National Lentil Festival 2009

Every August, Pullman is home to the National Lentil Festival. The Palouse region is responsible for growing 1/3 of the United States' lentils. Pullman celebrates by having a fair downtown, a 5K run, a 100K bike ride, hosting a lentil cook-off, serving lentil chili and lentil pancakes, a parade, bands, etc. It's a pretty big celebration. Greg and I loved it because you can get all sorts of things for free! We had free lentil chili, free sno-cones, and free cotton candy to name a few. We both ran in the 5K Tase T. Lentil run on Saturday morning, and Dixie joined us later for the parade downtown. She was doing fine until a person dressed up as a dog walked by handing out candy... she wasn't too fond of him. Imposter!
Here are a few pictures!

As soon as we left local restaurant Swilly's (where we celebrated our 4th anniverary) we walked into the Lentil Festival and saw the WSU Cougar.

I believe this is the US's largest bowl of chili. Free bowls of lentil chili for all!

The spout at the bottom of the giant chili bowl. It gave me heartburn just to watch the chili drip out!

The bowl was filled to the very brim at the beginning of the evening.

Free cotton candy!

Dixie & I enjoying the parade from a shady spot.

Tase T. Lentil himself. Some more parade pictures...



The WSU drumline.
Good parade!

Rainy Campout

Trying to squeeze the most out of what is left of summer, we decided to campout two weekends ago despite the imminent rain. We only drove a few miles down the road, back to Kamiak Butte where we had hiked earlier in the Spring. The campout had a rough start when we learned that wood fires were not permitted in the campground. By the time we came back to Pullman to round up some charcoal for the grill (so that we could still have hot dogs and s'mores) the rain had started. But everything worked out, we had our s'mores and the big rain held off until we were snugly in our tents. Greg and I got to try out our new sleeping mats (our anniversary presents to each other) which were far better than our old sleeping mats. With the exception of Dixie taking more of her share of the tent (no surprise there) I enjoyed one of the best nights of sleep I had in quite some time thanks to the steady rain and cooler temperatures.

Dixie, doing her usual.



The whole group, through the raindrops.

Coming back from the "bathroom" with Carolina & Elizabeth.

Angela, standing in one of the dry spots left by our tents.

The morning after.

Picking Wild Huckleberries

Our camping plans were foiled this past weekend by overcast skies, and unusually cool temperatures. But as I'm sure you all guessed, we couldn't just sit around the house for an entire day, much less an entire weekend! :) We joined some friends on Saturday and headed back to St. Joe's National Forest near Potlatch, Idaho to search for wild huckleberries. I had never tried a huckleberry, and didn't even know what they looked like until this weekend. We heard it through the grapevine (no pun intended) that there was a giant patch of wild huckleberries right off of a forest service road that were abundant and free for the picking. That was certainly no understatement! An entire hillside was covered in small bushes that were loaded with the tiny reddish-blue berries. Not knowing the size of a huckleberry, I was a little too ambitious and brought along a dozen gallon ziploc bags. Little did I know that it would take a week worth of picking to fill that many bags!

Greg and I put all of our berries in an old gallon ice-cream bucket, and ended up filling it a little more than halfway after probably 1.5-2 hours worth of picking. There were also quite a few raspberry vines along the road, but those seemed to be a little past their prime. Sunday afternoon we washed our berries, then made a turn of jelly, and a batch of Huckleberry Sour Cream muffins. We still have quite a few berries left, so after we sample the jelly, we may make another batch. Here are the pictures.

The view. This is off the left side of the forest road, the berry patch was on the right side.

The colorful little berries. Unfortunately, these berries have to be picked one at a time.

See how tiny they are! I can't tell you how many I dropped!

After about 30 minutes of picking.

Can you spot the little brown dog in the picture above?? She's in camoflauge.

She was on bear patrol! This would've been the perfect lunch spot for bears. Two little dogs for appetizers, slow-moving humans for lunch, and a nice selection of berries for dessert!!

Dixie did her usual...looked for the perfect spot to park while she waited.

A scooby-snack for a hungry bear! :)

Greg had a pretty efficient system going. He hooked the ice cream bucket to his belt so that he could pick with both hands.

It's really small, but here's a panoramic of the view, and Greg with a few raspberries.

The vibrant "fruits" of our labor.

Crushing berries to make jelly.

Straining out some of the seeds.

Sour Cream Huckleberry muffins. Anyone getting hungry yet??

As a side note, many farmers on the Palouse are starting to harvest their wheat. These pictures are from the highway, but we'll try to get some better ones before the wheat is all gone.



And finally, a big congratulations to Hannah and Randall on their engagement!! Can't wait for July 2010!