Cream of the Crop

We were saddened to read this past week of the imminent closure of Mallorie's Dairy, a local dairy producer that supplied Roth's, the Willamette Valley chain of grocery stores where Lisa does most of her food shopping. Lisa had found that their whipping cream was the best we've found, and it's something she uses in some of the things she cooks. All of the other brands on the shelf here (Umpqua being the worst offender) seem to have fillers and unnecessary additives; Mallorie's cream had exactly one ingredient: cream.

I wrote to Roth's asking if they'd be able to stock real cream again, and to my surprise, very quickly got a response from the company president, Michael Roth, saying that their new supplier, Alpenrose, which takes over sometime next week as Mallorie's ramps down production, produces real unadulterated cream. This morning I got a follow-up from Alpenrose confirming this. We're still going to save the last few containers of Mallorie's reclosable plastic containers, wash them, and decant the Alpenrose cartons into Mallorie's containers so it will keep better.

The Bear Conspiracy

Because Lisa's birthday is Sunday and I'm leaving tomorrow for California, we celebrated her birthday last Thursday by taking her to Red Lobster in Salem. (It didn't hurt that I had won a Red Lobster gift card at a drawing at my office.) travelswithkuma tells his version of how it went. Now Lisa knows what Kuma Bear and I were talking about when she wasn't around.