Tonight’s garden feast: capellini with garden fresh pesto, rustic whole wheat bread, and rice salad with fresh green beans, zucchini, basil, and jalepeño. I haven’t made pesto for years, but it’s not hard to remember.

Pesto

• fresh basil
• garlic
• olive oil
• some kind of dry, grated cheese (Parmesan works great)
• pine nuts
• salt to taste

(You could use some other kind of nuts — walnuts, almonds — but then don’t call it pesto.) We’ve got some old food processor I never use, but it’s perfect for this. Go cut a bunch of basil. I used the equivalent of about four bunches at the store. Rinse the bugs and dust off them, the strip all the leaves (and the tender buds) into the food processor. Add several cloves of garlic, a couple glugs of olive oil and some grated cheese. Puree the heck out it and set it aside in the fridge. Toss with hot pasta later.

Rice Salad with Green Beans

This is a variation on something I used to do with cilantro, but I’m not growing any cilantro this year. I added garbanzo beans to make a complete protein. Make a bunch; keeps well in fridge for several days.

• a pot of cooked rice, cooled
• cooked garbanzos, cooled, thawed or from a can, drained (I used one can)
• 1 small zucchini, grated
• 1 small jalepeño, minced
• 1/4 sweet onion, minced
• a couple fistfuls green beans, par-boiled
• lemon juice
• olive oil
• a small handful fresh basil, minced
• salt and pepper to taste

Prep beans like you’re going to freeze them: submerge in boiling water one or two minutes, then transfer to ice bath. While beans cool, mix rice, beans, a glug or two of olive oil and a fair amount of lemon juice. Add minced jalepeño, onion, basil, grated zuchinni, salt an pepper. Lemon zest would be great if you’re using fresh lemons. Add the beans, stir well, and set aside in the fridge to marry flavors.

Via Annaliese, who did hers according to David Bowie (on Facebook). Instructions: “Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to 15 people and include me. You can’t use the band I used. Try not to repeat a song title. It’s a lot harder than you think! Repost as ‘my life according to (band name)'” (I’m not doing the 15 people thing; do it if you want!)

Pick your Artist:

Thelonious Monk

Are you a male or female:

Lover Man

Describe yourself:

Nutty

How do you feel:

Off Minor

Describe where you currently live:

Brilliant Corners

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?

San Francisco Holiday

Your favorite form of transportation:

Locomotive

Your best friend is:

Just a Gigolo

You and your best friends are:

Rhythm-A-Ning

What’s the weather like:

April in Paris

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:

I Should Care

What is life to you:

Who Knows?

Your relationship:

Sweet and Lovely

Your fear:

Hackensack or Suburban Eyes

What is the best advice you have to give:

Introspection

Thought for the Day:

Nice Work If You Can Get it

How I would like to die:

Meet me Tonight in Dreamland

My soul’s present condition:

In Orbit

My motto:

Straight, no Chaser

We spent a couple days at the Oregon coast (highs of 60-65) after several days of 100+ in Portland with lows around 75. It’s still hot in Portland. We paid a visit (and a whole lot of simoleons) to the Oregon Coast Aquarium.

Maybe they’ll use some of that dough to send their shark divers to shark school.

In the window where you used to be able to watch not-Free Willy swim by, divers float amongst sharks and talk about them. They even take questions from the audience.

A kid asked, “What’s the biggest shark,” and the diver hemmed and hawed for a while before saying “Great White.”

The MC in the auditorium asked the diver, “What about the Whale Shark?” The diver said “I don’t know if that’s a whale or a shark.”

At this point, 7-year-old Jr., who knows pretty much everything there is to know about sharks, walked out. (Jr.: The Whale shark is, in fact, the largest living shark.)

The diver went on to say he was pretty sure whale sharks are vegetarians (Jr.: they’re not, though they feed mainly on tiny phyto- and zooplankton).

If you go to the Oregon Coast Aquarium, my kid is available for consultations.

Here’s a little number I whipped up for breakfast today.

Ingredients:

• a couple fistfuls of freshly dug spuds
• a fistful of basil
• half an onion
• half a bell pepper
• a dash of paprika
• salt and pepper to taste
• olive oil

Method:

Go out and dig up some potatoes. Admire them for their size. Rinse them with the garden hose and admire their surreal color (These steps can be done the night before).

Preheat oven to 425. Dice spuds and rinse. Chop onion and bell pepper. Put in roaster pan and pour some olive oil over them.

No, more than that. I said “pour,” not “drizzle.” There you go.

Add salt, pepper and paprika; mix well. Put it in the oven and go water the garden. When you’re mostly done watering, pick your basil. Slice it up, and throw it in with the spuds (which have been cooking, oh, 20 minutes by now). Stir well, then put it all back in the oven. Go back out and finish your watering.

Check out the raspberries… they’re past peak production, but some of those late bloomers have the best flavor. Graze a little. Pull some weeds. Get your feet and hands dirty, and enjoy the last fleeting moments of coolness.

Go back in and check the spuds. Put a fan in the back door. Spuds should be browned and basil should be crispy. Don’t forget to turn off the oven! It’s going to be hot today. Prop oven door open, and leave hood fan on high.

Serve with a fried egg, toast and coffee. Chase it with a ripe peach.

I. Love. Summer.

That’s the summary of how Tom Potter feels about Sam Adams, but you’ll want to read in full his scathing letter to the editor at Just Out.

“Potter may not have lit the city on fire during his one term that ended in 2008. But he retained a strong reputation for integrity,” writes Nigel Jaquiss in Willamette Week.

Potter ominously cites the fear many people have in coming out against Adams. “Today, there are many people who are afraid to speak out against Mayor Adams,” writes Potter, “yet feel they were duped by him.”

(Other elected officials I’ve spoken with have alluded to this as well. Obviously, this is about more than just Adams. It’s about the network that put him in City Hall. Potter is the only Mayor in recent history who didn’t come from that network.)

Potter may not be young and “hip” but he’s hip to what’s going on here: “This recall question is about honest government, an honest City Council and an honest Portland.”

A great place to spend a quiet and peaceful Fourth of July.

Of course, we hit the beach, too, and enjoyed visiting tide pools left by unusually low tides.

Here are a few more photos from our trip. If you want to rent a beach house in Lincoln City or Gleneden Beach, give Virginia a call.

…beat blogging!

Two and a half years ago, I started ranting on this site about the gross educational inequities in Portland’s public schools. This eventually got the attention of the local mainstream media and the greater school district community. I didn’t set out with a mission, other than just speaking my mind.

Pretty soon all I wrote about here was schools, schools, schools. One day, while writing yet another blog post about schools, my daughter asked me, “How come you only write about school politics on your hockey blog?” “Good question!” I said, and started another blog all about schools.

Why? Because I can (my day job is “professional nerd”).

Eventually, PPS Equity started taking on the look of a… what? Online magazine? I settled on calling it a “new media publication.” I even came up with a mission statement: “to inform, advocate and organize, with a goal of equal educational opportunity for all students in Portland Public Schools, regardless of their address, their parent’s wealth, or their race.” Readership climbed steadily, with around 20% of visits consistently coming directly from school district computers.

Since I host my blogs on a server that I own, I decided to open up my platform to others working for the common good.

That’s it, I thought, I’m doing “new media publishing!” It’s got a nice ring to it.

But I’m also doing some kind of journalism, and that’s where it gets tricky. I have a great deal of respect for professional journalists, and a healthy disdain of bloggers who pick up the latest news reports, toss off 500 words of commentary, and call themselves “citizen journalists” or some such. The point being that they are leeching off of the professionals. The story doesn’t run if somebody doesn’t report it in the first place. That’s what journalists — a.k.a. reporters — do.

When I wrote for Portland Metblogs (moribund since last February), I floated the idea of doing citizen journalism there, which didn’t go over well with a couple other contributors who couldn’t accept that writing from a point of view does not disqualify one as a journalist.

When I was invited to be on a panel about blogging at a conference for professional journalists and journalism students last fall, I had a little trepidation about being chewed up and spit out. (It was a very friendly crowd, as it turned out.) The two other bloggers on the panel were very clear about considering themselves journalists, but I made a point of identifying myself as a community activist, not a journalist.

But… the kind of writing — and reporting — that I do is outside of the usual realm activism. I actually do reporting, is the thing, at the same time I’m doing advocacy and organizing. “New media publishing” captures the big picture of what it means to run a community blog, but the actual beat reporting I do is, in fact, journalism.

Which all became clear to me the other day when BeatBlogging.org, a project affiliated with New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, gave me a nice shout-out on their Leaderboard, which they describe as “a list of the most innovative beat reporters in the world.”

Wha….? You’ve got to be kidding me! (Seriously, I’m floored over here!)

Their summary of my work on PPS Equity highlights the combination of advocacy and journalism. “…[I]t is starting to seem like good beatbloggers — especially education ones — mix in a bit of advocacy with their journalism. It’s not that they are biased, but rather that they care to see change,” writes Patrick Thornton, editor of BeatBlogging.org.

I poked around their site… man, great stuff. It’s all about “how journalists can use social networks, blogs and other Web tools to improve beat reporting.” I’ve only scratched the surface, but I’ve already found great information that I’ll be trying to incorporate into my work at PPS Equity going forward, like how in the hell to use Twitter effectively. (Sadly, I also found out that BeatBlogging.org is losing its funding. Damn, talk about bad timing!)

Most of all, I’m glad to have a name for what it is that I’ve been doing: beat blogging. It’s not at all what I set out to do, but here I am doing it. One of these days, I’ll have to figure out how to monetize it so I can quit my day job.

Harvest time!

• Wednesday, June 24th, 11:45 am
• Federal Building, 1220 SW 3rd Ave., Portland

Come help tell Senator Wyden we want everybody in and nobody out!

Gather at the Federal Building (1220 SW 3rd Ave) at 11:45 to hear doctors, nurses and patients speak about our broken health care system and how we can fix it!

We will be highlighting the huge campaign contributions from the medical industrial complex to Senator Wyden, and demanding that he represent his constituents. The majority of the American people believe that the best solution to our health care crisis is to get the insurance companies out of the way by creating a single payer system. We will then march to the Regence Blue Cross/Blue Shield office at SW 2nd and Market to highlight Regence’s campaign contributions to Senator Wyden and their outrageous rate increases over the last two years.

For more information contact Margaret Butler at Jobs with Justice:

margaret@jwjpdx.org