Coffee Daze

I was up until 4:30 this morning, buzzed out of my mind on Northwest coffee. The drive-thru latte shacks are dangerous to my sanity. Thankfully I had a good summer read—Marion Keye’s Is There Anybody Out There? to keep me company all night long.  I had checked it out from the local library and not just condemned myself to reading Ernest Hemmingway’s Complete Collection of Short Stories, which of course is incredible, but not exactly the kind of thing you want keeping you company while your mind is racing and you’re contemplating your career and questioning your goals and considering whether or not motherhood is perhaps reward enough and then you're thinking about whether or not you should spend the money to get a massage to undo the damage of a short bed with a-hundred year old mattress.  Hemmingway is definitely not the person to turn to at these sort of moments

Exhausted as I am today, I feel like it was such a treat to indulge like that—staying up all night to think about life, worry and read, cry a little, and dive into the drama of my own self indulgence. The consequences are small out here on the Gorge. We had no where to be the next day. Steve got the boys up and dressed, Christie, our babysitter we found at Steve’s Dad’s hippie church, came at 7:30 to mind the boys while I slept in and Steve went to our local café to get his writing done. At 10am, I drove the 3 blocks to Grounds, for the free wifi and more strong coffee (it’s a hopeless addiction). And in a not-so-strange coincidence—White Salmon where we stay out here is a small town and both the gay-loving/peace-making Christian church and the deer antler, 80’s rock playing, concrete-floored, local-wine/strong coffee café are within walking distance of our home-base––Christie, the babysitter works at the same café, so when she has to go to work, she drops our two boys off with us and starts her shift, and Steve and I, ostensibly end our writing days.

Food Update

I have invited the Italians, who moved here from Luca, one of those incredible hill towns in Tuscany, whom we met at the leftie church, along with their children Jean Luca (3) and Alessandro(1.5) to sample the American delicacy of smoked meat. Last summer, Steve and I made our own flower-pot smoker and besides a pork shoulder made just for the immediate family, we have not shown the Columbia River Gorge what we are really about.  As you can see from the images below, it’s a pretty simple contraption, our flower smoker is. Just a hot plate, a large flower pot and bottom, a meat thermometer and some wood chips.

This is the whole contraption...



Here's what it looks like when open. The grill is where you place the meat, underneath are the wood chips, and the hot plate slowly heats the chips so they smoke the meat.