A Trek Across the State

I promised to relive my trip to Eastern Oregon, so here goes.

It all started at 4 am on Thursday morning. Had to catch a 7:30 am flight from Portland and with an hour and a half of driving before hitting the airport, we needed an early-morning wake up call. Normally, this would have meant an early-morning drive-thru for coffee and a muffin or scone or, in a desperate moment, a Jack-in-the-Box breakfast sandwich that would leave us feeling sick and jittery all morning. And even though we have an exception for travel, I knew we could do better if we could wait until arriving at the airport. And we did do better. PDX has a number of home-grown shops and restaurants, including Good Dog/Bad Dog where I had a veggie breakfast burrito. Not local food, but at least it's a local business.

Luke slept on the way to Portland and then thoroughly enjoyed the flight. Perfect little traveler.
My mom met us at the Boise airport and then shuttled us directly to the Boise Co-Op for a little local Idaho shopping. My family has never been a "farm family," always living right in the middle of the Eastern Oregon town of Ontario. However, every summer we had a huge garden and I was raised to have a great respect for a garden-grown tomato. So even though my parents have become increasingly dependent on foreign produce like the rest of us, they still recognize and appreciate good food. This trip to the Co-Op was as much for their benefit as it was for ours.

We purchased ingredients for our dinner that night. Free-range chicken and hand-made sausages for the grill, green salad, rutabaga roasted with potatoes and onions from a farmer friend of the family. We had some Bird Dog White and Retriever Red from Idaho's Hell's Canyon Winery. For dessert we had some sweet bread made from my mom's sourdough starter. (I could tell that she'd had the starter for awhile and was trying to find new and creative ways to use it. That stuff always sounds like a good idea and then quickly becomes an albatross, a huge multiplying albatross.)

I can't pretend that each day of the trip, four days in all, was as virtuous or tasty as that first one. We had some coffee, a couple of bananas; Charlie had a Snickers bar and I had a poppyseed muffin. We tried to patronize local businesses rather than fast food chains. (Check out the new links for Eastern Oregon eateries, above.) But I must say that the first meal with my family was the culinary highlight