8-18-2016 SNOHOMISH, WA

On our way out of Blaine on 8-16, we intended to make two stops at places we had spotted on previous days traveling back and forth. 

The first place is Pleasant Valley Dairy.   Signs along the road read, “artisan cheeses.”  The proprietor and artist, Joyce, greeted us with a big, friendly smile behind her little counter wearing boots and a big thick plastic apron in which the tiny lady could possibly have drowned. 

She showed us a map of Washington that pinpoints all of the cheese-making dairies in the state, particularly those that participate in competitions for quality of their products.  Next, she laid a menu in front of us and starting at the top, sliced a piece of each of the cheeses for us to taste.  Normally, she said, she has an order sheet for the customer to mark on and take notes but she was out of them so we had to proceed from the memory bank installed in our taste buds.  I have been to wineries and done the wine-tasting procedure before, marking up a sheet, but I don’t think either Rob or I have ever been to a dairy that has “cheese tasting.” 

Her cheese artistry specializes in various goudas, smoky, provence herbs, jalapeno, peppercorn, smoky jalapeno and fines herbes.  In addition, she makes a wonderful mellow cheese called farmstead and one called mutschli, which if you let it sit and age a bit, begins to taste a bit like parmesan and can be shredded and sprinkled on pasta.  When Joyce gave us each a slice of jalapeno gouda, she said that we would at first experience the taste of the gouda and then, “in about 12 seconds you will feel the heat.”  She had the timing down perfectly right.  Well, what could we do?  We loaded up the scales with about ten ½ lb. blocks of cheese and walked away the richer as Joyce headed back to the barn to tend her cows while chatting with her chickens.  What a delightful experience!

Secondly, we were determined to stop in at the enormous barns of the Barleans Fishery.  We have stared at this place many times in passing.  The signs boast fresh local clams, cod and salmon. 

At first, the gigantic domestic refrigerator in this new beast seemed silly to us, but now we realize that the freezer begs to be loaded up with fresh, wild-caught sockeye salmon slabs, smoked salmon steak, chunks of halibut, calamari steaks and a bag of great big shrimp. 

This is not a pretty, tidy butcher shop with fish behind glass.  We stepped in onto a wet concrete floor where employees are dressed in aprons, rubber gloves and boots and stand before great big tubs with water jets flowing into them.  The fish, newly filleted, lay upon trays of ice and a wide variety are also vacuum-sealed and stacked in a wall-sized freezer on one side.  Off to the side is the scale and the till on a small table space that was cleared and dried.  The lady bagged up our treasures in gigantic, thick plastic sacks, we took out a second on the house and hiked back to the beast, happy and weighed down with heavy sacks.

We are now camped in #1 son, Rick, and Trina’s back yard in Snowhomish, WA for a couple days of fun with the DeLaMare family.  Kona The Dog (our granddaughter) sits on our patio mat doing perpetual guard duty.  “All is well and safe,” Kona is thinking.  Tonight, family and friends gather here for pizza and the start of the football season with a Seahawks game.  All right-y then, life is good!