Visit To Wineries & Awesome Picnic Food

A couple of days ago, my wonderful parents-in-law celebrated their anniversary, so we decided to take them out to the wineries for the day. The weather-gods must have been smiling down on us, because the weather went from being cold and rainy the day before to absolutely perfect with just the right temperature and sunny skies. In other words, we had a great time taking in the views and enjoying the setting. The Willamette Valley in Oregon has many lovely wineries, and the wines are usually really good too, so visiting a winery or two is always a nice thing to do. We don't go too often, however my in-laws love going (!), so my father-in-law was rather excited picking just the right spot for our outing.

I made a picnic lunch that we brought along.

Inside the basket there were antipasto skewers (marinated mushrooms, zucchini & feta) as well as melon-and-feta skewers (which are so so good!), a few cherries I picked that morning on my morning walk in the neighborhood (if the cherries hang towards the sidewalk I consider it fair game to do some picking!) and la pièce de résistance:

...an Italian stuffed tortano bread I baked the same morning. This bread really is the definition of good picnic food: a contained meal in form of a bread, does it get any better than that? I made a soft dough, containing semolina flour as well as bread flour, and stuffed the dough with prosciutto, Mozzarella cheese, olives and herbs.

All in all this made for a really nice meal.

And to go with that: some crisp Oregon Pinot Gris.

Cheers!

And for dessert, I decided simple is best (and we were busy taking down the fence the day before, so baking a cake was too much of a hassle!) so I made some chocolate covered strawberries. You cannot go wrong with chocolate covered strawberries, especially not with a glass of Pinot Gris!

All together we had a really nice day. Beautiful views, good conversation, tasty food and excellent wine. I've already heard talks about where are we going next time? But that's going to have to wait, because we have too many things going on at the home front, like building a fence (so we can create our own cozy winery-setting in the backyard!)