Thanksgiving 2021

Like last year and thanks once again to COVID, our Thanksgiving this year was subdued, just Annie and me. For weeks, Ann had been asking me to reprise the Thanksgiving lasagna from last year, so I made it once again this year.

The ingredients and method are all outlined in last year's post, so I won't be going into them again here. Once again, it was an awful lot of busy work (spread over three days, although nothing difficult) for a dinner for two people, and still, the reward was worth the effort.

Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes and Ham, Salsa Verde

Mid-morning, we were starting to get hungry and knowing that we would only eat two meals today given the caloric weight of dinner, I decided to make a substantial breakfast to carry us through to dinner. In about five minutes, I whipped up two bowls of scrambled eggs with ham and tomatoes, topped with salsa verde, thanks to the ever-present container of salsa verde in the refrigerator.

Salsa Verde

This salsa is so delicious and so simple that I generally keep a batch in the refrigerator to adorn any dish that needs a little pick-me-up.

1 can of whole tomatillos (14 ounces net wt.), drained
1 bunch of cilantro, stems and all, roughly chopped
1 large clove garlic
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

Add all the ingredients to a blender. Starting on low speed, blend to a smooth sauce. Season to taste with salt.

After breakfast, we started watching Peter Jackson's new Beatles documentary, Get Back, which feels entirely different from the original Let it Be film that I saw decades ago, much happier in tone. As I look 60 years of age straight in the face, I realize that the Beatles really have been a huge part of the soundtrack of my life.

Our watching was interrupted periodically sending and receiving Thanksgiving wishes to and from friends and family. After the movie in the early afternoon, Ann and I got started on our mini celebration with me opening a bottle of Prosecco and Ann setting the table.

Prosecco poured, we got to work on dinner. I had done all the prep on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, leaving only the last-minute items for Thursday. I started by using the drippings from roasting the turkey thighs to make a batch of gravy with double turkey stock. I mixed the gravy with a mixture of pulled neck and thigh meat for one of the layers of the lasagna.

The stock was slightly different this year in that I made a double stock, the first stock made from roasted turkey necks. After picking the meat off the necks and thighs, I roasted the bones and then used them to make a second stock using the first stock instead of water.

Making Roux for Gravy

Turkey layer complete, we then went on to the béchamel layer, making it pretty much like country sausage gravy. I fried up the country sausage that I made on Wednesday (ground pork shoulder, salt, black pepper, red pepper flakes, sage, thyme, garlic) with chopped porcini mushrooms that I rehydrated the day before as well. Then in went a bit of flour and a quart of milk, and voilà, sausage-mushroom béchamel. Or fancy sausage gravy, depending on where you come from.

Meanwhile, we brought a big stockpot of salted water up to a boil and then par-boiled our lasagna noodles for four minutes, many minutes shy of being done. We layered up the lasagna: turkey, herb and vegetable ricotta, béchamel, turkey, béchamel, cornbread crumbles. While it was baking in a 375F oven, 45 minutes covered, 30 minutes uncovered, we opened a bottle of 2016 WillaKenzie Pinot Noir Triple Black Slopes to have with our dinner.

Drake Park and Mirror Pond, Bend, OR

Ann and I so enjoyed our overnight trip to Bend, Oregon a couple of weeks back that we planned a weekend stay this last weekend before Thanksgiving before it becomes tricky to cross the Cascades. We lucked out in that despite the pouring rain in the Willamette Valley, snowfall in the Santiam Pass was only a dusting and the weather on the Bend side was spectacular, if cold. The views of the snow-covered Cascades from Bend, hidden behind cloud cover on our prior visit, were spectacular, reminding us a bit of our time at Grand Teton NP.

Although our primary mission was to get to know the town rather than brewery hop as we did last visit, we added to our collection of breweries while we were there, tasting beers at Three Creeks in Sisters, Immersion, Crux, Bend Brewing, McMenamin's Old St. Francis School, and Cascade Lakes. Most of the time, we spent wandering around Bend, getting a feel for the place, at one point ending up in Drake Park where I shot just a few frames. The light and the reflections off the Mirror Pond, an impoundment of the Deschutes River, could not have been better.

 

Pilot Butte, Bend, OR

We recently made our first visit to Bend, Oregon, in the high desert just east of the Cascades. It was a quick overnight trip in which we visited a number of breweries the first afternoon and explored a little of Bend the following morning.

As we were driving through town visiting breweries, we kept seeing a big hill (a volcano, actually) just east of Highway 97, the road that separates east Bend from west Bend. At the hotel, I found that the volcano is called Pilot Butte and that there is a series of easy trails to the summit. The cinder cone of an extinct volcano rising 500 or so feet above the city, Pilot Butte is now a state park called the Pilot Butte State Scenic Viewpoint.

After our beer-a-thon the evening before, we really needed to get out and stretch our legs, so over breakfast, we decided to walk up to the top before heading out of town back to McMinnville.

Pilot Butte, a Volcanic Cinder Cone

One of the primary motivators for me in taking this walk was that this was my first stay in the high desert of Central Oregon and I really wanted to check out the somewhat alien landscape. I have spent time in west Texas, northern New Mexico, the Sonoran desert in southern Arizona, and the high plains of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Idaho. I was looking forward to seeing how things differ here in Oregon. Something about barren, austere, arid, and harsh open spaces is very attractive to me.

This part of Oregon is populated mainly by western junipers and steppe scrub, which most people refer to generically as sagebrush. In reality, three primary shrubs make up the scrub here: gray rabbitbrush, antelope bitterbrush, and big sagebrush. At this particular location, I saw very little true sagebrush.

Gray Rabbitbrush, Ericameria nauseosa, Blooming

Rabbitbrush Seed Heads

Antelope Bitterbrush, Purshia tridentata, Leaves 

Many people confuse bitterbrush and sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) because both have tri-lobate (tridentata) leaves as you can see in the photo above. But sagebrush, being an artemisia and like the artemisias that people cultivate in their gardens, has wooly, almost blue-green gray leaves. Sagebrush leaves are generally much more elongated than bitterbrush leaves in my experience. Sagebrush, from a distance, looks a lot like lavender.

Yarrow, Achillea millefolium, Grows Everywhere

The vast majority of the trees at Pilot Butte are western juniper, which is expanding in range thanks to our fire suppression efforts. These very thirsty trees, when left unchecked, will outcompete most other species in arid climates. Wildfires used to keep them under control while the more fire-resistant ponderosa pines would survive the flash fires and thrive. Even so, old junipers twist into some very interesting forms in the landscape and are pleasing to look at.

Western Juniper, Juniperus occidentalis, Scrub

Robins were Feeding on Juniper Berries

This particular species of juniper, while immediately recognizable, is not one that I have seen before because its range is limited primarily to central and eastern Oregon. Even more interesting is that I have never seen a mistletoe growing on a conifer before, yet the trees at Pilot Butter are full of hemiparasitic mistletoe.

Juniper Mistletoe, Phoradendron juniperinum

Juniper Mistletoe Close Up

Higher towards the summit of Pilot Butte, there are a few ponderosa pines scattered about randomly. When I first encountered ponderosa pines as a teenager in the southern Rockies, I was told that if you smell the bark, you can get hints of vanilla or butterscotch. I have never been able to get any scent like that, but still these trees are easy to recognize with their long leaves and bark that goes orangey (some people say cinnamon-colored) with enough age (like 90 years).

Distinctive Ponderosa Pine Needles in Bundles of Three

Ponderosa Pine Bark Starting to Go Orange

What soil there is out here in the high desert is really poor. And that, coupled with the natural aridity from being in the Cascade rain shadow, really limits vegetation. The soil changes as you go up the hill, with the bottom being gravelly, parts of the middle being sandy, and towards the top, mostly pyroclastic cinders, none of it really good soil.

Iron-Rich Volcanic Cinders

Visting Pilot Butte was a chance for us to give Grace a short walk. She can no longer handle the long walks, but short ones like this, about 1.8 miles all told, are just manageable. She curled up and passed out in the car when we were done.

The views from the top were pretty interesting, but also obscured by the low cloud cover to the point where we could see none of the big volcanoes of the Cascades. Even so, I was impressed with how many cinder cones and other volcanic structures that I could see in the distance.

Cinder Cone in the Distance

There was little in the way of wildlife on the butte, not surprising because there were a lot of people there walking in the late morning. Moreover, as a land-locked city park, it is cut off from other wildlife habitat. We saw a single chipmunk scurrying with raised tail and a few birds, mainly robins scavenging juniper berries. A Steller's Jay, on the eastern edge of its range in the Cascades, did entertain us with its shrieking and carrying on.

Steller's Jay

Looking Like Eyes, Evidence of a Fire

Quaking Aspen

Pilot Butte is very busy, the most visited state park in Oregon east of the Cascades. It's a really nice urban walk, being surrounded by the city, but it isn't a place for solitude. The trails are easy to find and walk but you won't get much exercise on the less than two mile loop.

Brown Dog Goes to Bend

Ann and I, we promised ourselves to explore our adopted state of Oregon once we were able to. Our old dog Charlie was unable to travel and that limited our excursions to nearby day trips. With his passing about five weeks ago, we vowed to start exploring, even though we didn't much feel like it right after saying goodbye to Charlie. Our other dog, Grace, who goes most often by the moniker Brown Dog, loves to travel though and would love to accompany us. 

Our first destination would be Bend, Oregon, a city across the Cascades that we have been wanting to visit for a long while. We had been thinking of taking an overnight in Bend for a couple of weeks, but the weather hasn't been terribly cooperative. It has rained for about the last ten days here in the Willamette Valley, not terribly unusual for this time of year at the beginning of our rainy season. This is not four-season country; we have four months of drought and eight months of rain.

Though the weather patterns are different here in the valley and there on the far side of the Cascades, this recent storm off the Pacific was vast enough to bring to rain to Bend as well. Finally, despite it raining in McMinnville, we got a break for a day of sunny weather in Bend and we set out. The weather would get better and better as we traveled inland for our first visit to Bend.

Raining in McMinnville

Brown Dog is Ready to Travel

Not Used to the Rear Bucket Seats in Ann's New Used Car

From McMinnville, there is basically one way to get to Bend. We're used to the limited places to cross the Willamette River and thus the limited ways we can travel locally. But crossing the river is child's play compared to crossing the tall Cascade range on the eastern side of our valley. The sole road to Bend is Oregon Route 22 which crosses the mountains (in good weather) at Santiam Pass. Crossing the mountains is not a quick affair: the 160-mile trip takes just shy of three-and-a-half hours. As an aside, imagine the disruption this time last year when the massive wildfires closed a 40-mile or so stretch of Route 22. 

Heading south out of McMinnville, the first leg of our trip had us driving through our local farm and wine country to the nearby state capital of Salem, and then heading east into the hills on 22. Fall in the agricultural Willamette Valley can be spectacular and our drive today would show some peak fall color, despite the showers and gloomy skies. Down on the valley floor, the vast fields of blueberry bushes have changed to showy scarlet color while higher up, the masses of Pinot Noir vines were golden, row upon row of brilliant leaves cladding the hills.

Fall Color in the Eola-Amity Hills

Still higher on the hills below the point where mixed flora gives way to a carpet of conifers, the colors were a patchwork of black-green Douglas firs interspersed with golden-leaved big leaf maples. The odd Oregon white oaks added a russet note here and there. From time to time, a red or sugar maple would add a fiery orange-red note, mainly around dwellings. It truly is a magnificent time of year to travel.

Typically Willamette Valley Fall Color,
Black-Green Douglas Fir and Golden Big Leaf Maples

East of Salem, Oregon 22 climbs slowly, but steadily past Detroit with its hydroelectric dams on the Santiam River, the very low water level in the reservoirs resulting from the multi-year drought that exacerbated last year's fires. Crews are still busy on a long stretch of the road felling burned trees and taking them to the lumber mill. The relentless climb continues to the point where 22 merges with US 20 at Santiam Junction. From here, 20 climbs until it reaches its zenith at Santiam Pass and the Pacific Crest Trail at 4800 feet, then descends with a southerly bend through Sisters and into Bend, the seat of Deschutes County.

Detroit Reservoir, Very Low Water Level

Scenic Santiam River

Traveling this route really showed the contrast between east and west side vegetation in a way that we don't normally notice. We live on the east (dry) side of the Coastal Range and go regularly to the wetter west side. When we do so, we see a perceptible shift in the trees and vegetation, but nothing so dramatic as the contrast in crossing the Cascades.

The higher we climbed on the wet west side, the thicker and darker the forest became with the Douglas firs being joined by hemlocks, true firs, and spruce in a dense forest. Once across the mountains to the dry east side, the scenery was very different. There, the forest thinned out to open stands of Ponderosa pines, their orangey bark and long needles easy to recognize even at highway speed. What little color we saw over the mountains was limited to a few quaking aspens going golden, mostly in lower lying and therefore wetter areas of the arid landscape.

East Side Ponderosa Pines

Quaking Aspen, East Side Color

The further southeast we headed towards Bend, the more the scenery changed. From a long way off, we started to see volcanic formations, including the conical mountain called Black Butte. Volcanoes influenced this part of Oregon heavily and the further into Central Oregon that we drove, the more we saw the results of the very poor soils laden with volcanic rock. Quickly the ponderosa pines gave way to upland steppe covered in western juniper and typical sagebrush scrub, a far departure from the lush Willamette Valley that we call home.

Black Butte Behind Suttle Lake

Just at the town of Tumalo outside of Bend, we got our first view of the gorgeous Deschutes River which bisects Bend, flowing from south to north on the eastern flanks of the Cascades towards its ultimate destination, the Columbia River up on the Washington border. The name of the river and subsequently the county surrounding Bend is the anglicization of the French-speaking fur trappers' name Riviѐre des Chutes, literally River of Falls.

As we arrived in Bend, originally Farewell Bend for a fordable bend in the Deschutes, we noted that our start and our destination could not be farther apart in many respects. McMinnville sits in the lush Willamette Valley at 157 feet of elevation and despite being partially in the rain shadow of the Coastal Range, receives about 43 inches of rain per year. Bend, fully in the rain shadow of the massive Cascade Range, sits over 3600 feet above sea level and receives less than 12 inches of rain in an average year. McMinnville has about 35,000 inhabitants, Bend about 110,000.

McMinnville is very close to the highly-populated Portland metro area; Bend is really in the middle of nowhere in what is called the Oregon high desert. This area comprising primarily southeast Oregon is not truly a desert—it gets slightly too much rain for that, but clearly, the area is extremely arid. I felt if I tossed a match on the ground, the whole area would go up in flames, so desiccated did the vegetation appear.

On arriving in Bend, we hadn't planned on doing a pub crawl, but that's exactly what happened. And what a better place for it? Bend is home to some 30-plus brewery operations, a per capita ratio that may be the highest in the country. We ended up having a beer at five different places over about 6-7 hours. 

First stop was Deschutes Brewery, one of the Bend originals, which we selected because we were starving and they are known to have a decent kitchen. Our burgers, beef for me and elk for Ann, were spot-on rare as we asked for them and came out almost immediately, the kitchen clearly ridiculously bored to death, mid-afternoon, mid-week, and off-season.

Taking in the Street at Deschutes Brewery

From Deschutes, we went to the brewery that I most wanted to visit, Crux, situated directly in the center of Bend at the point where all four quadrants of the city meet. Crux is a beautiful brewery and is sited in a large open area adjacent to Route 97. There is lots of space here for dogs, kids, a fire pit, and a small food truck pod. On a clear day, the view of the mountains to the west would be amazing; we were battling a bit too much cloud cover, but still, we could see snow on the flanks of Mt. Bachelor, home to a renowned ski resort. Of all the breweries we visited, Crux was my favorite.

Creative Taster Trays

Snow on Mount Bachelor Peeking out from Clouds

The Letters are C R U and X

One of the motivating factors for visiting Bend is that we just had friends relocate there from McMinnville. Kayli pours at Boneyard, while Alisha and Alyssa work in the kitchen at Worthy. While at Crux, we made plans to drop by Boneyard next to see Kayli, who was at work tending the bar there.

Weekday business at Bend breweries has really slacked off for the fall: Deschutes was empty, Crux was on cruise control, and Boneyard was slow to the point where Kayli got cut as we were finishing our beer. She suggested that we go to her favorite dog-friendly space across the Deschutes River, Goodlife Brewing. When we arrived, we parked in a courtyard in a fairly industrial space that contained no hints why it might be a favorite destination.

After we went inside and ordered beers, Kayli led us through a door at the end of the bar, past a beautiful copper still, out a side door, and around behind the building which opened onto a large green space with fire pits, a food truck, lots of seating, and dozens of people and other dogs. Brown Dog had a great time visiting with other dogs and most especially with other people who are drawn magnetically to her crazy-looking ears. We had a great time here, meeting all manner of really wonderful people who were extremely welcoming to us visitors.

Co-Located with BackDrop Micro-Distillery

Outside Beers Served in Plastic

After dark, we found out that Alisha and Alyssa were getting off their jobs in the Worthy Brewing kitchen, so we headed back across the river to meet them. We arrived there just as the girls got off their shifts. They joined us for a beer out on the patio, home to a bunch of fire pits, where the Brown Dog got a lot more attention. We had a great evening catching up, but as the night was getting on, we reluctantly said our goodbyes and drove to our hotel to check in for the evening.

Kayli, Brown Dog, Alisha, and Alyssa

The next morning, the first order of business was to get some coffee to clear the cobwebs. While we got a lot of great recommendations from people at GoodLife, Ann had already chosen Thump Coffee in Old Bend as the place where she wanted to go. In our driving around, we saw so many great looking coffee shops. We'll have to give them a shot on future trips. We only have about three coffee shops in McMinnville and only one that does decent coffee.

Late Night: Brown Dog is the Last to Rise

After Beer, Coffee is a Must

Coffee on board, the next thing was a big breakfast. We had eaten only a burger apiece the day before at Deschutes and our stomachs were running on empty. One of the people with whom I was chatting at GoodLife told me about a New Mexican food truck that we'd "be sorry if we missed." After we finished chatting with people at Thump, we walked back to the car to cross the river to River West and find Sol Verde food truck. On the way to the car, we wandered by a neat alley in Old Bend containing the entrance to Spider Brewing, a destination for a future trip.

Neat Alley in Old Bend

I've spent some time in New Mexico and I love the food there. It is its own wonderful thing, neither Mexican nor American. Ann and I got breakfast burritos, mine chile verde with green sauce and hers carne adovada Christmas, meaning some each of red and green sauce. We traded them back and forth; both were delicious and spot-on for what I expected, a great late breakfast that would last us until dinner.

Fall Color Across from Sol Verde

As we were driving through town yesterday from brewery to brewery, we kept seeing a big hill just east of Highway 97, the road that separates east Bend from west Bend. At the hotel, I looked it up on the internet and found that it is called Pilot Butte and that there is a series of easy trails to the summit. The Brown Dog has the canine equivalent of ALS, a degenerative nerve disease, that makes long walks impossible for her. On the other hand, short walks are good for her, helping keep up her muscle tone. We decided during breakfast to take her on a walk there. The photos from our visit are in the next post.

The Last Blockbuster in America

After our walk at Pilot Butte, we got gas and started back through Bend headed for McMinnville in a light rain, the gorgeous weather in Bend lasting for but a day. As we headed for US-20, we passed the last remaining Blockbuster in America. That's quite something: who has a VCR any longer?

The trip back was uneventful and the closer we got to the Willamette Valley, the sunnier it got. We made the final climb into Santiam Pass in almost full sunlight that was causing the larches, a deciduous conifer, to glow spectacularly like lemon-yellow Christmas trees. Back home, we would have two spectacular clear and sunny days. I leave you with a final photo, snapped while driving by just south of home, of Zenith Vineyard, glowing yellow against a spectacular sky.

Golden Pinot Noir Vines and Blue Skies

Although we spent less than 24 hours in Bend, we came away with a terrific impression of the place. It's a small city with far more amenities than we have in McMinnville. Moreover, it is super dog friendly; Grace was offered treats everywhere we went. Bend gets the Brown Dog stamp of approval. It's a pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly town too. And it has so many breweries that you could visit one a day for a month and not get to them all. This is coupled with true four seasons, beautiful weather in the high desert, and a population that lives for outdoor recreation. The vibe is just right for us: based on our brief experience, we may have found our tribe.