"Molly and Me" - a Year Later

Molly Malone (1997-2008)

I started this blog on November 10, 2007 with a post about my dog Molly and about my own first steps of moving forward to a life after full time work. And, now I'm noting the first anniversary of my blog and, sadly, Molly is no longer here to celebrate with me. Both of the veterinarians we've seen recently remarked on how unusual it is to see an 11 1/2 year old Newfoundland. And, if it weren't for her loss of mobility, she'd still be with us. She was a real sweetie - gentle, very enamored with people (and with people food). She always followed one or the other of us around the house and would plop herself down to be within 6 or 8 feet once we settled down somewhere. It's going to be tough to get used to being around here without our constant companion.

I wish I had some digital pictures of Molly as a puppy. She was SO darned cute. But, we only have pictures on paper from that period. Here are a few of our memories of her.

Found a cool spot in the garden at our Manzanita house

Camping with our friend Susan

Her standard sprawl in her favorite spot at the beach house

Getting some attention from Aileen one Christmas

and always a beggar

Under the "Labels" section to the right (below the archives), there is a category for Molly. If you're a dog lover, you can click on her name in that list, and see other pictures of her from some of my previous posts during the past year. I guess I'll have to retire that label now.

Meanwhile, the Dark Days Eat Local Challenge has begun, as of yesterdat. So, I'll be back to blogging about our local eating efforts once we get over this hump. It's been kind of a rough week.

Halloween on Ladd Avenue

Doing our best to recreate the Miller-Creswell family Halloween parties of a few years ago, we invited Jennifer, Ian, Liam and Graham, and Jeff. Grace got a better offer, if you can imagine that. The basic ingredients of those parties when our kids and theirs were young were bobbing for apples and then making those into caramel apples, costumes, chili for dinner, and anything else we decided to get creative about.

So, we had those basic required elements of "the Halloween party". But, something new that was probably the best part of the whole evening were our trick-or-treat helpers! Liam and Graham are probably the only kids I've known who got great joy out of giving candy away and didn't really seem all that interested in getting some themselves. They positively squealed with delight each time there was a knock on the door. They ran to the door and got so excited when they saw the different kids in costumes. I've never had that much fun giving out the treats myself. Those two were a real kick. So, here are a few pictures from the evening:

Molly - not overly enthused about her "costume

Jennifer bobbing for an apple with tips from Graham

Ian did it the right way - going all the way down to the bottom of the "cauldron"

Liam and Graham were both successful bobbers

the same version of chili I wrote about a couple weeks ago

2 witches and a ghost

close up of the pin on one of the witches

Jennifer in one of the famous bug hats *

even the chicken gets into the party spirit

*Previous appearances of the famous bug hats at our house:

Dog Days in Portland

When we have three days in a row of 100+ temperatures, and you have a fur coat you can't hang up in the closet, you need some help. Molly seemed to appreciate having her own personal fan.

One Local Summer, Week 7

Just back from our road trip through British Columbia, so tonight's dinner is the only meal I've made here at home this week. It was an almost all local meal. We haven't had chicken in a while and I had a hankering for it. So we've grilled some local chicken breasts that I had marinated in ginger, garlic and chili powder - based loosely on a recipe in The Farm to Table Cookbook.
Chard from our garden sauteed with garlic and some hot pepper.
Gratin with local fingerlings, shitakes, and mild. I didn't have time to look for a local substitute for the cheese, so I went ahead and used gruyere as called for in the recipe. This was also a variation on a recipe in Ivy Manning's book.
And, finally, a green salad with lettuce from our garden.


The potatoes look a lot better in the before picture than they do in the completed meal - partly due to my picture-taking abilities, but also probably due to the fact that it got overcooked while I was waiting for Grady to get back from a visit to the neighbors. (Always handy to have someone else to blame!)

I haven't posted any pictures of Molly lately - the namesake for the "old dog", as I explained in the very first post of this blog. The potatoes gratin may have been overcooked, but that didn't keep her from showing her interest. She was happy to have us back home and she always appreciates it when we eat on the deck since the table there is lower than our kitchen island, making it much easier to get her nose up close.



We did have a lovely dinner in Victoria that also qualifies for One Local Summer. I asked our host at the B&B for suggestions of restaurants that use local products in their cooking. He enthusiastically suggested three restaurants that he said were all very good. We chose Paprika Bistro and it was excellent. I started with a salad of local organic greens, green apples, Poplar Grove Tiger blue cheese and hazelnuts. Then followed with Cowichan Bay Farm duck with sour cherry and ginger sauce and a potato strudel.

A few more observations on our trip through B.C. later. I managed to come home with one souvenir I didn't appreciate, a full-on cold with all the usual symptoms. So, this is about all the effort I can muster tonight.

Molly and me

This is Molly. Molly lives with us and she really IS an old dog. I, on the other hand, am neither a dog nor old (a point which the beloved offspring would surely challenge if they ever read this.) New tricks are highly unlikely to feature in Molly's future. But, I am beginning to learn all kinds of new things, tricks or otherwise. After leaving a 60+ hour a week job as principal of a PreK-8 school and moving into semi-retirement, I am finding that I can still learn lots of new things.

The most recent is that I have become a late entry into the Dark Days Eat Local Challenge. This challenge was issued by Laura at the Urban Hennery blog. (The rules for this can be found at http://urbanhennery.wordpress.com/dark-days-challenge/). My interest in the Dark Days Challenge is to improve what we eat here at our Portland FourSquare house in Ladd's Addition and to be more responsible about the effects of our eating choices. While my school was becoming an International Baccalaureate school, I talked a great deal with staff and parents about the goal for our students to understand that their actions have an effect on people and places all over the world. But, I think I was so busy running the school that I really didn't have time to examine the effects of my own daily choices. You never want to be in the position of telling students to do something you cant really back up in your own life at least in some way.

So, as a small beginning step I signed up today for the Dark Days challenge and prepared a dinner that was somewhat of a warm up for the 200 mile expectation. Tomorrow will be the full-on challenge dinner for this week. Tonight I took a wonderful recipe from the blog of another challenge participant and made "Roasted Poblano and Potato Quiche". I didn't take a picture of it because the photo from the recipe author was much prettier (http://figswithbri.com/?p=73) - I don't have a beautiful fluted pan like hers. The second photo is the gorgeous selection I brought home this morning from the farmer's market. (Being a rookie blogger, I haven't figured out how to move the picture to be next to the relevant text.) This includes the poblanos, walla walla sweet onion, and the German butterball new potatoes that went into the quiche. I used eggs and cheese that were not particularly local because I already had them in the fridge. But it was a positive, and very tasty, start to one of the new things I hope to be learning more about.
Thanks for checking in on my efforts. You can help keep me honest.