Sunday: A perfect summer evening

The big event of the day for us was the Bill Evans Soulgrass concert at the Britt Pavilion. One of the best things about summer for Andreas and me is spending evenings out on the lawn in Jacksonville listening to our favorite music with a picnic dinner and a bottle of wine. This time the event was made even more special because our old friends, Gary and Terry, would be joining us.

I previously wrote about how we are 11 people in the house this weekend; after a breakfast involving a couple dozen eggs and about four gallons of coffee, the 20-somethings took off for a day of wine tasting in the Applegate Valley. Our friends were interested in looking at property in the area (it doesn’t take long until visitors are beguiled by the Rogue Valley’s charms and want to stay), so Andreas went out touring with them while I stayed home to restore temporary order to the household and get our picnic together.

Andreas had barbecued several extra steaks last night with the idea that I could use them to make something else. I decided to slice up the leftover meat and serve it cold. The meat seemed a little dry, so I looked up a recipe for chimichurri on Epicurious – if you like to cook and haven’t seen this Web site, you should definitely check it out. It’s almost as good as a whole shelf of cookbooks (I’m a librarian, so that’s saying a lot).

Anyway, chimichiurri is a spicy Argentine marinade or sauce for beef. All that I needed for the recipe was in my pantry of local ingredients or growing in the back yard, so I whisked together a batch of that. I harvested some vegetables from the garden. Tomatoes are in full production now, and we have round ones, Romas, red cherry and yellow, pear-shaped ones. One of Dimitri’s friends also had brought us a big bowl of beautiful heirloom tomatoes from her garden (not technically local for us, but a special gift and not be wasted), so I packed up a selection.

I also picked a bowl of strawberries and raspberries and packed those up. I added a couple of pears to slice there and a wedge of Rogue Creamery Oregonzola cheese to go with them. I put some mixed green salad in a bag and made a little bottle of vinaigrette for it. I baked the slow-rising bread that I had mixed and set out to rise last night and sliced it thin when it was cool, so that people could make sandwiches if they wanted or use it to sop up chimichurri.

I had a little time left and the oven was hot, so I used some of the gorgeous '49er peaches that one of Andreas’s co-workers had given him to make a cobbler (there goes the no-sugar pledge). It seemed too complicated to try and take the cobbler with us, so I left it in the kitchen to have later after the show. I got a yellow zucchini and two green ones from the garden and sliced them thin with my mandoline (a wonderful invention – I don’t know how I got along so many years without one – although Nik’s girlfriend won’t go near it after almost cutting all her knuckles off the first time she used it). I sliced the eggplant from a friend's garden and a yellow onion in thicker slices and brushed all the vegetables with olive oil.

We had about half an hour before we had to leave, and I wasn’t quite ready yet. Luckily, the others arrived home just then and jumped right in to help, Andreas and Terry taking turns grilling the vegetables on the grill pan I use on the stove, while I packed everything up. Andreas and company had stopped at Fred Meyer on their way home to pick up some wine for the evening –a bottle each of Bridgeview cab-merlot and chardonnay. We grabbed the blankets and were out the door in time to get good parking and a perfect spot on the lawn.

Bill Evans, Sam Bush, and a really good gypsy jazz opening act were the hits of the evening, but the chimichurri with the crusty bread turned out to be pretty popular, too. And because we got home before the kids who’d gone to see "Othello," there was even peach cobbler waiting for us in the kitchen. Another perfect summer evening in the Rogue Valley.