School's Out For Summer

Where have I been, you ask? For the past month and a half, I've been thoroughly immersed in school, and what suffered from blog neglect paid off with A's for final grades in all of my classes. We're talking community college here, so it's not like it's Stanford, but nevertheless, I was happy to achieve a goal I set for myself at the beginning of the quarter.

I learned a lot in school, mostly how to use Adobe software projects, Photoshop in particular. I incorporated food and chickens into a lot of my assignments, and one week we had to build a realistic magazine cover and put ourselves on it. For that, I used one of my favorite magazines, Hobby Farm Home, and I think it was the best thing I made all quarter, so I'm putting it here so you can see for yourself.



After I was done with school, I spent some time on what we call the "West End," which means the western part of the Olympic Peninsula, in other words, the real coast. People who live in Eastern Washington call anything west of the Cascade Mountains "the coast," and everyone over here thinks that's way too inclusive. For us, the coast is everything from about Port Townsend, I suppose, westward around Cape Flattery (the northwestern-most point of the contiguous U.S. of A. at Neah Bay), and south down to the mouth of the Columbia River. If you can't see the Strait of Juan de Fuca or the Pacific Ocean, trust me, you're not on "the coast."

Right after finishing my final school projects, I went to Kalaloch (pronounced Clay-lock, it means "a good place to land") to be with friends who have a time-share beach house there. Down the road from where we stayed is Kalaloch Lodge that offers rooms and cabins and also a good restaurant with huge windows to view the ocean and surf, and Vic and Deb took me to breakfast there just so I could try the "Crispy French Toast."

For some reason, perhaps a change in management, even though I was told it was a specialty (famous even!) menu item there, Crispy, or Crunchy French Toast, actually, is no longer on the menu. How do these things happen? Why do people mess with success??

But since we asked about it, the waiter came back and said the cook would make it for us anyway. I asked about the recipe and he told us that, after soaking the bread (the lodge used bread slices that were about one inch thick) in the usual egg mixture, you coat it with a combination of crumbled corn flakes, crushed nuts (almonds, but you can use pecans, walnuts, whatever you wish...), brown sugar, and nutmeg. I ordered a smoked salmon omelet myself but had a few bites of Vic's, and it was delicious.

At home, I did that Google thing to see just how "famous" Kalaloch Lodge's Crunchy French Toast is in reality and found this more detailed recipe published in The Seattle Times. I'll use butter rather than margarine though.

After I left Kalaloch, I spent a few days with Tim in Sekiu (pronounced See-cue, it means "quiet waters") where he lives. Part of the fun of being in Sekiu and Clallam Bay is going to their neat little food co-op, the only one in Clallam County. Originally, it had been located in a smaller building across the street, but they moved several months ago to its current location.

As it happened, a small chest freezer had been left behind on the porch at the old spot, and so one day when Tim and I stopped in at the co-op, Jane, the manager, asked him if he could be of any help in moving this freezer since the person who now occupied the old building was getting a little (ahem) "aggressive" about its presence. Other people had wanted this freezer, she said, but no one had the means to move it. If someone could move it, it was theirs. For free.

Tim looked at me. I looked at him. And he said, "You need a freezer." And I said, "Yes, I do."

The truth is, I desperately needed a freezer for food preservation, and the expense of buying one had become something that nagged at me now and again.

So we told Jane we'd take a look, and because Tim is the kind of guy who owns a truck, a fork lift, and other thingamajigs that lift things so you don't have to, within the space of an hour or so, I had a free freezer which he'll bring to me the next time he comes to Port Townsend. It's not pretty, but it works, and that's all I care about.

And if that's not enough, after that we went back to his house and ate lemon meringue pie that he made for me, too.

I mean, he was even willing to suck gasoline through a hose because sometimes the fork lift's fuel pump is a little funky, but he didn't have to.

Am I lucky, or what?