy made a superb green salad called Crunchy Romaine Toss. It was a sweet/sour almost Caesar salad with an Asian tasting dressing and its crunch came from walnuts and uncooked ramen noodles broken up. Very inventive and very delicious.
Paul roasted potatoes on the grill. They were awesome. Even better was the cut of meat he grilled. Paul marinated a pretty good sized chunk of London Broil overnight and then grilled it and cut it into slices, similar to a roast. The London Broil looked so pink and juicy and beautiful when Paul brought the platter to the table that a part of me wanted to just sit and admire it, not eat it. But, I got over that sentiment in a hurry and savored my slices of this meat.
We also ate the fruit salad I made.
Molly contributed two bottles of wine. I had a small glass of the whiskey barrel-aged red wine she brought and loved it. I just didn't feel like ingesting any more alcohol than what I'd drunk, but a part of me wanted to sneak off with that bottle and drink it all myself (ha! ha!). I think the name of the wine is Apothic Inferno, but I'm not 100% sure.
Sitting outdoors, surrounded by Carol and Paul's large yard and multiple gardens, and with the growing season either approaching or upon us, we had a lot of garden talk tonight. Both Christy and Carol (along with Paul) are ambitious gardeners and spend a lot of time and energy shopping for plants and seeds, putting them in the ground, creating new garden spaces, and tending to their many plots and so, this time of year, especially, they have a lot to discuss and share ideas about.
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