Dick Jordan

Winding Your Way Across Oregon’s Mid-Willamette Valley Wine Country

By Dick Jordan | September 5, 2017

Both resident and visiting wine drinkers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley are confronted with a Gordian knot-like problem: With over 500 wineries, how can you possibly figure out which to visit and which to skip?

But there’s a simple solution: Rather than spending hours visiting Websites or consulting guidebooks to decide where to go, just pick a few and go taste wine!

Here are five wineries, plus a couple of places to taste beer and eat good food, that I discovered during a three-day, two-night long weekend in mid-valley back in April of this year.

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In Oregon: The Adult “School Lunch”

By Dick Jordan | August 1, 2017

When I was a kid my mother packed a lunch for me to take to school.

And that was a good thing because “The School Lunch” served up in the cafeteria often consisted of “mystery meat” and spinach that was so overcooked it looked as though it had been excreted from an orifice of some alien being from another planet.

Ick!

Today school lunch programs across the U.S. have improved since I turned my face away from them in disgust way back in the mid-20^th century.

For example in Berkeley, California, Alice Waters, owner of the legendary restaurant, Chez Panisse, has campaigned for healthier and more palatable school cafeteria food and created a foundation that “envisions a curriculum integrated with the school lunch service, in which growing, cooking, and sharing food at the table give students the knowledge and values to build a humane and sustainable future.”

And here in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, adults can enjoy a terrific “school lunch,” too.

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National Geographic’s “Rarely Seen: Photographs of The Extraordinary”

By Dick Jordan | July 18, 2017

Ask any reader of National Geographic magazine “Why do you subscribe?” and you’ll be told “It’s the photos, stupid!”

Although the magazine features some of the best-written stories about people and places you’ll find in any periodical, it has always been the photos used to illustrate the stories that has set off “NG” from other monthly publications.

An unexpected re-routing of a weekly hike that a local group that I recently joined does every Friday led me to discover yet more evidence of the preeminence of National Geographic photographers.

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