Culinary school student takes a holiday
Posted on | January 14, 2010
You ever eat at a restaurant in the middle of nowhere and have an incredibly spectacular meal?
I did.
You ever throw caution to the wind and order a dish you’ve never had before only to be blown away by how amazing it was?
I did.
You ever yearn for a treat so badly you can taste it?
I did. And do.
Let me tell you about it.
Why didn’t the sesame seed want to leave the gambling casino?
~ Because it was on a roll!
The husband and I decided to take a few days and go on a road trip.
We love road trips. We’ve driven all through the south (one of these days I have to tell you the muffuletta story), up to the Blue Ridge Mountains (breathtakingly beautiful) along the pacific coast (scenery for days), and so on. We’ve driven through Palm Springs and Asheville, Montgomery and San Francisco, Austin and Fresno, and on and on.
So we’ve got some experience with road trips.
Now, when we go on a trip, my job is to plot the route (I’m navigator – trust me, you don’t want me to drive – I’m a terrible driver), find lodging, and find restaurants for dinner (we wing breakfast and lunch or just eat whatever I stuff into the cooler). The husband helps with the research, if needed, gets the car ready, and drives.
I plot great routes: We rarely get lost and we usually see anything interesting there is to see.
And I find us, erm, interesting lodgings. We stayed at a B&B in Raleigh where I discussed Gerber daisies with a fellow guest over the best buckwheat pancakes I have ever had, a motel so scary I slept on top of the sheets and with my pants on (note to self: winging accommodation is not a good idea), and a pot-friendly B&B in Santa Cruz where we were (totally not surprisingly) woken up in the middle of the night to a blaring fire alarm.
As for the picnic and the restaurants …
What did the mayonnaise say to the refrigerator?
~ Close the door, I’m dressing!
I love the idea of packing fried chicken and casseroles and hand pies to take on trips. But, inevitably, I am too busy beforehand to cook and too concerned about food safety to do so even if I had the time.
A road trip, if you’ll forgive the pun, is a serious crappy time to get food poisoning.
So here is what I tend to pack:
- Fresh fruit. Nothing messy, such as a peach, or tricky to eat, such as watermelon. Apples and pears are always good. Grapes are great (the husband can pop them into his mouth as he drives). Ditto bananas. Of course, depending on timing, we try and pick these up at fruit stands on our travels.
- Drinks. Especially water. Lots of water. I have ice packs I keep in the freezer at all times. When we go on a trip, I throw these in the cooler, throw the cooler onto the back seat, and fill it with all the drinks it will hold. Certainly water is the big one. But I’ll also add a bottle or two of juice (which we will drink the first day out) and a single bottle of soda as a treat for the husband (It took us years to get over our soda addiction. I’m over it, but my husband still yearns, so this is a special treat for him.)
- A sweet munchie. Not chocolate, of course, which, alas, will melt in no time and become a sticky mess. But a few cookies are good or individual size Greek yogurts (to be eaten on the first day). Someone once gave me some snack tins from Dean and Deluca which worked really well. For this trip, I baked toasted almond biscotti the night before and that was great.
- A salty munchie. My first choice is always nuts, cashews, say, or a mix. But I’ve gotten sourdough pretzels before and they were good.
- Cheeses. I get an assortment and cut them to finger-food size. Of course, you can only bring enough for your first meal from home.
- Crackers. To have with the cheese. Of course! Or bread. Say a nice baguette or rolls. I’ve also been known to pack a handful of olives in the cooler to have with our cheese and crackers.
- Peanut butter. I don’t bother for a short trip, but for a longer one, I like to have peanut butter and apples on hand as a healthy snack.
- Whatever we can pick up on the road. We’ve gotten everything from fried chicken which made for a great picnic to cider and peanuts and fudge and berries.
My thinking is I just don’t want to be at the mercy of fast food joints. I’d rather make a picnic out of cheese and crackers and fresh fruit than eat fast food any day. This also means we can now take our time and find restaurants where we want to eat, not restaurants where we have to eat because we haven’t eaten all day.
What’s the worst thing about being an octopus?
~ Washing your hands before dinner!
Now, the picnic ideas, above, are for road trips that last up to a week. But this was a shorter trip and I was time pressed, so I only packed the biscotti I had baked as well as a bag of lightly salted (bah, pointless without tons of salt!) potato chips, bottles of water, and juice. The husband packed beef jerky (nasty stuff, but it is road food to him) and his bottle of soda.
I was counting on the fact that we were passing through some farm country and could supplement our supply, but the carrots at the only farm stand we stopped at were so soft you could bend them nearly in half, so I didn’t buy anything. What a shame.
So we were, in fact, hungry. But no worries. We were at the coast. Home of fish. Which I love. And an associate had told my husband of a place that had great chowder. We went for chowder.
Worst. Chowder. Ever.
Ever.
(In all fairness to the associate, I had heard this place had great chowder, too. But the original owner was gone and … well, you know.)
But no worries. I got my own by tormenting the husband with a long rambling discussion on ways to make a good chowder as we wandered along a very, very long boardwalk.
I’ve never actually made a chowder, so everyone in New England, cover your eyes, but I seem to remember my version had a base of white mirepoix (leeks instead of carrots), white pepper, and brandy. And I struggled over what to do with the potatoes (I know they act as a thickening agent, but can’t they add a level of flavor, too?).
(Oh, and speaking of tormenting, if my husband’s associate is reading this blog, and he did mention that some offices associates were reading me, then don’t be offended if he told you the chowder was wonderful. He is just terribly, terribly polite. Unlike, alas, me!)
Why is it easy to weight fish?
~ They have their own scales!
The chowder may have been dreadful, but our room was wonderful. It was a converted warehouse, on a pier overlooking a working harbor. So after our disastrous lunch and long walk, we spent a lazy twilight watching the fishing boats meander by, the seagulls scream at each other, and the otters having a nice munch (the best otter we’ve ever seen was in Santa Cruz – he was so close we could count his whiskers).
Then we ventured out for dinner.
And what a dinner it was.
How did the chewing gum cross the road?
~ Stuck to the chicken’s foot!
When we did seafood cookery at school, every team was given oysters for the team to prepare as a group as well as seafood items we cooked individually.
Now, we all had recipes for oysters, including a tempting one for fried oysters, but we were all so focused on out individual seafood items that every team simply opened the oysters and served them raw, on ice, with lemons and Tabasco.
Which was a real shame because I wanted to try pan-fried oysters.
So when we went to this tiny restaurant in this hole-in-the-wall harbor after having eaten (or, rather, left in the bowl) that bland chowder, I decided to take a chance and ordered something I had never eaten before: Pan-fried oysters (the husband got fish and chips without which, he had declared that morning, this trip would have been a dismal failure).
Let me tell you about those oysters.
The color was gorgeous: A deep, golden brown with not a hint of grease to be seen.
And the taste?
“What do you think?”
“Well, a bit chewy, you know.”
“Do you like it?
“I dunno.”
I could taste a hint of brine in the second one.
“How’s that one?”
“It tastes like the sea.”
“Is that good?”
“It’s wonderful.”
The third one tasted creamy.
“So?”
“It’s creamy. Creamy, not chewy. And I can still taste the sea.”
“Do you like it?”
“I love it.”
“Can I have some?”
“No.”
Okay. I slipped a few of the oysters onto his plate. And he liked them. And I tasted some of his fish. And it was lovely. But my oysters, oh those oysters, they were a revelation.
What can you see if you throw toast out of the window?
~ Butterfly!
Here’s the sad part: As truly amazing as the fish was, the sides were pretty mediocre. And not only was my tea bitter (steeped too long) but my husband said his coffee was watery.
The fries were pliable. And I suspect the fruit in the dessert was canned (it had that too-soft texture). Or perhaps it just sat around too long.
But those oysters!
The next morning, the place we spent the night recommend a tiny breakfast place down the street. But, alas, it was as pitiful as the chowder with one exception: Not only was my freshly squeezed orange juice truly freshly squeezed (including three pits floating on the surface) but it was served in a water glass (close to 8 ounces of juice in there!). That’s a lot of oranges. So I picked at my gluey turnover and ignored my husbands overcooked eggs and undercooked biscuit.
Already I was yearning for those oysters from last night. Those panko-buttermilk crusted pan-fried oysters.
Anyone got a good recipe?
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2 Responses to “Culinary school student takes a holiday”
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January 14th, 2010 @ 1:11 pm
When I used to go on road trips with my parents, we would pack a cooler for food that should be kept cold – like cheese, yogurt, drinks, and dip for veggies – and change the ice at every place where we stayed. It made it easier for my mom, who’s diabetic, not to end up with way too many carbs in her road trip food. We’re also vegetarians, and it can be tough for us to find food on the road, so we like to have options. When we drove out from where we live in IL to help me move into my now home in Seattle, we packed:
- Apples
- Carrots & dip
- String cheese
- Boursin and crackers
- Drinks (bottled water & cans of lemonade)
- Peanut butter & jelly sandwiches
- Peanut butter crackers
- Mixed nuts
- Mike & Ikes
- And my friend Ellen made us some snickerdoodles (yum)
Obviously that was a pretty long trip, and we wanted to have enough food to carry us vegetarians through some pretty non-veg states, but that’s what we call road trip food. ^^
January 14th, 2010 @ 11:37 pm
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