Prepare to become fat......and happy

Like any good daughter I asked my Dad what he wanted for Father's Day. 

Ask and he shall receive!

  This makes all of my other cheesecakes look like diet cheesecakes, so beware.

 If you like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups you will love this, because it tastes just like one!

All I had was my iPhone, so it's a little grainy. Deal with it....If the picture was any better you would be drooling.

 Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheesecake

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups Oreo cookie's (with the filling scraped out) crushed
• 3/4 stick butter, melted
• 3 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese
• 1 cup peanut butter
• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/4 cup half-and-half cream or milk. (I used 2 % milk because I had it)
• 8 oz of good chocolate (I used Ghirardelli semi-sweet baking chocolate)
• 1 cup of heavy whipping cream

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Line the outside of a 9 inch springform pan with aluminum foil.
2. To Make Crust: In a medium bowl, combine Oreo crumbs and melted butter. Press the mixture onto the bottom and sides of an ungreased 9 inch springform pan, and bake for 5 minutes at 350 degrees to set the crust. Put is aside.
3. To Make Filling: In a large mixing bowl, beat cream cheese (let it sit out for a half an hour before you use it and it will work better), sugar, peanut butter, flour, and vanilla with an electric mixer until smooth. Add eggs and egg yolk all at once, beating on low speed until combined. Stir in half-and-half or milk (depending on which one you used). If you mix the cream cheese up first and get it soft and then add the sugar next it'll help you not get lumps.
4. Pour batter into the springform pan. Bake the cheesecake in a water bath by placeing it in a large baking pan (I use a roasting pan), pour boiling water into the baking pan until it comes 1/2 way up the sides of the spring form pan. Bake in the preheated oven for 40 to 50 minutes, or until the center circle of the cheesecake is still slightly giggly when you shake it.                                         You do this because the center of the cheesecake will continue to cook even after you take it out of the oven so you want it to not be fully set.

Let cake cool on a wire wrack for an hour and half, and then wrap it in plastic wrap put it in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours before serving.                                                                                          

To make the Chocolate Ganache Topping:

Directions

1. Chop the chocolate into small pieces and place it in a large stainless steel bowl.
2. In a large, high sided saucepan, heat cream over medium high heat, stirring frequently, until it starts to boil. At this point, the cream will want to boil over, so keep an eye on it! Immediately remove from heat and pour over chopped chocolate. If you add about a tablespoon of corn syrup it will give it a shine to it.
3. Whisk until chocolate is completely melted and mixture is smooth. Cool and then pour over the top of the cheesecake. 

This is amazing tasting, by the way! This ganache would also work well for chocolate dipped strawberries or as hot fudge on ice cream. 

In case you couldn't tell, I decorated it with halved Reese's Peanut Butter Cups to make it fancier looking. It was Father's Day after all, and I felt it my duty to give my father-in-law exactly what he wanted... a chocolate peanut butter cheesecake, and if I do say so myself it was fabulous!

My epic weekend part 1: The calm before the storm

I've got a BIG post coming later on this weekend about what I'm currently up to at work.

Here's a hint: It involves me getting up at 3 a.m., nearly getting murdered by bovine and involves 1,800 pounds of nylon fabric.

What is it? The Tigard Festival of Balloons, of course!

What's the balloon fest, you ask? Good question. It's an annual summer festival where they bring in hot air balloons from all over the country to fly. There's also music and pancakes and rides, and I spend all weekend running around like crazy having a good time.

It runs all weekend long but before I give you a link to the details I wanted to show you this:

It's another of those (*cough* award winning *cough*) videos I make for my work, and I totally dig the crap out of it.

The festival is super fun and worth the drive out if you've never seen a hot air balloon before. The catch: They take off at about 6 a.m., so you've got to be up early if you want to see them do their thaang.

Details for this year's festival and more awesome photos can be found HERE. Expect my ACTUAL Balloon Fest post with pictures and videos (and the story of how I was nearly killed by cows and then became an accessory to a crime) later this week.

...I'll let you know when it's up.

Story problems

With the end of school approaching it makes me sad that I no longer get 3 months off just for kicks.
In honor of this we're going to have a pop quiz ladies and gentleman.

When Timmy goes to the grocery store at 5pm, just off work, hungry, and tired with money in his bank account and the inability to think above about a first grade level he buys what?

A: Just the necessities
B: Anything that looks/ smells good
C: Something that you neither want or can think to use in anything
D: All of the above

The answers D....always D

13/52 "Ladies and GentleMAN"

For those of you who don't know, Katie comes from a large family.

The best that I've been able to figure out is that roughly 1/10th of the world's population is a member of Katie's family.

That's 677 million, 523 thousand, 570 people.

Roughly.

Anyway, a good chunk of them get together at the beach once a year for a weekend of lounging and generally doing nothing.

Well, when I say "a good chunk of them" I mean this:



Or, to put it another way:

Girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl and GEOFF.

Most of the men-folk in Katie's family stay away from the beach weekend, because there aren't any other dudes to hang out with.

It's a statement that I've never really understood, but I'm the guy that invited my female friends to my bachelor party, so I guess I don't think like normal people.

Of course, being the only dude I'm given a lot of "manly tasks."

I've opened my fair share of pickle jars around that house is what I'm trying to say.

Anyway, it's nice to get away for a few days and be around family. Katie and I had a similar experience with my family last year.

Granted when MY family went it was with, like, 5 people.

Anyway, here's some fun photos from our weekend at DA OCHEN:

 

 

Beards, bears and blogposts

Gather 'round, children and let me tell you a tale.

A tale of courage and bravery. A tale of savage beasts and intrepid reporting.

In short, I'd like to tell you the story of:

Warning: This story is only about 10 percent as epic as I just made it out to be.

I don't know if I've ever actually written it down but: I love my job. I love it for the simple reason that every day is completely different. You never know what you'll be doing on any given day. Some days you're stuck covering long meetings about city planning that feel like they're sucking out your soul and other days you're rushing to a field at 8:30 in the morning to track down a wild black bear.

Those of you who follow the Portland happenings in any capacity probably heard about the bear that wandered near Tualatin Elementary School yesterday (if you hadn't heard then, please, read on!)

Normally I cover another city and don't write much about Tualatin, but early on Wednesday morning I got a call from my photographer saying that the Tualatin reporter wouldn't be able to cover the story so I headed out to face THE BEAR. 

The scary as all hell, taller than I am, 200-pound black bear, to be precise.

Whenever the press covers anything even remotely like this they tend to rope us off and make us all stand together in one area "for protection."

That spot was on the other side of where I parked my car, so I had to walk through the police barricade area in order to get there. 

There were dozens of police cars parked along the road. Some were local, some county, some state. A group of about four Oregon State troopers were loading shotguns just in case the bear tried any funny business. One of them pumped his shotgun as I walked past. 

He looked up at me and smiled. 

"Hey," he said.

There was a local TV news helicopter making some considerable noise overhead and the crowd of photographers and reporters (aka "people like me") were lined up near the elementary school. 

Between us and the bear was a soccer field and a waist-high chainlink fence. 

"Totally safe," I told myself.

Police armed with tranquilizer guns (and some impressive automatic rifles) were positioned around the area very near to where we were. Some were on the roof of the school with binoculars, others were in cars ready to chase after it, should it decide to make a run for it.

Our photographer Jaime Valdez was there snapping photos and doing interviews with local radio stations (at the same time. He's that good) as I arrived. 

(Before I forget, I should say that all of these photos are used by permission of photographer Jaime Valdez. Who is awesome in every way.)

 

Kids in the school had their noses pressed against the glass watching everything the bear and the police did. They waved at local TV cameras and craned their necks to spot the helicopter as it circled overhead. 

I made a few quick calls to get the word about what was happening. One of those calls was to the school district superintendent (he's speed dialed in my phone. Yes. I know. I'm awesome) to get the official "the safety of the children is our number one priority" statement.

That's him there, with the binoculars. He's standing on the roof of the school with some police officers, who keep him informed on all things student-bear related.

At one point in the conversation he tells me "Just to let you know, the doors to the building are unlocked should you need to run."

I tell that to Jaime, who laughs (a bit nervously) and the reporters near us joke how we would react should the bear come our way.

"Jaime, are you gonna stay and get the perfect shot?" one of his photographer friends asks him. "Or are you gonna run?" 

"Hey, many, I'll do what you do."

For the record: I would run. I would wet my pants, leave Jaime to fend for himself and run.

Anyway. We stood in the rain for awhile as the bear put on a bit of a show. The Fish and Wildlife biologists had to shoot it with a tranquilizer dart but couldn't sneak close enough to it in the open field to get a clear shot.

Every so often he'd hop the chain-link fence onto the school's property and then get scared back by police.

When the bear did finally make a break for it after about an hour and a half, he darted right past all the reporters, giving all of us the perfect shots we needed for our various newspapers/nightly news/websites.

He was, maybe, 50 yards away from us.

Jaime was able to shoot this:

While I was able to capture some it on the iPhone and use it in a small video on our website.

They did eventually tranquilize the bear when it ran up a tree and my exciting day was over. I spent most of the afternoon waiting for them to bring the bear down, then talked to some neighbors, the fish and wildlife biologists who captured it, and kids from the school who had probably the most memorable school day of their entire lives.

They released the bear back into the wild sometime today out in the woods near the beach.

When I got back to the office at about 3 p.m. we had to come up with some good bear-related puns for our new lead story and I had to start writing.

If you want to read my story (and if you've made it this far into this exceedingly long post then YOU DO) just click on the big pretty newspaper page.

Thanks for reading the blog and being awesome!