This weekend was just amazing. I can’t remember the last time Andrew and I both had three days off in a row (it definitely wasn’t in 2009) and I got to do a lot of my favorite things — gardening, vintage-dress-wearing, barbecuing, visiting the farmer’s market, going out to lunch, taking a long walk, and playing with Pearl. And on Sunday, the three of us headed out to Silver Falls State Park and went for a beautiful hike, right around the curve that takes you behind the South Falls.

We also got some unexpected inspiration for a last-minute Monday-afternoon baby-playdate-cocktail-party-barbecue with some friends in the neighborhood, which turned out to be awesome. Sunset is my favorite magazine, and I’m always happy to see the colorful new copy in my mailbox (and maybe try a new recipe, or file away another place I want to visit — this time, it was grilled corn and bay shrimp risotto, and Boise, Idaho, where Andrew and I went about nine years ago and haven’t been since).

But the timing has never been better than the June issue showing up just before the long weekend. Aside from falling madly in love with the cover (and putting “find some wooden chairs and paint them an awesome color” at the top of my backyard to-do list), I loved the luau feature, which updated a 1965 Sunset piece on the same topic with some very cool modern ideas and recipes.

We spotted a recipe for pineapple drops in the mix,

and wow, those are good.

We made them along with dark and stormys (my all-time favorite cocktail)

with a few different ginger beers to try on the drinks table.

Neither of the cocktails are supposed to have mint, but it’s so green and fresh in my herb garden right now that I couldn’t resist.

I made the shishkebobs and Andrew did all the grilling.

Our friends Mark and Mary brought quinoa salad

and amazing homemade strawberry shortcake

and Andrew found another Sunset treasure, an asparagus summer salad recipe, and made that too.

My plate was gorgeous.

I only wish I’d gotten a picture of the shortcake stacked up — it was beautiful, but with babies to wrangle, I just couldn’t pull off that one last photo before it was all gone.

There are a lot of other cool things in this issue (those fuschia chairs in that gorgeous backyard are my personal favorite), but super exciting to me is that Sunset used one of my photos for their California Road Trips insert!

They saw this picture I took at the Rose Bowl flea market a couple of summers ago in my flickr,

contacted me about using it, and here it is!

I was so excited to see it on the page. I love the Rose Bowl, and it’s such a treat to be part of their travel guide (which I really hope I’ll be using myself one of these summer months). Thank you, Sunset!