Tillamook Cheese Factory 2018--Bigger and Better Than Ever!

The Tillamook Cheese Factory is one of our favorite places to visit on a trip to the Oregon Coast. It happens to be the second most visited tourist site in the state, behind the natural splendor of Multnomah Falls. The cheese is great, the ice cream superb, and watching the cheesemakers work (while consuming a cone of delicious Espresso Madness) is mesmerizing.

The cheese fac as we knew it pre-2018 featured a small short-order grill and cafe, small crowded ice cream bar, small gift shop, crowded cheese-tasting line, and an upstairs view of the cheesemakers at work. A visitor could watch the cheese making and packaging process from behind enormous second-floor plate glass windows, if you could peer past the teeming masses.

As a bonus, a drive through the Tillamook area features vast green fields and brick-red barns, all of them full of various breeds of dairy cows: jersey, guernsey, holstein, brown swiss, and Dutch belt. Those very cows yesterday provided the milk for the cheese you will eat today.

In spring 2017 the Tillamook Creamery Association announced it would be closing the cheese fac for a year to rebuild the fantastically popular and horribly overcrowded visitor facilities. Here are four photos  of the old fac:

Well, it's out with the old, in with the new! We stopped at the brand new facility with out-of-town grandchildren in August 2018, along with what felt like the entire population of Oregon! It may be many times larger, but so are the crowds.

the new entrance is grand!

H experienced the brand new children's room

the world's best ice cream is always our favorite part of the day

everyone wants a "ride" in the Tillamook bus

We're pleased with the new, even though a summer-day visit is still madness. I took my Boston cousin ME here in October on a lovely un-crowded fall day. I enjoyed the new educational posters about milk and cheesemaking in the cheese sample area. The displays showing breeds of cows and what they eat have enlightened me as to how complicated a milk cow's life can be. Or I should say, the life of a dairyman. The shop is full of cheese-related items, both the practical and the kitsch. The new fac is a super upgrade from the old!

I'm Lucky To Be Alive

I ate bushels of Cocoa Krispies, yuck

Twenty-first century-ers are gaga over health-food, or, should I say, food that is touted by somebody, somewhere, to be healthy for you. Hardly a week goes by without media fanfare highlighting some miraculous new food that will  a) boost energy,  b) improve sex-life, c) detoxify (whatever that means),  d) make us sleep better, e) make us live to be 100, f) prevent a host of diseases including the big C, or g) all of the above. Celebrities are often proponents of one miracle food or another, and folks follow like sheep.

Trendy foods need not be pleasing to the palate--kale or fermented mushroom yuck come to mind. Proponents emphasize that the worse it tastes, the better it must be for you. These are the foods that become an overnight sensation with a rock-star following. Not that certain foods didn't become a health holy-grail in past generations--some did. But without the far-reaching tentacles of modern media, not to mention social media, food movements were a local flash-in-the-pan. An exception was the practically national about-face from butter to margarine around 1960. Butter==bad. Margarine ==good.  I remember this one because my Dad's high cholesterol forced our switch to margarine. We drank the kool-aid and stayed with margarine until about 20 years ago, when new information showed margarine's healthier hype to be a big fat lie.

Well, the purpose of this post is really to talk about a few super unhealthy foods I consumed in childhood. Most I wouldn't touch now with a ten-foot pole, but I still dream of fried bologna, the original 'heart attack on a plate.' Get a cast-iron skillet, sizzle a stick of butter, throw in the bologna until the center puffs up and the edges are crisp, and you have a meal fit for a king. My sister fried me some a few years ago and I tasted all the good memories of my childhood in every bite.

 fried bologna, one of the most heavenly foods ever

you know you're doing it right when they resemble little sombreros

Butter sandwiches. Mmm, my daily lunch during my pre-school years. Mom placed square slices of cold butter on the nutritionless white Wonder bread--no spreading the butter--it was delish. One small confession--we ate the generic version of Wonder bread, which was cheaper.

Cocoa Krispies. There isn't a food on the planet with less stick-to-your-ribs. Or nutrition. But I ate bushels of it.

Raw bread balls with a side of crusty pinwheel--these kept me alive from elementary through high school. Step 1) take a slice of white bread; 2) carefully peel the crust off into one long-strip; beware, if it breaks, then you can't make a proper crust pinwheel; 3) roll the crust up tight into a pinwheel; 4) squeeze the white part of the bread in a closed fist until the air is gone and all you have is a blob of dough; 5) eat the dough ball first; 6) hold the crusty pinwheel vertical and bite into it--if you see the many striped layers of crust in front of you, you'll know you're doing it right.

Twinkies--do they still make these? Now they sound pretty gross to me but we didn't get a lot of treats back in the day, so. Maybe these aren't actually Twinkies, but were called cupcakes. Anything chocolate tasted good to me. Still love chocolate but my tastes are more refined now. Even though the bar was lower then, I can't believe I ever thought these were tasty:

Another version of Twinkie cupcakes, but with pink coconut all over it. Yikes.

Yum, Them's Good Eatin'!

We kids of the 50s--60s--70s ate tons of disgusting and unhealthy foods, when held up to the fresh high quality choices available today. It's a miracle that any of us who were born in that era are still walking around. Sorry that some of us aren't.

There was one type of "food" I craved around ages three to five, that I'm pretty sure no other human ate. Our beagle--Sunny--loved dog biscuits, and so did I. Yup, I craved them. No idea why. Nothing about this yearning makes sense. Dog biscuits were fibrous and gritty and dry without any alluring flavor that made them appealing (to a human); I might as well have eaten sawdust. They did not go down easy. The grit in them could bring on a choking fit that required lots of water after indulging.

Mom had a fit about my habit. She forbid me to eat them and stuck the biscuit box up beyond my reach. Didn't matter. I discovered that if I silently sneaked into the tiny one-butt pantry, did not turn on the light, climbed the shelves monkey-style to grab the box, I could remain in there undetected long enough to chow down a couple of biscuits. There was always a price to pay when Mom finally found me, but it was so worth it.

The cure came when mischievous, pesty Sunny had to go away to live on a farm. No more dog biscuits for me. Somehow I got over it and moved on to eat other, more people-oriented junk food. More about those foods another day.

my favorites looked about like this

this may not have been the brand that I craved, but what an adorable box!

maybe it was Gro-Pup that I ate?

Our Love Affair With Tillamook

We love anything Tillamook: yogurt, ice cream, and cheese of course, and we also love the beaches of the Tillamook area. We travel to Tillamook several times a year and always, always stop at the cheese factory. We hit the free cheese sample line multiple times, and enjoy an cone of the best ice cream around. While we're eating we watch the cheese-making process through the huge plate glass windows in the viewing area.

If you come to Oregon, you must visit Tillamook. I don't want to hear that you have come to Oregon and missed out on the Tillamook Cheese Factory.

 Here's a few pictures from this summer's most recent visit.

Sh#!% on a Shingle

 SOS

I was in Costco yesterday and from one of the sample stations I took a small cup of Mountain House  beef stroganoff.  Mountain House freeze-dried meals make backpacking easy, and are the perfect food storage--the shelf life is about 10 years, it takes up little space, and the stuff tastes pretty good after you've stumbled into your makeshift camp after a day on the trail.  And let me tell you, I would be glad to have it during times of emergency and disaster.  I just have to be diligent in storing enough water to cook it with!

As I walked away from the sample station another shopper, an older man, tasted his sample and loudly exclaimed for all to hear, "This is the same sh#!% we ate in Vietnam!"   It was a crack-up moment, and then the sample lady came over to me laughing and we talked about what the man said.  I mentioned that my Dad, who was in the Navy during and after WW2, talked once in a while about a very special meal served on board ship which the men called, "shit on a shingle," which I'll call here, SOS.  My Dad did not swear, ever, except when he talked about SOS, and that doesn't really count as swearing. 

The Costco lady chuckled and exclaimed that her Navy veteran Dad also talked about SOS, so we suddenly became BFF, and exchanged e-mail and cell numbers.  Ha, not really, but we marveled at the common experience of our Dads and about what SOS actually is.  She told me it is chipped beef on toast and that her Mom made it once in a while but the kids weren't interested in eating something their Dad dubbed SOS. 

Just now I googled that term, spelled out, and lah-di-dah, there's tons of recipes online for SOS, and some don't look half bad, and one even looks possibly tasty (see above).  However, I nix any food that actually could be mistaken for Sh#!%--see below, yikes!--and that is no doubt what SOS looked like when served on board a Navy ship churning through the vast nothingness of the Pacific Ocean.  Thanks but, no thanks.

Portland's Annual Apple Fest

The world of apples, sliced and ready for tasting

Portland Nursery, a local haven for plant and landscape lovers, holds an annual fall apple festival for 2 weekends every October.  We attend the fest most years and come away marveling at what a tasty, satisfying wonderful fruit an apple really is.

Apples have always been something we ate because we were told they were good for us, as in, "an apple a day keeps the doctor away."  It's tragic that during the first 30 years of my life the only apples  available were Red Delicious and Golden Delicious (and Romes showed up in the store during holiday time).   Goldens are good but not great.  Reds could be good if you hit the right one, but often they were tough on the outside and mushy inside.  They were like ravishing blonds--beautiful, but easily bruised.   See Bridget's post about apples here.

A few decades ago exciting varieties made their way into the grocery.  Granny Smith, Fuji, and others  crisp and bursting with flavor redefined the apple.  Then Gala appeared and Red Delicious disappeared.  What a perfectly wonderful  trade.

At Portland Nursery's apple fest visitors can taste smidgens of about 40 varieties of apple.  Everything from common to rare to heirloom varieties from local growers are there for the tasting.  You can track your favorites on a sheet, and find out which varieties are for sale in the nearby apple tent.

This year we bought Jonathan's which are Craig's favorite; Jonnies also make a lovely pink applesauce.  We bought Criterions because the sample in the tent was scrumptious.  And we bought Ambrosias which turned out to be the very best apple I have ever tasted!   I cannot get enough of them, but alas, until next year's apple fest I will have to taste them in my dreams.

The Best Cookies Ever!

While I was growing up our family regularly got together with a group of people who, along with my Mom, called Holyoke Massachusetts home.  These folks had transplanted to Southern California, or were frequent visitors from the East.   The regular attendees were:

• Mom's closest friend, Eleanor Prentiss, and her husband Bob Price and son Bobby
• Eleanor's aunt Peg Prentiss and her husband Al Frank
• Peg's widowed brother Jimmy Prentiss (visited from Holyoke) (Jimmy had been married to my Grandpa Ashe's cousin)
• Peg and Jimmy's widowed sister Mary Prentiss Murray and her daughter Margaret Murray
• Ray Flynn, a survivor of World War One's Lost Battalion (visited from Holyoke)
• our family of 6

The group usually got together at Eleanor's because it was closer for her elderly aunts and uncles than our place.  My siblings and I and Bobby drove the adults crazy with our loud boisterous horseplay in that cramped boxy house.  We knew all the nooks and crannies for games of hide and seek, the bounciest beds to jump on, the most fun TV shows to watch.  We laughed enough to make me wet my pants.  When the Prices put in a swimming pool where a small neglected orchard stood, we really had a blast on those southern California hot summer days.

All of us got together around major holidays: 4th of July, Christmas and Easter, and in between.  The menu never varied.  Summer gatherings were barbeques.  Christmastime meant lasagne, Easter-time was lamb with mint jelly.  And it was on the Price's color TV where I watched the annual broadcasts of Peter Pan and the Wizard of Oz--and the 1969 moon landing on my Dad's 48th birthday.  

Once the swimming pool was built we went to the Prices more often in summer, and all the attendees helped out by bringing parts of the barbecue.  Hamburgers, hot dogs, chips, salad, pop, dessert.  Our family brought fresh-picked corn on the cob from a farm along the way.  We often brought fresh home-baked cookies.  What strong and wonderful memories these are.  

OK, the fresh home-baked cookies.  One summer Saturday Mom and Dad were bustling around preparing for an afternoon to-do at the Prices.  We were assigned to bring a batch of cookies for dessert, and Mom asked me to take care of the baking while she was out doing early morning errands.  Out came the baking equipment, the canisters of flour and sugar, the eggs, butter, and chocolate chips.  I creamed the butter, sugar and vanilla.  Added the eggs.  Added the salt.  Time for the flour.  I opened the canister of white flour, and holy cow, it was awash with tiny beady black bugs, the dreaded weevil.   Yikes, what to do?   Mom wasn't home to ask.  Our only supply of flour was infested with bugs, we were leaving in an hour, and those cookies had to be mixed and baked.  So that's what I did.  

Well, when it was time for dessert after the barbecue, you would have thought those chocolate chip cookies were made by some fancy schmancy downtown bakery.  Everyone raved about them!  The old folks couldn't get enough, and gushed that these were hands down, the best cookies they had ever tasted.  What could I do but mumble a brief thanks, flash a weak smile and get the heck out of there and into the deep end of the pool . . . 

I kept my secret ingredient quiet for over four decades.  Now you know how to make the very best chocolate chip cookies ever!

If You Are What You Ate in Childhood, Then I'm in Big Trouble

A distinct vision of my pre-school years sees me sitting at the kitchen table eating lunch with my Mom.    The colors of my lunch were yellow and white.  Can you guess what it was?    A banana with milk, or lemon yogurt with a slice of bread?    Sadly it was not anything that nutritious.  My daily lunch staple was a butter sandwich.  And golly it was delicious.  Mom sliced square slabs off the butter stick and arranged them on airy Weber's white bread, fresh from its blue and white checked wrapper.  The butter slabs were thick and cold and melted in my mouth.

It isn't that Mom didn't feed us well.   Junk food was limited and we ate plenty of fruits and some vegetables.  There was just so much that people didn't realize about food.  We sometimes ate twinkies and snowballs.  My kids never have.  We ate bologna sandwiches.  My kids never have.   When Mom or Dad was in a "gourmet" mood, they made us fried bologna sandwiches, one of the tastiest really bad foods ever.   We kids were mesmerized by the sight of the flat pink bologna frying in butter in the cast-iron skillet.   As it cooked the meat puffed up in the middle like a Mexican sombrero.  My sister Alice confessed that she recently made herself a fried bologna sandwich.  Wish she had invited me to join her!

Weber's white bread was served at our table every night and so was meat--we ate way too much beef.  Except we Catholics ate fish on Friday (usually frozen fillet of sole).  My Dad ate kielbasa supplemented with icky stuff like pickled pig's feet and other weird Hunkie food that I wouldn't touch.  Most vegetables served at dinner came out of the freezer section of Hughes market, or were courtesy of Del Monte cans.  Velveeta was the only "cheese" I knew.

On the humorous side, there is a portion of a butchered pig called the butt that is always served smoked.  It's very juicy, meaning it oozes fat.   On those twice a year days when our folks announced that dinner was smoked butt, we kids fell into paroxysms of wet-our-pants laughter.   My smart aleck brother once retorted, "no way you're gonna smoke my butt."

You can probably guess what we ate for breakfast.  We made extra sure to exclude any cereal with a shred of protein or fiber.  Top of my list were rice krispies and cocoa krispies.  Zero food value except for the milk.   I shudder thinking of all the worthless food I ate.   That includes (true confession alert!!) my favorite snack: dog biscuits.  Yup.   I would wait till Mom was busy, sneak into the small walk-in pantry and shut the door, then eat doggie treats right out of the box to my stomach's content.  It was a spanking offense and worth every bite.

As I said, if we are what we eat, or what we ate in childhood, I am in big trouble.  I have  hope that the last 4 decades of nutritious eating have reversed the ill effects of my childhood diet.

The Only Antique I Own

 Gram and my 2 goofy sisters at her apartment

My Grandma Ashe lived simply.  She took meticulous care of her apartment and her few household items.  She did not know the word clutter.  She never owned anything valuable except her tiny engagement ring.  She used and re-used simple items such as bits of string, or rubber bands from the daily newspaper.  She never returned items to the store—she once said, “First of all, if I didn’t want it I wouldn’t buy it.  And if I bought it and didn’t like it, I’d live with it.”  To my knowledge she never drove a car in her life.  In her late 70s she was hired to collect the rents for her apartment building, a task that fit perfectly with her innate accounting skills.

I am the proud owner of Gram’s 1931 Ball Blue Book (for canning).  It's not in bad condition for an 80-year old glorified pamphlet.  Considering that this book would have been spread out on her counter in reach of splashing water and sticky sugar syrup, it’s a miracle it survived, but Gram took careful care of everything, even a cheap paper canning guide.

 

 It’s both fun and frightening to look through the recipes in the book.  If you know anything about canning, you would know there are serious risks in canning vegetables—namely, deadly botulism—because of their low acid content.  They must be processed in a pressure canner (as opposed to a water bath which is adequate for fruits) at very specific pounds of pressure and lengths of time.  Yet even though they had pressure canners, on page 21 I find that in 1931 corn could be processed in a water bath for 3 hours!  Or beets for 2 hours.  There must be statistics on how many people died of home-grown botulism in the 30s.

On the fun side, did you know you could can frog legs?  Mmm-mmm!  The directions are right here on page 28.  Or fish roe, clams, and oysters?  How about rabbit?  Or pigeons?  Both  of those are processed same as chicken.  Brains, heart, and kidneys all take 3 hours in a water bath or 90 minutes in a pressure cooker.  And for the thriftiest among us, there are recipes for canning turkey bone soup, carrot ketchup, and "emergency pickles" (no cucumbers involved). 

 For us home canning is a practice we can adopt if we like, but for my grandparents, it was a necessity.  And Gram's canning book will always remind me of her thrift and "live simple" philosophy.

The Annual Verboort Sausage and Kraut Fest

 
We don't make it out to the Verboort Sausage and Kraut Fest every year, but we often attend this annual fund-raiser so I can get my hunkie food fix. Verboort was settled by Dutch Catholics about 1870 and descendants of the original settlers still live there--names like Vandehey, Evers, VanDomelan, VanDyke, Duyck, Schmidlkofer, Vandecoevering are common. The church funds their K-8 Visitation School for the children of the area through this annual fund-raising dinner. They have been doing it for 76 years.

 Visitation Church framed by giant sequoias

school pledge

the parking dude has the most scenic job of all

To make this annual dinner a success, everybody helps. Young men direct the parking. The younger children roll the silverware into the napkins. The next older group sets the tables and keeps the water pitchers filled. The teenagers assist the adults in serving the food. And the adults and teens work all year long raising the beef, pork, cabbage, green beans, and apples. The menu:

sausage
sauerkraut
salad
green beans
potatoes
applesauce
rolls
apple or lemon meringue pie

 dinner!

The organizers have the process down to a science. All summer and fall they are making and smoking sausage and preparing the kraut and applesauce. They plan on serving 8000 dinners the first Saturday of November. Every year. Tickets cost $15 and each is numbered. You can't sit down to the table until your number is lower than the posted number. Yesterday our tickets were in the 700s so we entered when the posted number was 1600 (we could have gone in earlier; when we came out the number was up to 2400).

  the sign indicates that ticket numbers 1600 and under are now being served

The parish hall is built with two large banquet rooms each holding close to 200 diners. Servers in Dutch hats bring you a plate fully loaded with dinner. The salad and applesauce are already on the table. Other servers circulate with more sausage and kraut. When you are about to burst and manage to waddle out the door, your table is cleared and reset for the next group of diners.

 servers lined up at kitchen to fetch dinners

our fellow diners

Along with the dinner, there is a beer garden, bingo, holiday bazaar, quilt raffle, and take-out dinner sales. The Visitation Catholic Church and school are built in the shade of 140-year-old giant sequoias. It's a great way to spend part of a Saturday and help a good cause.

 mmmm, that was delicious
I'm glad that Verboort is just a few miles down the road!