McMinnville July 2024

Once spring arrives and before fall closes the summer growing season, we try to get back over to McMinnville in the Willamette Valley to shop at the farmers market and to revisit the town where we used to live before coming across the Cascades to Bend. We have a goal of making the trip once a month, centered around Thursdays, the day of the McMinnville Downtown Farmers Market.

After getting in our morning workouts, we grabbed a couple of to-go trays of sushi at Market of Choice on our way out of town for our combination breakfast-lunch. We got away from Bend at 12:30 and that put us in McMinnville at about 4pm, traffic in Salem trying to get across the bridge into West Salem being a bear.

The timing of our first trip of 2024 could not have been better. It was the prettiest trip we have ever made across the Cascades because the timing placed us right in the middle of an exquisite wildflower bloom.

The wildflower show kicked off between Tumalo and Sisters where the forest floor under the widely-spaced Ponderosa Pines was highlighted with sulfur-yellow blooms of wild buckwheats, spikes of blue lupines, and masses of yellow balsamroots. As usual, traffic is a total pain in the rear in Sisters, but the trip out was far less a pain that the return trip on Friday afternoon when traffic was backed up a mile into Sisters.

As we climbed up toward Santiam Pass, we saw more and more penstemons along the roadside, both Royal penstemons and big patches of mat-forming ones, like Cardwell's. From the pass down into the Willamette Valley, the roadsides were colored by blooming rhododendrons, lupines much larger than we see east of the mountains, acres of oxeye daisies, red and black elderberries, masses of tall yellow dandelion-looking Cat's Ears near Detroit Lake, and ditches full of digitalis, more than I’ve ever seen in one place before. As we descended into the valley proper, masses of fuchsia sweet peas and acres of white to light purple Himalayan Blackberries added to the day.

On arriving in McMinnville, we went back to our old neighborhood and dropped in on friends Pat and Mary Jo. Unfortunately for us, it is hard to go back and see what has become of our magnificent gardens. We spent about 90 minutes catching up with them before heading to check in to our room conveniently located downtown near the county office, court, and jail complex.

After resting for a few minutes and changing into dinner clothes, we walked the block to dinner. This was our first visit to Pinch which opened last December. Located in the former Red Fox Bakery space next door to McMenamin’s Hotel Oregon, it is run by Paul and Emily Bachand, former owners of an old favorite of ours, Recipe, in Newberg.

Having dined at Recipe many times in the past, we already knew that the food would be really good. While it is a new restaurant, it is really pretty much a known quantity to us. 

Champagne to Start
It Would be Rude Not to

Starters: Sardinian Carta da Musica aka Pane Carasau
Olives, Pickled Peppers, Feta, and Manchego

Barbaresco with Dinner

Isn't She Beautiful?

Grilled Octopus, a Gorgeous Plate

Rigatoni with Lamb Ragù

While our preference would have been to have grazed small plates, the menu is a more traditional appetizer-entrée style. No matter; we certainly enjoyed our dinner. While the octopus plate was absolutely gorgeous, the lamb rigatoni stole the show. 

Ann and I agonized over choosing between the two pastas, rigatoni with lamb and cavatelli neri with Dungeness crab. While we much prefer the thicker cavatelli to rigatoni as a shape, really the Barbaresco dictated our choice of lamb over crab. We did not regret the choice at all and the rigatoni could not have been more perfectly cooked. That's our style: simple food, brilliantly executed.

After dinner, while chatting with Emily, Ann had mentioned our indecision and that she was intrigued by seeing a video that they had posted of their cavatelli maker in action making the black cavatelli. Emily retrieved the maker from the kitchen so I could see it. The first thing I did on going back to our room was to order one from Amazon, the price being extremely reasonable. I am not one to buy special purpose kitchen gear, but this machine looks to be a huge labor saver and thus worth finding a place to store it in our kitchen. It will actually fit in the drawer with the rest of our pasta gear.

Coffee at Flag & Wire

Well-served and well-sated, we walked the block back to our room and soon enough it was Thursday morning. The options for good coffee in McMinnville are slim so we always go to Flag & Wire over in the Grain Station building. Their coffee is always good and it is an easy walk from anywhere downtown. If we did not have a more-than-a-decade-long relationship with another Oregon roaster, we might order our beans from Flag & Wire.

After coffee and a brief return to our room, we were on to the main reason for our trip to McMinnville, the farmers market that opens at 11:30 on Thursdays. It is one of the main things that we miss about McMinnville. We managed to fill our cooler to overflowing with green onions, sprouting cauliflower, broccolini, beets, cucumber, cavolo nero, salad mix, small carrots, chives, dill, asparagus, hakurei turnips, sugar snaps, squash blooms, chicken eggs, and duck eggs.

Our Farmers Market Haul

After stowing our two overflowing shopping bags in the refrigerator back in our room, we set out for the half block walk to Two Dogs Taphouse to see our friend Brady. Two Dogs, when it was located on Third Street at Ford, was our old stomping grounds and a must-stop after the farmers market before our walk back to our house on the very northern edge of town.

Lunch at Two Dogs

After lunch at Two Dogs, we headed out to see our former next door neighbor Barb. Her dog Sierra is in a really bad way but was super happy to see us. I'm afraid the poor thing is about at the end of her stay with us and we really feel for Barb. It was great to catch up with Barb and see Sierra, whom we've known since she was a puppy, for perhaps the final time.

Our old neighborhood has really changed. Situated on a hazelnut orchard when we lived there, it felt nestled away and secluded on the far northern edge of town, with lots of wildlife: birds, tree squirrels, ground squirrels, skunks, coyotes, and deer.

The School Board owned the orchards, having bought them some years ago for expansion purposes. The trees were no longer neither young nor in good shape and the production costs for hazelnuts no doubt far exceeded the income that they could generate, so sadly, they decided that trees had to go. And with their demise, the character of the neighborhood changed overnight. Now with the trees all cut, it seems more urban and less welcoming. We moved at a good time.

Speaking of moving, our move across the Cascades took us away from the vast hayfields that hit peak bloom in late May and early June. We could see waves of pollen on the breeze. We arrived back in the valley at peak pollen time and it really hammered Ann. I felt bad for her; on the way back from Barb's, we stopped at the drug store to get some meds for her.

After the drug store, we spent a few minutes resting back at our room before changing for dinner at Humble Spirit on Third Street. We tried this restaurant with Dyce and Rob on our last trip on our last trip over and we were impressed. We were probably even more impressed on this visit.

Pink Shrimp Rolls

Hazelnuts and Pork Belly

Hot Mess Croquette

We started with Champagne and an order of shrimp rolls, hazelnuts with pork belly, and a croquette called a hot mess, a dish we ordered on spec, not really understanding what it was. It turned out to be very similar to a charcuterie dish that I used to make at the restaurant in which I would pick shreds of cooked meat (often turkey neck meat) and pack it into a loaf mold. Then I would set it with highly reduced stock and after refrigerating, would slice it and fry it to serve as an appetizer. In many respects, it is similar to souse or headcheese, but served warm. This one, made of pork, was breaded and fried and served as a croquette. Delicious.

Clams and Chorizo

We still had some Champagne left, so we ordered a dish of small clams braised with chorizo and Sherry to go with it, before moving on to red wine and red wine food. The unusual thing is that it was served on top of a croustade smeared with a beef liver pâté. Ann and I fought over this bread that was soaked in the braising liquid.

2010 Tondonia, Still Too Young

We had been chatting with our server all night long and it is was clear to us that he is as passionate about food as we are. In the course of talking about the restaurant sourcing many of its products from its own farm, Ann mentioned that we are looking for a supplier for a skin-on pork belly from which to make a porchetta for the holidays. She wondered if their farm might be amenable. And while we didn't get an answer other than it would not hurt to ask, it seems a seed was planted.

Unbeknownst to us, the restaurant was hosting a large table of family that evening for which the chef had prepared a special meal, including porchetta. After we ordered a red to accompany dinner, our server asked us to hold off on ordering anything else and went to find out if there was any porchetta we could have. He did; there was; we killed it. As good as the porchetta itself was, the beluga lentils it was sat upon were fantastic, having been cooked with smoky ham hocks. 

Porchetta, Beluga Lentils, Fennel and Herb Salad
Cherry Gastrique

After killing the porchetta, we got a piece of cheese with which to finish our remaining wine. All in all, a terrific meal and one that reinforced for us that Humble Spirit might be the best restaurant in McMinnville.

The following morning, I packed up our vegetables and we set out for coffee once again at Flag & Wire. Caffeined up, we headed south toward Salem, getting gas and sandwiches for lunch along the way. Our goal was to stop at Silver Falls State Park on the way home for a nice walk which is described in the next post.