Good Things List No.64: Oregon River, Cut Flowers, Beautiful Pan, Book Reviews & More

A monthly list of good things to see, buy, read and watch.

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Happy late summer! As the calendar turns from July to August in the Pacific Northwest you can depend on a couple things:

1. The Back to School advertising is in full throttle even though our kids don’t go back until after Labor Day. It’s always a weird time – trying to enjoy the last month of summer with the back to school stuff hanging over your head. But also looking forward to being back into routines and the smells and flavors of fall.
2. The vegetable gardens start really producing. Up until now it’s been mostly “harvest what we eat” things: lettuce, peas, kale, carrots, onions, strawberries. Now the warm weather preserving foods start producing like tomatoes, beans, zucchini, peppers, blackberries and cucumbers.
3. And now in the last five years it also sadly means smoke from wildfires. Some fires started a bit early this year in July but most of the smoke has stayed in the Cascades and here in the Willamette Valley we’ve only had a bit of high haze. It’s only a matter of time now, though, before our skies are smokey and our windows have to stay closed.

We have a lake trip planned and a couple smaller outings, but other than that we are sticking close to home and enjoying the garden and last slow days of summer.

What are some things that are unique to August in your part of the world?

Good Things

Cut Flowers

I had been used to having a ton of flowers to cut from our cottage garden to bring inside – everything from roses to hydrangeas to cosmos and zinnias. So it was a big let down to move to the farmhouse where there was literally no flowering shrub or perennial.

I love having fresh flowers through the growing season and so I made it a mission to plant things I could cut to bring inside. I planted peonies, yarrow, lavender, zinnias, blackeyed Susans, coneflowers, and flowering oregano in the deer resistant sunken garden.

And I saved an area in the fenced vegetable garden for the flowers the deer would decimate here if left unprotected: dahlias, cosmos, snapdragons, hydrangeas, roses, and asters.

The photo above shows what I’ve been cutting from the fenced garden to make loose cottage-style arrangements for our kitchen island – two varieties of dahlias, light and dark pink cosmos, a pretty salmon calendula, and a pink mix of snapdragons.

I’m loving the mix of pinks, whites and yellows that all work together so beautifully.

The moral here? Make room for flowers! They’re worth it.

The Deschutes River

We were able to spend a weekend in late July with my parents in central Oregon and one day we hiked along the Deschutes river. It was so beautiful – hardly any smoke that day from the three fires that were burning then. I mean, look at those skies against the trees?

My daughter saw the purple loosestrife and thought it would frame the bend in the river perfectly – and she was right. Sadly that wild flower is invasive, but it is still pretty when it’s blooming.

For me it wasn’t just about the river and beauty of the surroundings, but also the quiet – there was hardly any other people around and you could hear the sound of the water, the breeze through the trees and the birds calling. What a beautiful memory.

If you ever have time to visit central Oregon, do make time for some Deschutes river walking!

The First Large Ripe Tomato

In July we had a number of grape and cherry tomatoes ripen, but the first large slicing tomato that ripened – way ahead of others – was the heirloom, Cherokee Purple.

It was so unexpected, I almost missed it when I was out harvesting. It’s one of my absolute favorite for flavor so I snapped this photo right before slicing thickly for a simple Tomato-Feta Salad. I can’t even describe how good those first bites were!

Drew Barrymore Hero Pan

I have not jumped on the Instagram famous pastel colored “everything” pan you see everywhere there. It was just too expensive for me and I wasn’t sure I actually needed it.

What I did need was a pan with tall sides that I could make stir-fries and sautéed dishes in that wouldn’t stick to the bottom like my favorite stainless steel everything pan. I mean, just a simple chicken stir fry would turn the bottom into a solid black mess that would take a lot of scrubbing.

Then I saw that Drew Barrymore’s kitchen line with Walmart now included a pan with tall sides that they call a “hero pan” and decided to try it since it was about half the price of the other pan.

It is has a ceramic nonstick coating (PTFE, PFOA & PFOS free), so literally nothing sticks – finally! Plus it is a good size at 4 quarts to make a large recipes and comes in the same fun colors of the other products in her line (I chose the sage green).

After using it for more than a month I’ve discovered something else – I didn’t really think I’d use the steamer basket but I’ve actually used it a lot! It’s a bigger surface than my other folding-type basket so it holds more green beans, other veggies, and eggs (steaming eggs = easy to peel eggs every time!).

It’s pretty enough, too, that I can simply bring it to the table to serve from when needed.

I haven’t bought a pan or pot in a long time, but this has really been a nice addition to my cookware, so I just had to share it!

Beautiful All-in-One 4 QT Hero Pan with Steam Insert

July Reads

The Kill Fee (Poppy Denby Investigates Book 2), Fiona Veitch Smith. I’ve been working my way through this series of six books in audio while I garden and cook and it’s a nice, light hearted series set in mostly London in the early 1920s centering around Poppy and her job as a newspaper reporter and the scrapes she gets into usually around a mystery or murder. I of course enjoy the history part – especially the author’s notes at the end where she explains what was true at the time and what she changed or added, historically. I also have enjoyed the characters and the continuity of them in the books. The mysteries themselves are not that complicated and learning about early 20th century journalism is interesting. It hasn’t drawn me in emotionally like the Maisie Dobbs books, but they are still fun, interesting reads/listens. I also finished The Death Beat (Book 3) and The Cairo Brief (Book 4) this month.

To Marry and To Meddle, Martha Waters. I discovered this author through a blog described as a fun closed door romance writer with witty banter. This book is actually number 3 in a series, but the first two didn’t look as interesting to me. This is a marriage of convenience trope set in the Regency era which is a favorite of mine and the hero and heroine were both likable which is another thing I enjoy (versus when one is so mean and they end up loving them anyway and I’m like, what??). Anyway, just fun if you need a “palate cleanser” type read.

A Bride’s Guide to Marriage and Murder, Dianne Freeman. This was the last book in this fun Victorian series about a couple that just stumble into mysteries around murders. I really liked the fun overall feeling of the books, especially the audiobooks that are narrated by Sarah Zimmerman. She’s so good and really brings life to the characters, especially the main character, with her timing and inflections. There’s the sweet, very tame, romance as well as relationships with friends and family that are loving and realistic. I don’t know if the author is planning another in the series, but I’ll definitely listen if she does.

Paul: A Biography, N.T. Wright. This was a fairly long book that I started in June and finished in mid-July. I have a lot of respect for this author and remember my father-in-law reading this book years ago. It’s such an interesting way to look at Paul, taking all the verses from Acts as well as clues in the letters he wrote to piece together what his life and travels looked like. You get more of an understanding of the place and time when he wrote and how you need to keep that in mind when reading his works. What he accomplished (with the Lord’s help, obviously), is truly amazing.

The Kabul Beauty School, Deborah Rodriguez. This memoir was recommended by a reader and it was available in Hoopla, so I grabbed it. This is set after the first war in Afghanistan when the Taliban had been defeated (which was kind of sad knowing what it must be like now with the Taliban back in charge…). A volunteer with a background in hair dressing goes to the country to help and sees a need for women to be taught the skills to open their own beauty schools. She then spends a number of years doing that which allowed many women to earn money in a country where it was usually impossible to do. There are some questionable things the author did (marrying a local without knowing them or speaking their language??), and I’ve read there is some controversy over incidents she added, but on the whole it’s eye-opening to view a culture so different from our own and how it might be to live as women there.

Liturgy Of The Ordinary, Tish Harrison Warren. This came up in the Hoopla App after reading Paul and I’m always drawn to ways we can praise God in the mundane, normal aspects of our lives. Living a simple life is biblical – it’s not only those who are in ministry who are doing the Lord’s work. I always wonder how my everyday choices can make differences, so wrote down this quote in my Book Notes Journal:

“Each time we make a small choice towards justice, or to buy fair trade, or to seek to share instead of hoard, or to extend mercy to those around us and kindness to those with whom we disagree, or say “I forgive you,” we pass peace where we are, in the ways that we can. And God can take these ordinary things, like fish and bread, bless them and multiply them.”

Practice Makes Perfect, Sarah Adams. This was another author I found through the same blog as Martha Waters, another closed door romance author described as “the master of the sweet, happy-ending romance.” And that is what this is, for sure. This is set in a small town with a heroine who has lived there her whole life and everyone knows. So when an out-of-town bodyguard pays her attention it becomes everybody’s business. I enjoyed the slow-burn romance and how each of the protagonists had to work out their baggage from childhood before they could move on. The ending really was super sweet, too.

The Stand, Stephen King. Whew! Brian and I finally finished listening to this the last week of July – two+ months and 47 hours later. After a kind of slow start that was a bit hard to get into with all the different characters introduced, it pulled us into the world King creates after a man-made “superflu” pandemic kills (gruesomely, of course à la Mr. King) 99.4% of the population. It’s truly amazing to see how something like this could spread. The characters coalesced into mostly fleshed-out people we could root for or be repelled by. We knew it was a Good vs. Evil plot and could see the way the characters would land from the first pages. We wanted to listen whenever we could – while eating meals and driving places. It had surprisingly comic parts – and we have phrases we still use (“m-o-o-n spells ____” anything but moon, “happy crappy,” etc.) that we laughed about. King writes gore, so when someone is shot, you get all the details of what the bullet did to the body, but this isn’t horror like some of his other novels. There’s a supernatural element to it (people dream the same things and follow the dreams to the same place), but also a lot of talk of the Bible and God as the antidote to the evil. Not for everyone, maybe, but I’m so glad I read it – it really makes you think about society as a whole. Will definitely be on my top 10 list.

Watching

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. If I had known this was only part one, I wouldn’t have seen it in the theater, I would’ve just waited until the second one came out and watched it before seeing it. It’s all the same things you’ve seen in the other Mission Impossible movies, except it’s almost 3 hours long. Although I guess you get your money’s worth!

That’s it for another addition of the Good Things List!

If you’d like to see more of what I’m enjoying, you can check out all the Good Things Lists here. I’d love to know what you think – if you’ve tried any of these or what you’d recommend. Leave a comment below with your thoughts!

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