Picked a lot of the backyard Gravensteins this weekend. They're destined for fresh eating, crumbles, apple butter and the dehydrator this year.

It feels like fall and we’ve still only had a handful of tomatoes from the garden. That’s alright though because we’ve had a lot of other great homegrown food in the past couple weeks including Brooks plums (into wine and dehydrated), zucchini (grilled, pureed into soup, sauteed and then some), lemon cucumbers (straight up, but soon to be pickled), and some really nice garden gifts from neighbors — big sacks of green beans and pickling cucumbers to be exact.

A lot of people have been complaining about green tomatoes in the past few weeks (myself included) and so I’d just like to pass on a little trick. If your tomatoes don’t ripen on the vine this year — a lot of them still will — harvest them and keep them in a brown paper sack rolled up or fastened at the top in a cool part of your home. Check the bag every couple days and pull out the ripe ones. They’ll ripen that way for weeks and although they don’t taste as good as vine ripened it’s a nice trick if you can’t deal with any more fried green tomatoes or tomato chutney.

Here’s a slice of what I’ve been cooking up during the past few weeks…

Happy hour spread and homemade hard cider with Steve and Lorna.

Roasted red pepper, zuke and scallion sandwich with cheddar and romesco sauce.

Grilled salmon and fresh jalapeno sandwich on Pearl ciabatta with slow cooked green beans and tomatoes.

Pureed zuke, potato, cilantro, spinach and lime soup with bread and olive oil.

Turkey, lemon cucumber, green zebra tomato sandwich on an english muffin.

Yard Fresh Pt. 6
Yard Fresh Pt. 5
Yard Fresh Pt. 4
Yard Fresh Pt. 3
Yard Fresh Pt. 2
Yard Fresh Pt. 1

Come say hi if you're at the Beaverton Farmers Market this Saturday.

When I was thinking about summer in respect to my book I decided that I’d give it a solid three months of events and publicity and then I’d let it do its thing. Well, now it’s the beginning of the third and final month and there are some fun upcoming events to report. I’m also happy to announce that I’ll be cutting the month a little short and heading out for a 10-day vacation on the first day of fall. Yahoo!

Here’s a slice of what I’ll be up to in upcoming weeks. Come say “hello” if you’re at any of these events…

Beaverton Farmers Market
Saturday, September 4th
10:30am-Noon

Check out the Beaverton Farmers Market this Saturday.

Belmont Street Fair
Stumptown Scribes
Sunday, September 12th
10am-5pm

I'll be at the Stumptown Scribes table all day...

Foodportunity
Monday, September 13th
The Heathman library
6-9pm

I'm honored to be in this line-up for Portland's first Foodportunity at The Heathman Monday, September 13th.

Wild About Game
Sunday, September 19th
The Resort at the Mountain in Welches, OR
11am-4pm (game dinner buffet 5:30pm)

I'll be at Wild About Game this year -- about an hour southeast of Portland.

The meanest pie I ever laid eyes on...

This post isn’t about Portland — it’s about Portland people enjoying food and drink somewhere beyond Portland. Earlier in the summer my boyfriend and I and our friends Loly and Faulkner went to our friends’ Jude and Colleen’s wedding in Prescott, Arizona. It was such a great long weekend and wedding and some good eats were had by all. Consider this a post about wider eats — a photographic tale from Portland to Prescott…

First respite of the trip on the way from the airport in Phoenix to Prescott.

Deep fried hot dog. Need I say more?

Old school club with cottage cheese.

I love where we stayed. Look them up...

We drank at fine saloons such as this on Whiskey Row...

And this...The Raven Cafe. Our favorite Prescott place.

Cheers Prescott! Hope to see you again real soon.

Our favorite spots in Prescott, Arizona…

The Motor Lodge
www.themotorlodge.com

The Raven Cafe
www.ravencafe.com

This homemade plum wine is better than our cherry wine.

Making fruit wine has quickly become one of my favorite summer things. I initially got into it via dandelion wine — my gateway home hooch. Next up was hard cider (although not a wine it’s a home fermented beverage that’s similar to DIY wine) and this summer I got to bottle both my first attempts at homemade cherry wine and now plum wine.

I made the plum wine with Sandor Ellix Katz’s recipe (check out my abdriged version of that here) last summer with some of our sideyard plums and it’s been sitting pretty in the utility room ever since. After the initial ferment in a food-grade bucket I funneled it into a three-gallon glass carboy. A few months later I racked it but other than that it’s just been doing its thing. Until I bottled it this weekend that is.

***Just so you know I’ve been using about half the called for sugar when the fruit is good and sweet and the wine has been tasty.***

I thought it would be good but I had no idea it’d be this freaking good. It’s tart, dry and tastes like a perfect plum. Except better. And alcoholic. We’re not sure what kind of plums they are but they look like these cherry plums.

Everything that makes these plums not so great as fresh eating plums — small fruit to pit ratio, very sour and slightly bitter skin, not so sweet flesh — makes them perfect for wine. Most of the sugar and sweetness is fermented off and the sour and bitter of the skin adds character and body.

This year is the first year that our front yard Brooks Plum is significantly fruiting — we planted it three years ago — so I started a batch of plum wine this week out of those. I’ll be sure to let you know how that is about this time next year.

All you need is a two-three gallons of plums to make 10-plus bottles of tasty plum wine. What are you waiting for?

Plum wine -- straight from the vine!

Please point me in the right direction?

I know that there are a lot of worthy people, businesses and organizations that unfortunately didn’t make it into Food Lover’s Guide to Portland whether they opened too late to be included, didn’t fit nicely into any chapter, or were just plain overlooked.

I’ve been keeping a list and when it comes to working on the second edition I’ll be checking that list more than twice. In the meantime, I’d love your input on spots that you wish were included. I’ll get you started with just a handful from the list that I’ve got going. Thanks in advance for any and all feedback!

Urban Farm Collective
Portland Meat Collective
Homebrew Exchange
Fred Carlo Sausage
Confectionary
Fifty Licks Ice Cream
Mr. Green Beans
Coalition Brewing
Cellar Door Wine Shop
Oblique Coffee Roasters
Heart Roasters
Breakside Brewery
Lovejoy Bakers
Florio Bakery and Cafe