Delicious/Good things we’ve eaten.
It’s hard to know whether or not we would love travel so much if we didn’t love food so much. In some countries, like Italy, France, Thailand, and Argentina, the travel experience is just as much about the food as it is about the sightseeing. Tapas in Spain, Indian food in England, gyros in Greece, mussels and fries (moules en frites) in Belgium, Irish breakfast, and all the usual suspects are reason enough to pack your bags, but it’s the unexpected surprises combined with the old favorites that makes travel such a passion for us.
- Steak with Gorgonzola cheese – At some small restaurant in a small town in the Loire Valley, France, we ate a delicious and perfectly cooked, tender steak topped with gorgonzola cheese. Yum!
- Hungarian cherries – May is a great time to visit Hungary, if for no other reason than the fact that it is cherry harvest time. Be careful when purchasing them from the street vendors because some cherries are the sour variety, used for making soup and not suitable for snacking. You want to find the type that we would call Rainier cherries here (not dark but rather the kind that have a lot of white/yellow in their coloring). They are superb.
- Bariloche chocolate – The ski resort of Bariloche, Argentina looks a lot like a Swiss Alpine village, and therefore the plethora of chocolate places should come as no surprise. Mitre Street in particular is lined with chocolate stores, and we sampled something in pretty much every shop. Chocolates Mamushka has these incredible marzipan-filled dates (okay, not chocolate, but that was good there, too). Chocolates Rapa Nui has the best of the chocolate that looks like a tree bark (similar to the English Cadbury Flake, called “chocolate en rama”). Chocolates Fenoglio has great ice cream. You’ll see Chocolates de la Abuela Goya all over the place, and while it’s not the best it is open late and has a decent hot chocolate. Check out this article on the “Street of Chocolate Dreams”.
Niagara area, upstate New York
- Tree ripened stone fruits – Perhaps it’s the terrible quality of produce available in our home Boston area, but more likely it’s just the sheer delight of tree ripened fruit that makes a trip to a summer farmstand such a treat. The Pacific Northwest in late summer is particularly great. The Okanagen region of British Columbia, Canada there are farmstands all over the place selling apricots, peaches, and nectarines. This isn’t the dry, tasteless variety you pick up in distant supermarkets but rather juicy, flavor-filled treats. You can also buy flavored honey at these stands (blueberry is incredible!). Washington state also has farm stands like this, and we stopped at a great one en route to Mt. Rainier National Park. In the Mt. Hood/Columbia River Valley of Oregon you can take a self-guided driving tour around the “Fruit Loop,” stopping at various farms and farm stands. Upstate New York also has terrific farmstands, like the one we stopped at while traveling the Niagara Wine Trail.
- Mamaliga and Mushrooms – We know it as polenta, but in Romania it’s called mamaliga. As in Italy, it’s traditionally just a peasant dish, simple corn meal mush. Topped with cheese (in Italy it’s called caccio cavallo cheese – it’s very similar in Romanian, kashkaval), it’s a delicacy (our tour guide thought we were nuts over the level of excitement over this common meal). In the Carpathian Mountains, we were served a variety of wild mushrooms (with garlic sauce, with cream sauce, with wine sauce) and topped the mamaliga with the mushrooms (and cheese, of course). If you read Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” mamaliga is mentioned.
- Pasta in London – England gets a terrible rap for having bad food, but the influx of ethnic cuisines makes it one of the top culinary destinations in the world. Who knew that we would eat an amazing pasta dish, topped with the freshest pesto ever, in the little café (The Pantry) inside the tiny St. Etheldreda Church in the heart of “the City” of London (a neighborhood rarely visited by tourists because it is a business centre). The cook and waitress are Italian, and the church itself is the oldest existing Roman Catholic church in London. The Pantry is only open for lunch on weekdays.
- Banana and Nutella Crepes – It’s hard to think of a more satisfying snack than a banana and nutella crepe made by a street vendor in Paris. We had a particularly tasty one on the Blvd. St. Germain right after going to a movie at one of the theaters clustered around the Metro Odeon stop.
- Grilled Ostrich Steaks – At a restaurant near the Waterfront Hall in Belfast, Northern Ireland (where we saw Synge’s classic “Playboy of the Western World”) we ate some delicious and nutritious ostrich steaks with a side of “mash.” Also ate ostrich at Nairobi, Kenya’s famous Carnivore restaurant (nyoma choma type restaurant).
http://www.nickswarehouse.co.uk - Green Cotton Candy Burritos – That’s not really what they’re called, but it’s a pretty accurate description, and probably the real name is about 37 syllables long. These were purchased in an open market at a rest stop in central Thailand. You get this stringy stuff that melts in your mouth like cotton candy, and is undoubtedly made of pure sugar. Then you wrap in up in a tortilla/pancake sort of thing (sort of like the moo shoo pancake you get in Chinese restaurants in the U.S). The pancake isn’t very sweet, so it sort of tempers the sugary cotton candy, which you put in the middle of the pancake and wrap up like a burrito. Fun and tasty.
- Mussels in Scotland — Mussels in a cream sauce with pancetta and leeks, so delicious I had to lap up all the sauce with a piece of crusty bread.
Mussels at the Stockbridge Tap in Edinburgh, Scotland
- Kenyan tea – The tea in Kenya (a wonderful, cheap and light item to bring home with you) is just incredible. A lot of tea we can buy here is from Kenya, but for whatever reason the tea purchased there is just superb. The black tea has no bitterness, none whatsoever, and is smoother than smooth. The cinnamon tea is like chewing on Big Red gum – it is just bursting with cinnamon flavor and makes some of the best, most refreshing iced tea you’ve ever had.
- Guatemalan papaya — It must be the freshness (and perhaps the cheap price makes it tastier). You can buy cut papaya from street vendors all over Guatemala, and it is overflowing with Vitamin A and flavor, at the perfect stage of ripeness. Hawaiian papaya isn’t half bad, either.
- Galuska or Nokedli — this is the Hungarian version of gnocchi and prepared in a paprika cream sauce. It’s a common side dish all over Hungary, but Annabella ate this dish at the famous Gundel restaurant in Budapest (where the pancakes were pretty darned good, too)
- Les calissons d’Aix – a marzipan treat from Provence that is sort of diamond-shaped and uniquely delicious because of its slightly hard/chewy outer coating (and reminiscent of the Sienese ricciarelli cookie ….. described in our Italian food favorites section)
- Connie’s broccoli rabe and cavatelli – No list of delicious foods would be complete without mentioning my Mom’s terrific homemade cavatelli topped with broccoli rabe sautéed in olive oil, garlic, and pancetta. This is my wife’s favorite dish.
- Chocolate in Brugges, Belgium – I know you can buy Leonidas and other Belgian chocolates in the U.S., but the fresh chocolates purchased from one of the many little chocolatiers around the town of Brugges (a worthy destination even without the chocolate) are arguably the best in the world. Words cannot describe the taste sensation.
- Grilled octopus, Santorini, Greece – The sheer delight of dining al fresco in the Greek Isles makes the food taste good, but octopus fresh off the boat and grilled to perfection – not too chewy, not too fishy – is one of those dishes that you would be hard pressed to find at home. (we also had octopus in Venice, Italy that was outstanding)
- Dumplings in China — They have 100s of dumpling shapes and fill them with all kinds of fillings. They are cheap, satisfying and fantastic.
Dumpling cart in Shanghai.
- Fresh bread in Split, Croatia – It was Yugoslavia at the time, and Annabella was walking down to the beach when the smell of fresh baked bread came drifting over the white stone walls calling out to her. She followed her nose and walked into a tiny bakery that seemed to operate out of the front of someone’s house. The warm loaf had been devoured before even hitting the sand.
- Foreign spices – One of our favorite souvenirs are spices and other dry goods purchased abroad and brought home to cook in our own kitchen. Herbes de Provence and sea salt from France, porcini mushrooms from Italy, cinnamon and jerk spices from the Caribbean, hot pepper from Thailand, tea from just about anywhere, and saffron from Spain or any regional specialty can be brought home fresh and for a fraction of the cost you’d pay for it at home (sea salt at Williams Sonoma will cost you $15 for a small jar while you can buy a one pound bag at any French market for about a dollar).
