Monday December 21st to Friday December 25th - Days 2 through 5 of fly and drive trip to Oregon - Family Time

I won't get into a ton of details about my time with family. I spend most of my time in Eugene as the main point of this entire trip was to see my grandmother.  I did spend once nice evening with her at my parents house playing games and eating dinner. Unfortunately, I couldn't go to her residence since I'm from out of the area and frankly, given the risks, slight though they may be, I'd rather not wander through her group living facility.  Also unfortunately, that 1 evening was the only time we had together during my trip so far other than a few phone calls.  Being 98 is rough.

 

I enjoyed seeing my dad and step-mother for a few days and we had some nice meals together etc.  Christmas Eve I picked up my rental car and in view of the rapidly worsening weather forecasts I asked if there was any non SUV vehicle available with all wheel drive.  I really don't like most of the sub-compact SUV's and I want to keep the MPG as high as possible.  They had one AWD car available and it was a Mercedes A220. It's a fantastic little car and while it added a little bit to the cost, it is a joy to drive.  And the AWD has already been helpful as the next entry will show.

The drive to Redmond on Christmas Eve was lovely and not busy with only minor snow near the summit of the US-20 pass near Hoodoo ski bowl.  My time in Redmond was limited to 2 nights and just 1 useful day.  We stayed up late Christmas Eve chatting which was fun.  

Christmas day we went on a good 3 mile long walk in Redmond's Dry Canyon.  It was cool and it snowed a bit.  My step-dad couldn't join us but he did drop us off on one end and pick us up at the other end so I got to see more of the trail that I have in the past. 

We thought it would be fun to make dinner together for the 2 people who came over to join the 3 of us for Christmas dinner.  With 1 vegetarian, 1 near vegetarian and 3 omnivores, a Turkey or Ham was not going to be a good fit.  I could have probably done more thinking about it earlier but I kind of put it off until the last day before I headed over to Redmond.  I found a recipe for Moroccan Lentil Meatballs with a roasted red pepper sauce.  My mom made a special trip to get several of the ingredients but neither of us initially knew what Harissa was and they couldn't find it for her at Fred Meyer's because they were looking in the spice section where it's really likely to be in the International Foods section. 

As I got started with the recipe, I tried to follow the recipe very precisely since I had never made it before.  We both thought their very powerful Vita-Mix would be suitable as a food processor.  So we stuck all the meatball ingredients in starting with the canned lentils and then proceeded to blend the lentils and only the lentils into a mush. while everything else was motionless.  Ultimately we opted to dump the contents of the mixer into a plastic bowl and use a comical combination of a hand mixer, a potato masher and kitchen shears to mix the ingredients, crumble the croutons (substituting for bread crumbs) and chop up the spinach which the recipe went out of its way to say you needn't chop because the food processor, had it existed, would have instantly taken care of it.  I had looked up Harissa substitution and the last choice of the 3 listed said, if you must, use red pepper flakes. Well we didn't have the preferable first 2 substitution ingredients and we didn't really have red pepper flakes but we did cobble together cayenne pepper and some extra tomato paste to hopefully make it work.  I was so focused on the missing Harissa that once we decided what we were going to use in place of it, I threw it into the meatball mush before realizing that it was actually for the red pepper sauce.  And the long list of ingredients for the meatballs all were supposed to go into the food processor except for the olive oil which was last on the list and was actually for frying the balls in a saute pan.  Thankfully I noticed after adding just 1 of the 2 TB to the mush.  The meatballs were also supposed to have smoked paprika but we didn't even have regular paprika.  We dribbled a few drops of liquid smoke into the mix like it was an explosive chemical because anybody who has used liquid smoke knows it is astonishingly potent and pungent if overused.  If that wasn't enough substitutions and goofs, we also didn't have soy sauce but the Bragg's Amino acids we put in probably were the least of our problems.

Eventually the dinner guests showed up and I did my best to make the best dinner I could from what we had.  The best thing we served was the side of tri-color Couscous with sun dried tomatoes and a bit of lemon juice which we collaborated on.  Overall, it was a very stressful prep process and I would have chose something simpler if I'd known how many road blocks there would have been. but we got through it and Christmas dinner was served.