Fred here. Finding mushrooms at a market still counts as
finding mushrooms in our book, when you have to go to a Farmer’s Market in Oregon
to find them. And this market in Waldport was different than your typical
Missouri farmer’s market. There was an African woman selling jewelry, another
African woman selling baked goods, several artists of various mediums, one
small stand of fruit and berries, and our mushroom lady. We felt pretty fortunate,
and Ann wasn’t going to let the opportunity get by.
Before I go on, I need to take a moment to describe our accommodations
during our trip. Because we were flying to Portland, we opted not to tent camp.
We didn’t want to have to pack a tent and sleeping pads on the plane. But we
did want to camp, so I used www.reserveamerica.com
and www.recreation.gov to seek out
camping cabins. Oregon is full of them, with cabins and yurts at state parks,
but even though I was planning the trip a few months in advance, most were
full.
For the first two nights I did find an old U.S. Forest
Service fire guard station for rent. It was built in the 1930s as a CCC
project. It didn’t have electricity, but had built in propane lights in every
room, a propane stove/oven, and even a propane refrigerator. It also had a
spring-fed trout stream in its backyard and was very near Oregon’s volcanic
areas that we wanted to see. It was great.
After that we headed to the coast. The only available
options were cabins at a KOA campground. At Waldport our cabin did have a view
of the bay, although you had to stretch to see it past the blackberry bramble.
The aforementioned meal was cooked at this cabin.
After two nights at this campground, we drove up the coast
to another KOA campground in the Seaside/Astoria area. It’s actually located
near the small town of Hammond.
I don’t want to disparage RV parks too much because I know a
lot of people really enjoy them, but they are not our ideal situation. KOA
offers a lot of activities, but the mere fact that they spell camping with a “k”
starts us off on the wrong foot. This campground was across the street from the
state park where would we have liked to have stayed, and the view from the
front of our cabin looked out on our KOA trailer park. In the evening when
everyone gathers around their individual fires and cooks dinner the sounds and
smell of the smoke remind me of being in a African village. Ann’s been to some
of those same African villages, but her connotations with RV parks are
considerably less romantic. We decided our campground would just be used for
sleeping.
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| Oliver's eyes at Ft. Stevens beach. |
After arriving we headed out to the nearest beach, Ft. Stevens. It was on
a point, and very windy. They boys embraced it, but we found the sand and wind
harsh, or Ann’s word for it was “inhospitable.”
So the next day we sought refuge in the village of Astoria. It’s
a famously beautiful town, and lives up to its reputation. The day started off
right with pastries in a coffee shop where they really knew how to make a Latte
like Ann likes it. Then we went to the top of the Astoria Column on top of the
hill and sailed balsa-wood gliders off it into the woods below. We took a trolley
ride and enjoyed the town.
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| 3 C coffee shop with a hammock chair and monopoly! |
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| Launching a plane off Astoria column. |
While there we visited a place recommended for its smoked
fish. There we found the smoked salmon needed for our next mushroom recipe. The
$40 per pound price tag was a little shocking, but we only needed about a ¼ of
a pound, so we bit the bullet and got some. One more stop at a liquor store to
buy a tiny bottle of brandy to use to sauté the chanterelles and we were good
to go.
The recipe we were planning on was a salmon and mushroom spread
on bruschetta. Ann had thought this might make a better lunch than dinner, and
didn’t really want to cook back in our campground, so we planned on making it
in a city park in Astoria. Instead lunchtime came and went, and we ended up
having a very late lunch of wings and shrimp at a Rogue-brewery that looked out
on ships coming up the Columbia River, having just arrived from China and
Japan.
So the recipe was bumped back to dinner. We decided to give
the beach another try, but this time we picked one a little farther down the
coast, on the other side of Seaside. When we arrived we took a hike among the
giant rocks on the coast, and then another hike in the woods on top of the
bluff overlooking the ocean. 
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| The boys in a typical scene of them helping Ann cook dinner. |
Near the parking lot overlooking the beach was a picnic
table with a fire ring beside it. This was an ideal setting for dinner. The sun
had set early behind a bank of clouds over the sea, so the light was already
getting dim when we started.
I built a fire, and Ann expertly sautéed the mushrooms, and
added the sour cream and salmon, and then toasted the bread over the fire. The
result was an unbelievably delicious meal at what must be one of the most
picturesque settings in the country. And this recipe was no appetizer, it was
made more than we could eat. We ended up giving the last piece to the last
surfer who was coming in from the beach in the dark.
Overall, at the time Ann was saying that this was one of the neatest cooking experiences she has ever had, and I couldn’t argue. The ingredient list
was pricey, but still much less than we would have spent at an average restaurant,
and the result was better than you would get at any restaurant, and we had the
best table in the house. This would have been a grand meal to end the Woods to
Food project on, but we still have a few recipes to go. And I’m happy about
that.
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