Sylvia's Scenario

    Bruce's birthday this year was more of a low key birthday than last year when he had four different celebrations for turning 70. Another year has gone by already and here we are celebrating again. This year, we went to Seaside, Oregon; one of our favorite spots to go to for the past 35 years. We have lots of wonderful memories here and still love going to Seaside whenever we get the chance. This year, Lauren was able to join us since she now lives in Portland which is only an hour and a half away from Seaside vs. the three and a half hours away for us. We spent the weekend in Portland and then drove out to the beach for Bruce's birthday on Monday. She was a great host in Portland and we had a wonderful barbecue at her house similar to what we've been doing all summer. I guess she inherited my genes... She and her boyfriend, Dustin, took us out to many of Portland's finest eating scenes and there are many.   They live in a very cute neighborhood with lots of neighbo...

We picked twelve cups of blackberries the other day while we had visitors here and turned it into blackberry coffee cake.  This recipe used 3-1/2 cups of blackberries so I also made two loaves of  blackberry bread   and the most popular  blackberry cobbler  that got eaten so fast I never got a photo of it.  And I still have blackberries leftover.  All these recipes are from a very old cookbook of mine called Wild & Free Blackberries that I've had since around the mid-1990's.    And this is definitely the time of year that this little cookbook is sitting out on my kitchen counter.  We picked them at our local golf course because Bruce sees how plentiful they are when he plays golf and he has been eager to get us out there to pick and we finally did. Our visitors have returned home now but they had three children who LOVED picking blackberries and also LOVED eating them.  They were children of Bruce's nephew who was here with his ...