Gigot a la cuillere

Two years ago, for Christmas, my cousins wife departed from the traditional "gigot de noel" and instead of seeing the entire family fight over 5 minutes more or less of cooking time, she cooked it for the entire day. Yes you read it, the whole day, not 35 minutes nor 40. It was so delicious that since then, this is my preferred way of preparing it. So if you want to get that juicy, melting in the mouth lamb taste, here is how you do it, and it's so easy that I doubt anyone can fail.
To reproduce what I did last sunday, you will need:
- a lamb leg that fits in your dish, we had ~7 pounds of meat with the bone. Got it at our local New Seasons market, they cut off the shank so it would not be too big.
- a dozen of garlic cloves (don't peel them)
- a dozen of mushrooms (the "champignon de Paris" kind)
- 3-4 carrots cut in large chunks
- 2 bay leaves
- a pinch of salt
- optional: a few slices of bacon
Preheat the oven at 275F (135C, that s very low). Put the lamb leg in your oven proof dish (eventually lay the slices of bacon at the bottom of the dish). If there is a side with more fat start with it at the bottom. Add the other ingredients in the dish and 2 glasses of water. Cover with aluminum foil. Put in the Oven for 10 hours. After a few hours (3-5), turn the meat, remove the extra juice and save it for later (pour a bit of juice on the meat). You might want to check another time that there isn't too much juice.
Towards the end you might want to remove the foil and put the oven on broil to finish it. What I did is about 1 hour before the end I added potatoes in another dish with some of the juice and baked them at 400 (leaving the meat covered by the foil). It worked perfectly. Reheat the juice that you saved so your guests can soak their meat as much as they want ! No picture, we destroyed it before I even thought of bringing the camera.


You might want to serve that with green beans, and M would certainly suggest finishing with a raspberry chiffon pie :).

Backpacking Around Mt Adams

Last weekend we headed for a 2 days backpacking trip around Mt Adams with Ian and Jagan. We left Portland at 6:30 am and were at the foot of Mt Adams at 8:30. There was a rather large crowd at the start of the trail as it happened to be the start of the path that climbs up Mt Adams. As soon as our trail separated from theirs we were pretty much alone for 2 days. The views from the side of mount Adams were gorgeous, especially towards Mt Hood and Mt St Helens. Between the flowers, the butterflies and the scenic landscape we were all 4 busy taking pictures all day.
I took advantage of the opportunity to play a little bit with filters and take some Infra Red landscapes. Bellow is a demonstration of the effect. You can see how haze pretty much disappears in Infra Red that offers very detailed and contrasty horizons and skies. Mount Hood and Stream from Mt Adams trail:


Mount St Helens seems to still emit puffs of smoke once in a while:


We established camp away from the trail near a little (dried up) waterfall. I think it was the first time I camped in an area that was "this wild". In France you can never really be that far from civilization in an area that is so untouched. Besides the fact that cellphone network was reaching, there was no sign of civilization and it felt great. We filtered water from a snowpatch melt, hanged our food in the trees for the night and fought mosquitoes all we could (they still mostly won) while playing cards. We played a game called Euchre which happened to be close enough to our good old French Belotte so I had quite some fun :). Ian and Jagan went away at sunset to take pictures, but I slacked and stayed at our camp and snapped from there.

Mount Adams at Sunset


We woke up just after sunrise, just int time for a great Panorama on Mt Hood


You can find the rest of the pictures here and Ian's pictures there.

Seattle with Olivier and Claire

The second weekend of July we drove up to Seattle and spent 2 days with M's dad and old friends of mine from France that were in Seattle for a conference. As they had spent the week around downtown, we picked them and the 2 kids at their hotel and headed for the countryside. We went to the nearby Snoqualmie falls, enjoyed the landscape, went for a (good) burger in the nearby town of Fall City and stopped at Chateau St Michelle winery.

We unfortunately arrived too late for the winery tour, so we just hanged there for like an hour before heading back to M's dad home. We had a nice relaxing afternoon, sipping beer in the shade and preparing a barbecue for the dinner. Fiona and Tristan enjoyed the house quite a bit and played with the balcony door for easily an hour :).


Snoqualmie falls


Olivier and Fiona


Claire and tristan

Eagle Creek

I know my blog posts are getting totally out of order, that's the result of me posting when I have pictures ready, and as I rotate between film and digital, whatever got taken on film ends up being super delayed... So a few weekends ago, we went to help Amy move to La Center, then went strawberry picking with Ian and Janel (Melvin and Anne were late enough to arrive when we were leaving), cooked a few kilos of Jam, and the next day Ian took us for a hike to Eagle Creek in the Gorges.



It was our first long hike since Ethiopia, but despite the fast pace I survived :). Our target was Cave Falls, some 6.5 miles away from the start:

The path is actually passing in a cave behind the waterfall around the middle of the cliff, that is quite impressive. There was another nice fall right after it:


The rest of the pictures of the hike and from our Sauvie Island harvest can be found here.

Strawberry picking

Last weekend of June we went strawberry picking, and made about 5kg of jam afterward. Here is a quick picture that summarizes well the Saturday afternoon:


(I love Kodak Ektar's colors, I wish I could get that with digital).

4th of July at Rainier National Park

Ian organized a 3 day weekend camping trip at Rainier National Park. We car pooled with them and setup camp Friday around noon and ate some sandwiches at the campsite. I was surprised to see how nice the campsite was. Each tent spot was surrounded by a patch of forest that was isolating it from the other tents. That way it felt almost like we were camping by ourselves despite being in a rather large campsite. Each spot has a fire pit where you can cook your food as long as you buy/bring wood. There was even bathrooms with drinkable water, and even toilet paper... 5 star luxury camping if you're asking me. Only downside was probably the swarms of mosquitoes. Not that much of a problem for me as there was plenty of honeypots around ;).
From left to right: Melvin, Allen, Ian, Janel, Andy, Kevin and Michelle. Missing: Anne, Jason and myself.


We then spent the afternoon on a short hike to Comet falls. We almost missed the falls as we stopped there:


To realize that we had to walk a few steps more to get to see this one: the real Comet falls !


We had a nice evening around the fire, barbecued lots of salmon, drank a few local brews and some bourbon and went to bed. Next morning at 4:45 Ian and I were up for some sunrise photography action. We drove straight to Reflection Lake and got some very nice shots of Mount Rainier.


A few hours later we drove to Paradise, which is the starting point to climb up Mount Rainier and deserves its name: the view is gorgeous. We then climbed for like 2 hours in snow until we got tired and decided the view would not improve by going higher.

Looking up towards Mount Rainier:


Looking south, towards Oregon we can see mount Adams to the left and Mount Saint Helens to the right (Mount Hood is hidden in this picture).


Once we arrived down the place was literally packed with visitors. It was one of the most fantastic hikes I've done in term of ease of access and quality of the view. I must admit that hiking in the snow in July felt quite good.


We came back to our campsite and met Jason that had just drove up to join us. M, Andy, Kevin and Jason went on another "short" (it was a lot longer than the ranger had told us) hike for the afternoon while Janel, Ian and myself slacked at the camp. We prepared the fire for our 4th of July's dinner (Melvin's first as an American citizen). We had a fun night around the fire, playing with sparklers, eating sausages and chatting.

You can find the rest of the pictures here, or read about it with more pictures on Ian and Janel's blog.

B&W Portland

The other day I had to go to the lab to get some film developed and I decided to just do the 4 miles by foot and bring a camera with me. The weather was great and I got a few B&W shots of Portland I like. All the pictures were shot on my Zeiss Super Ikonta III from the fifties with medium format rolls of Kodak Tri-X. Most of my path was on the waterfront so you'll see quite a few bridges in these pictures.
In the afternoon, there is a guy sitting by the stop sign at the entrance of the Hawthorn bridge. He's cool, a bit weird but does a good job at entertaining the long line of cars slowly passing by.


The bridge has a central part which is 2 ways, 2 side parts that are 1 way and 2 sidewalks with markings for a bike lane and a pedestrian lane. It's interesting to see that cars actually just drive on a metallic grid and you can see the water bellow under the "road". Kind of creepy (and slippery as well). The central part of the bridge lifts between the 2 towers, kind of like an elevator, to let tall boats pass. There's a guy that is sitting there all day, waiting for big boats to horn. I've seen it up only twice, but there is probably 1 or 2 boats a day :). When it happens the entertainer gets a lot of work as the line grows: operation of the bridge is really slooow.


There's a pedestrian path on both banks of the Willamette in the downtown section, with drinkable water fountains. Lots of people walk around there, or run, bike. It's a very live and enjoyable area.


More B&W Portland pictures here.