Mention Texas, and visions of smoky barbecue dance in my head.

I once heard that the very first barbecue that passes your lips forever defines what you consider the best ‘cue.

If that’s true, tender Texas brisket, smoked low and slow, charred on the outside with a visible pink smoke ring on the inside, is my idea of the perfect ‘cue. I grew up on the stuff.

For the second year in a row, I got my fill of Texas ‘cue at the BBQ Crash Course, a SXSW-sanctioned function held at Emo’s in Austin.

What’s special about the crash course is not a what, it’s a who, as in who bellies up to the bar — in this case, it’s a who’s who among Texas Hill Country smoke houses.

Normally, it would take at least two full days to get to all six of these barbecue beacons, and here they were, all gathered in one gritty, downtown Austin bar.

Rated number #1 by Texas Monthly, Snow’s BBQ from Lexington (only open on Saturday mornings) was there, with their special cut of brisket and coarse beef sausage.

Lockheart’s Smitty’s Market was there, too. And Louie Mueller from Taylor. And R.O.’s Outpost from Spicewood (with possibly the best apple-jalapeno pie ever).

Two Austin-based ‘cue giants were carving up meat as well: The County Line, with Flintstones-sized beef ribs and smoked turkey and Franklin, with their divine brisket and famous espresso bbq sauce, and a juicy, pulled pork and creamy slaw.

If that wasn’t enough ‘cue (clearly it wasn’t — can you really ever get enough?) we had the pleasure of tooling around with Austinite Gloria Corral, who just authored a new book called Barbecue Lover’s Guide to Austin.

Gloria took us to an old-school BBQ haunt, Sam’s BBQ, in central East Austin, and introduced us to Willie Mays, Sam’s son, who runs the joint.

Painted on the front is an appropriate slogan, “You don’t need no teeth to eat my beef!”

Hundreds of photographs, some yellowed and curling are tacked to the wall. The smell of smoke hangs heavy in the air.

Granted, the combo plate ain’t purdy to look at, but the fatty brisket (we asked for fatty specifically, instead of a lean cut) was sublime. I wasn’t crazy about the too-soft sausage, but I could eat a mound of the creamy mustard potato salad and the chile-flavored beans. And I can’t even begin to describe how glorious the charred brisket was.

That, partner, is serious Texas ‘cue.

The thing is, there is great barbecue all over Texas, but especially so in Austin and the surrounding Texas Hill Country.

In fact, Gloria profiled more than 70 barbecue joints in a 30-mile radius in her new book. Handily, it’s organized by location with maps included.

If you’re saddling up in Austin anytime soon, don’t forget to pack your boots… leave your belt at home… and grab a copy of the new Barbecue Lovers Guide to Austin.

Yee haw, y’all.

Tags: Austin BBQ, Austin dining, BBQ Lovers Guide to Austin, Franklin BBQ, Gloria Corral, Louie Mueller BBQ, RO Outpost BBQ, Sams BBQ, Smittys Market, Snows BBQ, The County Line BBQ
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“You have to try Iliana’s food before you leave Austin,” our friends said a year ago, when we were in town for SXSW.

Iliana de la Vega is a chef instructor at the San Antonio branch of the Culinary Institute of America, and in March of 2010, she and her husband opened el naranjo, a mobile food trailer on the southeastern edge of downtown.

We wandered over to Rainey Street to find this have-to-try food our friends raved about, but the trailer was closed. We found out later they opened for business the day we left.

Fast forward a year, we’re back in Austin, and the first place I want to hit is el naranjo. On an early Thursday evening, we’re in luck.

El naranjo is open and dishing out exciting Mexican street food in a city known for abundant Mexican food.

Before Vega joined the staff at the CIA where she teaches Latin cuisines, she owned a popular restaurant in Oaxaca with the same name (translation: the orange).

Vega commutes to San Antonio from Austin to teach while her family runs the food trailer, but on weekends, you’ll find her running the small kitchen in the trailer.

The menu is simple — mostly tacos — but this is no Tex-Mex fare. Appetizers are either fried empanadas stuffed with mushrooms, serrano and epazote, or a bowl of soup (tortilla the evening we visited) or guacamole.

The generous portion of chunky guacamole ($6) is made-to-order and served with fresh fried tortilla chips (above). Since it’s made after you order, it takes a few minutes to arrive, but the vibrant lime and cilantro-flecked, buttery avocado mash is well worth the wait.

The tacos dorados (above) are three rolled and deep fried corn tortillas stuffed with either res (shredded beef) pollo (shredded chicken) or papa (goat cheese mashed potatos). ($6.75)

I order one of each flavor, and while the beef and chicken are note worthy, I fell in love with the chunky mashed potatoes tinged with goat cheese and parsley. It’s a perfect mix of crisp tortilla and soft, tangy filling.

The pork for the tacos al pastor is cooked on a trompo (above), a vertical spit roaster with pineapple.

The marinated, juicy pork is shaved off the spit and stuffed into warm, moist corn tortillas and served with chopped pineapple, cilantro and white onion. ($6.50 for 2)

A menu board lists the day’s special and we jumped at the chance to try a Puebla specialty, pipián verde, with shredded chicken (above).

The sauce is made with ground roasted sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds and peanuts, cooked with tart tomatillos and fresh hoja santo leaves, which give the dish a faint licorice flavor. ($11.50) Don’t expect a spice bite from this dish — it’s mild and nutty, almost creamy.

Settle at one of the picnic tables on the gravel lawn with a Mexican soda, or get your food to go and walk next door to the urban chic Icenhauer’s for a local draft beer or “the linda” margarita with Patron reposado tequila, lime juice and chile infused syrup.

I’m already planning a return trip to sample the few things I missed, like tacos tasajo (Oaxacan-style salted, dried beef) and tacos de camaron estilo Istmo (shrimp tacos with slaw and chipotle flavored Mexican crema).

Our friends were right. We had to try el naranjo. If you’re in Austin, you should, too.

el naranjo

85 Rainey Street
Austin, TX
512-474-2776

Tags: Austin dining, Downtown Austin dining, El Naranjo, Iliana de la Vega, Mexican, pipian verde, tacos dorados
Posted in Travel Eats | 6 Comments »

As brick and mortar behemoth bookstores battle the new publishing model, specifically monster sales portals like Amazon, a matchbox-size cookbook store in San Francisco is thriving.

In this case, thriving means the owner is paying her rent and pocketing some change while pursuing her passion — not necessarily bankrolling millions.

Wait. A cookbook book store? Yes, San Francisco’s Omnivore Books is a bookstore that stocks only cookbooks and other food & drink books.

It wasn’t that uncommon 10 years ago, but today, cookbook-only stores are either dying (LA’s The Cook’s Library closed in 2009) or carving out small, successful niches.

So far, Omnivore is in the latter category, along with Kitchen Arts and Letters in New York, The Cookbook Stall in Philadelphia and Books for Cooks in London.

San Francisco native Ceila Sack, owner of Omnivore Books, knows a thing or two about books. Especially old books.

She was a rare book specialist at an auction house before she opened Omnivore Books in late 2008. Her specialty was food books.

Sack knew she would never make it if she only carried antiquarian books, but what if she mixed in old cookbooks with new cookbooks?

“I knew I would attract a larger audience if I had new books, and along the way, I could introduce people to the older books,” she says. Has it worked?

Yes, Sack says. She can show her customers a canning book from the turn of the century, then another one from the wartime 1940′s, and finally one published recently, a what’s-old-is-new canning book.

“It’s amazing to see the progression,” she says. And she loves watching her customers make the connection from old to new.

Sack may love antiquarian books, but her methods of enticing people to her Noe Valley neighborhood store are modern. She leverages Twitter and Facebook along with an email mailing list of customers.

“Social media has made a huge difference in my business,” Sack says.

Not surprising. In November, her Facebook page boasted a picture with the tagline “Check out who stopped by yesterday.” The picture was former Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl.

On March 17, Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas, founders of Alinea in Chicago are “stopping by” for a chat — a sold-out chat, but Sack promised in her email newsletter that anyone who wanted a signed copy of their new book, Life, on The Line, could have one.

You just have to call and reserve a book. With a credit card, of course.

Another inventive business tactic, Sack started a cookbook club in 2010. It’s a signed cookbook club, and every three months for those who join, Sack will mail a signed cookbook from an author that’s come by to give a talk.

Four books a year, for $160. For cookbook collectors, it’s a deal. Sack picks the books, customizing each pick to the customer’s profile. It averages $40 per book (shipping is included).

Next time you are in San Francisco, plan a side trip to Omnivore Books. The bookstore is just steps from the J Church Muni Metro route, and as an added incentive, the world class Tartine Bakery is a short 20-minute walk away.

You’ll find Sack chatting with a customer about the latest, greatest cookbook or — even more likely — pointing out some of the rare gems in her cracker box store.

Omnivore Books
3885a Cesar Chavez Street
415-282-4712
San Francisco, CA

Tags: Books For Cooks, Cecila Sack, cookbook store, Kitchen Arts and Letters, Omnivore Books, San Francisco, signed cookbook club, The Cookbook Stall
Posted in Travel Eats | 6 Comments »

Ah, spaghetti with clams cooked with white wine from a Venetian restaurant. There is something to be said for eating clams pulled from the sea that morning. OK, there is something to be said for eating pasta in Venice. Period.

Before my first trip to Italy, I had this image in my head about the pasta. I pictured eating in charming mom & pop trattorias, with mamma in the corner rolling out pasta by hand.

I never saw that image come to life. Most of the time we dined al fresco because the street scenes were too compelling. When we did eat indoors, the kitchen was usually hidden behind closed doors.

There are 350 different pasta shapes and I wanted to try a variety of ones I wasn’t familiar with, but in the end, I ordered more for the other ingredients than the pasta.

Many times, I ordered dishes surely made with dried pasta rather than fresh pasta. Nonetheless, I never ordered a mediocre dish.

Even a simple rigatoni pomodoro from a Roman restaurant in the Trastevere area was sublime. It tasted as if it was finished in a seasoned cast iron skillet with loads of garlic.

When we hit Bologna, I was on the hunt for authentic bolognese, and below is four samples of this classic meat and pasta sauce.

All four were different, yet all were the same. Eat enough bolognese, and you can recognize the taste with your eyes closed — meaty and less tomato-y than you’d think.

One of my favorite dishes was spaghetti carbonara from a Roman trattoria. The egg was barely cooked, resulting in a silky texture, and the salty pancetta cut through the richness.

Siena is known for pici — thick, hand-rolled pasta that looks like bloated spaghetti strands. This version was served with wild boar ragu — and a glass of Chianti, of course.

In Castellina in Chianti, north of Siena, we slurped on spinach ravioli (top left) and in Parma we had the only lasagne (spinach) of the trip.

In Florence, we ducked into a tiny trattoria on a narrow side street and had cheese tortellini with black olives (bottom left), and in Venice, we tried ink squid spaghetti at Alla Madonna, but only because it was what the gondola guys were eating.

I kept wanting to close my eyes to eat it — and it should never be eaten when wearing white — but I would order it again in a heartbeat.

In Vernazza (Cinque Terre), we tried another version of ink squid pasta, only this time, it was black chittara (square spaghetti) made with squid ink, tossed with tomatoes, garlic and minced clams.

At an upscale trattoria in Bologna, we had rigatoni with canocce, a sea creature that resembles a cross between a crayfish and a lobster. The little suckers were chopped with the shells on, so it made eating it awkward. The server assured me that I was to pick them up and gnaw on them. I was more than happy to dive into the deeply flavored dish and lick my fingers clean.

I kept wondering what kind of pasta home cooks used, so in every town, I’d duck into the grocery stores and take a look around.

Every grocery store had rows and rows of shelves dedicated to dried pastas. The brand I saw most often?

Barilla.

Tags: eating in Italy, Italy, pasta, Travel Eats
Posted in Travel Eats | 3 Comments »

It’s drizzling and cool. Two weathered men hover over a makeshift roaster on a side street in Rome. They’re smoking and talking, punctuating their conversation with sweeping arm gestures.

They don’t notice that I’m standing in front of them, slightly bent at the waist, sniffing the chestnuts.

A couple of things are wrong with this scene. For one, it’s not chestnut season in Italy. It’s early May.

Two, no one else is buying the chestnuts, although the streets are packed on this unusually cool, wet morning.

Except me. I’ve never seen chestnuts roasting before.

So of course I buy them. Two Euros for a paper cone filled to the brim.

They’re warm in my hand. I crack one open, eager to taste a freshly roasted chestnut. Did I mention I was in Rome? IN ROME! Standing near the Piazza Navona, holding a bag of Italian chestnuts roasted before my very eyes by old men who look like quintessential street chestnut roasters — I’m euphoric.

I pop the chestnut into my mouth, close my eyes and chew.

My heart sinks. The chestnut is mealy, dry and over roasted. Disappointed, I try another one. Ick. And another. The same.

Nearby is a park. A homeless man sits on a bench near a fountain. He looks at me and I hold out the paper cone filled with out-of-season, over-roasted chestnuts.

He takes them, bows his head and mumbles “grazie, grazie.”

For a brief moment, I feel bad handing him these less than perfect chestnuts, but I figure he’s hungry, so it’s better than throwing them away.

I walk away but after a few yards I turn and look back.

He’s feeding the chestnuts to the birds.

Tags: chestnuts, Rome
Posted in Travel Eats | 2 Comments »

I’m working on a post about pasta in Italy from my recent trip, and I came across this photo I took in the seaside Cinque Terre town of Monterosso al Mare.

He’s just a stray cat fed on a sea wall — spaghetti alla Fancy Feast.

Even the cats love pasta in Italy.

Tags: cat eating pasta, Italy, pasta
Posted in Travel Eats | No Comments »

Odd that I begin this look at Talisker On Main, a new restaurant in Park City, Utah, with a picture of Brussels sprouts. Even more odd, I actually ordered it. Stranger still, I enjoyed it.

I’ve never been a fan of Brussels sprouts, but I was in the middle of a three-week experiment as a temporary vegetarian, and the Rocky Mountain elk carpaccio or the grilled baby octopus or the sous vide duck breast weren’t going to cut it for my first course.

So roasted Brussels sprouts with sherry vinegar, toasted hazelnuts and mixed berries had to do — and did so nicely, with the vinegar and berries effectively zeroing out the bitter cabbage taste.

Based in Park City for a few weeks to write a travel story for PHOENIX Magazine, I’d heard about a posh new restaurant that had opened last January on the historic Main Street in Park City.

Talisker on Main is owned by Talisker Mountain Deer Valley, a luxury residential development company, and Talisker on Main is their first open-to-the-public restaurant. Inside is a bistro scene, with a black and white large-tiled floor, dark wood tables, powder blue accents and an open exhibition kitchen. Tucked on the side is a narrow, charming patio anchored by a fireplace.

Even though the restaurant is billed as fine dining, Park City is a resort town, so casual dress isn’t out of the question. The cuisine is modern American, with global influences, and French cooking techniques and presentations, including starting the meal with an amuse bouche.

Like this heirloom tomato slice on top of a square of seared polenta, garnished with a whisper of frisée and paper-thin shallots.

There was only one vegetarian entree, but after one bite it was clear that it wasn’t just an after-thought dish. English pea Israeli couscous risotto with fried chick peas and a pistou of zucchini and garlic was just as deeply flavored as any meat dish could be. I loved the tempura battered and fried squash blossoms, too.

That didn’t mean I didn’t drool over my dining partner’s buttermilk fried chicken with black-eyed peas and garlicky collard greens.

I did sneak a bite of the honey glazed biscuit, but still, I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of envy with heady wafts of chicken fat drifting my way.

I consoled myself with a rich chocolate lavender torte, draped in Ecuadorian chocolate ganache, sprinkled with praline crumbs and accompanied by a small scoop of limoncello sorbet.

Isn’t it funny how chocolate always makes up for a lack of fried chicken?

Talisker On Main
515 Main Street
435-658-5479
Entree prices $19-$34

Tags: Brussels sprouts, chocolate lavender torte, couscous risotto, fried chicken, Park City, Talisker On Main
Posted in Travel Eats | 2 Comments »

Comfort food. It means different things to different people.

I have a friend who thinks of fried chicken as comfort food. To be completely honest, she thinks of fried chicken, period. In her world, fried chicken is its own food group on the pyramid.

For me, macaroni and cheese is the ultimate comfort food. Like most people, I grew up on the blue box of Kraft mac and cheese.

I’m all grown up now, and I want a better mac and cheese.

I found one at ZOOM in Park City, Utah.

It isn’t so gourmet that it loses the homey comfort of pasta bathed in cheese, but it’s gussied up enough to make the Kraft mac and cheese seem like child’s play.

I love the fat, ribbed shells, the gooey, herb-flecked cheese sauce, and the crunch from toasted bread crumbs.

I even found the recipe in a cookbook I bought. The book is called Park City Cooks: An Eclectic Collection of Park City Recipes.

All the proceeds from the cookbook go to The Peace House, a non-profit organization that provides education, shelter and support services to women who are victims of domestic violence.

The recipes are from members of the Park City community, and in the back of the book, there are a few recipes from the local restaurants, including this recipe from ZOOM.

ZOOM is owned by The Sundance Resort (Robert Redford’s remarkable property about 35 miles from Park City).

As I licked the plate clean, I thought to myself “I’d love to have that recipe.” And lo and behold, it appeared. I love when that happens.

Now you can have it, too.

ZOOM White Cheddar Mac & Cheese

from Park City Cooks

12 Servings

Ingredients
1-1/2 cups fresh breadcrumbs from crustless French bread
3/4 cup freshly grated Asiago cheese
1 teaspoon sweet paprika
8 tablespoons butter, divided
6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
6 cups whole milk
1-1/2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
4 cups grated white cheddar cheese (about 1 pound)
1-1/2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1 pound macaroni

Method
1. Mix the breadcrumbs, Asiago and paprika in a medium bowl.

2. Melt 6 tablespoons of butter in a large, heavy saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour and stir for three minutes. Gradually whisk in the milk, then the mustard and pepper.

3. Cook until thickened, stirring often, about 1o minutes. Stir in the cheddar and parsley.
(The topping and the sauce can be made 1 day ahead, stored separately. Cool the sauce slightly, then cover and refrigerate. Refrigerate the topping, too. Re-warm the sauce, stirring frequently and thinning with more milk if necessary before proceeding.)

4. Heat the oven to 400°F. Butter a 15″ X 10″ X 2″ glass baking dish.

5. Cook the macaroni in a pot of boiling salted water until just tender, but firm to the bite, stirring occasionally. Drain the macaroni well.

6. Return the macaroni to the drained pot; stir in the sauce. Season to taste with salt.

7. Spread the mixture in the prepared baking dish. Sprinkle with the bread crumb topping. Dot with the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter.

8. Bake until the cheese is bubbling and the crumbs are brown, about 40-45 minutes. Cool slightly before serving.

ZOOM
Park City, Utah

Where to buy the Park City Cooks cookbook:
La Niche
(435) 649-2372

Tags: comfort food, Mac and Cheese, Park City, Zoom Restaurant
Posted in Recipes, Side Dishes, Travel Eats | 4 Comments »

No, no, not here. Although, it is fetching, isn’t it? At least from the outside. But sometimes, appearances aren’t what they seem.

The fabulous restaurant I’m about to share with you doesn’t look anything like the idyllic Venice trattoria pictured above.

From the outside, Il Ridotto is rather nondescript. I’d even call it plain.

The adage “don’t judge a book by its cover” — even though we all do — should have run through my head. I almost skipped it because it didn’t look like the charming restaurant above.

Il Ridotto is near one of Venice’s main attractions, Piazza San Marco, but it’s not easy to find. (Frankly, nothing is easy to find — Venice is an exacerbating maze with more twists and turns than a Diane Mott Davidson novel.)

I wouldn’t have given Il Ridotto a second thought if not for my Twitter friend, Sharon Miro (@nicklemoon), who’d just been to Venice a couple of days before we arrived.

Sharon insisted we not miss Il Ridotto. I scribbled down the address and set off to have a look. I must have walked past it three times before I finally noticed it.

In hindsight, it was one of the best (of many great) meals across our 21-day Italian Affair.

What Il Ridotto lacks in “curb” appeal, it makes up for ten-fold by the charming interior and the exquisite food.

Il Ridotto is fine dining in a sleek, modern setting. (It reminded me of noca, one of the best restaurants in Phoenix and Frasca, one of the best restaurants in Boulder, Colorado.)

Thoroughly Italian — yet it bears no resemblance to the old-school traditional Italian ristorante — Il Ridotto is nuovo Italian.

The  small, 14-seat restaurant positively glows at night.

Il Ridotto doesn’t open until 7:30 p.m., but the chef graciously opened at 7 p.m. for a couple of hungry Americans, and for half an hour, we had the whole place to ourselves.

By the time we left, every seat was full, while a flock of foodies waited patiently outside.

When faced with a choice between navigating a several-pages menu versus a chef’s tasting menu, go with the latter. Especially at Il Ridotto.

The tasting menu reads “menu of land and of sea / light, beautiful, good / four plates / 50 Euro.

That’s it. No course descriptions. That’s because the chef, Gianni Bonaccorsi, a tall, thin, bespectacled man, comes to the table to discuss the menu. His halting English is charming, and he surprised me with his gracious manner. He apologized profusely for not being fluent. I assure you, that is not the norm in most Italian eateries, fine dining or otherwise.

Using English peppered with Italian and lots of hand gestures, he said that he’d received some beautiful frutti di mare that morning, and would we be happy if he just sent out dishes? Who are we to argue with such a kind, stately chef?

We both started with an amuse: two succulent shrimp on top of a sweet-sour caponata.

The chef and one server manage all 14 seats. I’m not used to plates personally delivered by the chef, but I think I could get used to it, especially if the chef is as engaging as Bonaccorsi.

Bonaccorsi had two cooks in the tiny galley kitchen tucked behind a mirrored wall, but every course we had was personally delivered by the chef, with a dissertation on the composition of the dish. (He had no idea I am a food writer, and throughout the evening he delivered most courses to the other diners as well.)

Because there were two of us, the chef made sure that we sampled different dishes with each course.

The first course was a white asparagus puree surrounding a mound of burrata and garnished with sauteed green asparagus, crisp croutons and a drizzle of olive oil and aged balsamic.

And the other, an eye-popping vision of the sea with lobster, mussels, clams, cuttlefish and canocce, swimming in a pool of silky potato puree.

Canocce is an interesting sea creature. It has very little meat — it’s mostly exoskeleton. I saw the finger-shaped crustacean in several seafood markets, and first tasted it in a trattoria in Bologna, where it was chopped it into pieces and cooked in a Marsala cream sauce. But it was difficult to eat with the shell on. When I inquired how to eat it, the server mimicked Tom Hanks in the movie Big, gnawing on baby corn.

At Il Ridotto, Bonaccorsi shelled it whole (a difficult, time-consuming thing to do), leaving the head and tail intact. The taste and texture was a cross between lobster and crawfish.

Moving to the second course, we tasted a lobster stock risotto studded with cuttlefish and garnished with squid ink powder. The dish, like most dishes in Italy, was finished with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. It’s a trick I’ve since incorporated into my own cooking.

We also tasted handmade ravioli, stuffed with wild herbs and ricotta and garnished with clams and mussels. The three fat pillows would have been a substantial meal on their own.

Our third courses were equally filling, although a mushroom topped sea bass was lighter than the other third course.

Two baby squids stuffed with potato and zucchini, with a salsa of sweet red peppers and green peppers, were garnished with tiny clams. The squid was a pleasant chewy counter point to the soft potato filling.

At this point, I didn’t think I could eat another bite but that’s before I saw the desserts. First up was a deconstructed tiramisu, served in a glass with a heavy dusting of rich, dark cocoa. The Marsala flavored mascarpone cream must have contained a dozen egg yolks, it was so rich and golden.

But it was the last dessert that wowed me. Maybe because it was so simple or maybe because I’m crazy about pistachios. The pistachio cake, obviously baked in a mold, was crunchy on the outside, and dense, moist and rich on the inside. The batter probably contained both ground pistachios and chopped pistachios — it was the very essence of the pistachio nut. The gelato tasted of rich vanilla — egg-rich French vanilla — and had plenty of texture from the chopped, roasted pistachios.

With the exception of the storefront, nothing about Il Ridotto was understated, yet nothing was over-the-top flashy, either. No molecular gastronomy, no bells and whistles, just beautifully crafted dishes with ingredients that tasted fresh-plucked from the ground and sea, served by a humble chef in a chic, elegant setting. In a word? Squisito.

Il Ridotto
Campo San Filippo e Giacomo 4509
Venice, Italy

Tags: Frasca Boulder, Il Ridotto, noca, restaurant near Piazza San Marco Venice, Venice Restaurant, where to eat in Venice
Posted in Travel Eats | 4 Comments »

I’m doing something I’ve never done before.

I’m eschewing meat. On purpose.

There is no ulterior motive, and no need to get alarmed — it’s only temporary. How hard can it be?

Blame it on my working vacation in a mountain town filled with fit granola heads, and restaurants with plenty of menu space dedicated to veg-heads.

And I don’t have to review a single one of them, so I can order what I want, like a bowl of yellow curry with tofu and mushrooms at Squatters Brew Pub.

Blame it on my temporary housing, in the home of a lovely vegetarian, who has a pantry stocked with grains, beans, and nuts, and shelves stuffed with vegetarian cookbooks. (That’s her own cookbook in the middle, the blue Chocolate Snowball.)

The surprising thing about eating strictly vegetarian, to me anyway, is that it’s just not that hard. A piece of cake.

Breakfast has always been an easy meal to drop the meat, what with all the oatmeal and egg options, including one of my favorites, huevos rancheros from Loco Lizard — not to mention the smoothie kick I’ve been on lately.

Lunch and dinner, on the other hand, always seemed like meat meals to me.

But I’m finding I don’t have to struggle find something appealing without meat, like a juicy avocado, tomato and sprout sandwich with smoked Gouda from The Back Door Deli.

Of course, this — like all fairy tales — will come to an end.

Because at the end of the day, I’m a bacon-loving, steak-eating girl. Life without meat just doesn’t sit right in the saddle for me.

Maybe that’s why my temporarily vegetarian mouth and my permanent carnivorous brain had a failure to communicate just two weeks into this little experiment.

You see, I ordered a bowl of French Onion Soup at The Foundry Grill at Sundance Resort without blinking an eye. Delicious, caramelized onion soup with a toasted crostini and melted Gruyere — vegetarian, right? Wrong.

I had reached a turning point:

I could drop the charade and return to my flesh-eating ways, or I could dust myself off, wiped the sherry-drenched, rich veal stock off my chin, and climb back on the vegetarian horse.

In the end, I chose the latter (right after I drained the soup bowl) and, for now, I’m back on the veg-train with another week to go.

But I was wrong about one thing.

Giving up meat is lot harder than I thought, after all. It’s not a piece of cake (and I probably couldn’t give up cake for very long, either.)

How about you? Have you ever given up meat? Did you stick with it, or revert back to your old ways?

Tags: Back Door Deli, Chocolate Snowball Cookbook, giving up meat, Letty Flatt, Loco Lizard, Park City, Squatters Brew Pub, The Foundry Grill, vegetarian
Posted in Travel Eats | 28 Comments »

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