These are especially good with milk.  (Or soy milk, as the case may be.)

Ingredients
 1  cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
1  cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 cup Tillamook whey powder (I don’t know where you can buy this outside of the gift shop)
2  eggs
1  teaspoon vanilla (Use the pure vanilla – none of that artificial nonsense)
1-1/2  cups wheat flour (Bob’s Red Mill!)
1  teaspoon baking soda
2  teaspoons Vietnamese cinnamon (The type of cinnamon you use makes a big difference.  Costco has it for a really good price.)
3  cups uncooked Scottish Oatmeal (Again, Bob’s Red Mill!)
At least one teaspoon zest from a Clementine mandarin orange.  I think more is better.

Prep
Heat oven to 350°F. In small bowl, blend together flour, baking soda, and cinnamon. In large bowl, beat butter, brown sugar, and whey powder with an electric mixer until creamy. Beat in eggs and vanilla until mixture is even creamier. Gradually add flour mixture; mix well with a wooden spoon. Add oats and orange zest; mix well.

Drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets.

Bake 10 to 12 minutes or until light golden brown. Use metal spatula to move cookies to wire rack for cooling. Once cooled completely, serve or store.

I froze some of the dough to use for baking later, and hopefully that will work out well.

My friend Kris let me borrow her combo apple peeler / corer / slicer. The intent was to do only dehydrated apples, but since Diana taught me a stupid simple tasty crust recipe, making a pie as well was definitely in order.

I think the apples are Fuji (definitely locally grown in Hood River), and the crust is slightly savory with rosemary and basil.

We wound up having apple pie for dinner, as well as breakfast the next day. I even saved a slice for Kris.

Visited Jossy Farms and Sara’s Blueberries this weekend with the girls. Four women in a Subaru Outback with a ton of boxes and containers! Distracted on the way out to North Plains by a number of yard and estate sales, and had to stop and pick up more cash for fruit because we had blown all of our cash on garage sales.  Picked up fun fixings for the costumes I am crafting for Aaron and I to wear to the Portland Pirate Festival next month. Finally made it out to the farm.

At Jossy Farms, you get a little wagon and pull it through the orchard while you pick out your peaches, pears, or apples. This is a steal at eighty cents a pound, and it is so much fun to wander the rows. There is nothing like peaches right off the tree! My pears are sitting a few more days to finish ripening, but the peaches I picked were so perfectly ripe that they bruised a bit on the way home.

One of the gals also had her heart set on blueberries, even though it is the end of the season, and the folks at the farm gave us directions to Sara’s Blueberries. It is hidden behind a neighborhood of relatively new tract homes, and you would never know it was there unless you knew where you were going.  They have about an acre of blueberry bushes, and a pen of goats.  At $1.50/lb, again a steal!  I picked close to two pounds.

Once I got home, I started prepping to dehydrate the whole lot.  Here are the lessons I learned this weekend:

• More than blanching is needed for blueberries.  I tried drying them blanching only, and finally gave up after around 36 hours at 125 degrees.  Think I will try slicing them next time.  Read something about a water and vinegar rinse, too.
• Uniform slices for peaches (preferably thin) are best
• If the skin isn’t coming off the peach after it has been blanched, it is not ripe enough.
• Must remember to lightly oil the dehydrator trays before arranging the fruit.  Might also pick up some additional mesh liners, too.

While this batch of both fruits is delicious, it is not shelf stable, so I’ve given Aaron the directive that the fruit must be eaten within the next couple of days.  I had barely gotten the words “must be eaten” out of my mouth when he made a beeline for the kitchen to make Scottish oatmeal, which is an excellent base for dried fruit.

Aaron decided that “fried ice cream” flavor ice cream would go really well with oatmeal cookies, so that is what I used.  I used a large spoon to squish ice cream into my silicone muffin pan.  I filled them all the way up, but next time I would only fill them half way. You could probably do this with a regular muffin tin, but the silicone makes it really easy to release the ice cream from the mold.  The muffin pan went into the freezer while I prepped and baked the cookies.

I used a circular cookie cutter to make the cookies match the same size as the muffin pan reservoirs. Cookies were a little crumbly because I didn’t use enough egg, but oh, were they tasty!!!!  I think it is better to assemble the pieces while the cookies are a little bit warm because that helps the ice cream to stick to the cookies.

(Cue Twilight Zone music) Dee dee dee dee. Dee dee dee dee. Picture if you will… a company. An adorable company. Cuddly. Owned and operated by young Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy types with lots of hair. Cut. Everybody take 5. Rewrite. Action. Owned and operated by older Buck Henry and Bea Arthur types. CUT! Conference room NOW! Here’s the plot. Simple. Cute soup company secretly the subject of government radiation tests grows to gargantuan size. Later, company is absorbed by vast intergalactic gaseous entity called Campbellians in a bid for superiority over their sworn enemy the Progressans.
Roll credits.
Sound far-fetched? Well, maybe it’s not. And here’s where YOU come in… You are our GREATEST ASSET. Stop blushing. It’s TRUE! You are the biggest bunch of lovable soup guzzling home town heroes any team could HOPE for. And WE NEED YOU! John and I are putting together a team of ALL STARS to put SOUP OF THE GODS! in a SUPERMARKET NEAR YOU!! These things take time and $$$.
But with the right team we can do it. We’re looking for an experienced marketer / distributor familiar with taking a product from concept to store shelf. If you have this type experience or know someone who has please call Sean at 503-235-5378 or email me at sean -at- nofishgofish.com. Don’t sell yourself short! Portland is a small town and we’re all only 2 degrees separated from Phil Knight. LET’S JUST DO IT!

The joy of close-knit Portland. Do you know someone who can help them make their dream come true? Give them a call.
I’m dreaming of the day I can pick up No Fish! Go Fish! soup from the store so I can have their soup for lunch again. If you can convince them to bring their sandwiches to the freezer section, too, all the better.