Home Living
B
Tuesday, July 5, 2022
The Observer & Baker City Herald
Fun food:
DOROTHY
FLESHMAN
DORY’S DIARY
Strawberry
ice cream
sandwiches
Gretchen McKay/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette-TNS
Greta McKay, 2, enjoys a homemade ice cream sandwich fi lled with no-churn strawberry ice cream.
By GRETCHEN McKAY • Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
O
ne of the best things about summer, especially if you’ve got kids or
grandkids, is all the ice cream you get to eat to cool off, no excuses
necessary. And it’s relatively easy to make, even if you don’t have an ice
cream maker, if you go with a no-churn recipe in which whipped cream is gently folded
into a sweetened condensed milk enriched with vanilla and other flavorings, like fresh
fruit or spices.
My 2-year-old granddaughter Greta’s current
favorite is “pink” ice cream, both colored by and
studded with chunks of strawberry. She also recently
discovered ice cream sandwiches, and is such a fan
that, on a recent visit, I watched her try to eat the
paper wrapping on one after polishing off the cookie
in an attempt to get every single drop of fl avor pos-
sible into her mouth.
It made me decide we should try our hands at
making them at home, stirring the chocolate cookie
batter together in a big bowl on the kitchen counter
after mixing the ingredients for the ice cream and
pouring it into a loaf pan to freeze overnight.
It was a fun way to spend some one-on-one time
together, and the sheer joy she expressed when we
unwrapped “her” fi nished sandwiches the next day at
her baby brother Sean’s baptism party was priceless.
My adult children loved them, too, as a late-night
munchie.
This recipe, adapted from Smitten Kitchen, is both
super easy and super satisfying. I went slightly off
script by cutting the sheet pan-sized cookie into indi-
vidual squares to make the individual sandwiches,
which meant some of my cookies crumbled before
being stuff ed. (I didn’t have an off set spatula to smooth
the batter.) As a result, the sandwiches weren’t picture
perfect. (I saved the broken bits to crumble on top of
ice cream as a sundae). But they were still pretty tasty,
a great introduction to baking for a toddler — and a
sweet start to everyone’s summer vacation.
See, Ice cream/Page B2
My 2-year-old granddaughter Greta’s current
favorite is “pink” ice cream, both colored by and
studded with chunks of strawberry.
Meeker’s stone
was empty, but
La Grande is
full of history
T
he stone was there 20 years before I was
born, but I was taught to honor it from the
time I was a small child.
In 1906, Trail marker Ezra Meeker, on one of
his trips through Oregon, was making sure that
the Oregon Trail, which had brought so many
people west in covered wagons drawn by oxen
or horses, afoot, or by horseback, would not be
forgotten, by placing the stone at the head of B
Avenue in La Grande.
On this day we were to see whether or not
there were historic items within the stone, pre-
paring ourselves for disappointment in the event
the stone was empty, whether by never having
been put there in the fi rst place or that the stone
had been tampered with over the many years it
had been there. It well could end in disappoint-
ment for onlookers.
Yes, to some, the hollow interior of the
Meeker stone was a disappointment because
there was nothing inside the stone where Meeker
had said he had put items of interest to folks
from the early 1900s. On June 23, 2022, the
stone was pulled off its base and held up for all to
see. It was empty.
If there had ever been anything there when
he said he put it there, then it had long ago
disappeared.
With this new knowledge, the people were
turned away greatly disappointed and tempted to
drift away as though nothing important had hap-
pened this beautiful sunny day.
I wasn’t. Well, maybe just a wee bit disap-
pointed because the possibility of what it con-
tained could have been historically valuable. But
I’m afraid it was what I expected.
The years had taken a great toll on the looks
of the area, and I was never really sure that the
stone itself could survive when folks decided that
they wanted to build their houses on that ledge,
let alone be in the same place after the road work
had been done in that area, great changes taking
place there over the years.
You see, I remember B Avenue when it was
a dirt road, narrow and muddy in times of rain,
dusty in the summer. It went up the B Avenue
slope of the hill and turned in a curve onto the
county road before it became Walnut Street. It
was just the road that led to Morgan Lake, hills
in which to hunt or chop winter wood, or have
a little cabin up in there someplace for solitude
or hunting. We children ran those hills like a
backyard. Cross-street Oak Street wasn’t yet cut
through when I was eight years old and neither
did C Avenue go up the hill beyond that point
but turned right onto Alder Street (Sunset Drive)
and down the graveled road where we lived
years later. The land above was just a hillside for
grazing.
My aunt and uncle, the Lovans, lived at the
foot of the hill facing B Avenue above the Cedar
Street intersection, and our family had moved on
up the road and around the hill into the retired
Hofmann Swiss dairy chalet a quarter of a mile
from the city limits, so we drove or rode that
road every time the parents were to take us
someplace important like fi shing in Wallowa
County or swimming in warm water at Cove or
huckleberrying on Mount Emily.
The rest of the time, we children at our chalet
home came down what was then called the Mill
Canyon Creek/Road beside the power plant and
cut across country open fi eld and down between
Crandall’s big farm and dairy and the remains
of the old fl our mill, then into the backdoor of
our relatives via the cow barn and chicken pen.
Thusly, we made our way to school or town to
see the Saturday cowboy movie at the Granada
Theatre, bypassing the length of the road to B
Avenue where one of the cattle or sheep drives
might be coming up our way.
And, so, we just knew that the road began at
the curve when it left B Avenue and went by a
miniature chalet likened to the one we lived in on
up the hill. The Hofmanns and Hildebrandts had
lived there much much earlier, the Hildebrandts
downstairs, the Hofmanns upstairs, a system that
worked for all since the 1911 arrival of the fami-
lies across the states from New York where their
ship had docked separately from Europe.
But that probably has little to do with the
Meeker stone except to show how things have
changed over the years, the stone and the chalet
gracing the hill by themselves. The little chalet
was the only building on the uphill side of the
road. There were no buildings at all across the
town side of the hill. In fact, the Lovans’ place
beyond their house went up the slope to the
county road and grew grain or grass that turned
brown in the fall, a good place for kids to play,
especially when they found the uncle’s old and
rusted car with isinglass windows. But, then,
that’s not about the Meeker stone, either, is it. It
is about local history.
See, History/Page B6