Why hello there, and welcome to a new segment for the site, “Trail Mix” a name I came up with literally off the cuff at midnight, so we’ll see if it stays. Sorry for the delay, this was meant to go up on Thursday (editor’s note: meaning June 10th. That’s how late this is) but my schedule is a mess. Anyway, the idea is to give you a brief overview of some of the things I ate on my recent trip to Bend. It’s not something I normally do for reasons I think I’ve touched on, but I’ll quickly revisit. So let’s get a DISCLAIMER!

Disclaimer: I am not a restaurant reviewer, I am not being paid to talk about any of these places, and frankly, I’ve never been super happy with the idea of reviewing a restaurant. My family are HIGHLY critical people: Nate and I have joked to cast-mates that “our mother is watching the play, I assure you, there will be at least a page of notes”, a joke they find funny, and then a different level of funny when, after the show, our mom says “that was a good show…did you fuck up your line in the tea scene? I thought so. Why do the flowers look flat on the right side of the stage? How did you guys stick them to the wall? The daughter’s dress looks a little scandalously cut for a woman of her standing at that time. Was that the only option you had?” And so on. The best description I can give is is that we have a low floor, and a high ceiling: it’s easy to get us to accept things “this is fine”, it’s very hard to get us to “this is amazing”.

So, what did I eat in/around Bend?

Thursday

Nate and I drove down, and I ate a bunch of garbage. Did you know there’s Taco Bell flavored Sunflower seeds?

Your scientists were too concerned with if they could…

They taste mostly like cumin and salt, but after your first handful or two, you start to get some of the nuances. And kidney damage, because this bag is like, triple your daily sodium. Mix those with some soda, and a bunch of sour fruit candies, and a quick stop to get McDonald’s breakfast burritos because we had a six hour drive and we had to leave 20 minutes after I woke up. We skipped lunch, and for dinner, had pizza. The pizza was from a place in Bend, and it was perfectly adequate. I didn’t take a picture of it. Live in the moment, nerds.

Friday

On our way to the rapids trip, we grabbed a breakfast bagel sandwich from the grocery store, and drove to Maupin to hit the rapids. I had to leave my phone in the car (Because you know, bringing a phone on a rapids trip is an easy way to say “I would like to not have a phone anymore.”) so no pics of our lunch burger. Dinner was…something. Look, between the 12 guys there, we drank 180 beers in the first 2 days. Mathematically, that means I had something like 10 Coors that night. Oh, yeah, it was fish tacos.

Saturday

I was amused to find the Obama-Biden Mysteries for sale in town.

If you’re wondering why I was at a bookstore, you really don’t know me all that well.

Which, if you want something cheesy, are a fun two-book series taking place in 2017 where Joe Biden and Barack Obama team up to solve mysteries. Imagine the Hardy Boys by way of all those “Old Guys doing a Heist” movies that were a thing a while back. The first one is about Joe Biden’s favorite train conductor being MURDERED.

We skipped lunch (by which I mean “we had breakfast at 11:30, and then were doing stuff until 6:45”) And went to a nearby restaurant for dinner where I was BLOWN AWAY by the General Tso’s Fried Cauliflower.

Not a phrase I utter often.

Seriously, Sunriver Brewing Company, where we went for dinner, had this dish on the menu, so I snagged it as an app for the table, and it was dynamite. It’s neither as sweet nor as spicy as a more common General Tso’s, coming closer to something like Vietnamese caramel chicken, with a salty-savory flavor as the backbone for the dish. But it was EASILY the most interesting thing I ate, and the thing I am most interested in figuring out how to replicate/reproduce/relocate.

Which is not to say the burger I had wasn’t good, but it ended up kind of how I thought it would: the burger was actually the one I referenced reading about in last week’s post with like, 7 boldly flavored components, and all together, they just cancelled each other out to a sort of “vaguely spicy, vaguely meaty burger”.

Did I like it? Sure. Would I order it again? Absolutely. Could I tell you anything interesting about it? …One of the bites in the middle got a pretty solid hit of Dijon that surprised me?

Sunday

Nothing of real culinary importance happened. I cooked the breakfast burritos we covered two weeks ago, and we had garlic bread and freezer lasagna for dinner. I watched (most of) Hot Shots for the first time.

Monday

On the drive home, some kind of cool stuff happened. Firstly, Nate and I stopped at Schlotzky’s, a sandwich chain that I had only vaguely heard of from Nate talking about hearing their ad. Turns out? Pretty good. They do sandwiches on a round sourdough bun, instead of the more typical longer loaf. Bread’s crispy in an really interesting way, and the sandwich is remarkably hefty.

I am fairly sure it was at least a 2 pound sandwich. Like, I have fairly big hands, and this filled them.

Then, in Gresham (a suburb of Portland), we stopped at a Food Truck/Cart Pod, because I think they’re cool, and kind of uniquely Oregon. Is that accurate? I don’t know, I haven’t looked into it all that much, and it’s too fucking late for me to care. But a basic summary: you know food trucks? Imagine a little lot/structure where like 10 of them all congregate, essentially making like, a modular food court: trucks can change lots, but they all share a common seating area, public restrooms, and sometimes bars set up in the shared space/create the shared space, in a symbiotic team-up.

So Stephen got a gyro for lunch and tikka masala for dinner later, Nate got California rolls, and I got a vegetable korma with rice and cheese naan, which took long enough to make (Like, maybe 12-15 minutes, nothing crazy) that Nate got and ate half of his sushi, so I only ate a couple bites of the piping-hot korma, before giving up and just loading it in the car to be reheated later.

Which I did.

The korma was very nice, as was the cheese naan, and the trip was very fun. Now let me pass out so I can upload this tomorrow and then cook and write-up something in one day because my schedule is a total mess. (Editor’s note: Oh man, did Past Jon underestimate how true that was. He was writing this Saturday/Sunday 12/13)

MONDAY: LET ME FIGURE OUT WHAT I WANNA DO. IT MIGHT BE A TACO, A BURGER, A BREAD, OR SOMETHING ELSE.

THURSDAY: MAN, I WANT TO WATCH SOMETHING AND TALK ABOUT IT, BUT I’M RUNNING AROUND TOO MUCH.