Wine Wednesday in McMinnville

Each summer we try to make one or more trips to our former home of McMinnville over in the Willamette Valley, about 3.5 hours from Bend, give or take, depending on weather and traffic. We go on Wednesday, stay the night, and after breakfast, go to the McMinnville Downtown Farmers Market and then drive home via Newberg to shop for seafood at Northwest Fresh Seafood. Good produce and seafood are hard to come by in the high desert.

Cheers from our McMinnville Favorite, Two Dogs Taphouse

Crossing the Cascades is always a crap shoot based on weather and traffic. Our prior crossing in June coming back from Bellingham went without a hitch, so this trip over, we were due for pretty much all the entries on our traffic bingo card: slow-ass hooptie RV about to tip over in the road, idiot's day out, and 10-miles following a baler and two hay rakes out of Amity, the baler tractor wider than a lane of the highway. We were really only lacking a tandem gas tanker with three miles of traffic behind it to score big.

Our Wednesday plan this trip was to leave late morning, grab lunch and a beer at Two Dogs Taphouse, see some of our old neighbors, check-in to our room at Douglas on Third, then have a light dinner and wine downstairs at HiFi Wine Bar.

After the incredibly slow trip over the mountains and the long, slow crawl into McMinnville behind tractors taking up both lanes of 99-W, we finally pulled into the parking lot behind Two Dogs on a mission to use the restroom, then get a beer and a burger. We were able to catch up with our friends on staff there before returning to our former neighborhood to harass Barb (who was out of town) and Pat and Mary Jo.

We were some of the first customers at Two Dogs when it opened when COVID was in full rampage and we were some of the last customers at their former location on 3rd Street before their landlords booted them out. Just days after they closed, we moved to Bend. In the intervening years, they moved into a new building at 4th and Evans across from the Yamhill County offices. We have been visiting the new building regularly as it has undergone a slow build-out. It is finally starting to acquire its own personality now, but we really do miss the old location. It was a fantastic space.

At Two Dogs: Detect a Dog Theme?

Directly Across from the Clerk's Office

Photos of Customers' Dogs

Twin New Yorkers

How Often is Someone Taller than Me?
Brady is Now Coaching Basketball at Mac High

After visiting with Pat and Mary Jo and getting introduced to their new dog, we made our way back downtown to our room at Douglas on Third, on the second floor above our destination for the night, HiFi Wine Bar. We were some of the first customers at HiFi when they opened and we go back regularly where we trust that Ben will find great wines for us to drink from their massive inventory of great wines.

HiFi is where the industry gathers to taste wines that are not local. After days of working with and tasting Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, wine industry folks really appreciate tasting something different. After tasting barrel samples and doing blending trials for days on end, your palate does get worn out. Mine certainly did. We call it cellar palate, a real fatigue than can make you immune to faults in your own wines compared to wines of other regions.

Tasting Chenin Blanc at HiFi

When we walked in (unannounced; we did not tell Ben we were coming), Ben greeted us effusively with a splash of Champagne while we pondered the list. As we were sitting on the couch up front, we noticed our insurance agent and his wife, Michael and Estelle, sitting at the bar. We caught up with them for a few minutes, not having seen them since we moved to Bend 3.5 years ago.

We Love the Grapevine Chandelier and Live-Edge Bar

We tasted some phenomenal wines. I selected the first wine, a beautifully crisp Anjou Blanc (Chenin Blanc) from Thibaut Boudignon, a master of Chenin and maker of killer Savennières. With food, we asked Ben to pick a Nebbiolo with the instructions, less extracted (more like Barbaresco than Barolo) and highly aromatic. He surprised us with a Valtellina. Most Valtellina is second-rate to Barolo and Barbaresco, but the 2017 Arpepe Valtellina Superiore Inferno was dynamite. I could wax poetic about the 2022 Domaine Fourrier Gevrey-Chambertin that tasted 100% like what it should, a stunning wine. Ann's favorite of the night and a revelation to her about how well Sauternes ages was the 1998 Château de Fargues, once the sister property of Yquem which now is in the LVMH portfolio.

2023 Boudignon Anjou Blanc
Beautifully Crisp and Affordable Chenin Blanc

2017 Arpepe Valtellina Superiore Inferno 'Fiamme Antichi'
Absolutely Top-Class Nebbiolo

2022 Domaine Fourrier Gevrey-Chambertin
Mind Blown! Such Classic Bourgogne

1998 Château de Fargues Sauternes Drinking Perfectly Now

After all these brilliant wines, we took leave of HiFi and walked upstairs to our room to call it a night. In the morning, we decided a big, late breakfast was just the thing because we would not be eating lunch. Ann suggested The Diner, a McMinnville favorite, and far enough off the beaten path (at the hospital) to be away from the tourists jamming the downtown restaurants. We always go there to get our tot fix: locals know to order tots there.

Breakfast at The Diner
My Usual: Chicken Fried Steak and Tots

Ann became ill during breakfast, so we scrapped going back into town to the market, instead continuing on to Newberg to get seafood before heading back south to Salem and home. We did not score all those delicious blackberries, marionberries, and blueberries that we hoped to at the market, but we did get some great fish and scallops for a moqueca on Saturday night with Michelle and Andreas.

Goodbye Rob and Dyce

While we were in Italy for three weeks, Rob and Dyce decided, quite suddenly as it appeared to Ann and me from the outside, to pack up their belongings and move to Boulder. They told us about a week after we returned from Italy that they would be gone within days, by the end of October. Talk about dropping a bomb!

A Farewell Cassoulet

As sad as I feel about their leaving, I'm a big believer that everyone has to find happiness where happiness can be found. And so, if Bend is not the right place for Rob and Dyce, they should go and find the right place. We wish them all the best in Boulder; it is a great town. When I was a young man, I spent a fair amount of time camped out at the Hotel Boulderado while calling on customers at the IBM locations in and near Boulder and at HP just up I-25 in Fort Collins.

After they shell-shocked us over dinner at their house, a house that was in the process of being dismantled, we all wanted to get together one final time to celebrate. Rather than celebrate at a restaurant, Ann and I preferred to have them to dinner at our house, where we could be assured of a great meal, restaurant quality in Bend being somewhat suspect. We set a date for the final Saturday night that they would be in Bend.

Later on at home, I asked Ann to ask Dyce what they would really like for dinner. Almost immediately came a response that I would have never expected: cassoulet. Of all the dishes in the world, it was going to be cassoulet. Dyce asked if it would be possible. With only three days left before our planned dinner, the answer was yes, but just barely. I did have a pound of really great beans on hand (Steuben Yellow Eye beans rather than Tarbais, different but equally good) and I could just get the cassoulet made in 72 hours. Cassoulet is only as good as the stock you cook it in and great stock takes a long time to make. For me, it's a three-day process and if I started right away, I had three days to make it.

Having done all the shopping and prep on Thursday and Friday, on Saturday morning, I started the cassoulet cooking. By the time they had arrived at 6:30, I had punched the crust down 9 times. Each time you punch the crust into the broth, it enriches and thickens the broth. Traditional lore in France says you must punch the crust into the broth a minimum of 7 times.

What to drink with dinner? Naturally, we are all huge white Burgundy fans and so I met the guys at the front door with a glass of Bouchard Beaune du Château. While it is all well and good to start with a white, a long-cooked cassoulet demands red. But which?

White Burgundy to Start

Those who drink wine at our house know that we have one wine cooler that we designate the do-not-touch cooler. This is the cooler in which we have all our great wines as well as some that will be great after laying down for a long time. If there were ever an occasion to scrounge in this cooler for a wine for dinner, this would be the time. And so, I pulled out a bottle of 1995 Côte-Rôtie the day before and let it stand upright overnight to settle out any solids. Then I gently decanted it about an hour before they arrived.

Gangloff Côte-Rôtie 1995: Brilliant

It is always a crapshoot when opening an older bottle of wine, but it helps to have held the wine in your cooler since it was released as I have this wine. The fill level was great and the cork could have been new, not 30 years old. Thankfully, there was no whiff of cork taint at all. I cannot count the number of times I have opened old bottles just to have to pour them out. This wine was beautiful, with great color, bright acidity, gentle tannins, and aromas and flavors of leather, smoke, and dark fruit. This bottle was brilliant and everything you want a great wine to be. We sipped it with reverence.

I was so off my game that I forgot to take any people pictures and I just barely snapped any at all.

With a heavy meal like cassoulet, I decided not to do any appetizers. None of the four of us is a huge eater. I made a simple salad of arugula and julienned fennel and apples that I dressed with a vinaigrette made with an acidic sherry vinegar. With a heavy dish like cassoulet, you want some bright acidity to counterbalance the long-cooked beans and high fat meats.

Arugula, Fennel, Apple, Sherry Vinaigrette

Cassoulet and Salad

This post is about saying goodbye to friends; there are plenty of others that address how to make a cassoulet. Here's one that discusses a similar cassoulet.

And so here's to Rob and Dyce! It's been great having you as neighbors here in Bend and we wish you all the best on your new adventure in Boulder. We'll see you this summer!

Happy Bendiversary!

[Ed note: so I started this post on February 11, never expecting that I would shatter my left foot on the 15th in a freak accident and here it is already the first of April before I'm feeling up to working at the computer again.]

Time is flying right by! It struck me a couple weeks back that we were quickly coming up on the first anniversary of our moving to Bend on February 10, 2022 from our prior home in McMinnville, closing a year that zoomed by at warp speed. I thought we should celebrate if for no other reason than we don't do enough celebrating in our busy lives. And time is flying right by!

Here's to a Year in Bend!

I asked Ann if she would have a date with me on the 10th to celebrate moving. Her immediate acceptance was never in question! I planned a stay-home date without telling Ann, because we have a brand new kitchen in our house to celebrate. I thought that celebrating by making a nice dinner at home and having a date at our new kitchen counter would be both fitting and appropriate. 

At first, I let Ann believe that we were going to a restaurant, but there was no way that I could pull off a meal in the kitchen and still maintain the ruse of going out. A day or two before, I told her what my plan was and enlisted her help in making the island counter look nice. To that end, I bought a bunch of spider mums and Siberian iris and arranged them. Ann set our places at the counter.

All Set for the Two of Us

Ann Taking the Shot Above

In thinking about what to make for our celebration, I recalled that recently Ann has been pinging me about making coq au vin, a dish that she has never had before (incredible, if I may say so). This got me planning a French-inspired menu for our celebration. French food is something that I am well versed in and certainly classic French technique underpinned nearly everything that we did at the restaurant.

Even if we desired to dine out, there is no French restaurant at all in this part of Central Oregon. And besides, I don't get the urge to get in the kitchen and cook much any more, so I wanted to strike while the proverbial iron was hot and make a delightful rendition of coq au vin for Ann.

I planned a simple menu of tartines, coq au vin, and cheese (which we never got around to eating, so filling was dinner). Tartines are a classic component of the apéro, the French happy hour and are typically small open-faced sandwiches. And the difference between a tartine and a canapé is in the eye of the beholder. To me, a canapé is much more of a one-biter and a tartine is slightly larger. YMMV.

Tartines of Mousse Truffée, Cornichons, Dill, and Lemon Zest

For tartines, I thought they should be slightly decadent and worthy of a celebration, so I stopped by our high-end grocery store for a locally baked baguette and a block of mousse truffée, truffled foie gras mousse. Rounding out the toppings are split cornichons, sprigs of dill, lemon zest, and a sprinkle of my very best salt. The result: simple, elegant, and terribly easy to make.

To accompany them, I opened a bottle of Champagne, a great non-vintage blend with both red and white notes. The nutty raspberry notes from the red fruit (Pinot noir and Pinot meunier) work well with the foie gras while the lemony acidity from the Chardonnay really help cut through the fat. 

Champagne: The Celebratory Drink of Choice

For our plat principal, our main course, I made an upscale coq au vin. Coq au vin and its many variations are a classic of French country cooking, traditionally a tough old rooster (coq) braised to tenderness in wine (vin). The wine varies depending on the region of France, to wit: coq au champagne from the Champagne, coq au riesling from Alsace, coq au vin jaune from the Jura, coq au chambertin from Bourgogne, etc.

While I have fond memories of sitting in a tiny, homey, low-ceilinged café in Fleurie chatting away waiting for our Bresse hen to braise to tenderness in a bath of Beaujolais, because of its humble origins, coq au vin is not a dish found in too many higher end French restaurants. By extension, I never made it at my restaurant: it would not have sold, being too homey and not chi chi enough for fine dining. Pity that.

Traditionally, a whole chicken is cut up, browned, and braised with white mushrooms, pork belly lardons, onions, carrots, red wine, and often a good slug of Cognac. Once the chicken is tender, the braising liquid is thickened with beurre manié, a flour and butter mixture.

While I have cooked it just so, these days, my fine dining chef instincts kick in, especially for a celebration and I deviate slightly from the canonical recipe. I think the food gods will allow this liberty because I have paid my dues in over 40 years of making the dish.

I start deviating with the chicken. It was traditionally made from an old and tough yard bird, but that has morphed into using younger Bresse hens, at least in more upscale places. In any case, the bird is cut into pieces and cooked and served on the bone.

In America at least (I cannot speak for France), the chicken quality is poor and the white breast meat is almost uniformly terrible. I would rather eat nothing than breast meat and so I only use thighs for their succulent and tender meat. And in this particular case, I deboned the thighs and halved them, wanting to do a nice presentation and to avoid having to deal with bones at the table.

Most high-end versions use whole tiny onions; I prefer whole small shallots. Because of the slight garlic undertone of the shallots, I forego any garlic. Instead of plain pork belly, I have a great fondness for using American smoked bacon if for no other reason that it plays so well against red Burgundy and Beaujolais. I really do not care for white mushrooms, the mushroom used in the classic preparation, the mushroom that the French call champignons de Paris. And so, I use rehydrated dried porcini to amp the earthiness of the dish.

Happy Bendiversary!

Coq au Vin on Puff Pastry

I Use Shallots Rather Than Onions

The Pot Ready for Braising

I really did enjoy making this dish for Ann and spending the last year in Bend with her!

Christmas 2022

Christmas 2022 was very quiet for us. The kids are scattered to the wind in Colorado Springs, Winston-Salem, and Philly, eliminating any chance of seeing them. My siblings and father, our only remaining parent, are in Alabama and my father was in the hospital, barely coherent since Thanksgiving and just barely hanging on. Ann, as an only child, doesn't have any other family.

Even though it was just the two of us, for once we were both at home simultaneously and not rushing around tending to an ill parent or in the process of moving as we were last year, our house sold out from under us less than two weeks before Christmas. This would be our first Christmas in our new home in Bend.

For Christmas Day, we received an invitation to visit with friends for dinner at their place, but sadly they got sick and had to cancel. While we are just fine on our own, Christmas is a time to celebrate with friends and family. Our Christmas ended up being mostly just another day, pretty anticlimactic all in all.

A bright spot was our Christmas tree, something we did not get last year in the middle of moving, and as pretty a fir as I have ever seen. We have just learned that for $5, you can cut your own tree off a National Forest and we thought to do that, but deep snow and lack of planning sent us looking for a pre-cut tree.

Next year in late summer and early fall, we will scope a couple options for stands of trees to cut that have relatively easy ingress and egress. Right now, I know where a bunch of decent trees are, but getting to the trees and getting back to the truck would be very tough.

Our Gorgeous 8' Fir

Because of our invite for Christmas Dinner, we moved our fancy dinner to Christmas Eve, a full pork rack, frenched and herb-crusted, accompanied by creamed leek scalloped potatoes.

Herb-Crusted Rack of Pork, Creamed Leek Scalloped Potatoes
Savigny-lès-Beaune Premier Cru Burgundy

While prepping, we opened a bottle of Jeeper Champagne, a house that I don't know. I bought it on spec, hoping for the best. Truth be told, it was a delightful blend with both red fruit and Chardonnay characteristics and a great buy for the price. I was impressed by this blend from parcels all over the Champagne.

With our pork roast, we opened a bourgogne rouge, a 2017 Chanson Savigny-Dominode. La Dominode is arguably the best cru of Savigny and Savigny is in my experience one of the best values in the Côte de Beaune. The combination of depth of fresh fruit against lively acidity («tension» diraient les français), coupled with tobacco aromatics and precise tannins was delightful. This is the best Pinot we have had in a long time, and having worked in the Willamette wine industry with and around some excellent Pinots, that is saying something.

Champagne, de Rigueur for a Celebration

As for our roast, although I prefer to do my own butchery, I don't have the space or refrigeration to do so like at my restaurant where we practiced whole animal butchery as a matter of course. That leaves me buying cuts at retail. The standards practiced for the retail trade would have engendered my wrath had they happened in my restaurant. A case in point: the photo below shows the shoddy work that passes for a frenched rack of pork. I spent 15 minutes cleaning up the rack such that it was suitable for presentation.

A So-Called Frenched Rack of Pork

What a Frenched Rack Should Look Like

The Herb-Crusted Rack, Resting Before Service

There are, I suppose, lots of ways to herb crust a rack. At the restaurant, we mostly crusted racks of lamb and for elegant tastings, racks of rabbit. This would involve mixing smooth Dijon mustard with herbs and seasonings appropriate for the meat and slathering that on the rack, before coating it in panko, the mustard mixture helping the panko to adhere. The leftover flavored mustard would be used at the last moment to thicken a pan sauce for the rack.

I wasn't terribly keen on a mustardy flavor for the rack of pork, mainly because I did not want to detract from either the accompanying potato dish or the red Burgundy. To that end, I mixed a scant couple of tablespoons of Dijon mustard with a good quantity of mayonnaise and added finely minced fresh rosemary, thyme, and Italian parsley. This I slathered on the top side and ends of the rack, then sprinkled it with salt and pepper. Finally, I pressed on a thin layer of panko and put the rack into the fridge for a couple of hours so that the crust could set up.

Two hours and a half hours before we wanted to eat, I heated olive oil on medium flame in a roasting pan on the stovetop and left the rack in the pan, crust side down, until it browned all over, about ten minutes. Flipping the rack over, I put it in a moderately slow oven (325F) and cooked it about 90 minutes, until the thermometer read 150F in the big end. The rack would rest for 30-45 minutes while the potatoes were finishing.

Ann wanted scalloped potatoes and I wanted creamed leeks, so I combined the two, sweating leeks in butter, then adding a touch of flour and building a nice leek béchamel with some half-and-half. I sliced the potatoes thinly and mixed in the béchamel. These went into the oven, covered, for the final 45 minutes that the pork was cooking.

Potatoes Ready for the Oven

When the pork came out of the oven, I removed the cover from the potatoes and cranked the heat to 400F and continued cooking the potatoes until they became brown on top.

Creamed Leek Scalloped Potatoes

Our Christmas Eve dinner was exceptionally good as was the amazingly beautiful bottle of Burgundy. The only thing missing was somebody to share it with.