Local Eating on the Coast

Boy, did we have some great meals over Memorial Day weekend while we were at the coast. On Sunday, we drove up to Astoria to go to the farmer's market. We brought home lettuce, asparagus, and yellow fin potatoes. On the way back to Manzanita, Ardie spotted a sign for fresh seafood. Following the signs down a back road, we came to Joe's Seafood Market and Smokehouse. We chose some fillets of fresh troll-caught Pacific salmon. Grady cooked the salmon on the charcoal grill, we roasted the potatoes, steamed the asparagus and made a salad with the greens. And I'm sure it wasn't just the influence of the champagne and pinot noir when we all declared the salmon to the best we'd had in a long time. So moist and delicious.

As good as it was, we didn't finish all the salmon. So, Monday morning Karla made omlettes for us with the leftover salmon, chunks of the potatoes, mushrooms, and a Willamette Valley farmstead cheddar. Plus, I had made a compote with the local rhubarb I had gotten the previous week at one of our Portland markets.

Earlier in the weekend, we'd had a salad with lettuce from our garden and some other local greens that Karla brought for a dinner. Grady and I had stopped at the new pie shop in Manzanita and brought home a marionberry pie for dessert. It was as tasty as it was pretty:
And, just so you don't think that all we did was eat, here are a few pictures from some of our other sight-seeing in Astoria. These next two are the famous Astoria column. It was built on the highest hill in the town and is about 125 feet tall with scenes from the Lewis and Clark expedition all around it. The artist used a technique called 'sgraffito' - a combination of painting and engraving in plaster. Here are Ardie and Grady in front of it - in the short view and the longer view:
Looks kind of like the leaning tower of Astoria here:
The bridge that crosses the Columbia River from Astoria to Washington:

So, there you have it - my latest report on local foods, a new vocabulary word for the day, and some goofy pictures of a phallic-looking landmark on the Oregon coast.