TILLAMOOK CHEESE AND HOT SAUCE

On our three capes drive yesterday, we entered the town of Tillamook. Everyone knows this place is home to a huge cheese industry. I don’t remember how many people they employ nor the number of dairy farms in the area. We were hungry and asked at the local Eagles Club for a recommendation for a seafood restaurant. We were sent to this ramshackle, roadside, fish stand that sells  basic eats, fish & chips, fish burger, crab salad, fresh oysters, etc. about 10 different items. It’s located directly across the highway from the cheese factory.  On each of the four little tables were three or more choices of hot sauce. I tried three of them on my great cod burger but the Irazu, a volcanic hot sauce made from “ghost peppers” was stunningly good and, I do like it hot. I know there are hotter sauces available, because this place has almost every one made, except, one of our favorites, Marie Sharps Habanero.  Here is a sampling:

When the cook noticed I’d tried the Irazu, he said, ” We have ghost peppers here. We make jerky out of it.”  He brought over a jar of them and carefully offered me a sniff.
I took a light sniff being careful, then the ghost factor kicks in. You don’t smell them at first, then the heat hits your nose. Ghost pepper is just a nickname for some hot peppers that, as the sauce names hint, are potent as in  Death, Pecker Pucker, Hemorrhoid Cleaner, and other colorful names.  What a hoot!  I could kick myself for not picking up  some Irazu, but we have one unopened bottle of  Blitz we bought in Louisiana last year, and our Marie Sharps is 3/4 full yet.
Cheese at Tillamook is excellent stuff.  They allow you to sample it. They don’t go in for anything fancy, just basic cheeses, milk, yogurt, and ice cream.  My last visit to a cheese factory was in Pleasanton, CA. in the 50′s where you watched the curds and whey being hand paddled by a guy with huge muscles. The strong smell of sour milk was enough to make you temporarily give up cheese. Here everything is stainless steel, climate controlled, automated, super clean and fascinating to watch the assembly lines. First formed into 30 pound blocks, then cut to the various sizes. Any uneven bits of cheese, or mistakes in the packaging go into a bin for shredded cheese.
Four  separate lines on this floor cut medium cheddar, sharp cheddar into one and two-pound sizes.  Without stopping the new sized cheese runs into the automatic wrapping and vacuum packaging machines. Each line sends up one package per second. Now that’s a lot of cheese.  We stopped in their restaurant  for a dish of high quality ice cream.
Our last stop of the day, mainly just a drive by, was a look at one of the largest timbered structures in the world. It was used to house blimps in the days when blimps looked like the new mode of air travel.
We’ll return someday to do the air museum housed here.

COPING WITH HARD TIMES PART 5

Coping with hard times today is a world event, as it was before and during World War II. Brunhilde Overstreet, 70, of Sonora remembers those difficult years in West Germany between 1938 and 1944, living in a barn, watching bombs fall and destroy people when the war was going on. "My mother took her jewelry to the mountains to sell for money for food. Old clothes were cut down...we had no garden because we couldn't get seeds. We lived on plants and herbs grown wild. We made tea with mistletoe. One time, all we had was large-kernel corn, the kind fed to animals. It smelled awful and took hours to cook. We lived cold-it was easy to etch flowers in the ice on walls. It was not easy. (Subscribe to "friends & neighbors" at tcfan.net)
Margot Osborn of Murphys also lived through the war years in West Germany as a little girl. Her family lived in a cellar and they ate mostly wild foods. Without electricity, her mother stole coal for the stove and peaches and apples from a nearby orchard during the spring. "We ate wild rabbit with potato peelings and oatmeal. I had bad teeth because we didn't get enough milk. My mother had sold her silver on the black market when we got desperate, where you could buy very little, a bit of sausage and cheese. My clothes were one skirt and one pullover that I got from an aunt. In 1947 my father got a job working for the British in Bonn and he would bring home powdered chocolate in metal boxes. We' d have a treat and sell the rest. Then the Marshall Plan helped us recover. West Germans worked together to rebuild stone by stone, the bombed out buildings."
People who experienced those hard times never forget and we can learn from them as we and our children face thinner times today.