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Posts tagged ‘travel’

Oct 23

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Chewy oatmeal cookies with maple sugar and drizzled icing

And, we’re back! I mean that in two ways; we’re physically back in Eugene at Brett’s parents’ house for about a month before we head abroad again, and that means I’m finally back in a place where I can cook and post recipes. Back in two ways, and I couldn’t be happier about both of them. We are exhausted and happy and it absolutely does not feel like three and a half months have passed since we left Claremont, but we certainly feel every single one of those 16,000+ miles we’ve put on our car since July 9. (16,000 miles! That’s more than halfway around the world, you know.) Our last night on the road we stopped in a tiny town in the middle of Idaho – at least I think it was tiny, we arrived and left in darkness – and splurged on a Best Western that had a hot tub. I honestly don’t know that I’ve ever felt anything so wonderful in my life as the 20 minutes I spent there. We had driven 14 hours that day, my head was pounding, and nothing would let me forget that I was only one day away from sleeping in my own bed.

But now we’re here! We’re here for a full month so Brett can do his graduate school applications and so we can prepare for the next four plus months abroad. And I will cook. Oh boy, will I cook. Unpacking my stand mixer today felt almost as good as that hot tub in the middle of Idaho. There are only four days in the last month that we didn’t spend more than 6 hours in the car (think about that for a moment – seriously, think about that), and among the many, many other things I did to pass the time in the car I made a fairly lengthy list of things I want to cook while we’re here in one place and with all of our kitchen belongings.  Hopefully I’ll be sharing a lot of them here, a combination of things I love that I’ve never gotten around to posting (like butternut squash soup with tarragon) and things that have been on my to-do list for a long time (like paté and croissants) and things I dreamed up while we were driving back and forth across a continent.

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Oct 7

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Montreal: The Food

Of all the places we planned to visit on our cross-country road trip across Canada, we looked forward to the food in Montreal more than anywhere else.  Vancouver and Prince Edward Island were also often noted as excellent travel spots as far as food was concerned, and we had amazing food experiences there as well as Quebec City, but we knew Montreal would have the sort of French and French-inspired cuisine we had loved so much on our trip to France a few years ago along with a good selection of hip new restaurants, traditional Canadian food, and markets full of fresh, local, seasonal foods.

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Unfortunately, our calendar did not match up with our desires to eat as well as it might have. As in France (as in many places in the world), Montreal’s restaurant scene is mostly shut down on Sundays and Mondays, the only two nights we would be in the city. But if anything that actually helped us in making eating choices, since my large, researched list of potential meal sources was shortened to just a few when we figured out what would be open while we were there. Read more

Sep 21

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A night at The Bachelor Farmer

I may have grown up with a vaguely Scandinavian heritage in an overwhelmingly Scandinavian region of the United States, but my experience with the foods of that area of the world is limited at best. Sure, pickled herring was on the buffet table of every family holiday as far back as I can remember and I’m a sucker for fresh lefse rolled with butter and sugar – oh, and I suppose I’ve had the meatballs at the Ikea restaurant time and again – but that’s mainly the extent of it. So Brett and I decided to wrap up our few glorious weeks in the Twin Cities with dinner and drinks at The Bachelor Farmer, one of the city’s most talked-about new restaurants. According to its website it “draws inspiration from contemporary Nordic cuisine,” and with that I would heartily agree.

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Sep 9

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A day at the Great Minnesota Get-Together

I want to write something about the food at the Minnesota State Fair. I can’t not write something about the food at the Fair. I grew up going to the Fair every year, this Fair famous for its food on a stick and for its long-standing focus on traditional food-related fair activities, like agriculture and livestock and food preservation and baking contests. But I hadn’t been in over a decade, and my interest in the food is so much more intense than it was before. And it was Brett’s first time, which meant we needed to eat our way through good coverage of the Fair basics – the Pronto Pups and the cheese curds and the Sweet Martha’s cookies and some stuff on sticks – as well as the new and the more sophisticated options.

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Jul 18

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Oregon Country Fair: The Food

We spent this last weekend at the Oregon Country Fair. The Fair is a beast which requires a full post of its own to even remotely begin to describe, and as such you should immediately head to the post I wrote about it on the site we’ve started to document this crazy year of travel and adventure.

Because here I just want to talk about the food for a bit. Ahhhhh, Country Fair food. As big a draw for me as the costumes, the music, and the general ridiculousness of the whole thing. As most festivals and fairs are, the Country Fair is packed with a huge variety of food booths and stands, the vast majority of which are full of things delicious and worth waiting for in the long lines that sneak through the Fair’s paths for most of the day.  Some booths are Eugene-area regulars that show up regularly at farmers’ markets, the Holiday Market, and other community events. Some are Fair-only setups, once each year. Some are outposts of classic Eugene-area restaurants and food companies, many of which serve special Fair-specific items. (For example: Springfield Creamery, maker of beloved Nancy’s yogurt and a veritable culinary institution in Eugene, sells at the Fair items like ice cream, frozen yogurt, and other products they otherwise don’t sell anywhere, in stores or anywhere else. Most notably, ice cream sandwiches. Delicious, delicious ice cream sandwiches. More on that later.)

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Food options range from simple salads and smoothies to extravagant sandwiches and from classic Northwest-style natural foods to ethnic cuisines of almost any sort.  As Brett and I are wont to do in almost any eating situation, we shared almost everything we ate, in this particular case to make sure we each were able to try as many things as possible.  Here’s a rundown of everything we ate at the Fair (plus our own cereal for breakfasts and other food for snacks), with notes on the most spectacular: Read more

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