For us, the best part of traveling is checking out local restaurants. On a recent work trip to Portland, OR, which Luke tagged along on for fun, we found some great restaurants and ate some really good food!

Let’s start with breakfast. Obviously, there is Voodoo Doughnuts. Of the 20 or so different crazy flavors, we tried several: Bubble Gum (REALLY tasted like bubble gum!), Bacon (with maple glaze…tasted like pancakes with syrup and bacon), Capt’n Crunch (ultra sugary), and Old Fashion with maple glaze. It was quite an experience! On the less sugary side, Pazzo Bakery made a delicious brioche roll. Order two because one won’t be enough!

Of course you will need something to wash down that doughnut. One block from Voodoo is Stumptown Coffee Roasters. It is great place to grab a seat and a cup and watch a mix of office workers, tourists and Portland-ites stream through. Most importantly they make a great cup of coffee.

Saint Honore Boulangerie has delicious food for breakfast, lunch or snack. We stopped in for lunch and had a prosciutto sandwich. I wish there had been time to try all their breads and pastries…they looked amazing! One afternoon we went to Southpark for lunch. They had a great lunch deal of 1/2 sandwich, soup or salad, and a cookie for under $10! Won’t find that in DC! I tried the smoked pork loin sandwich and it was delicious!

We were fortunate to have two amazing dinners at two of Portland’s top restaurants, both of which specialized in local, organic food and were beautiful settings. The first, Veritable Quandry Restaurant was right on the water and close to City Hall. Apparently it’s one of Portland’s “power” restaurants. The roasted wild mushroom and baby spinach salad was amazing, as was the NY strip steak with grilled Abalone mushrooms and black truffle butter. Definitely one of my favorite meals of 2009.

The last night we dined at Urban Farmer in the “pickle room,” surrounded by jars of pickled everything. It was pretty cool. Again, the food was amazing. I have never had oysters as good as they were here. Main course was Sweet Briar Farms pig with blue cheese, arugula and figs. Another favorite meal!

Portland has tons of food carts! We didn’t have time to do any sampling, but there are tons of options. In DC carts mostly sell either hot dogs or…hot dogs. In Portland they seem to have every cuisine available.

With all this food we needed to do something to exercise. Luckily Luke found Ground Kontrol, an arcade filled with vintage arcade games and pinball machines. After 5 pm they even serve beer. Best workout ever!

Pasta Puttanesca is one of our favorite pasta dishes. It’s basically our “go-to” pasta recipe. The other day we were getting ready to make it and went to cookography to look up the recipe, only to discover that we’ve never posted it! A serious oversight on our part!

Recently, the Washington Post did a great article on pastas and sauces and put together a handy chart for pairing different pasta shapes with the appropriate sauces.

Normally we buy Barilla Plus multi-grain pasta, but decided to spice it up a bit and went for a fun shape. We bought Campanelle, which means “bellflowers” in Italian and has fluted edges and a hollow center–perfect for capturing the puttanesca sauce. In general, short sturdy shapes with hollows and ridges, such as rigatoni, penne and tortiglioni, work well with robust, chunky sauces and rich cream sauces.

“Ga-wow, this is the most amazing dinner ever!” – Luke, pretending to be Jose Andres

I was in LA for work this weekend and I got to check out Jose Andres’s newest restaurant, The Bazaar, which is in a brand new hotel called SLS. It was truly an amazing and entertaining experience. I wasn’t the only one having fun, everyone there seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Dinning these days seems to be an exercise in formality, a show that goes through the motions without anyone enjoying it. Amuse bouches are no longer fun surprises, but are expected if you go someplace “new and innovative.” Dining is not normally a shared experience, one that transcends the divide of tables. Each table ends up being an island of isolation.

None of this is the case at The Bazaar. Eating there ends up being an experience shared by all diners. I sat at the tapas bar for dinner, and the people sitting next to me started telling me how much amazed they were with the whole experience. Carolyn and I first got to experience something similar when we ate the Jose’s MiniBar, which is a six-seat bar with a fixed menu and all the food prepared right before you. Everyone at the bar eats the same food at the same time–some of it interesting and unusual and all of it delicious. The whole group of strangers are all trying something new for the first time, together. The Bazaar manages to capture this experience and expand it to the whole restaurant.

The food is complemented by a whimsical interior design that looks trendy without being at all pretentious. I ate in the bar area of Rojo, which has dark wood, chalkboards with Picasso-like drawings, and low hanging lights. I had dessert in the Patisserie area, which resembles something out of Marie Antoinette or a scene from Alice in Wonderland. Everything seems enthusiastic and over sized, much like Jose’s hand gestures and way of speaking. It all works, and none of it seems out of place.

The tapas served in the Rojo y Blanco section pull from Jose Andres other restaurants. A large number of the traditional tapas come from the menu at Jaleo. A tzatziki and flatbread tapa would fit right in at Zatinya and a number of ceviche and latin dishes seem to be influenced by Cafe Alantico and Oyamel.

Ok, enough rambling…on to the food!

• The Best Gin and Tonic – Mine was made with Hendrick’s gin and Fever Tree Tonic. What made this fun is that they added aromatics, some sort of blossom, juniper berries and a cool round, extra large ice cube. “Best” is a strong statement, but this was a strong drink and I think it stands up to the claim.
• Olives Two Ways – This was a two part dish. The first part was a traditional serving of olives, each stuffed with roasted pepper, a fillet of anchovy and topped with orange zest and micro basil. All of this is drizzled with olive oil. The combination is sweet, salty and savory, all at the same time.
  The second part are bubbles of olively goodness, with a liquid center. The center is some sort of olive and olive oil puree. It is surprising at first, but yummy. They are served out of a glass “olive” jar on to a spoon.
• “Miso” Linguini – This is a fun dish. Miso soup has some sort of gelatin added to it, then it is ladled out into a thin layer to harden. The “soup” is then cut into thin noodles and topped with fish eggs. The flavor doesn’t pop, but it is a lot of fun.

• Philly Cheese steak – This was a very fun dish. It is pretty much an inside out cheese steak. The first layer is very thinly sliced and very rare wagyu beef. The beef is wrapped around “air bread” which seems to be a hollow cracker, bread-like thing. The air bread is filled with a warm and gooey cheese that puts cheese wiz to shame. This dish walks the fine line between meathead and art house sophistic, and does it amazing well.
• Tortilla Reinvented – This was one of my favorite dishes, it is simply amazing. It is a traditional tortilla, reimagined. The base is a soft boiled quail egg yolk. It is topped with a foam made from potatoes, all of which is topped with little potato crunchies. It may sound a little weird, but it all worked together so well. This dish is both savory and delicate at the same time. It was also only $3, I wish I could get one every morning instead of a cup of coffee.
• Tuna Roll – Ceviched tuna, wrapped with thinly sliced avocado. This may not have been my favorite dish, but it still was very good.
• Caprese Salad – This is another great dish and so much more fun than a traditional Caprese salad. It has all the makings of a regular one, but all the flavors are amped. The tomatoes are blanched and peeled and are either very flavorful or juiced with some tomato puree. They are extra tomatoey. Instead of balls of mozzarella, there were bubbles of mozzarella, little globules filled with liquid mozzarella. There were basil leaves, but they were micro basil leaves and there was pesto to really bring home the basil flavor. All of this was topped with small air bread croutons.

Some how after all of that, I was still hungry. For my final dish I ordered the Sausage with White Beans. This is one of my favorite dishes at Jaleo. At Jaleo, the dish is small sausages served on a bed of white beans. At The Bazaar it is one large, homemade white sausage served over roasted white beans. I am not sure what they do to those beans, but they are amazing. I am guessing they are cooked cassoulet style, with lots of fat, and some mushrooms thrown in for good effect. The sausage was perfectly cooked, browned on the outside, but still moist in the center.

My journey at The Bazaar was not over yet. I was escorted to the Patisserie section which looks like some weird fantasy land, but has a very cool vibe. For dessert I had the Chocolate Stick, which is chocolate mousse on top of a bed of crunchies, dipped in chocolate or something fun like that. I accompanied this with a North Coast Imperial Stout, which worked perfectly with the chocolate and the bubbles helped break up the heaviness of the desert.

We have to thank our friends at Foodbuzz for tickets to the Washington, DC International Wine and Food Festival. It was the 10th annual and, while we’ve each lived in DC for close to 10 years, neither of us had been before. The wine festival was a two day event (we went the second day) with lots of booths pouring lots of different wines. And lots of people. LOTS of people.

The sheer mass of people was the main drawback to the event. There were times you could barely walk down an isle or get close to a booth to sample the wine. There was also a rediculously long line to sample small cubes Cabot cheese. Cabot cheese is good and all, but not worth standing in a 50-person line.

Despite the excessive crowds, we were able to sample some really good wine. (Note: There are no bottles for sale at this event.) The Argentinian wines were a stand out, including the malbecs from Luigi Bosca and Don Miguel Gascon. We’ve also been into zinfandels recently and sampled two delicious ones at the festival – Alexander Valley Vineyards Redemption Zin and Klinker Brink Old Ghost Old Vine Zinfandel. The latter is from 90 year old vines.We also liked the wines from Evergreen Vineyards from Oregon; we’ll be visiting Oregon in April and hope to do a little wine tour.

To cleanse our palete, we headed over to the Dogfish Head booth and sample some Midus Touch and 60 Minute IPA. The Dogfish Head booth was right near McDonalds, which was giving out samples of the new McCafe drinks…hot chocolate, lattes etc. (DCer’s – supposedly the McDonalds on New York Ave is already serving up these cafe drinks and the one at 18th and Columbia will be soon.)

We found a few delicious bites of food to sustain us throughout the afternoon. Samples from Biscotti Goddess were yummy…and with 12 different biscotti flavors, there is something for everyone. Tillen Farms had several different samples of pickled vegetables, including green beans, asparagus and peppers. While the Pear Bureau Northwest wasn’t giving out pear samples, we did pick up a handy pear, cheese and wine selector that lets you know what kind of pear, cheese and wine go together.

The Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute had salmon pasta salad to sample and recipe cards for different Alaskan seafood…can’t wait to try some of the recipes. Todd’s Dirt Seasoning Company had tasty seasons that can be used as a dry rub or to make dips. Finally, the Embassy of Chile was offering samples of an exotic Chilean fruit…Carica, which grows in the semi-desert valleys in the northern part of the country. According to the little pamphlet, Carica goes well with prosciutto and cheese. They also had some canned razor clams (in the photo above), which were really good drizzled in olive oil.

Bottom line: Some very good wine and tasty food to sample. Too many people. Probably not worth the $85 ticket price.

Salads need not be limited to just lunch or an appetizer, they can be a meal! I threw this salad together one day after work when I was feeling too lazy to make anything. It was simply some of that lettuce that comes in those plastic boxes, an avocado and a can smoked tuna in oil. As I said, this was a salad that was a meal. The best part was that it didn’t take any special planning.

Can you guess what this is?
Give up?
Well, it is a grain of salt from Bali! The salt is shaped like a little hollow pyramid. I zoomed in 60x with a toy digital microscope I have to get a better look. Below is a picture of the salt grain, but only zoomed in 10x. You can see its shape a lot better and the hollow indentation. The shape gives each grain a nice crunch.

In Washington, DC there are a bunch of places to find products from Big Tree Farms. There is only one place in Bali, however, where you can get their products. A little challenge makes everything more fun though! I had a free afternoon so I got a car and headed 45 minutes north to the Bali Spirit Kafe in Ubud. Ubud takes pride in their arts scene and is sort of Earthy crunchy and funky…and so is the Kafe. The Kafe also seems to be a bit of an ex-pat hang out, catering to travelers looking for a little inner renewal and other zen improvements.

Bali is a very tropical place and the heat coupled with the humidity can be a little draining. Once I made it to Ubud, I got a seat outside on the porch at the Kafe and ordered a Vanilla Lime Soda, which is vanilla bean syrup & Bali lime with soda. The soda hit the spot and helped refresh.

After being on travel for a week, I was looking for a bit of comfort food; food which didn’t make you think. The Kafe has lots of healthy, whole grain salads and organic foods, but sometimes you just need a burger. Luckily the Kafe came through in a big way. Their burger is made from local free range beef and I got mine topped with sauteed mushrooms and onions. I don’t know if it was my craving for a burger, but this is one of the best burgers I have had.

Of course I needed to order some desert, so I got a banana spice smoothie which is a banana smoothie topped with nutmeg and hazelnut. In order to make sure I left totally full, I also ordered Bubur Injin, a traditional Balinese dish of black rice topped with sweet coconut milk.

The truth is that I wasn’t there for eating food, no matter how good it was, I was there to buy some Big Tree Farm products and some Jam which they served at my hotel. The Kafe has a small shop which sells local products and donates the profits to local charities. Luckily they had everything I was looking for and more. I had a great meal and left with some great souvenirs!

The Kafe’s website has directions, in case you are in the neighborhood, and menus.

Sometimes you have to make the best of a bad situation…and a 9 hour layover is a bad situation. I was in Indonesia for work and on the way back I had a layover in Japan. After an overnight flight into Narita, Japan, I got off the plane and saw that it was drizzling outside…perfect weather for soup. Since I had so much time, I headed into the town of Narita. It is a popular place to visit if you are stuck with a layover, so it is pretty easy to get around. One great comfort food is Miso Ramen, which is ramen in a strong miso broth. Miso ramen is definitely not your typical wimpy miso soup. This stuff sticks to your ribs.

I stopped by Ramen Bayashi which is pretty popular with international flight crews. When I was there it was almost all foreigners…then again I was there at 11:30 am which is probably a little early for a local to be having lunch. Not too surprisingly, they mostly had ramen on the menu.

There are tons of different styles of ramen soups, and you can top each with different fixings. I searched around for a recipe that gets close to the bowl I had in Japan. For the noodles, you want to try to find something close to a yakisoba or chow mein type of noodle.

I used a brown miso because that is all I had on hand, but I have seen recipes that call for using both brown and white miso. It sounds like a good idea and will probably add a bit more depth. Using homemade broth will add more flavor, but I am lazy so I never have it around.

We just got back from a week in San Francisco and Napa Valley and ate such amazing food and drank delicious wine that our trip deserves a recap!

First stop in San Francisco was Zuni Cafe for appetizers of sliced heirloom tomatoes and marinated olives. We continued our walk to Nopa for a dinner of little fried fish, pork chop (Carolyn), duck confit (Luke) and pumkin sage souffle. Completely delicious!

The next day we visited Liguria Bakery for some fresh foccacia (amazing!) and then on to Mama’s for an omelette with pancetta, mushrooms, fresh basil, tomato, and garlic jack cheese (Carolyn) and chocolate and cinnamon french toast with fresh berries and bananas (Luke). YUM!

For lunch we hit up the Ferry Building and shared a salami sandwich from the Acme Bread Company. Walking around in the afternoon we stumbled upon the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory. Dinner was at Kokkari, a Greek restaurant. We shared appetizers of favosalata and tirosalata (different feta dips) with homemade grilled pita bread. We got the special of the day which was lamb from a rotisserie. It was good, but I bet the braised lamb shank would have been better.

On day three we drove to Napa and visited some vineyards with friends – Gundlach Bundschu, Ravenswood and Viansa. Dinner was at Ad Hoc, a Thomas Keller restaurant in Yountville. It’s a set menu, different each day, served family style. The menu consisted of frisee & watercress salad, Snake River Farms pork loin, Rouge et Noir camembert, and citrus pound cake. The food completely blew us away! Amazing!

Day four started with a visit to Domaine Chandon for some champagne tasting. Afterward we visited a couple of wineries – Goosecross Cellars, PlumpJack, and Regusci – and had some wine, cheese, salami and bread for lunch. Dinner was more casual that night – we went to Taylor’s Automatic Refresher for some

great burgers. Breakfast most mornings and afternoon snacks usually consisted of some fresh bread and/or pasteries from Buchon Bakery (another Thomas Keller creation). Day five we went hiking, then stopped at the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena for a looksy, then lunch at Model Bakery, which had really yummy panini sandwiches. After, we stopped by Peju for a wine tasting.

Our last day in Napa Valley/San Francisco we visited Copia, a small institution to educate, promote and celebrate American excellence and achievements in the culinary, winemaking and visual arts arenas. We walked around the garden, which had almost every kind of fruit and vegetable growing and ate lunch at Julia’s Kitchen, named after Julia Child. After a visit to Muir Woods and some hiking, we ate dinner at Sushi Ran in Sausalito, which was delicious.

Overall Food Rating: A++

Overall Wine Rating: A

When you cook a 4 lb chicken for two people, you are bound to have a few left overs. Don’t sweat it though! Take those left overs, pick-out the bones and skin and then roughly chop up and the big pieces of chicken. Toss the chicken in a skillet and slightly brown it. Now cut some bread and add fix’ns.

For our sandwiches ( If you just said “Sammies” in your head, punch yourself in the face. It will help prevent you from doing this in the future. Your Welcome. ) we mixed some pesto with mayonnaise, plucked a few leaves of basil, cut the cheese (it is acceptable to laugh internally at “cutting the cheese”, I don’t care how old you are, it never gets old.) and then we went to town making some Sammies. (Ha! Deal with it!)

Our panini press makes every sandwich just a little better. Even peanut butter sandwiches. This started out as a sort of boring ham and cheese sandwich. But adding sauteed mushrooms and pressing made it into a super sandwich. Add some tomato soup on the side and you have dinner! The mushrooms were sauteed with some fresh thyme for a little extra something-something.