Peppermint White Chocolate Brownies

I bet that subject title alone is making your mouth water. Trust me, the result is just as good as it sounds, and I'm going to share the deliciousness with you.

Oh, and also this is my first time to show off the awesome mushroom apron I got from Miss Bonnie's Etsy shop, Kitchen Roost. Thanks, Bonnie! I heart it!

{peppermint white chocolate brownies}

3 oz unsweetened chocolate, chopped
8 tbsp (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
2/3 cup flour
1 cup (6 oz) white chocolate chips
1/3 cup chopped peppermint candies (about 14)

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Line an 8-inch square baking pan with foil and grease the foil. Heat chocolate and butter until melted and smooth. Cool slightly and blend with sugar, baking powder, salt eggs, and vanilla in a medium bowl until well combined. Add in chocolate mixture and whisk until smooth. Stir in flour.

Spread batter evenly into pan. Bake until toothpick inserted in the center comes out mostly clean, about 20-25 minutes. Remove brownies from oven and sprinkle with white chocolate chips. You might be tempted to add more chips, since one cup doesn't seem to cover, but if you do, your brownies will be very heavily frosted. Keep this in mind. The photo below shows what an over-abundance of white chocolate chips looks like:

Let the chips sit until they are softened but not melted. Use a spatula to evenly spread the chips out over the top of the brownies, then sprinkle on the crushed peppermints.

Let cool, cut into bars and serve! Yum!

Homemade Strawberry Jam

Every May my family goes strawberry picking. We head out cheerfully with baskets in tow, expecting to fill our tote, stain our fingers, and return home to spend the afternoon making and canning fresh strawberry jam. Every year we think we'll stop at one basket, but the ripe strawberries beg us to keep picking, and inevitably we return with thirty pounds or more and the slightly guilty feeling that perhaps we didn't need quite that much fruit.

At any rate, there's hardly anything better than strawberry jam, and with thirty pounds of fruit, you can even use the leftovers to make breads, pies, dessert toppings, pancakes, and cakes if you happen to run out of jars. (Heaven forbid!)

Then again, perhaps you have stronger will power than us, and you'll stop before you hit the weight capacity of a small pony.

Here's the recipe for a simple no-heat strawberry jam. It turns out somewhat runny, but still delicious. If you'd rather have a more jelled jam, boiling pectin works well, but it tends to be a much messier process, so beware.

{homemade strawberry jam}

4 cups crushed strawberries
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 1.59 oz pkg Ball Freezer Jam Pectin
1 16 oz Ball Freezer Jam jar (I recommend buying a pack of 12)

Put strawberries in a blender and blend until smooth.

In a medium bowl, stir together sugar and package of pectin until well mixed. Add the strawberries and stir for 3 minutes. Transfer mixture into clean freezer jar. (Leave a little space at the top since it will expand when frozen.) Twist on lid and allow to stand at room temperature for 30 minutes to thicken. Freeze until ready to use.

This is for one 16 oz jar of jam. If you're like us and pick 30 pounds of strawberries... you may want to 30-tuple the recipe and buy pectin and jars in bulk. Just sayin.

Best of all, you get to enjoy a day in the fields with the sun and the strawberries!

Sunny Days and Hiking Boots

Courtney and I have been hiking our little legs off lately, not to mention while I've been at work she's been exploring downtown, gardens, waterfalls, the coast, etc, etc. I think she's seen more in five days than I have in a month, but I'm going to blame that one on the fact that I work forty hours a week.

For her birthday she wanted to go hiking, and Oregon graced us with a phenomenally beautiful, sunny day, leading Courtney to say such crazy things as: "I love Oregon; it has such pretty weather!" and "I don't understand what you mean by, 'it's overcast all the time'?"

After assuring her of Oregon's propensity to rain nine months of the year, and this was simply a freak solar anomaly, we packed up and headed to the gorge.

We made the obligatory stop at Multnomah Falls, and although I've visited it on several occasions, it looked completely different by sunlight. The sun was rising just behind the falls, dropping beams of light across the misty spray. Beautiful.

We then hurried on to the trails, exploring Wahclella Falls (not to be confused with Wahkeena Falls), Elowah Falls, Upper McCord Creek Falls, and then drove to Mt. Hood in search of good views. After driving for an hour, however, we discovered the roads were closed "due to snow" (apparently they didn't get the memo that it was 75 and sunny today) and instead pulled off along the road to take some lovely shots of the gorge. We ended the day with a "short" commute to the city, which turned into an hour and a half of traffic, but were rewarded with views of Mt. Hood, Mt. Rainier, and Mt. St. Helens, from high above the city. Then it was home to scarf down food at 8:00 pm -- the last thing we had eaten all day was a bite of cheese and pita during our hike.

My favorite stop of the day was Wahclella Falls -- a quick hike leads you into a secluded cove, where the impressive waterfall cascades down from a rock chute and fills the gorge below. High cliffs surround you on all sides, and while you sit and enjoy a bite of lunch, it's as though you have just discovered something wonderful and secret and all your own.

My Two Loves

When Tanner arrived in town on Thursday, we did what any couple would do together when they've been apart for a month: we organized the closets.

I know, you're thinking I'm a horrible girlfriend. But you wouldn't think such things if you saw the state of our closets, now. They are beautiful. The guest bedroom closet used to be a tangled mess (imagine those movies where someone opens a door and things start spilling out on top of them... it was kind of like that) and now is nicely organized for any outdoor adventure we might undertake. Two days ago it was a death-defying crawl into an outdoor storage unit just to retrieve a folding chair.

Of course, the end result of cleaning the closets is, inevitably, a very messy house. I spent all day cleaning every room, in anticipation for Tanner's arrival, and ten minutes later it was a complete wreck again. Go figure...

But the results paid off, since yesterday I was off work and Tanner and I hit the trails for the afternoon. The weather managed to give us a little bit of everything: hard rain, misty rain, freezing cold, warm sun, and thick, puffy clouds that floated by all day long. It was actually the perfect combination, because for most of the day, we hiked beneath a soft fuzz of mist with the sun shining through the clouds. With the waterfalls cascading over the top of the cliffs as we walked beneath them, it was a very magical hike.

And Tanner loved it. As he put it: "this is hands-down the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, except for you."

Hey, he's nothing if not cheesy. :)