I just got my package of play food this week from the second swap I did, and wow, it’s amazing!

I loved making those simple little veggie burgers, but I am completely wowed by all the 3D and hand-stitching in the swap mix! I put notes on everything in the flickr picture if you’re interested in a few more details. It all looks so gorgeous in person, Pearl is going to love playing with all this stuff when she’s a tiny bit older. She has already had a lot of fun waving the asparagus stalks around (exactly like she does with their real counterparts).

Speaking of food, we surprised Andrew with some extremely fantastic grilling cookbooks for Father’s Day. The first one, Grill Every Day, is by a Portland author I met at the Oregon Historical Society, Diane Morgan.

With this nice weather, we have been grilling a ton lately — in fact, we made her recipe for salmon grilled on a bed of herbs for dinner that night! It was so good, and so easy to make (thanks to the herb garden flourishing so much, I only had to go about thirty feet to get all the extra ingredients).

Then yesterday I made the Israeli couscous with zucchini and red bell pepper (pictured on the cover) — also so good, and so easy. (Though I have to admit that there was no grilling involved, it was just a regular old stovetop production.)

We’re hoping to do some camping this summer with Pearl, so I also snapped up a copy of Campfire Cuisine, which is by lovely San Francisco food writer Robin Donovan.

I’ve marked a bunch of things I want to try (Robin has included handy extras for adapting her outdoor recipes to your home kitchen, too) and one at the top of the list is the grilled salmon with balsalmic fig sauce — we had so many figs from our tree last summer and I can’t wait to make that one!

A huge bonus is that Robin also offers up some really nice outdoor-friendly sauces (dressings, spice rubs, marinades, glazes, and compound butters ) and sides to go with the tempting main dishes — super inspiring, and super easy.

I found both of these at Powell’s on Hawthorne (the cooks, crafts and gardening annex, if you’re local). As much as I love reading craft blogs online and hanging out on flickr, there is something so amazingly nice about buying a book right off a shelf and cooking from a smooth, inviting page, and these two are gems.