Eating With Food Bloggers in California
travel
What We Ate in Portland, Oregon
I am doing something now called convalescing which, in dictionary terms, means I’m recovering from an illness: specifically, the flu, which hit me like a ton of bricks Monday morning and kept me in bed, motionless, for 48 some-odd hours. Now I’m starting to get the twinkle back in my eye and I’m glad that’s the case because I had so much I wanted to blog about this week! Specifically, this year’s trip to the Pacific Northwest.
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Weary Traveler’s Spaghetti
Last night, before I fell asleep, I tried to remember all the phases of my 21 hours of travel from the previous day.
I took a bus from the Bellingham airport to the Seattle airport where I rode a mini-train to my gate, waited three hours (during which I bought a Snickers bar which I saved for the plane) and as I finally boarded, I was told that my overstuffed suitcase was too overstuffed to fit in the overhead. During the flight, I had a middle seat but it was in an exit row, which is kind of a mixed blessing. I read a George Saunders story in last week’s New Yorker, which I highly recommend. When I landed in Washington, D.C. (the only place I could fly to make it home to New York before January 3rd), I rode another mini-train to the baggage claim where I was told that I was at Dulles airport which is 25 miles from D.C. proper.
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Greek Salad
It’s true that travel is an important component of any burgeoning chef’s education, but sometimes you go somewhere and the lessons don’t stick. For example, I spent ten days last summer in Spain–most of that time in Barcelona–and though we ate some truly extraordinary food, I can’t really say that it changed the way I cook. Yes, I use smoked paprika a bit more freely in my food and I’m very intrigued by the possibilities of pairing chickpeas with seafood, but beyond that? I’m still the same old me in the kitchen.
However, the trip I took in 2005 with my family to Greece (see here), stuck in a very important way: I now make a very good, very authentic Greek salad.
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Let’s Eat Puerto Rico
A funny thing happened when I got back from Barcelona. I received an e-mail that basically said, “Dear Adam: would you like to come to Puerto Rico? We’re having a Wine & Food Festival and will fly you out, put you up and treat you to lots of authentic Puerto Rican food. We just hope you’ll write about it. What do you say?”
Frankly, I didn’t know what to say. What were the ethical implications here? What would my readers think if I took a free trip? Would the benefits of sharing my experience outweigh the cost to my integrity? Do I even have any integrity? What are the responsibilities of a food blogger?
Before I could think myself into a tizzy, the P.R. P.R. person (get that?) happened to mention one other thing that made me toss all ethical concerns aside and say “yes.” What was it?
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The Food At Disney World
There’s high culture and there’s low culture and then there’s Disney World. I grew up going there and going there and going there; seriously, we went there a lot (we lived in Florida, so it was close). When I dream, I dream about theme parks (psychologists: what does that mean?) and the theme parks I dream about most often are Disney theme parks. So when Craig’s movie got into the Florida Film Festival in Orlando and he was hooked up with a hotel room and a car and all I would have to do is pay for a plane ticket there and back, it was hard to resist a trip to Disney World. It’d been almost ten years since I’d been there last and I was immensely curious to see if I’d still think if it was fun or if I’d outgrown it. More importantly, I wanted to write about the food–a strange idea, but a compelling one, perhaps. What’s there to say about the food at Disney World? Actually, there’s plenty.
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Patty Eats Thailand
[Note: My friend Patty is awesome. She’s so awesome that I won’t let her go to Thailand without writing a guest post, so here it is! Thanks Patty. Oh, and check out her website: PatriciaJang.com.]
After consuming untold amounts of green papaya salad, pad thai, and red curry at our local Thai restaurant haunts, Lauren and I were looking forward to trying authentic Thai food (and laying out on the beaches with a Singha) during our trip to Thailand. The food was incredibly cheap, delicious and ubiquitous – Thai people love to eat, and eat well. The streets in Bangkok were literally lined with food stalls hawking sausages, noodles, fried chicken, and all sorts of tropical fruit, but the insane traffic, air pollution, and narrow, bustling sidewalks made for seriously extreme al fresco dining. We also travelled to the north to the mountains in Chiang Mai and flew south to the stunning beaches in Railay, Koh Phi Phi, and Phuket. To simplify the task of describing our culinary travels, I’ve listed my top five favorite eats.
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The Kindness of Food Bloggers
What’s worse than traveling during the holidays? The answer: traveling from one snow storm to ANOTHER snow storm during the holidays.
That’s what I attempted to do yesterday in what may have been the worst travel day of my life (though I’m sure you’ve experienced worse.) Let’s not talk about the 12 hours on the plane, the refueling in Salt Lake City, and the waiting for a gate to open once we arrived in Seattle. Instead, let’s focus on my helpless situation once I got off the plane. You see Craig, whose family lives in Bellingham (two hours north of Seattle), was stuck in Las Vegas because his connecting flight was canceled (he’d left the day before). The Bel-Air Airporter bus which goes from the Seattle Airport to Bellingham was all sold out; the idea of taking a car there was ludicrous (the snow was pummeling down from the sky.) My only option was to spend the night in Seattle and, utterly exhausted, I flipped open my phone and though Craig has many friends who would’ve let me stay with them, my eyes fixed immediately upon a food blogger friend who you all know and love: Molly, aka Orangette.
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