Exploring Rancho Gordo Dried Beans

I have mentioned many times on this blog that Ann and I must be Tuscan at heart. We are without doubt mangiafagioli, bean eaters: we love beans and they are a substantial source of protein in our diet. While our everyday diet heretofore has depended largely on canned beans (because when you're busy, you don't always have time to cook dried beans), we recognize that dried beans almost always taste better and come in a lot wider variety than the five or six kinds in cans at the grocery store.

Now that I am retired and finding the time to cook dried beans is no longer an issue, I'm using a lot more dried beans. In the past, Cannellini were the beans that we used the most, followed by Black Beans and Great Northern Beans. From time to time, I cooked dried Pintos or Mayocobas, largely for frijoles refritos. For refritos, I learned that I prefered Mayocobas to Pintos, but also refry Black Beans from time to time. Frankly, any leftover pot beans are likely to become refritos at our house.

I have just recently started buying beans from Rancho Gordo in Napa, CA. Although I have known of them for a very, very long time thanks to a tip from chef Alice Waters, I never needed to order from them while I was in the restaurant business. On the East Coast, we had our own growers and small importers for wholesale quantities of beans.

Here are some notes about beans (updated with each reorder) that we have purchased from Rancho Gordo. They are mostly to refresh my feeble mind when it comes time to reorder, but they're out here for anyone looking for ideas as well.

One Haul from Rancho Gordo

Christmas Lima Beans. I've seen these beans in seed catalogs, but had never eaten them. I didn't imagine that they were significantly different from any other form of lima beans. Ann loves dried limas so I got them for her. I grew up eating the fresh form, which in the South we call butterbeans, and don't have a lot of experience cooking the dried form.

Because the beans are reputedly meaty, I treated them like meat, braising them with bacon, onions, porcini mushrooms, and Pinot Noir à la boeuf bourguignon. I feel like this dish was a miss in two ways. First, I should have reserved the expensive treatment for meat. And second, I wasn't happy with these beans. After an overnight soaking and 7-1/2 hours of braising, only 2/3 of the beans were cooked through.

Although I'm leaning towards not reordering these enormously popular beans again, my cooking method is likely at fault. I did not par-cook these large beans after soaking overnight and maybe that accounts for their less than wonderful texture.

Royal Corona Beans. Ann really likes the large white beans from Greece called, aptly enough, gigantes. Royal Coronas are supposed to be similar but larger, richer, and creamier than gigantes. What's not to love about that? I turned them into gigantes plaki, the traditional baked bean dish of Greece. They took longer to cook than I first thought, but in the end, I liked these beans a lot.

Snowcap Beans. I got these beans because I had no idea what they are like and I liked their great looks. The name snowcap is honest: they are large cannellini-sized kidney-shaped tan beans with chestnut stripes reminiscent of Borlotti or Bird Egg beans, the whole draped with a seemingly hand-painted blob of white. With these highly attractive beans, I made a bean and chicken adovada along the lines of classic New Mexican carne adovada. The verdict on the Snowcap beans is that they are large, plenty creamy, and delicious enough to want to reorder time and again.

Cassoulet Beans (Tarbais). These are the traditional French beans used for cassoulet and we used to get them in 10-kilo bags at the restaurant so I am very familiar with them. Heretofore, they have not been my favorite bean for cassoulet, however. That honor went to the Steuben Yellow Eye bean (see below).

However, I made a mind-blowing cassoulet with these Tarbais beans and they were absolutely superb, holding their shape through 8-1/2 hours of cooking (90 minutes of par-cooking and 7 hours baking in the oven). It seems to me that this batch of US-grown beans is significantly better than any of the imported beans from France. It may simply be that they are fresher beans than the imported ones that I used at the restaurant. In any case, they are a winner.

Rebosero Beans. I know nothing about these small pinkish grey Mexican beans that resemble the seeds for Kentucky Wonder pole beans that we used to plant in our garden. I was also drawn to the name of these beans which, if my limited Spanish serves me, means shawlmaker, reboso meaning "scarf."

After cooking these somewhat nondescript-looking beans in what I am calling a "Mexican cassoulet," I am in love with these beans. They cook up beautifully soft and creamy and in a perfect world in which I had unlimited amounts of these beans, would quickly become my new favorites for making frijoles refritos. They far surpass my previous favorites, Mayocobas.

Large White Lima Beans. Large limas are one of Ann's favorites and a sometime staple in our pantry. These proved to be silky and delicious in a Lima Bean and Beef Stew. I will reorder them, but to my mind, they are not a super sexy bean, rather a common workhorse bean in my culinary lexicon, and so I am more likely to order rarer beans than limas.

Yellow Eye Beans (Steuben). This was a workhorse bean at the restaurant, consistently cooking up creamy and delicious and was my go-to for cassoulet when I could not get Tarbais beans. Many people think that these are the original beans for Boston Baked Beans. I constantly reorder these beans and they end up in many dishes, including cassoulets and a Moroccan white bean stew called Loubia.

Rio Zape. This large purplish brown bean with dark stripes, splotches, and spots is also known as the Hopi String Bean. To me, it tastes like a Pinto on steroids. This is a great pot bean and that is how we eat it, soaked overnight in lightly salted water and cooked simply in the slow cooker with onion, garlic, poblano, chipotle, and Mexican oregano. The next day, they make the most excellent refried beans. Forget about Reboseros; there's a new king in town for refritos!.

The last pound of Rio Zapes served us well for two dinners, the first as pot beans served with a bit of cotjia cheese and cilantro, and the second as refried beans served on tostadas and topped with Dungeness Crab salad.

Ayocote Morado. This is quite a large purplish runner bean that is somewhat similar to the Rio Zape. I used it for pot beans and then for refried beans. The beans are extremely creamy but not as flavorful as the Rio Zape beans. The skins are a bit thick as well. All in all, a tasty bean, but I prefer Rio Zapes.

Long Weekend in Santa Fe

Ann and I are just back from our first visit to Santa Fe, a three-day weekend in the beautiful small town that is the capital of the state of New Mexico.

Ever since we first met Rob and Dyce, two days after they had relocated to Bend from Santa Fe, they have consistently mentioned that we needed to visit Santa Fe, their former home of ten years. At about 90,000 residents, Santa Fe is just a bit smaller than Bend. Back in the spring of this year, we all decided to visit Santa Fe for a few days during the holiday season to see the town all decorated. In the early fall, we set the date for the first weekend in December. Ann and I planned to fly in Thursday and out Monday, leaving us a nice long weekend in Santa Fe. Rob and Dyce had come in from Boulder a couple days prior.

Ann has never been to New Mexico before and was excitedly looking forward to crossing it off the list of states that she has never visited. I’ve been a few times but not recently. My last trip to the Land of Enchantment was a gig at Sandia National Labs in the mid-to-late 80s. I no longer can clearly fix that visit to a firm date in my mind. Prior to that, I had hiked a fair amount in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the southernmost extension of the Rocky Mountain chain. So while I have spent time in and near Albuquerque and in far northeast New Mexico, I have never been to Santa Fe.

I have a fondness for the Sangre de Cristos: those mountains are where I, as a young man from the East, first encountered the Ponderosa Pines that are so familiar to us in Bend and all over the Wwest. I had never seen anything like them. I marveled then and I still marvel now at how they form open savannas of widely spaced trees with underlying grasses and shrubs.

Early December in Central Oregon is not a time that is conducive to air travel. It is our season for freezing fog and no carrier will fly their planes in or out of that icy mess. Nobody wants to stall because of ice build-up on the wings. We watched the weather anxiously as flights were cancelled Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings. If the planes cannot land at our airport the night before, they will not be here for flights out the following morning.

Rime from Freezing Fog

It will come as no surprise then that Wednesday night at 8:00pm, we got a message that our was flight cancelled for Thursday morning. Anticipating this, I had already looked at flight availability out of PDX the next day, so that when we finally got a callback from an Alaska agent, Ashley in Boise, we were able to get her to look into a 14:46 flight out of PDX to ABQ. Ashley was fantastic in getting us rebooked.

Naturally, rebooking to another airport has its own set of ripple effects. We had to move our return flight to Portland as well, because our car would be there, sitting in the long term garage. And because our rebooked flight would be getting in very late to Portland, we booked a hotel there rather than risk driving over the Cascades in the dark of night. Finally, I canceled our car shuttle service to and from the local airport.

Sadly and despite my best attempt to prevent a shuttle from showing up at the house unnecessarily, a shuttle driver texted me the next morning at 7:07 from the curb outside the house. Nobody can say that I did not try. I felt truly bad for the driver; it was not his or her fault that the dispatcher messed up.

We did not plan to leave for PDX until 8:30 or 9:00, depending on weather conditions outside. The later in the day, the better the roads through the Cascades were likely to be. It was super foggy when I got up, but that had largely burned off by the time we got underway towards PDX at 8:30. As we headed through the neighborhood to fill up on gas, we marveled at the winter wonderland around us. Every single tree and every single surface was covered in beautiful and delicate crystalline ice as if a giant had sprayed our entire world with massive cans of spray snow.

Even though the fog had cleared in south Bend, as we drove north, we could see the fog bank on the horizon and the sunlight faded with each mile north. Just north of Bend, we entered the fog bank and could barely see the airport exit in Redmond when we passed it. The drive north, albeit foggy, was spectacularly beautiful. Every surface was covered in feathery rime.

The roads were largely clear except for a few miles just on the outskirts of Redmond where there was a little snow on the travel lanes. The weather forecast was for cold and foggy on our side of the Cascades, but for sun and blue skies on the west side of the mountains in the Willamette Valley where the airport sits. Look at the following photos taken just 11 minutes apart as we were climbing up the Cascades near Mount Hood.

Clouds and Fog Starting up into the Cascades

Eleven Minutes Later, Bluebird Day at Mount Hood

It's always a pleasure to see Mount Hood, but today it was particularly beautiful in the sunshine, gleaming with its huge cover of snow. We found it positively mild at the rest stop just before Timberline Lodge, compared to 21 degrees at home. The run to the airport through Clackamas County was about as drama free as it could be, including no back ups on I-84.

We arrived at the airport just before noon and found parking easily. We did not expect to breeze through security to our gate, but it took only 15 minutes from the parking garage through security. Having plenty of time on our hands, not having had any breakfast, and with no prospects of food until late in the evening, we went in search of some grub, hoping to get a sandwich at Lardo. Unfortunately, no longer living in Portlandia, we missed the memo about Lardo, a favorite sandwich shop, closing. Sadly, we opted for lunch in some generic airport bar near our gate. The food was terrible.

Back at the gate, I was eyeballing the crowd gathering for our flight. I made a mental note of the two worst passengers that I hoped would not be seated near us. The first was an obese woman who would not shut up, yammering on with volume at 11, Spinal Tap style. The second was a special needs girl in a wheel chair who screamed piercingly and frequently.

As we boarded in the last boarding group (thanks to our rebooked flight), I was displeased to see both of them seated in the row in front of us. The large woman was relatively quieter on the plane, eating for the duration of the 2-1/2 hour flight.

On the other hand, the little girl screamed a lot. She did not appear to be verbal, so I imagine that screaming is the only way she can communicate. I felt horrible for the mom. Ann and I would only have to put up with the screaming for the duration of the flight. The poor mother never gets a break from it. Ann summed it up, "That poor woman has a hell of a cross to bear." The mom spoke no English, only Spanish. At one point, she used Google Translate to ask the flight attendant to tell us she was sorry. My kitchen Spanish does not extend to consoling someone with a cranky special needs kid, but at least I could assure her that we were not mad. Poor woman. I feel so bad for her.

The Moon, Venus, and Sunset at 30,000 Feet over Utah

Now during the shortest days of our year, we enjoyed a fantastic sunset as we were headed over Utah into ABQ. We had already received some photos of glorious sunsets in Santa Fe from Rob and Dyce and this sight out the airplane window only whetted our appetite to see more, which we would on Sunday night.

The guys met us at the airport in Albuquerque; Santa Fe is on the short list of US capital cities without a major airport, such as Dover and Annapolis. We made the run up I-25 to Santa Fe in a hurry to get to a restaurant before closing. They had planned to take us to a favorite Santa Fe restaurant, La Choza, back when we were arriving in the mid-afternoon. Our rebooked flight arriving at dinner time put that plan in jeopardy given the one-hour ride back to Santa Fe.

We needn't have worried. Although we were the last table at the restaurant, we were on a short wait to get a table when we arrived at 8:15 or so at La Choza, an unpretentious restaurant with a classic New Mexican menu. I have always loved New Mexican food, especially the more northern style featuring a lot of Chimayo chile (as opposed to the more southern style down in Las Cruces). I promised myself to order as much New Mexican food as possible while we were in New Mexico.

I'm the Nut with the Cell Phone in the Mirror

Rob's Quesadilla

My Pork Burrito with Green Chile

I ordered a burrito filled with rice, beans, and pork adovada topped with green chile. My take on chile is this: red for beef, green for everything else, Christmas never. Ann is going to Christmas it up any chance she gets. Me, I love the complex herbaceousness of a good green chile sauce. In comparison, red seems a bit one-note, though I make plenty of it myself.

My first bite of the green sauce on my burrito answered my question if they like spice at this restaurant. Why, yes they do! The chile was delightfully spicy; "live" is the word I used to describe it. Finally, spice without apology! Our server said this year's chiles are on the spicy end of the spectrum.

I must say that this burrito went a long way towards satisfying my itch for New Mexican food. Also, I am a posole fiend and was happy to see a small pile of that cooked nixtamalized corn on my plate as a side dish. I have only seen this in New Mexico. In Mexico, posole is most often served in a bowl by itself as a guisado, a stew. Good on La Choza!

La Choza offers a choice of sopaipillas or garlic bread with dinner or after dinner. Sopaipillas are a fried pastry alla pizza fritta, gnocchi fritti, beignets, poori, or crescentine, basically fried pie crust of which pretty much every culture has a version. Some people eat them as bread or fill them with savory foods, but I would say that the vast majority of people bite the corner off of them, squeeze honey into them, and eat them for dessert.

Sopaipillas bring back great boyhood memories for me. After having learned how to make them as a teenager in New Mexico, I used to make them with my friend Mark on our camping trips in Alabama when we were able to bring along a dutch oven and oil (lard is the best) enough to fry the dough. Those were good times. And times when I could eat anything I wanted thanks to a teenage metabolism!

I totally enjoyed my experience at La Choza as we all did. After dinner, we headed to our house in the hills just north and slightly east of downtown. Because it was pitch black, I couldn't really appreciate anything about the house or the neighborhood or even Santa Fe itself. But once inside, I did appreciate the nicely appointed Pueblo Revival house and especially the gas fire in the kiva, the corner fireplace.

Welcome Warm Fire in the Kiva

The story of our fantastic long weekend with our great friends Rob and Dyce continues in separate posts:

Friday: Shopping Downtown

Friday Part 2: Friday Night on the Town
Saturday: Ghost Ranch and Dinner at the Pink Adobe

Sunday: Brunch, a Glorious Sunset, and Japanese Food

On Monday, after our splendid weekend in New Mexico thanks to wonderful hosts Rob and Dyce, we had to face going back home. I awoke about 15 minutes before sunup to coyotes howling. We don’t hear them at our house in Bend like we did in McMinnville, but they aren’t far away. Still, I love to hear these guys yip and yap.

We were facing a long layover today because in leaving Oregon, winter weather forced us to reroute our entire trip through Portland instead of Seattle. The rerouted return flight was several hours after our originally scheduled flight. Because we carpooled with Rob and Dyce who had to be at the airport by noon, we were facing a long wait in Albuquerque: our flight did not board until nearly 19:00.

On the drive in to Albuquerque, we looked for mustangs alongside I-25 to no avail. We did, however, have great views of the New Mexico landscape and of the Sandia Crest, views that we did not see on the way in because it was dark. We also had tantalizing views of the greenbelt and canyon around the Rio Grande River, but never a glimpse of water.

Before the airport, we stopped for gas and brunch in Albuquerque at Tin Can Alley, an indoor food court. From the parking lot, we had beautiful views of Sandia Peak in the background. We ended up waiting a few minutes for Cuban food at Guava Tree Sabor Latino. It was worth the wait. The guys assured us that these were cubanos worth eating. And they were so right. We enjoyed classic cubanos: the bread, mustard, cheese, ham, pork, and pickles were just as they should be. Delicious!

Arriving at Tin Can Alley

Waiting for Lunch in the Large Atrium

It Would be Hard to Find a Better Cubano

On the way to drop off the rental car, Rob and Dyce dropped us at noon at the departures curb where we said our goodbyes. We will not see them again until they move back to Bend from Boulder, hopefully in about six weeks. By 12:30 we were through security and at our gate in the very small terminal. We chose seats and set about whiling away the hours until our flight. We had the option of taking a Uber into Albuquerque but we were tired and it seemed more appropriate just to hole up at the airport even though that would be no fun.

Four hours later when we were just about out of our skulls with boredom, we went to the sports bar across from our gate to kill some more time and eat some dinner. We planned, on arriving at PDX, to go straight to our hotel and go to sleep without stopping to eat.

Our food was surprisingly good. I got a green chile burger and our bartender was kind enough to have the kitchen smother my fries in green chile. While the green chile was good, the red chile sauce on Ann's dinner was the best we had all trip. Go figure! Add that to my list of airport surprises: the best cubano ever at MIA and the best chile relleno at ABQ.

Final Green Chile of the Trip

Naturally, after waiting seven hours to board, we had to wait some more while the mechanics repaired a broken seat that was needed on the full flight. Once boarded, just ten or fifteen minutes late, I found the seats in the new Embraer 157 to be terribly uncomfortable.

We arrived at PDX more or less on time and got our car out of hock, arriving at our hotel at 22:00 where we proceeded to pass out. I slept surprisingly well for being in a hotel, especially one directly in the flight path of the primary runway with jet engines roaring all night long.

The original plan was to depart for home at 9:00 to give the road by Mount Hood a bit of time to thaw. But at 8:10, I was done being cooped up and proposed to Ann that we leave immediately and stop in Gresham for coffee. A quick search found Autumn Coffee Roasters in Gresham directly on our path home.

Fine Coffee, Fine Scone at Autumn Coffee in Gresham

We took our time with our drip coffee, which was pretty good. After coffee, we went around the block to highway 26/Powell Boulevard and headed east towards Mount Hood. We encountered a couple inches of fresh snow just as we were getting up to Mount Hood, especially in the section from Government Camp past Timberline Lodge.

Fresh Snow in the Cascades
Selfie in the Side View Mirror

Other than the new snow by Hood, the roads were reasonable with only about a 30-mile stretch of somewhat icy road. I am amazed at the number of drivers of four-wheel-drive vehicles that think that having four-wheel-drive is somehow going to help them on ice. We did not have any problems with traction, and I only felt the traction control system engage once as we moved out into the snow to pass a tandem UPS truck going up the mountain.

Driving east on Mount Hood Highway, it was gorgeous to see that big volcano in the early morning light silhouetted against the horizon. Once across the Cascades on the east side, it was unusual to be driving with Mount Hood in my rearview mirror and Mount Jefferson just over my right shoulder in my peripheral vision. That's a sight I could see every day!

And so ends the saga of our first visit to Santa Fe. Rob and Dyce, we are so grateful for your friendship and your hospitality. Thank you so much for showing us "your" Santa Fe! It was so much more meaningful than if we had just visited on our own.

Santa Fe: Sunday Brunch, a Glorious Sunset, and Japanese Food

On our final day in Santa Fe, after a straight 8 hours of sleep, a rarity in my world, I woke up at 6:30 just as it was starting to get light, though the sun was still not above the horizon at 7:30 when I started moving about. Ann made a pot of coffee and joined me in the living room as the sun was coming up.

Coffee in the Early Morning Sunshine

On the Back Patio, a Reminder of Where We Are

As we sat with our cups of coffee, the birds were busy just outside the house. For an hour after the sun cleared the mountains to our east, hordes of birds started actively foraging in the shrubs by the house. At one point, something much larger moved across the patio and the motion caught my eye. It turned out to be a spotted ground squirrel that I recognized from our trip to San Angelo TX earlier this year. This Rock Squirrel, however, was much more petite and way less black than those big monsters we saw on the banks of the Concho River in Texas.

Dainty Rock Squirrel

Rob and Dyce had most of a day planned for us starting with brunch, then cocktails at sunset, and finally dinner. Dyce really wanted to know what we wanted to do in the afternoon between lunch and sunset. Ann and I do not have to do everything there is to do; we are OK with both doing nothing and letting things come to us as they will. We do not have to have a plan for every moment. And so we headed out the door to brunch with the idea that whatever we were supposed to do would come to us in its own time.

Late morning, we drove to Cafe Fina in a former service station on I-25 southeast of Santa Fe out toward Las Vegas, NM. I had not realized on leaving the house that the day was exceedingly windy, especially on the exposed hilltop where the cafe patrons had to shield their eyes from the wicked clouds of dust whipped up by the gusts.

The drive out from town let me compare and contrast this area with back home. It is more rolling here in northern New Mexico and flatter back home. The rocks are sedimentary here versus volcanic in Oregon. Here, the piñon-juniper scrub is a good bit thicker than the juniper scrub at home. There is little sagebrush here, but much more in Central Oregon.

The plan was to meet another of Rob and Dyce's friends, Joleen, a civil rights attorney. She arrived shortly after us and while Ann held down our table, we got in line to order food. Cafe Fina is a counter service restaurant; you order at the counter and a runner brings the food to your table when it is ready.

The five of us were sitting at the table when the runner brought out four plates on a platter. Missing was Ann's omelet which we assumed that the runner couldn't fit on his tray. When he didn't come right back with her plate, we figured out that nobody ordered the omelet. I thought Rob or Dyce had ordered it; likewise, they thought that I had ordered it.

I went back to the counter and ordered her omelet which our runner was very kind to expedite in the kitchen. While I was at the counter, I also bought two pounds of Chimayo chile powder to take back home. I only have a few ounces left in the pantry. A thing about New Mexican chile: it is spicy, so even medium is going to pack a bit of punch. I always buy medium because I like a lot of chile in my dishes and I don't want them overwhelmingly spicy. My operating theory is that I can always make a dish spicier, but I can never make it less spicy. Medium is a good spice level from which to work.

Breakfast Burrito with Green Chile

Score! Two Pounds of Chimayo Red

After breakfast and saying goodbye to Joleen, Dyce asked if we would like to make the short drive out of town to Ski Santa Fe up in the mountains so that we could view New Mexico from on high. That seemed like a good idea to us. As we were headed in that direction, Rob asked if we would like to see the famous helix-shaped spiral staircase at the Gothic Revival Loretto Chapel, former Catholic Church and present privately-owned museum that we photographed all lit up on Friday night.

Knowing that we would be going to Santa Fe, I had the staircase on my mental list of things to see. I'm a decent finish carpenter and that staircase has always fascinated me. The physics of such a staircase are extremely tricky in that it probably should collapse under its own weight. The thought process is that it stands because the inner spiral is tight enough to act more or less as a straight beam. It is even more impressive if you consider that it was built without the handrails; those were added later for safety. We went to have a look at it before heading out of town.

The Gothic Revival Loretto Chapel

The So-Called "Miraculous" Staircase

In the Gift Shop
Weird Juxtaposition of Santa Claus and Catholicism

After spending ten minutes visiting the chapel, we headed north on Artist Road in the direction of 12,621-foot Santa Fe Baldy to Ski Santa Fe. Situated in Santa Fe National Forest near Lake Peak and Tesuque Peak, Ski Santa Fe is the southernmost big mountain ski area in the US. It wasn’t the skiing we were after, of course. We went because it’s a nice drive through the mountains with great views at the overlooks. From on high, we could see all the way to Sandia Peak near Albuquerque. We had not seen the Sandia Crest yet because it was dark when we landed in Albuquerque.

I Love the Blues in the Mountain Ranges

As we ascended ever higher towards the ski area, I loved watching how the flora changed. Down at the Santa Fe elevation of 7000 feet, the rolling hills are covered in typical piñon and juniper scrub. As we climbed, tall Ponderosas started dominating the shorter scrub. If you are observant, you will notice that the Ponderosas in New Mexico don’t look like ours in Central Oregon. The Southwestern Ponderosa Pine is shorter and more rounded with flatter branches and shorter needles than our Columbia Ponderosa Pines.

Climbing further up the mountain and despite of the profusion of pines, nearer the ski area at about 10,000 feet, large groves of Aspens grow in masses near the road. Aspens grow in thickets, all trees sprouting from a common root system. While this grove is large, there are far bigger groves. The largest clonal Aspen thicket is located near Salt Lake City and is estimated to contain 40,000 trees.

Aspens to the Horizon
These are Likely to Share a Single Root System

We continued ascending the nicely paved and well-maintained highway through S-curve after S-curve with a few horseshoe bends thrown in until we reached the parking area for Ski Santa Fe where we looped around and started our descent towards town. I loved getting out and seeing the scenery which is so different to ours in Central Oregon.

We could not have asked for a prettier day, with bluebird skies and barely a cloud to be seen (though you can see a hint of a lenticular cloud above the mountains in the photo above; more about which later in this post). As in most desert areas, the nighttime temperatures are cold, below freezing, but the daytime temperatures are pleasant in the abundant sunshine.

This is no different than in Oregon except it seems to me that we have more clouds in the winter thanks to storms off the Pacific that manage to clear the Cascades and bring us our winter snow. In contrast to Santa Fe where the summer is the "wet" season, we get all our precipitation in the winter. The limited amounts of rainfall in the two places are similar, hence the common use of the term desert.

Back at the house with plans to take it easy for the afternoon, everyone settled in for a rest after our go-go-go weekend. I took advantage of the bright sun and warm temperatures to wander about the neighborhood. The rental house is situated in rolling sandy red dirt hills covered in piñon and juniper scrub. Along the open spaces, there is a lot of rabbitbrush, prickly pears, and yuccas. There are no chollas or sagebrush in this vicinity.

It seems that every part of the country has its form of prickly pears. The Opuntia genus is varied and widespread. In this area, the form called the Tulip Prickly Pear has fearsome-looking thorns, though those are not the ones you need to worry with. It is the fine hair-like ones that you see as clumps of yellow on the top edge in the photo below that you need to worry with. They are hard to see and will irritate the heck out of you should you get them in your skin.

Although yuccas are common in much of the US, I no longer see them on any regular basis as they are not found except in garden plantings in the Pacific Northwest. I used to see them with some regularity on my hikes in Virginia, but even though our climate in Central Oregon is well-suited to yuccas, this is not in their range. All the yuccas that I saw in New Mexico have extremely fine leaves, in contrast to the broader-leaved versions we saw back east.

Fearsome Thorns on Tulip Prickly Pear, Opuntia phaeacantha

Local Species of Yucca with Fine Leaves

More Rabbitbrush Seedheads in the Sun

During the later afternoon while sitting in the living room taking in the sights out the windows, Ann noticed a series of lenticular clouds above the Sangre de Cristos. From the Latin word for lens, a lenticular cloud is most often formed when moist air flows over a mountain. If the temperature is cold enough to condense the moisture into a cloud, a seemingly stationary, long and thin cloud may form on the leeward side parallel to the direction of the wind. Lenticular clouds may form in layers, which is a really fun sight to see.

Lenticular Clouds over the Sangre de Cristos

Lenticular Clouds: Nature's Own Abstract Art

All weekend, Rob and Dyce had been talking about taking us to see the fabulous sunset that they had sent us photos of before we arrived in New Mexico. With plans to arrive just before sundown and have pre-dinner cocktails, we left for the Four Seasons Rancho Encantado about 4pm, sunset being about 4:25-4:30 this time of year. As we sat there enjoying a glass of wine, the sunset color started off amazing and once the sun was well below the horizon, became almost indescribably unbelievable. It's a good thing I brought my camera along. I shot photos for about a half an hour, from when the sun was just on the horizon to almost dark with the lights of Los Alamos twinkling in the distance.

After it got dark, we sat around chatting with our especially gregarious server (from Virginia no less) until we needed to leave for dinner. This gave me an opportunity to take some photos around the Four Seasons. I am always fascinated by the interplay of light and dark in high contrast photos.

Dinner was planned for an izakaya at a local resort and I was looking forward to a change-up from my steady diet of carb-laden New Mexican classics. We made the short drive from the Four Seasons to the Ten Thousand Waves resort that we passed earlier in the day on our way to Ski Santa Fe. Ten Thousand Waves is an homage to a Japanese onsen or mountain spa, resort, and restaurant complex. We had reservations for a tapas-style meal at their izakaya called Izanami.

Parking is very tight along the winding road up the steep hillside from the base of the resort to the restaurant, but after a complete lap around the property, we arrived back at the restaurant just as another car was leaving, giving us essentially front row parking. The tour of the property trying to find parking was not without benefit: it looks magical all lit up at night. I am sure that it is equally but differently beautiful in the light of day.

Second Best Dish in Santa Fe: Gobo (Burdock) Salad

After a leisurely meal of way too much food, everything from temaki to karaage chicken, we set off in the dark for home. Back at the house, we sipped at more wine and played games until we were all good and tired, a great way to end our long weekend in Santa Fe. Ann and I went to bed tired from a long and wonderful weekend, looking forward to being in our own bed again, but dreading a long travel day on Monday and having to spend yet another night away from home at PDX.

The story of our trip home continues at the bottom of the trip summary post.