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Food

Destinations, Featured Places, Food, Landscape Architecture, Thailand

The Travelling Soul: In Search of the Northern Thai Spirit at Tamarind Village

December 7, 2012

The most beautiful glimpse into Lanna culture came from an unexpected turn down a lantern-lit walkway. After admiring handicrafts and tasting our way through local dishes during a warm evening wander through Chaing Mai’s Sunday Market street stalls, Ted pulled me aside.

“What’s down there?”

A bamboo grove lit by spotlights and floating lanterns beckoned us onward, away from the noise of the street and toward the promise of a grand discovery. The flags said something about Travelling Souls… Continue Reading…

Destinations, Food, Thailand

Onward to Asia: Surprised In Bangkok

December 1, 2012

Hey friends, welcome to Asia! We’ve sunk completely into New Zealand life after completing a five-week tour of Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. At long last, with a bit of reasonable wifi and more than a few cups of tea and toastie sandwiches to fuel the photo sorting and story gathering, we’re finally set to start sharing the new series. Hope you enjoy the tales as much as we enjoyed the adventures! Cheers, Bethany


Aspects of Asia intimidated me. Challenging alphabets, unidentifiable ingredients, eastern traditions of dress and worship and dwelling. Mayhem on the roadways. All so decidedly different from my upbringing as an English-speaking westerner living in calm-as-mashed-potatoes Oregon.

Bangkok, Thailand made sense on the map when we worked out our RTW route: an easy jump into the shallow end of Southeast Asia, a hub for accessing neighboring countries. We bought the tickets and committed, and I fully expected to do more research and trip planning while we were in Africa. Reality took a different shape: our wifi access was expensive and limited during the string of months leading to arrival, and quite unlike our preparation for beginning-of-the-trip South America, we had little on hand in terms of guidebooks, itineraries, or resources.

Thankfully, our friend Lindsay posted Love at First Sight about her summer visit, and Meg and Tony, our pals at Landing Standing, shared their (promising!) First Impressions of Bustling Bangkok. Others, like Bethaney at Flashpacker Family, wrote about Tough Times in Bangkok. After experiencing our own bouts of travel fatigue and more than a few cravings for stability and calm, we honestly didn’t know what to expect. Continue Reading…

Destinations, Food, Zanzibar

Flavor on a Dime, Luxury on a Dollar: Favorites From A Dozen Days in Zanzibar

November 16, 2012

During our dozen days in Zanzibar, we managed to find delightful meals, new friends, comfortable accommodations, and perfectly pulled espresso shots, some for the price of a few pretty pennies, others at cost of shiny gold coins. For those planning a visit to Zanzibar, enjoy our mini cheat-sheet of favorite activities in Stone Town and beyond, and for those of you reading along for armchair travel, enjoy the peek at life on this colorful island. I so wish we could’ve packed you along in our suitcase!

Colorful Street Food – Fodorhani Gardens Night Market
Favorite fare: Coconut potato soup with fry bread dumplings: 1,000Tsh ($0.62 +/-)

This outdoor market on the Stone Town waterfront crawls with visitors looking for a bite and vendors looking for a mark. Strike one on the grilled octopus (especially compared to octopus later in the trip), but absolute home run on the coconut potato soup Ted learned about from a friendly fellow named Ahmed.



Freshly-squeezed sugar cane juice; grilled octopus and seafood galore Continue Reading…

Destinations, Food, Photography, Zanzibar

Cooking Octopus Curry with A Woman Named Peace

November 10, 2012

Coconut palms, mango trees, citrus fruits, rice and spice and fish. Turmeric, vanilla beans, hot chilies, black pepper, and cinnamon curls…

Zanzibar cuisine.

When we arrived on the island, a spice tour and a cooking lesson were my two highest hopes. Rather than find a touristy cooking lesson in Stone Town, I waited to look for a teacher until we left the city and settled into our spot an hour east, on the beach near the little town of Bwejuu. I’d read about a project in a neighboring village where local women taught cooking lessons as part of a grass-roots community development project, but as it turned out, I didn’t even have to look that far to find exactly what, or rather who, I was hoping for.

Removed by sea and time from the hazy city of Dar es Salaam (a gritty place on mainland Tanzania, ironically bearing the Swahili name Haven of Peace), a woman named Peace sits inside a woven-palm-walled hut on the white sands, selling her wares, saving her earnings, and offering kindness to strangers like me. Continue Reading…

Destinations, Featured Places, Food, Zanzibar

Tasting Zanzibar: Dinner in Stone Town at Emerson Spice Hotel

November 4, 2012

We found ourselves at sunset in Tanzania, making that upward, upward climb, not pursuing Kilimanjaro’s summit, mind you, but following the wooden stairways winding skyward to the rooftop restaurant at Emerson Spice Hotel in Zanzibar.

My hopes for spice revelations in Zanzibar briefly went up in smoke after our disheartening spice tour…but the flavors and atmosphere of a magical night at Emerson Spice high above Stone Town’s skyline effortlessly resurrected the romance of our East African dream. Continue Reading…

Destinations, Food, Musings, Zanzibar

Cardamom Spice Tea: Bitter and Sweet on a Spice Tour in Zanzibar

October 31, 2012

“Zany Zebras Zoom Through Zanzibar!”

Alphabet cassette tapes of the 1980s pained a wild and colorful picture of a place in my childhood mind. Twenty years later, I heard Lynn Rosetto Casper’s voice through my iPod headphones. She was chatting with a Splendid Table listener who had recently returned from Zanzibar, and my imagination again filled with scenes of spice plantations and market stalls. I could almost smell the coconut and cinnamon and cardamom spice as Lynn rattled off recipes, and I was smitten by the sounds of such an exotic trip…

I remember Ted and I sharing travel planning dates at Townshend’s Tea in NE Portland, drinking alternating pots of highland, kashmiri, and masala chai…plotting our great escape. When we pinned down our travel route and sorted flights, this Tanzanian island off the eastern coast of Africa moved from fantasy to reality, and I could barely contain my excitement at the thought of tracking my favorite spices back to their origins.

My highest hopes:

1) Seeing my kitchen pantry spices growing in fertile soil under tropical sun

2) Bringing my cookbook-world to life by learning a recipe or two from someone living on the island

Like most visions of the unknown, reality came in different shades. Continue Reading…

Destinations, Feature Trips, Food, South Africa, twoOregonians Tour the Cape

Sedgefield and Knysna: Another Edition of Oregon Twinsies

October 2, 2012


Proteas and fynbos for sale at Wild Oats Farmer’s Market, Sedgefield, South Africa

Can’t help it: I’m always stacking the world up against Oregon. My home-state is in my blood, and I’m proud of it.

Local food? Gorgeous scenery? Check, check. Good friends? Double check.

Thanks to relationships built over our month-long stint volunteering at Carmel by the Sea, Ted and I were treated to a little taste of home way on the opposite side of the world.

Our new (and hopefully life-long) friends Gary and Susan surprised us on our last weekend at Carmel with tickets for a cruise on the Knysna Lagoon, gifted to us by the organization in thanks for our time volunteering. (No thanks needed, though! We’re still thanking them for three meals a day for a month and a beautiful retreat on the Indian Ocean…)

The Saturday itinerary: straight out of the playbook for a perfect day at home. Imagine a community farmers market (with a little taste of Eugene’s Oregon Country Fair thrown in the mix), and then a trip up to Oregon and Washington’s Columbia River Gorge for scenic views across majestic cliffs and waterways… Got the mental image in your head? (If not – here are a few cheat sheets from other visitors.)

Now just jump to South Africa, change the names, a few of the faces, and tell me if you see the similarities: Continue Reading…

Destinations, Feature Trips, Food, South Africa, twoOregonians Tour the Cape

Local Food + Pink Martini: Dinner at the Veg-Table

September 16, 2012

We were out driving around the Cape of South Africa, stopping from time to time to ask residents what they might recommend, explaining that we love finding small scale producers and local food. The next thing we knew, a woman in Sedgefield was scribbling down a phone number for a fellow named Brett. “Give him a call,” she said.

And oh, we are so glad we did.

On a Wednesday night, we pulled off the rural road and our car headlights illuminated the promise enchantingly hidden in the woods: “Veg-Table Private Dining Room.”


Love the sign. It loosely translates to, “This way for slow, cow-friendly food”

Down the dark drive, we pulled up to a little cabin, lit with candles and filled with music swirling through the rustic rooms and drifting out the open doors… Crackling open flames danced on the hearth and smiles crossed our faces as we were shown to a tiny table adorned with antique green and white fabric and perfectly mismatched giraffe figurines. Continue Reading…

Destinations, Food, Lebanon, Musings

Flavors, Friendships, and Top Meals in Lebanon: A Visit in Review

September 3, 2012

It’s fair to say that our Lebanon experience was shaped by two main factors: the overwhelming kindness of friends, new and old, and the mouthwatering flavors of Lebanese food (and drink!).

This is one of those posts entirely dedicated to fellow foodies and free spirits: to Jodi and Wade and Megan for taking us to t-marbouta on our first night in Beirut, to Lindsay and Samantha for hosting us for a rooftop dinner high above the frantic city, and especially to Jimmy and Madeleine for leading us directly to their favorite spots and top meals in Lebanon: some in plain sight, others hidden away where we’d never have found them on our own… In town, in the countryside, in restaurants and around kitchen tables, Lebanon won our taste buds and our hearts.

Small Town Lunch in Rural Lebanon
Massaad
Zahlé Blvd, Zahleh, Lebanon
“Perfection in a chicken sandwich” from the Daily Travel Journal notes. Freshly grilled chicken, a mouthwatering combination of seasonings and spices, homemade pickles (see the crazy purple color below!), perfectly wrapped pita with sesame seeds, and chefs with killer-sharp knife skills.

Continue Reading…

Destinations, Food, Lebanon

Homemade Preserves: Savoring Breakfast in Hasroun, Lebanon

August 26, 2012

Our guest house breakfast in the little Lebanese village of Hasroun would doubtless cause any DIY food-swapper to salivate slack jaw at the sight of the decadent, traditional spread.

After a night’s sleep recovering from blazing sunshine and our Qadisha Valley hike, we awoke to birdsong and our hostess’s incredible homemade offerings: bowl after bowl of preserved and pickled pears, quince, apples, figs, and cherries; apricot butter, walnut and fig spread, cheese, olives, brown farm eggs, zaatar, labneh, and a steaming pot of strong, strong tea. Continue Reading…