Okay, not so top secret. It’s different every time I make it, anyway. Here’s How I did it today.

Ingredients

Big bowl of sauce tomatoes from the garden (“federle” variety, start from Fair Weather Farm, Lebanon, Ore.)
2 onions
3 stalks celery
1 bulb garlic
1 bunch fresh basil (from Gathering Together Farm, Philomath, Ore., bought at Beaverton Farmers Market)
3 small zucchini (from Dennison Farms, Corvallis, Ore., bought at Beaverton Farmers Market)
2 red bell peppers (Dennison)
Dried herbs: oregano, thyme, basil, tarragon, crushed red peppers (the hot kind)
Salt and pepper
Olive oil

Start a saute with olive oil (don’t be shy, use a little more!), chopped onions, garlic, celery and red pepper. Add salt and pepper, crushed red pepper and dried herbs. I use just a pinch of tarragon, and a good dash or two each of oregano, thyme and basil. Let it cook to bring out the sweetness.

While the saute is working, look in the fridge and add any other veggies you can sneak in (this will all be blended later, so you can do just about anything if you’re trying to sneak it past a picky eater). This being September, I found some zucchini.

Add extra veggies to the saute, and cook some more.

While that’s cooking, start cutting up the tomatoes. If you’re really picky, you can parboil them and peel them, but I’m not picky. I never do this. Just dice them into small enough pieces that the skins don’t get huge and curly in your sauce. Add the tomatoes as they’re chopped, and cook all day.

After simmering all day, chop up the fresh basil and mix it in. Turn off heat and puree with a hand blender.

Then, make lasagna!

Ingredients

Sauce (see above)
1 box no-boil noodles
1 32 oz. container ricotta
4 eggs
Mozzarella, grated
Parmesan, grated
Nutmeg

Preheat oven to 350. Mix eggs, ricotta and a dash of nutmeg. Ladle a generous layer of sauce in the bottom of a 9×13 pan. Layer with noodles. Space them out and don’t overlap; they’ll expand. Add a layer of the ricotta mixture and another layer of sauce. Add another layer of noodles, then more sauce, and ricotta mixture. Top with grated mozzarella and parmesan. Bake for 45 minutes or until top is browned. Let stand 15 minutes before serving.

Pico de gallo this morning, marinara tomorow.

Pico de gallo (crow of the cock)

Tomatoes
Onions
Jalape�os
Cillantro
Lime juice
Salt

Chop all ingredients and mix in a bowl. If you like it spicier, increase the proportion of onion, chilis and cillantro to tomatoes.

Stay tuned… have a couple new tracks in the works with live traps (instead of midi).

River mile 37.4 – 38.4 (approximate)

For our third paddle on the Tualatin River, we hoisted the barge on top of the van and headed to Hillsboro’s Rood Bridge Park.

Couple things about this park: 1) Damn, what a nice park. Clean, well maintained, and beautifully planted/restored. 2) It’s adjacent to the Rock Creek Advanced Wastewater Treatment Facility, which has significance we’ll talk about later.

We first parked at the wrong end, where they were setting up for a wedding (or was it a quincea�era?). After a stroll through the grounds to a map, we drove to the other end of the park (take a right when you enter, not left), and found the river access point. There are a half dozen parking spots there, and a steep ramp that ends in a rough and steep dirt put-in area. Not ideal, but doable. Tualatin Riverkeeprs notes that there are many impassable logjams just upstream from this spot, so we headed downstream.

There was more current than our first two days of paddling, so we enjoyed a nice coast through a riverscape that could have looked the same 500 years ago. It’s so quiet once you get on the river, just birds and the breeze and the trickling sound of the water against the hull.

There were quite a few logs and trees to dodge, and just ahead a splashing sound and… white water? No, couldn’t be.

But something was going on. The water was foamy, and the closer we got, we could see there was some kind of high volume underwater discharge roiling the surface. What could it be, we wondered.

(Remember that sewage treatment plant? Oh, right.)

Anyway, there was a sign about it being “clean water” yada yada “air bubbles may cause harmless foam” yada yada and holy crap, we’re paddling through sewage. Didn’t smell too bad. Oh wait. It was a little stinky, but we convinced ourselves that it was just the usual river stank from algae and fish. We paddled on. Until we heard thunder.

Yeah, thunder. And then again. And again and again. It was 87 degrees and sunny, but somewhere just over the left bank there was a thunder cell unleashing frequent lightning. We turned back, judging it not the best place to be in a thunder storm. The banks of the river are very steep and thick with vegetation. No place to take out. So we paddled hard against the current, the storm cell seeming to pace us to our right, past the poop plant and back to Rood Bridge under a light sprinkle.

We landed between crawdad traps a couple had placed just after we put in, and hauled out. It’s a ten mile stretch from this spot to the next access point down river, so we probably won’t do this again until we’re ready to do a two-car one-way trip (next summer?) Next up (today, if weather cooperates): Schaumburg Bridge downstream to where we left off on day two.

River Mile 11.5 – 13

Photo by SoulRider.222

Day 2, and we picked up where we left off yesterday: River mile 11.5, where OR Highway 99W crosses the Tualatin River on the south side of Tigard.

We paddled upstream to the edge of the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge.

The Tualatin River is flows mainly through farm land, but there is some exurban development and a little river-front property. The 4.2 miles we’ve paddled so far is predominately wooded, pretty much like the picture above (not sure exactly where this one was taken).

River travel gives an uncommon view into a world filled not only with all kinds of wildlife and trees and shrubs draped over placid waters, but derelict irrigation pumps, makeshift riprap, wrecked and working docs, decks and gazebos perched high on the river banks, precarious stairways and ladders to the water, and not as much trash as you might expect (thanks in no small part to the efforts of the Tualatin River Keepers).

Our only wildlife close encounter today was an adolescent female mallard, swimming on a collision course with us from 12 o’clock. We stopped paddling, but she kept at us, only veering away at the last minute, intent on her hunt. And a couple of buzzards, who apparently don’t have as much confidence in our seamanship as we do; they always seem to be around when we’re out.

So not as much wildlife today as yesterday, but we did see some colorful human denizens in the water cleaning up a fallen tree to the dulcet tones of Green Day.

Next up: put in at Shamburg Bridge (River mile 16.2) and go downstream to where we left off today.

River mile 9.8 – 11.5

Photo by Greg Emel

Nancy and I are on a new mission: canoe the safely navigable length of the Tualatin River.

(Special thanks to friend and coworker D, who is letting us test drive his canoe and got us set up with everything. And he taught me a couple crucial knots I shoulda known from being a Cub Scout. Aye aye, cap’n!)

Most of the Tualatin Valley’s population is north of the river’s course, which runs out of the Coast Range near Hagg Lake and meanders through agricultural land and the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge south of Suburban Portland’s urban growth boundary. In our neck of the woods, it cuts between Cooper Mountain and Bull Mountain to the northeast and the Chehalem Mountains (Bald Peak) to the southwest, on its way to the Willamette River in West Linn.

Tualatin Riverkeepers, a nonprofit org dedicated to preserving and restoring the river, maps (PDF) about 33 miles of navigable water. This morning we paddled upstream from Cook Park (mile 9.8) the the 99W bridge (mile 11.5) and back.

We saw several happy paddlers in kayaks and one rowboat, as well as two Blue Herons (up close and personal), two Turkey Vultures (a little too close) and a large red-headed woodpecker. To the squirrel N initially mistook for a river otter: sorry for our disappointment, pal. (No pics; need a water-proof camera!)

Next up: 99W upstream into the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge.

Even though I don’t live in Portland anymore, I spilled some bits trying to keep Eileen Brady out of City Hall, mainly based on having crossed swords with her distinctly anti-union husband, Brian Rohter, while working for him in the 90s.

Brady was the first to declare, raised (and spent) a ton of money, had the support of the business community, and was the early front-runner. But she was ultimately eliminated in the May primary. She spent $1.3 million and took only 22% of the vote. Willamette Week notes this all-time spending record comes out to a whopping $46 per vote.

(About $31,000 of that scratch went to none other than BlueOregon publisher Kari Chisolm’s Mandate Media, which took close to $17,000 of public finance money from Jesse Cornett’s third place city council run in 2010. “In a rational universe,” one astute observer remarked to me, “Chisolm might develop a reputation as an over-priced loser.” But Portland is many, many miles from any kind of rational universe — see, for example, “Goldschmidt, Neil, continuing political influence of.”)

Willy Week published this map showing precinct-by-precinct results. Despite her massive spending (and Kari Chisolm’s campaign work) Brady only managed to win two (very small) precincts city-wide (marked blue on the map).

View Larger Map

I would guess that Brady, who floated trial balloons for a US Senate run in 2008, is done with electoral politics. The same can’t be said for the Kari Chisolm clown show. I’m sure they’ll keep taking money from clueless candidates and delivering virtual bupkes.

Look, I’m not half the writer NYMag.com/Vulture.com’s Dave Holmes is, so if you really want the low down on American Idol, check his recaps. Other than his crush on Philip Philips and his love of Elise Testone (she who could bear no criticism), I pretty much agree with him right down the line. (And what the hell happened to MTV’s Jim Cantiello?)

But I’ve got a few comments.

First, I finally figured who Steven Tyler (STyler in our house) looks like: that aging hippie woman at the local co-op, who spends hours a week shopping and socializing with the staff and wants to tell the young produce guy all about her wild days on the commune or her latest colonic recipe. I mean, he looks exactly like that woman. (I spent the better part of 10 years working produce at natural food stores, so I speak as an authority on this.)

Second, let me just say that Jimmy Iovine is the refreshing voice of truth in contrast to all the fluffy nonsense spouted by the judges. STyler, JLo and Randy Jackson seem so hopped up on goof balls all the time, it’s a shock — a shock! — when they say something critical, and even more of a shock when their criticism is actually accurate.

I don’t always agree with Jimmy’s analysis, but he’s the pro, with real actual insight into what makes an artist a star. He criticized 16-year-old phenom Jessica Sanchez for “pulling the rabbit out of the hat” too much (i.e. overusing her growl she started developing at the age of 7), but went on to reveal that she’s basically already got a contract with his Interscope label (along with fellow top-three contenders Joshua Ledet and Philip Philips).

So Jimmy, speaking of leaving the rabbit in the hat, what’s the deal with signing the top three to Interscope contracts when the grand prize of this whole contest is… a contract with Interscope?

At this point you may be asking yourself: What the hell is Steve doing paying all this attention to American Idol? Yeah, I’m asking myself that too. In three hours a week, there’s about ten minutes of entertainment, the rest being fluffed-up group numbers, ginned-up reality TV drama, embedded Coke and Ford ads, and listless (and/or overwrought) performances by past Idol losers (and a couple winners).

But I’m funny that way. If I’ve committed to half an hour of a crappy film, I’m in it to the end. We’re a few weeks from the Idol finale (featuring that aging hippie lady and her rock band Aerosmith, and probably not Mark Anthony and Sheila E., darn it), so I can’t quit now. We’re not going to the live show this year, however.

You gotta draw the line somewhere.

This is what happens when the new ice rink management gets a liquor license… no more BYOB for beer league! It’s $3 a bottle at the snack bar, boys!

After pickup hockey today, I took a shower and was toweling off with my back to the shower. I was alone in the locker room. The shower turned back on suddenly. Pretty sure it’s just the crappy plumbing at the old dump, but it kind of freaked me out a little. Maybe it was a ghost of beer leagues past, coming back to haunt the joint.

Now that they’re raking it in with the beer sales, maybe they can rehab the showers. Just sayin.

Winter’s final full moon rises behind Mt. Hood. I was a few minutes too late to catch the moon breaking the horizon, which was one of the most dramatic moon rises I’ve seen (and made me shout “Holy shit!”).