Monday, May 22, 2006
Mighty Day of Many Meat Treats
I admit that I did sort of trick Pat into taking a side trip to Cle Elum on our way home from Lake Chelan, Washington, but any ill will he felt at being deceived was obliterated once he realized cookies and smoked meats were to be had. After locating my Italian great grandfather’s old tavern on the main drag, we walked across the street to Owens Meats. I tried a sample and immediately asked for a pound of their smoked Alaskan white salmon, but Pat, who is all too familiar with my various shortcomings, not the least of which is my grizzly-bear-like lack of self-control when it comes to cured fish, quickly doubled the order. I was easily upsold to Owens’ landjaeger, which, according to the kid behind the counter, is a German sausage with Swiss origins and popular with hunters and outdoorsmen throughout history because it doesn’t require refrigeration. He described the process Owens uses to make theirs, and it involves--if I remember correctly--grinding, pressing, seasoning, stuffing, smoking, and somewhere in there, fermenting. That’s the part that really got my attention--the fermenting. Why would anyone do that to meat unless it tasted really, really good? So I stepped right up and bought a sack, knowing full well that if I extended this line of logic I might find myself eagerly purchasing sausage packed in the butcher’s socks, if, by chance, they offered something like that for sale. Luckily, they didn’t appear to, but it’s not like I asked outright or anything.
We walked across the street to the Cle Elum Bakery, which opened in 1906 and reportedly hasn’t cooled its ovens once in over a hundred years. My own Grandma Katie bought torchiette cookies there as a young girl with her friends. She said they would sip milk through them like a straw. I decided I needed a sack of those, too, and they were just as tasty as Grandma remembered.
As we headed south, Pat dug out one of the Chelan apples to snack on while I sucked on SweeTARTS and--somewhat to his chagrin--carved off a piece of a sausage with my pocketknife. I asked him if he wanted some, but he just gave me a disgusted look. At first I thought he was annoyed I was eating it in the car, but then he muttered something about not knowing where my knife had been, which I have to admit made me stop and think for a moment. I quickly ran down in my head a list of the grosser scenarios that might require a pocket-sized tool that can cut, saw, dig, scrape, or poke, but determined that nothing I had done with my knife recently could be any worse than the fermenting that had happened to that sausage, and thus I resumed my lunch.
Somewhere past Shaniko, Oregon, the weather took a turn for the worse. I’m not sure if it was just that big wide open space capped by dark ominous clouds that tipped me off, but about five minutes after I uttered, “Pat, we gotta get out of here...,” it started raining so hard we lost sight of the road, and just when it seemed like it couldn’t get any worse, the rain turned to gravel-sized hail. We inched along with our hazard lights on until we finally found a wide spot in the road where other people had pulled off to wait out the storm. It finally let up after what seemed like several minutes, but the hail had made such a racket that we were both surprised to find the car unscathed.
When we got to Bend it was still early, so we decided to pass on mountain oysters at the Tumalo Feed Company, where Pat first sampled the delicacy that has inspired many a testicle festival across the West. Instead we continued south to Mount Shasta, where we arrived in time for homemade ravioli at the family-owned Piemont restaurant, where the food is so good that I once ate four dinners in a row here. The owner, Judy, told me she can make up to 160 dozen ravioli in a few hours using an ancient-looking machine to roll the dough. (I did some figuring and that’s roughly the same amount of Piemont ravioli I’ve eaten in my lifetime.) Our meal, complete with minestrone, antipasti, spumoni, and coffee was deeply satisfying and came to about $30 for the both of us. Where else can you get a homemade dinner for that price? If you know, tell me!
When we got home, I learned from my mom that the Owens Meat people are our distant cousins. I’m hoping they have some sort of family discount because, thanks to them, I’ve already developed a wicked landjaeger habit and will be looking to score some more fermented meat cheap in the very near future.
