eclaire (what's in a) name?

hi readers, how are you doing? long time no post. i hope you’re all having a good summer and enjoying the beautiful weather outside. we’ve been quite busy the past month, with both fun events (peter and jenny’s wedding, katie’s birthday, and a trip to ohio) and a sad event.

throughout the good times and bad, the constant in our lives is food – whether it’s the (mostly) healthy stuff we make at home or the not so healthy stuff we eat when we’re on vacation. i love food, and as you may have gathered from other posts, cooking is part of my genetics – my whole family loves to prepare and consume delicious comida. mike and i make at least 4-5 meals at home per week, all of which are vegetarian and some of which are vegan (i will eat and bake with eggs, but i use very little dairy). i also read a ton of food blogs (my favs are 101 cookbooks, smitten kitchen, and vegan lunchbox), and we subscribe to a great magazine called vegetarian times that continually inspires us to create new, seasonal meals.

a month or so ago, my sister-in-law laura and i were sharing our favorite food blogs, and she was telling me how she wants to create her own food blog about the scrumptious vegan food she cooks. during the course of the conversation, i began to wonder why i haven’t yet taken some of the things i love doing – cooking, writing, and taking pictures – and combine them into blog posts about food. silly me!!

so…drum roll please….i am planning on posting at least once per week with a dish we’ve made! many of the recipes will be classic powell family cuisine that i grew up eating (i should probably make sure my parents are ok with me publishing the secret family recipes – will you guys please let me know if this is ok in the comments?), and the rest will be my own spin on vegetarian times or food blog recipes, letting you know how well they turned out in real life.

to begin this new feature on my blog, i prepared a picnic lunch that you may have read about on my husband’s blog. we packed up the picnic items: falafel, pita bread, hummus, fresh veggies, my own version of tabouli salad (recipe is below), iced tea, and some delicious raspberry bars  into our backpacks and biked out to the bluffs of wilder ranch to enjoy the feast and the view.

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my grandmother, marion claire white, passed away last week after a long fight with alzheimer’s.

below is a picture circa 1981 – my mom is in the upper left corner wearing the green dress, my grandma marion is next to her in the printed dress, i am the baby seated on the lap of my great grandmother clara, and next to clara is my great grandfather charlie:

and here’s a more recent picture from my grandparent’s 60th wedding anniversary in august of 2007:

this weekend, linnea graduated on saturday and on sunday we celebrated father’s day. as you may be realizing after reading my blog for half of a year, any celebration in my family includes multiple and/or copious quantities of food. this weekend did not disappoint.

we began the feasting with delicious home made raspberry muffins and mimosas at linn’s house, followed by the graduation and culminated the day with an amazing buffet dinner at chaminade that left us stuffed to the brim. pics of all of these are here.

the next morning, we ate a huge tofu-veggie scramble to begin father’s day and then headed up to coastways to pick some olallieberries. after picking a combined 14 pounds of olallieberries (there were four of us pickers), i made a tasty crisp.

ollalieberry crisp

serves 8-10

• 4½c ollalieberries
• 4T white sugar
• 1c flour
• 1½c oats
• 3/4c brown sugar
• 1t ground cinnamon
• 1/2t ground nutmeg
• 8T butter (or fake butter)
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1. mix ollalieberries with sugar and spread in a 9×13 pan
2. in a separate bowl, combine flour, oats, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and butter (or fake butter) and sprinkle the mixture over the top of the berries
3. bake the crisp in a 350º oven for 35 minutes, and voila!

the second fire in santa cruz county in the past two months raged in bonny doon this afternoon (a solid 10 miles from our house), but we had a pretty clear view from our backyard. all of our neighbors were outside, snapping pics, complaining about the heat, and feeling pretty amazed at the power of fire. i felt a mixed combination of relief that the fire was far away from my home and sadness for all the homes that were burning and lives that were changing. mike and i walked around a bit to try to snap better pictures, and we saw several empty uhaul vans being driven FAST up western towards the blaze, which we could only assume were about to be filled to save their belongings from being destroyed.

check out more fire pictures here.

while you’re on flickr, check out pics of linnea’s last resident string quartet performance and linn’s 22nd birthday.

this isn’t a real post, my dear readers, it’s just a notification that i have put pictures on flickr from our last two weekends that have been filled with great friends, lots of fun, and even more food, so you should check out said pictures.  as soon as i recover from all this fun, i’ll get back to posting as usual.

angels camp

cinco de mustache cuatro