Summer Eats: Sesame Sōmen with Shrimp and Edamame

When the temperatures soar, who feels like eating large, hot meals? We certainly don't. High summer is the perfect time for a cold pasta salad such as the one I made the other night with sōmen, thin wheat noodles from Japan, poached shrimp, shelled edamame, and a soy-sesame dressing augmented with a healthy dose of crushed red pepper flakes.

Summer Salad: Sesame Sōmen with Shrimp and Edamame

The really great thing about this salad is that you can make it in the morning in just a few minutes, put it in the refrigerator, and it will be ready for you when you get home from doing whatever it is that you do on a wonderful summer day.

Although at the restaurant, I developed a standard recipe for the soy-sesame dressing, at home, I don't bother with a recipe, preferring to eyeball it instead. I use roughly equal parts of soy sauce (or tamari), unseasoned rice vinegar, and toasted sesame oil, which I whisk together roughly with a fork just before dumping in the warm wheat noodles.

I pour a bunch of frozen shelled edamame onto the warm noodles; they will defrost quickly in the salad.

For salads, I use small shrimp which I dump into boiling salted water which I turn off. I let the shrimp stand in the hot water until they are just cooked through, a minute to three depending on size. They go into the bowl of warm noodles along with sliced green onions and a healthy pinch of crushed red pepper flakes.

Toss the salad well and let it cool a few minutes before putting it in the refrigerator. Don't worry about seasoning the salad until you are ready to eat. It will take a few minutes for the noodles to absorb the dressing, which can change the seasoning balance. The flavors are better if you let the salad warm up a few minutes on the counter before serving. Just before serving, taste and season as necessary.

Summer Sipper: Txakoli

What to drink with this salad? The obvious choice for a lot of somms is Riesling. Others might go with a Chenin Blanc or even a fragrant Sake. For my part, living in one of the great Riesling producing parts of the world, I drink a gracious plenty of Riesling in the summer. While I am not over-sated on Riesling by any stretch, I do like to taste wines from elsewhere on occasion. Moreover, I like serving obscurer wines that others might not have tasted. Summer screams to me of Vinho Verde from Portugal, but these days, it is ubiquitous. So for me in my quest for obscurer wines, branching out to its Spanish cousin from Basque country makes a lot of sense.

Txakoli (or Txakolina as the bottle in the photo above is called) is a great lightly effervescent alternative to Vinho Verde. Pronounced CHACK-uh-lee, this wine, like Vinho Verde, comes in white, red, and rosado forms, though most people know only the white form made from Hondarrabi Zuri grapes, if they know the wine at all.

It's a high acid, low alcohol, clean and easy-to-drink wine. Depending on the producer, it may be vinified in a riper, more aromatically fruity style, or as is my preference, in a more lemony and saline style reminiscent of great Albariño that has been picked slightly early.

Here's to cold salads and crisp wines to beat the summer heat!

Pad Thai

Last week, after our weekly weigh-in in our battle against COVID lethargy, our weight totals continued to drop and this caused Ann to ask, "After we weigh in next week, I feel like a treat. Would you make pad thai?"

Pad Thai with Tofu and Dried Shrimp

Of course I would make pad thai, for it is one of my favorite foods, so much so that I continue to blog about making it. It seems that I make it so infrequently that I feel compelled to blog about it on those occasions when I do make it. If you want to see how my versions vary, here is one from 2015 and another from 2012. Each dish is different, yet they all share the same common steps and ingredients.

Making pad thai is really our only option, if we want to eat it. If going out for pad thai weren't a non-starter because of COVID, we still wouldn't go out for it here. We have one Thai restaurant and one Thai food truck and neither make food that we would pay for. Both make especially un-noteworthy pad thai. It's probably a good thing. If either made a decent version, I might have real trouble keeping the weight off.

Soapbox alert. Why is the average dish of pad thai in the US so terrible? Even restaurants that I really respect make crap for pad thai. Why? There's nothing hard about it. Is it because it is the one Thai dish that every American knows and will order and therefore restaurants knowingly serve slop to these unadventurous diners? Maybe as pizza is to Italian food in the US, so goes pad thai for Thai food: Americans will eat anything you put in front of them as long as it is cheap, massive in portion, and not challenging. Off my soapbox now.

I don't keep the ingredients that I need for pad thai at home, so our dish had to wait for a run to the grocery store to pick up tamarind, dried shrimp, and rice stick. Rice stick especially, along with all forms of pasta, is in that class of carbs that we would decimate were it in our pantry. So we don't keep it in our pantry. That forces me to make a special trip to buy it eliminating the temptation to carb out after a couple of glasses of wine. Don't judge. It works for us.

Pad Thai Mise en Place

Similarly, we cannot have peanuts in the house. We're down a combined 38 pounds now during COVID and all that might go out the window if we had peanuts to feast on, because neither of us has any self control when it comes to roasted peanuts. So, as a salty crunch for our pad thai, I substituted some tiny dried shrimp. Not peanuts exactly, but not bad either.

The rest of the ingredients are eggs, bean sprouts, green onions, firm tofu, and lime wedges for garnish.

Pad Thai Sauce

Pad Thai Sauce: Tamarind, Palm Sugar, and Fish Sauce

To sauce the rice stick, I make a sauce separately from the noodles and combine the two at the last minute. First, palm sugar is hard to get into solution. Second, I don't have enough firepower on my range to reduce the sauce ingredients quickly and efficiently without overcooking the noodles.

1/2 cup tamarind water

2 tablespoons palm sugar

1 tablespoon fish sauce

Mix the ingredients in a small sauce pan and cook until the sugar is well dissolved. Follow this link for a primer on making tamarind water. Adjust to your taste.

Pad Thai Procedure

This makes enough for two nice portions.

1/2 pound rice stick
2 eggs, beaten

4 ounces firm tofu, in bite-sized pieces

1 ounce dried shrimp

2 green onions or a few Chinese or garlic chives, in 1-inch lengths

1 cup bean sprouts

1 recipe of Pad Thai sauce, above

Soak the rice stick in hot water until it is pliable and ready to eat.

In a very hot pan, add the beaten eggs and scramble.

Add the tofu, dried shrimp, chives, and bean sprouts. Cook for a minute.

Add the soft noodles, then the sauce.

Cook, tossing until the sauce coats the noodles and everything is hot. Serve immediately.

My only regret about this dish? I wish I had some preserved vegetable to put in it, some radish or mustard pickles.

The Girls Do Oregon

I haven't had much time or will to update the blog for the past few months. Play time has been on hold: we're in a brand new house with zero landscaping and all my spare time is devoted to planning and planting the yard, which is coming along nicely. Last week was a welcome break to our yardwork routine: my daughters Lillie and Ellie came to visit us in Oregon, their first visit to Oregon and to the West Coast.

Unfortunately, their flight into PDX arrived at 10am, meaning we had to battle Portland rush hour traffic to get to the airport. We live about 38 miles as the crow flies from the airport and the drive took just over two hours. What a non-drive!

What do you do with first timers to Portland, especially young ladies who eat like they're starving all the time?

Day 1

Naturally, they wanted to go to Voodoo Doughnuts, so we drove back into downtown to the Voodoo Doughnuts just off 3rd and Burnside. At 11am, there wasn't much of a line. I'm not a doughnut fan at all, but the girls have always been and both of them got some concoction covered in Oreos, sugar on sugar. I didn't hear any complaints and the doughnuts disappeared pronto. My take is that Voodoo is more hype than substance, but they seemed happy.

Lillie Does Voodoo Doughnuts

While the girls were stuffing doughnuts in their faces, we walked up 3rd to Washington to the food cart pod there where I knew I wanted to eat at Stretch the Noodle, well known among food cart cognoscenti for their hand-stretched noodles. We walked right up and placed our order from the five-item menu, three dishes for the four of us, and we still had plenty of leftovers even after making pigs of ourselves at the shelf-table alongside the cart.

Stretching the Dough for Noodles

Although at 11:30am we could just walk right up and place our order at the window, there were several people on the sidewalk ahead of us who had already ordered. I would guess that it took about ten minutes for our order to be up. That gave Lillie plenty of time to tell us all about the medical school in Philadelphia to which she has been accepted and where she will start in July.

Chow Mian

We ordered our two noodle dishes spicy and spicy they were, almost too spicy for Ellie. You can see the healthy amount of chile oil on top of the noodle soup below. An equal amount is mixed in with the chow mian above. Chow mian means stir-fried noodles and as you can see in the photo above, ours was a fantastic mix of fresh vegetables and noodles, a far cry from the so-called chow mien that you see in Americanized Chinese restaurants.

La Mian

Noodles in soup is one of my favorite meals ever and this bowl did not disappoint me. The noodles are on the bottom with a deep beef broth and chunks of chuck ladled over. On top are cilantro, green onions, a healthy amount of chile oil, peanuts, and a pickled radish or mustard of some sort. La mian is the term for hand-pulled noodles but could also mean spicy noodles, and in this case, the noodles were righteously spicy. Isn't it wonderful to ask for something to be spicy and actually get it?

Pork and Shrimp Dumplings

The pork and shrimp dumpling were about as good as any I have had, doused in black vinegar, chile oil, and green onions. The food at Stretch the Noodle is stupid cheap and stupid delicious. Definitely a must-do when in Portland.

Lompoc Brewing

Leaving downtown Portland, we headed east across the Willamette River on the I-405 over to Lompoc Brewing in a pretty hip neighborhood over on N. Williams Avenue. And much to our good fortune, beers are $3 on Wednesdays, usually $5.50. Of all the gazillions of breweries in Portland, we chose Lompoc because they make one of Ann's favorite porters, Lomporter. I had a seasonal IPA called Straight Outta Lompton. Lillie had a red ale and Ellie, not much of a beer fan, ended up with a cider.

We made the trip back from Portland via 26 and 217 through the heart of Nike country to 99W and back to McMinnville, where we spent the afternoon on the porch. After I woke from a nap (I had been feeling poorly all day), the girls were way into our stash of Pinot Gris. There was much mirth and laughter on the porch as I rejoined them. Silly girls!

Dinner was a pot of pinto beans that I had put in the crock pot before we left for the airport in the morning and bed time was early, especially with the girls being on east coast time.

Day 2

Wednesday, given the less pretty weather forecast than Thursday, we opted for going to the coast and doing the Three Capes Scenic Loop, from Cape Meares in the north near Tillamook, passing Cape Lookout in the middle, to Cape Kiwanda in the south just at Pacific City.

We started the day with eggs at the house and then dropped in to the winery so that the girls could see the bottling line in action, it being day three of a marathon 4-day bottling stretch. For our road trip, we all got coffee at The Common Cup in Amity, before heading back over to highway 18 to the coast. The drive afforded the girls the chance to see what an agricultural area the Willamette Valley is: blueberry fields, hayfields, walnut orchards, filbert orchards, chestnut groves, and mile after mile of grass seed fields, this being the grass seed capital of the country.

The Three Co-Conspirators

We drove out to Grand Ronde where we encountered a bit of rain as we headed up into the Coastal Range and the Siuslaw National Forest where the girls really got a look at old growth forest for the first time. We picked up 101 at Hebo and headed north to Tillamook, turning due west on 1st St. and drove out to the Cape Meares Lighthouse.

Cape Meares Looking South

Posing in Front of Oceanside

The Very Calm Surf at Oceanside

Sitka Spruce Forest Meets the Pacific

Cliffs at Cape Meares

Looking Down to the Lighthouse

Distinctive Red and White Fresnel Lens

While the girls were looking about, I got a chance to look at some of the local vegetation.

Gaultheria shallon in Full Bloom

Hairy Manzanita, Arctostaphylos columbiana

Everywhere we looked, Cow Parsnip was in full bloom. Experts are divided about whether it is poisonous to humans. I am not going to be a guinea pig. I like the tableau of Equisetum (horse tail), Sitka spruce, Cow Parsnip, and Manroot in the photo below.

Cow Parsnip, Heracleum maximum

I had to double take walking along some of the cliffside paths as I saw what appeared to be cucumber or gourd vines clambering over the other foliage. I didn't quite recognize the foliage and I certainly didn't recognize the bloom, but the family heritage was unmistakable. It didn't take long with my wildflower guide to name these vines as Coastal Manroot, sometimes called Bitter Cucumber. They apparently have massive tuberous roots that resemble people and their appendages. Who knew?

Coastal Manroot, Marah oreganus

Roses Blooming in Profusion

Once we crossed the Coastal Range and entered west-side forest, every clearing and roadside was painted in long streaks of fuchsia Digitalis purpurea. The massive stands of them put those in my own garden to shame.

Digitalis purpurea

After viewing the lighthouse at Cape Meares, we backtracked through Oceanside and Netarts to Cape Lookout. We had thought to walk out to the point of the cape, but at 2.5 miles round trip, it didn't fit our time budget. I was also feeling very poorly. It's on our list to hike some day.

Cape Lookout Behind Us

Lone Fisherman

Three Arches Rocks and Cape Meares
in the Distance

Continuing our trek further south to Cape Kiwanda, the third of the three capes on our loop tour, we crossed through the dunes at Sand Lake, arriving quickly at Pacific City in dire need of both food and gas. Our plan had been to eat lunch at the flagship Pelican Brewing location in Pacific City. The brewpub is pretty much the first thing you come to on the beach in Pacific City, where we found about 8 school buses full of high schoolers from McMinnville High School on a last days of school field trip. Fortunately, they were packing up to leave when we arrived.

IPA? Why yes please!

Annie's Burger, Onion Rings, and Stout

Post Lunch Behind Pelican Brewing

Lillie was all excited to get her feet in the Pacific Ocean for the first time, so after lunch we headed out back of the brewery and walked down to Cape Kiwanda.

Haystack Rock in Pacific City

Goofing

Exploring at Low Tide

Annie Like a Kid Again

Cape Kiwanda

Cape Kiwanda Skyline

The Girls Had to Climb the Massive Dune

Up Top

Coming Back Down the Steep Dune Face

After finishing up playing on the beach and on the dunes, we headed back to the car to gas up and head back to McMinnville.

Day 3

Thursday was the girls' final day with us before heading back to Virginia. We wanted to show them a bit of McMinnville and hopefully take them up into the Dundee Hills where they could see Mount Hood. They had great views of it when they flew in on Tuesday and while we were in Portland, we were also able to show them Mount St. Helens and Mount Adams.

Our day started leisurely with breakfast at Community Plate, a local lunch and breakfast icon in downtown McMinnville. After breakfast, we wandered around downtown McMinnville and ultimately arrived at the Farmers Market, where we scored a few things, some strawberries and some sugar snaps.

Latte at Community Plate

Although the weather was less overcast on Thursday than on Wednesday, there wasn't much hope of seeing Mt. Hood as we headed up into the Dundee Hills. As we arrived at Red Ridge Farm and Durant Vineyards, it was clear that we would not see the big volcano some 70 miles due east of us at all, not even a glimpse. It's a shame; on a clear day, the snowcapped peak glows.

Chardonnay at Red Ridge Farm

Back at home, Lillie was begging me to make a risotto for dinner and I obliged with this very simple saffron and sugar snap version.

Saffron and Sugar Snap Risotto

Day 4

Friday was a slow morning as the girls got ready to go to the airport. We didn't need to leave until 10:30, so we missed the bulk of traffic and made it to PDX in good time. After our sad goodbyes, we were in need of solace, so we chose to visit Ecliptic Brewing in north Portland right near Lompoc. We chose it because they make Capella Porter, also one of Ann's favorites.

Juicy IPA

Beet and Goat Cheese Grilled Cheese

We watched Ronaldo score his third goal of the World Cup match to draw Portugal with Spain 3-all while we sampled Ecliptic beers and ate what would prove to be very good food for a brew pub, reminiscent of the great food we had at Snake River Brewing in Jackson Hole, WY. As a result, Ann has tasked me with replicating and bettering the beet and goat cheese grilled cheese that she ate.

So ends the saga of the girls making a joint trip to the west coast to see us. It may be a very long time until that happens again, now that med school is upon us.

Oregon Trail: Idaho

Tomorrow we arrive at our new home in Oregon. We're ten days in at this point and the sightseeing is mainly behind us. We have to get clear across two states in two days. It is 750 miles no matter how you slice it, so we buckled in for a couple of long road days. Still, at 75mph average speed (most of I-84 is posted at 80mph but there are constant construction zones), we did have a little slack in our schedule to get off the highway for a few minutes.

The first thing I noticed was lava. There are lava rocks everywhere and we have driven through a few cuts in lava beds. The rest of the place is flat, dead flat, and I have the distinct impression that there is but a very thin veneer of topsoil over lava beds. I also notice that it is very arid: just about every field has big irrigation rigs. Good thing the Snake River, which keeps getting wider every time we encounter it, has a lot of water.

The ever present irrigation rigs prove to be excellent perches for raptors. We see hundreds if not thousands of raptors. Every fence line and every irrigation rig has at least one if not more raptors perched upon it. Every couple of minutes, we see a kestrel hovering over some prey. As the Snake River came close to the highway, we saw four bald eagles perched right alongside the highway. Remember my U-turn in Wyoming to see two eagles in a tree and my thinking that I might never see such a sight again in my life? Never mind. Life is good.

But the most prominent sight? Potato fields. Mile upon mile upon mile of potato fields. And potato barns. Some are tiny, some are acres and acres under roof, but they all have one thing in common: the lower side walls are insulated with mounded dirt, rigid insulation, or some combination. I have never seen anything like this before, huge above-ground root cellars. Some of the larger warehouses have monster condensing units outside with refrigeration lines going inside. Potatoes are huge business here. We also saw row after row of potato harvesters, giant rolling conveyor belts that loosen the earth, scoop the potatoes and dirt onto an open conveyor that lets the dirt falls through and transports the potatoes to a truck or hopper.

Mustard in Eastern Idaho, A Rare Non-Potato Field

We Agree. Portland Beer in Idaho

Because we had a little slack in our day, we started looking for things along the interstate to amuse us and we quickly latched onto Shoshone Falls on the Snake River at Twin Falls, ID. The pictures we saw on the internet were amazing; they don't call it the Niagara of the West for nothing and at 208 feet high, it's taller than Niagara Falls. And bonus, it is perhaps a 10-minute detour off the highway to get to the park managed by the City of Twin Falls. As we were navigating the back roads to the park, we got a great view of a prairie falcon as it winged right in front of our windshield.

Shoshone Falls. Detour Number One

Snake River at Shoshone Falls

As you can see in the photo below, we didn't see the massive Niagara of the West that is shown in all the photos of the place. Waterflow was restricted to a trickle, the usual state of affairs at this time of year. Still, as a great place to get out of the car and stretch our legs, it was well worth the detour off the highway and the $3 entrance fee.

Where are the 208-Foot Falls?

Looking Downstream of the Falls

Small Waterfall at Park Entrance

Creek Spilling Into Snake River Canyon

Another Trickle

The Main Falls, Just About Dry

Butte Overlooking Canyon

I took leave of Ann to scramble higher on the canyon walls to get a different angle for my shots and at one point when I looked down at her from a couple hundred feet above, I saw this shot of her warming herself in the sun.

Warm Sun, Chilly Morning

Hillside Covered in Gutierrezia sarothrae, Broom Snakeweed

For the last week at least, we have been driving past clematis plants covered in their fuzzy seed heads. This is the first place that I have actually been able to walk up to a plant to see what it was. And to my surprise, it was still blooming, making the identification that much easier.

Clematis Seed Head

Invasive Clematis orientalis, Oriental Clematis

As I was scrambling on the hill sides, I came across a lot of prickly plants blooming pink. I was guessing they were Euphorbias, but that turned out not to be the case. I had no idea that I was looking at Prickly Russian Thistle aka Tumbleweed. It's a pretty undesirable invasive in most of the western US.

Salsola tragus, Prickly Russian Thistle (Tumbleweed)

We all recognize sunflowers when we see them, but when those of us back east see them, it's almost always because they've been planted in somebody's flower bed. And the ones we see are likely highly selected and bred for color, shape, and height. I find it really cool to see the native plants growing in their native habitat. It's fun to be where they grow just naturally. Of course, I am reminded of the vast fields of sunflowers grown as a crop in South Dakota.

Annual Sunflower, Helianthus annuus

After visiting the falls, we headed back to the highway for points west. There wasn't a lot to see along the road at this point, just mile after mile of high desert. West of Twin Falls the land becomes much more rugged and then the interstate dives down inside the Snake River canyon for a while. Off to our north, we had good views of the Sawtooth Range, some 60 miles distant.

About 1pm, we started getting really hungry so we looked for a nearby town. The next town of any size (there's a whole lot of nothing between Twin Falls and Boise) was Mountain Home. We were looking for a sit-down meal to get us out of the car, rather than fast food, of which we were totally sick.

We came across a Singaporean restaurant named Shiok. With visions of Singapore noodles running through my brain, we left the interstate to find the restaurant which is about 15 minutes south of the highway, right near the main gate for Mountain Home AFB. In other words, the restaurant is smack in the middle of nowhere, BFE to be exact. We wondered exactly why such a restaurant would be this far out in nowhere. The Air Force base, we guessed.

Pavement Mirage, Mountain Home ID

The food was well worth the effort. Of the four dishes we ordered, three were really good. Only a hot pot was not good, the worst kind of American-Chinese glop in a dish. We ordered extra Singapore Noodles to take with us for dinner.

Laksa Curry Noodles

Singapore Style Vermicelli

Salt and Pepper Calamari

After lunch we headed to Ontario on the Idaho-Oregon border. This is the point where we needed to decide which route to take across Oregon. We could go through the back country on either US-20 or US-26 or we could continue on I-84 through the Columbia River Gorge. It was the traveling with dogs deal that decided for us. It was tough enough finding a hotel that accepted dogs along the I-84 corridor. Traveling the backroads did not look like a win, so we stayed on I-84 until we came to a town with a hotel that accepted dogs, Baker City OR.

Northeast Oregon. Golden Brown Mountains with Zero Trees

After our dinner of leftovers, we turned in for our final night in a hotel, equally looking forward to our last day on the road and a bit sad that our great adventure was coming quickly to a close.