Can We Glean Boboli?

Marisa is the queen of Boboli pizza and necessity is the mother of invention. And that is how we ended up using scissors to cut pizza. "It's the best way," says Marisa, and although this may not hold true in all instances, compared to our plastic pizza cutter and dull knives, this did prove to be the most effective method. 

And she looks cute doing it!

 Friday night means let us bake!

Blackberries and nectarines married in lemon juice and cinnamon.

A crusty creation of oats, pecans, butter and brown sugar.

Great until the last piece!

Rachel is passionate about making a difference in the community, and is always looking for ways to volunteer and get involved. The trouble is, sometimes she double-books herself; take this for example:

This year Rachel led a summer community service orientation for a group of incoming first year Whitman students. On their SCORE (Summer Community OutReach Excursion) the group had the opportunity to go gleaning! Gleaning (you may recognize the term from the Old Testament story of Ruth) happens after farmers have harvested their fields but have remaining crops available in the fields. In the case of Rachel's SCORE, the farmers contacted Whitman Glean Team to come glean, and the crops are given to Blue Mountain Action Council (BMac) which distributes the produce to local food banks.

Rachel had so much fun gleaning with her SCOREos that she insisted we all sign up for the Whitman Glean Team listserve (a means by which to be notified of all future gleaning excursions). Marisa and I like to please Rachel, so we signed up. Lo and behold, before a week had passed we received emails about two gleaning outings this weekend. I was unavailable for the first, but had no excuse to not sign up to glean corn on Sunday. Rachel was overjoyed (not an atypical Rachel emotion) and quickly shot back an email signing the two of us up. Marisa opted out.

Unfortunately, in Rachel's excitement and haste, she had failed to confirm her availability with her calendar. In a moment that I can liken to that of a dog with its tail between its legs, Rachel approached me to share the bad news. Thankfully Rachel had procured a stand-in (Marisa to the rescue!) and after I reminded Rachel of the spaghetti feed incident (the last time she had signed me up then bailed) Marisa and I let the matter go.

We enjoyed a quick corn glean in a slightly dried out, very overgrown corn field. Much of the corn was inedible, being either dried out, covered in bugs, too small, or infested by corn fungus (known as huitlacoche and used a lot in Latin American cuisine). However, we were able to collect a fair amount for local food banks!

Now I will leave you with a ferocious-looking picture of an incredibly tame cat.