Visiting the Adirondacks: Mountains, Lakes, and Smoked Pork!

I visited the Adirondacks, in northern New York State, recently. It's a beautiful place, full of lakes, rushing rivers, and tree-covered mountains. The Adirondacks were the "wilderness" place to be among the moneyed set long before places like Yosemite or Yellowstone. If you love the outdoors, you should definitely visit. You can canoe and hike and fish, or just relax by a lake.

If in Waterbury, Connecticut...

Grotto cavatelli with chicken, pesto, and artichoke hearts

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I traveled to Connecticut to visit my sister and her family. And see my lovely daughter who is taking an intensive year of math nearby in Massachusetts. And I got to see an old college friend too! It was wonderful visiting Ann and Michael. I need to visit them again. These people know food. As if visiting a dear old friend isn't enough? There's great food too!

They took us to the place for homemade cavatelli in Waterbury: Grotto. This is a treat. Ann was kind enough to purchase two pounds of it for us. We stashed it in the freezer until our daughter came home for Winter Break. Delicioso! It has the perfect bite and these wonderful crannies for holding the sauce.

If you find yourself in the neighborhood, buy some. You will not regret it!

Grotto
634 Watertown Avenue, Waterbury, CT 06708
(203)754-0295

Eating Your Way Through Chile: Part 3

Mote con huesillo, a local Kunstmann beer and pastel de jaiba at a big fair of local food in Niebla, near Valdivia

Last part of my series on my dining adventures in Chile. See Part 1 on seasonal produce, eating in Santiago, and oddities. Part 2 covers seafood (more oddities!). This installment will cover some of the traditional food/drink, family specialties, dessert, and the most exciting food in Chile. Hint: it's not Chilean.

Eating Your Way Through Chile: Part 2

Living picorocos. They move in a rather sinister way.

You may be asking yourself: What is that? Is that actually something related to eating? Indeed, it is. Chile has quite a few "interesting" seafood options, this being the most exotic one we tried. That's a photo of picorocos, also known as the giant barnacle. It's native to the coast of Peru and Chile. It appears to be a rock with an alien living inside. It tastes a bit like crab, but more savory than sweet. It is a pain in the arse to get out of the shell (the rock is not a natural rock, but a shell made by the barancle). As far as wild seafood go, this is as odd as I've ever eaten! Here's a photo of the whole thing out of its shell.

Eating Your Way Thru Chile: Part 1

Scenes from a market in Santiago: clockwise from top left, my daughter enjoying some delicious watermelon, tomatoes and strawberries, shell beans and mature corn, massive heads of broccoli

I spent 3 weeks in Chile around Christmas time. We went to visit family; my husband was born there. From a food standpoint, that was a huge advantage. The relatives know my love of food and they pulled out all the stops, as you will see throughout this series on eating in Chile.

Reflections on a Week in Montreal

Scenes from Montreal (clockwise from upper left): Asian spiced salmon with a spicy slaw, classic row houses, local strawberries at Marche Jean-Talon, amuse bouche, paella burners and Serrano ham, the Arts Complex, me at the Botanic Gardens, Montreal waterfront

Please dear readers, forgive my absence. I have been spending all my spare time on my other blog (School of Eating Good) and traveling around a bit. Then I had a pet emergency. But, I'm back and I'm will try to be more regular with my posts.

I visited Montreal in early July with a few of my college friends. We went for the Jazz Festival. If you are a lover of great music, you should try to get there during the Montreal Jazz Festival. It's fantastic. While you are there, you will eat well. Really, really well. Like Toronto and Vancouver, Montreal is a foodie paradise. It is every bit as multicultural as these other large Canadian cities but it feels like you are in an old European city. Besides the food, you can enjoy fantastic museums, a world-class Botanic Gardens, and go to the top of the tower built for the Olympics in 1976. There is great shopping, a beautiful and charming historic Old City, and close proximity to the deep forests of Quebec for hiking in the summer and skiing in the winter. Or visit Parc Mont-Royal, where you can see those forests within the city.

Bringing this back to food, those forests produce the most maple syrup of any place in the world, 80% of all maple syrup. Not surprising given that the sugar maple is a Northeastern native and Quebec has a whole lot of maple forest. We visited the Maple Museum in the Old City, full of all things maple syrup. I bought a cookbook (of course!), Cooking with Quebec Maple Syrup by Anne Fortin. It is filled with maple recipes from the traditional to the cutting edge from some of the finest restaurant kitchens in Montreal. I can't wait to try out a recipe for lamb shanks au parfum d'erable.

Montreal boosts an impressive array of ethnic restaurants: Cambodian, Venezuelan, Portuguese, Greek, Ethiopian, Thai, Korean. The list goes on and on. There is a small Chinatown with excellent Asian shopping. I even found rambutans, my daughter's favorite fruit:

We spent a morning at the Marche Jean-Talon, one of three large everyday produce markets. Produce comes from Quebec and all over the world. Of course, I had to find the wild mushrooms, and I found some very wild ones, indeed!

Those are Amanita caesarea, American Caesar's Mushroom, a species I was surprised to see in the market. There are many similar looking Amanita that are poisonous so these guys must know what they are doing!

Here are a few more images from the market. Frankly, I could have spent all day there!

We ate very well during our 5 days in Montreal, sometimes picking restaurants at random, sometimes using the recommendations from our excellent hosts, Bob and Mariko of Bob & Mariko's Bed & Breakfast.

We had a truly cross-cultural experience in a Korean restaurant, a kimchee quesadilla! It wasn't terribly spicy but quite tasty and makes the perfect post-bar snack. We enjoyed a French meal at Cafe Cherrier. I had a Toulouse sausage. I'm not sure what the sausages from Toulouse are supposed to taste like but it was delicious and moist, accompanied by perfect pommes frites (as one would expect at a French cafe). We found out-of-this-world pastry at Mamie Clafoutis. Not exactly French pastry, it definitely had a French-Canadien spin to it. They earned their French creds turning out baguette worthy of any Parisian boulangerie. We enjoyed excellent gelato; traditional Belgian moules (as well as curried mussels, Thai-style mussels, and Provencal-style mussels), frites, and local beer; Portuguese live-fire grilled sardines with piri-piri sauce; and when in Montreal, you must try the smoked meat. Smoked meat is cured, spiced, smoked fatty brisket and it's sort of like pastrami but it has its own special spice blend. I recommend it highly, but if you like your meat lean, it may give you a scare. As my Jewish grandmother would say: "Live a little. A bit of fat never killed anyone." :-)

Clockwise from the upper left: Kimchee quesadilla, Schwartz's Deli, what a selection of salami/saucisson/cured meat, moules, Schwartz's window full of smoked meat, Toulouse sausage and frites

For another uniquely Jewish Montreal institution, visit Fairmount Bagels. Montreal is now considered the only place to get traditional bagels. Given that most bagels in the US have little resemblance to traditional bagels, you may be disappointed by these. They are fantastic, to my mind - chewy, fairly small, and the perfect carrier for a smear and some salty lox. Fairmount turns them out around the clock so you can have a bagel hot from the wood-fired ovens whenever you like, even post-barhopping.

Below are the names and addresses of all the places I remembered to keep track of, if you are lucky enough to find yourself in Montreal in the future.

Pagliacci Bistro Gelati
125 Rue Prince-Arthur E for gelato

Cafe Cherrier
3635 rue Saint-Denis for reasonably priced French

Mamie Clafoutis
3660, rue Saint-Denis for amazing pastry and bread

Bieres et Compagnie
4350 St Denis, for moules frites and an excellent selection of beer on tap

Schwartz's
3895 Saint-Laurent Blvd for the best smoked meat

Bob & Mariko's B&B
3458 Avenue Laval, I would stay here again. Great hosts and a great location!

Marche Jean-Talon
7070 Avenue Henri Julien

Fairmount Bagels
74 rue Fairmount Quest

Eating my way through New Orleans

Mid-Afternoon Beignet at Cafe du Monde

Frankly, we didn't get very far, eating our way through New Orleans. First off, we only had 4 days there and second, there is way, way too much great food to get through, even if you had months.

Full disclosure: I absolutely loved New Orleans. We had never been there before and I had heard many things about it, good and bad. Forget the bad. It's good. No, it's great. If you haven't been there, go. If you were there before Katrina, go back. I don't know if it's as good as before (certainly for many of the residents, it isn't, since some neighborhoods still haven't come back) but for tourists it's a blast. There is food, there is art, there is culture. And there are the people, who are just wonderful. Obviously, they are resilient. The owners of the B&B we stayed in moved back to the city about 5 weeks after Katrina. They had unreliable electricity for months. They had no potable tap water for 5 months! But, back they came and rebuilt their beautiful B&B in an historic neighborhood, the Faubourg Marigny, downriver from the French Quarter. (It's the Royal Street Courtyard. It's charming, lovely and a bargain.) New Orleans needs tourists. Help them continue to rebuild by going to visit them. You won't regret it.

On to the food. Because, one of the best reasons to go to New Orleans is the food. It's unique - lots of Creole (a combination of Spanish, African, French and American influences), as well as German, Cajun, French, American, well, most anything. New Orleans has always been a city of immigrants and it shows in its dining scene. We saw very few fast food chains in the city. These folks know good food and they have enough local fast food (can you say "po' boy?") that they don't want lousy hamburgers. Good for them! Here in no particular order are my favorite dishes.

Mussels in white wine at Adolpho's on Frenchman Street. Some of the meatiest, sweetest mussels I've ever had. Tons of garlic. Absolutely delicious. Adolpho's is Creole-Italian. Italian figures big in the Creole cuisine, but it's not really Italian. It's thoroughly New Orleans.

One of the best snacks in the world

Beignets and cafe au lait at Cafe du Monde. If you don't go to Cafe du Monde for this, you have missed one of the grand New Orleans traditions. Yes, tons of tourists there but who cares? The beignets are perfectly fresh, generously dusted with powdered sugar. Well, dusted isn't quite the right word. Buried, actually. The cafe au lait is excellent too. You have no excuse to miss Cafe du Monde; it's open 24 hours a day.

Praline bacon (with grits), callas, boudin balls

Praline bacon, callas, and boudin balls at Elizabeth's in the Bywater. The Bywater is the next residential neighborhood downriver from the Faubourg Marigny. Not a place you happen upon unless you went looking for it. But, you should look for it. Praline bacon is their signature dish - thick cut meaty bacon with a crust of brown sugar and pecans. The perfect combination of salty sweet piggy goodness. Callas are an old New Orleans recipe. They are sweet rice fritters and you rarely see them on menus anymore. They are spiked with a good dose of lemon juice, I believe, giving them a unique tang. Unusual and delicious. Boudin balls are deep fried sausage balls, served with a creole mustard sauce. Again, delicious! Just skip the biscuits.

Corn and sweet pepper fritters at Mat & Naddie's in Uptown. Actually, a lot of what we had at Mat & Naddie's was fantastic. We had a 4 course Reveillon dinner here. Reveillon is a December New Orleans tradition. Originally, it was the big feast after fasting at Christmas. Now, it's a bunch of New Orleans restaurants offering multi-course dinners for very reasonable prices during the month of December. So, December is a good month to visit New Orleans if you are a foodie. The corn fritters were light and crispy, like little crunchy clouds filled with sweet corn. These people know their fried foods! We also had incredible shrimp risotto, smoked quail on manchego waffles and eggnog creme brulee. They have an excellent wine list filled with unusual selections too.

Aren't they pretty!

Chocolates at Sucre on Magazine St. Not only are they stunningly beautiful, they are delicious. I bought a collection of them for my dear chocolate-loving friend Ronnie and she assures me that they were all wonderful. I bought some for myself and I agree! Sucre is a lovely sweet shop, on a funky section of Magazine St. Magazine is the prime shopping district, full of galleries, restaurants and shops.

There was so much we didn't get to try, like muffeletas, raw oysters, bbq shrimp and po' boys. So, we need to go back. There is always more good stuff to discover and eat in New Orleans.