Sculpin

The tomatoes in the farmers markets are starting to look pretty good! Unless you’re a tomater-hater like Josh, that is, in which case they look about the same.

For a One Local Summer late lunch, I cored and chopped three different kinds of tomatoes (I’ve forgotten their vendor), then added a handful of Appel Farms cheese curds and some cubes of toasted Microbakery roasted-garlic bread. Drizzled the lot with olive oil and ground a little pepper over it. Tasty!

I had a good chat with Larry of Microbakery this afternoon. He’s as clued in to locavory as anybody I could name; he strives to use local ingredients as much as he can. Larry gets all his flour from the Fairhaven organic flour mills, and the grain is originally from Eastern Washington and Montana. It’s tough to find hard organic wheat that’s more local than that, but there are a few places popping up. I hope my expression of interest encouraged him to check out a farm/mill in the Methow Valley.

Today we had our first real trip on the tandem! We went to yoga and back on it, a distance of just over 2.5 miles round-trip. This involved a lot of firsts: first ride in light traffic; first ride after dark; first time at a stoplight; first time with an unleashed dog in the street. We made it up one fairly respectable little hill, too.

It was pretty easy! I think we’re doing very well. And it’s still a lot of fun. I loved riding at dusk. I’m particularly pleased because I wasn’t at 100% today, but still it was no trouble getting there and back. I was pretty pale and nervous before we set off, but it was much easier than I thought it’d be.

I mention the stoplight because that was the one time I was discombobulated. Without leaning well to the side, I can’t see the stoplights until we’re right up at them, it turns out. We got to the intersection and the light was yellow, not green. How long it’d been yellow, I had no idea, and to my fevered imagination the light was just about to turn red and we were going to blow halfway through the intersection and be crushed, crushed!! “AAAAUUGHHH!!” I bellowed. We stopped.

We could both use some more practice taking the tandem through intersections. (I will not forget to pay more attention to stoplights.) Our next goal is to take 20th a good way further south and have a treat at the Ravenna Boulevard Grocery. After that we’ll stretch ourselves and hit the farmers market.