Getting the flavor of...Oregon’s truffle country

Oregon’s truffle country

We’re standing in a cold, dense forest with our dogs, each of us hunting the elusive Oregon truffle, said Ted Katauskas in Sunset. Every year during the last week of January, gourmands descend on Eugene for the Oregon Truffle Festival—“three days of unrestrained fungal madness”—to celebrate harvest time in an area now recognized as one of the world’s best truffle regions. There’ll be time enough later for the seminars, wine tastings, and truffle-centric meals. On this chilly Saturday morning, foraging is the mission. “The air is heavy with the scent of pine” as the dogs get to work. The poodles and the Chihuahua in our cohort prove of little use, but the Lagotto Romagnolos take the lead, following some “programmed instinct” as they begin sniffing in circles until they locate a fir tree worth digging under. Soon enough they come up with their prizes—“mud-caked balls of earth” that are worth up to $400 a pound.

The ‘City of Cowboys’

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Fort Worth “prides itself on being a city of culture,” especially cowboy culture, said Eileen Ogintz in the Chicago Tribune. You can find Michelangelo’s first painting in this former cattle town, as well as the nation’s second-largest modern-art collection. But it was inside the Cattle Raisers Museum, part of the “fantastic” Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, that I got my first taste of what I’d come for—the chuck-wagon days when a pancake was called a “saddle blanket” and coffee was “belly wash.” Lessons in the history of cattle rustling continue next door at the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, where your young’un can try her skills on a mechanical bull. Of course, cowboy life can’t be fully experienced in the museums. So be sure to stop by a local honky tonk, book a room outside town at Beaumont Ranch, or just head down to Stockyards Station, where twice a day cowboys re-enact a small longhorn drive.