A Season of Picnics

When we were young, growing up on the Northern California coast, my sister and I delighted in picnics. If we weren't going to school, then just about every lunch was best eaten outside. At that time, we lived on a ranch a mile away from the Pacific and Glo and I would carry sandwiches and cookies to "Fairy Rock" on a gurgling stream on our ranch and lay out our offerings there. If we were really fancy, we'd carry a bottle of water that would be poured into doll size tea cups, but usually we just ate our sandwiches plain. On week-ends, every week-end, our mother and grandmother would tote big picnic lunches to the boat landing my dad and uncle worked and another, bigger lunch would be eaten outdoors on Saturdays and Sundays.

My favorite picnic from my grandma was her cold fried chicken, with buttered white bread sandwiches and deviled eggs. Grandma always had a tin of cookies that was passed around. Her favorites were inevitably Snickerdoodles. My mother's were Molasses Crinkles. Both ladies made them weekly. My sister and I ate them all diligently!

As we got older, the picnics at the Landing continued but got more involved. Somebody, usually Mother, would make a big pot of chili beans. When my Aunt Dolores married into the family, her favorite (being's she was from a big Italian family) would be a big pan of Minestrone Soup. Aunt Dolores was a fan of Biscottini. So our education into being cookie connoisseurs grew too.

Picnics became more sporadic as I became a young mother and continued working in the boat landing. Bill and I liked to pack picnic lunches for our day offs when the boys were little and we'd fly somewhere or go fishing and there was always something stashed away to eat outdoors. In Baja, where we took our vacations, we had some great al fresco picnics with boiled shrimp with mustard sauce, buttered bolillos, tortilla chips and salsa. We never starved eating outside.

And this past winter season, whooping it up in Arizona, has seen its share of picnics too. Once again, my sister and I are reveling in the warm winter weather and trekking out to exotic desert-y areas with our husbands and .... packing picnic lunches. We've made it a point not to tell each other what we'll be bringing and only a couple of times, have brought the same thing. Usually, it's blocks of cheese (I've been a bit unhappy with the paltry choice of good cheese in Arizona! California got me spoiled, I guess.), some sourdough or tortillas or crackers, fresh grapes and apples or dried apricots and figs, sometimes a beefstick or jerky, once I splurged and made a gorgonzola focaccia that we swooned over. And we always top it off with some kind of cookies. Glo and I are big fans of butter cookies and oatmeal-raisin. We haven't made Grandma's Snickerdoodles yet.

So tomorrow will be another trek out into the desert to look at wildflowers and sample another picnic. The purply red fairydusters are in bloom as are the allium, also purple, some reddy purple clover type flowers, and the blue straw flowers I don't know their name, as well as the lupine and poppy. There's a lot of stalk-y type flowers blooming after the rains too, and more of them I don't know their names, just that it's fun finding new ones. So if I'm not too busy stuffing myself on picnic food, I shall take some pictures and show you What's What in my next blog.