11 posts tagged “food”

We went to a Mensa lunch at Guido's Favorite Foods in Durango, yesterday.  People in the Four Corners area of New Mexico frequently cross into Colorado to eat.  It's an hour drive each way, but hey, they have a much better selection of restaurants.  My County doesn't even have an Italian restaurant, except for one that I wouldn't insult the Italians with by calling it Italian.

Anyway, we both had paninis.  Strix had the portobello mushroom panini, and I had the "Guido's Favorite" panini, which was pastrami, onions, roasted red peppers, provalone...  God, I'm hungry again.

Strix brought this home from the store the other day.  She had gotten some smoked salmon in the mail from her brother as a graduation present, so she bought this to drink while we ate salmon on crackers with chevre cheese and capers (nom nom nom).

The beaujolais was good for this purpose.  It was not very complex, but it had a nice smoky flavor that complemented the salmon.

Strix and I are in Telluride for the weekend.  It's pretty cold here, being high altitude and all, but apparently not cold enough for the skiiers who are dying for snow.  It's a beautiful little town, despite all of the trees being dead.  A word of warning, though - there was a sign outside of town that said "Icy Conditions Ahead," and someone had written "PR" before "Icy."  Fairly warned, as they say.  I wish I could have gotten a picture of it, but I was driving.

We wandered around downtown for a little while and found that most of the restaurants here don't open until 5:30 for dinner.  At 5:15, one of them deigned to let us sit down and look over the menu while they got the kitchen up and running.  It was an Rustico Ristorante, an Italian restaurant with an impressive menu of gourmet country Italian cuisine.  Strix had risotto with saffron and rice, and I had rigatoni alla montanara, which is tube pasta with an arrabiata sauce and Italian sausage.  Both were excellent.  The bill, unfortunately, reflected the excellence of the meal.  I only wish I had been in a better mood to enjoy it.

In an aside, the restaurant's website is worth visiting for the music alone.

After dinner, we took a shuttle over to the High School, which has a surprisingly nice theater, to hear the San Juan Symphony play with the combined community choruses from Durango and Telluride.  The concert was very well done, as always.

Last night, Strix and I ate at Azuma Sushi & Teppan in Albuquerque.  The teppan chef didn't have the flare that chefs I've seen at similar restaurants had, but the food was delicious, and they have an interesting drink menu.  I had an unfiltered sake that looked like chalky water and tasted like coconut, bananas, and pineapple.  I don't think I'd get it every time, but it was tasty enough to get again sometime.

Noodles being expertly cooked on the table in front of us.  What I was really taking a picture of was the onion "volcano" on the top left.  This is a common trick at these restaurants, so I knew what was coming.

The volcano made of onion rings is filled with alcohol, then let ablaze.

Then he pours teriyaki sauce into it, which boils out looking like lava.  No, you're right, it's even more fun than when your mother made a little happy face out of pancakes.

Management gave us a free ice cream sunday to share around the table.  The ice cream itself was plum wine ice cream, and was very tasty.

Overall, I'd say it was a positive experience, the slightly grumpy chef notwithstanding. 

How you know you're in New Mexico:

An ice cream shop close to my office.  Sounds delicious, doesn't it?

So what can you say about a $5 bottle of pinot noir?  How about, "Hey, that's actually not bad."  This isn't a wine to write home about, with little complexity to it.  There are some undertones of black cherry or blackberry, which I expect in a pinot noir, but beyond that it's just a flat table wine.  The fact that it's actually drinkable and recognizable as a pinot at $5 per bottle is amazing enough, so let's just say it did it's job.

And drank this and used it on a homemade marinara over rotini.  The marinara was delicious, and would be a good base for any variation I wanted to make on pasta sauces.  I'll definitely be keeping this recipe.

We drank this today with snapper à la Caribbean, made by yours truly.  This is a Californian Chardonnay from the Russian River Valley (note: not actually in Russia).  It was very oaky, as Chardonnay tends to be, with tones of caramel apple.  I'm not an enormous fan of Chardonnay, but this was very good, and it went very well with the seafood dish.

The dish itself was interesting.  We couldn't actually get snapper (the store was out), so we used tilapia, which was very good but I think it would have been better with snapper.  The recipe called for grapeseed oil, which I'd never used before.  I mean, really, how many grapeseeds do you have to squeez to get a can of grapeseed oil?  My guess is a lot.  Info I found online about grapeseed oil is that it has a very high flash point (485° F), so it's good for frying foods at high temperature.  The fish was also coated in semolina flour before frying, which made for a very light breading.  All in all, this was an excellent meal, and I have the marinade left over, which I can cook down and use to season rice, later.

I went to Albuquerque yesterday to pick Strix up from the airport, and she hadn't had dinner yet so before heading back we ate at one of my favorite restaurants, Chama River Brewing Company.  Relaxed but sophisticated atmosphere, excellent service, great microbrews, terrific wine selection, and outstanding food.  I can't recommend this place enough.

I had honey-glazed salmon served on a bed of mashed sweet potatoes with french beans.  Yes, it's just as good as it sounds, only more so.  I had a lovely glass of pinot noir with it.  Strix had farfalle stossed in pesto with shrimp.  She had a wine of a varietal we had never heard of - albariño - a Spanish wine.  We both finished our dinners, and I asked Strix if it would be bad manners to lick my plate.

Sunday afternoon, Strix and I ate at a Cuban cafe in the Nob Hill area of Albuquerque called Laru Ni Hati.  Don't ask what what name means, because I don't know.  It's not Spanish.

This is a very strange place.  It's a bar, cafe, purveyor of greeting cards and postcards, and humidor.  Oh, yes, and it's a hair salon.  That's right, there's a hair salon in the same place as the restaurant, which doesn't seem very hygenic, but I was hungry and I'd never had Cuban food before.  And it's an Internet cafe.  And a place to play pool.  I'd like to see their business plan.

I had the Cuban Wrap, which had ham, chicken, and pork in a wrap with generous portions of green leafy stuff, and it was absolutely delicious.  The black beans and rice that came with it was worth the prices of the meal by itself.  Strix had the camarones y arroz (shrimp and rice), which had the same smooth, smokey seasoning as the wrap.

Saturday morning, we flew out from Albuquerque on ExpressJet, direct flight to Austin for the National Poetry Slam competitions.  I hate flying, with the the lugging of the luggage and the stripping down at the security checkpoint.  (It always takes longer when I get female security personnel, I don't know why.)

As we expected, stepping off the plane was like walking into a sauna.  It doesn't take long at all to acclimatize to the dry air in New Mexico, and going back to 95% humidity is quite the treat.  On top of that, of course, is that it's August and really damn hot, humidity aside.

We're staying at the Extended Stay America, which is expensive for what it is but it's downtown and close to the slam venues, and since we're staying here for a week it will be nice to have a fridge and microwave.  The other poets from Farmington are staying at an Econo Lodge way out on the edge of town, but I didn't want to commute in for our competitions, and we don't have a car.

After enjoying the air conditioning of our room for a little while, we went out and took in some of the sights of downtown Austin.

Anyone know what this building is?  It's cool.

A lot of cities have public art programs like this one.  Someone, usually a business, sponsors the piece, and the artist gets an undecorated form, and they get to decorate it how they want.  In Austin, they have guitars.  In Kansas City, it's cows, and in Milwaukee, its "beasties."  This guitar is decorated with old computer boards, with printer connectors for the struts.

There were a number of these horse-drawn carriages downtown.  I also saw a few bicycle rickshaws, believe it or not, but didn't get a picture of any of them.  I have only seen them on TV images of foreign countries up until now.

Downtown Austin is a justaposition.  High class restaurants and night clubs are a block away from places like this, the Dirty Dog Bar, with a picture of a dog... um... being affectionate with a woman's leg for its sign.  No, we didn't go in.  There are also a number of massage parlors and tattoo joints that looked like each ink came with a free case of hepatitis.  One massage parlor's sign said, "Modeling and Oriental Massage."  Modeling.  I'd never heard that take on it before.

It also became clear while walking around downtown Austin, that it has a serious, serious homeless problem.  There were places where the homeless outnumbered the tourists, restaurant patrons, and bar-goers combined.  Most of them were just hanging out, and a few were panhandling.  Some of them were too busy talking to themselves to be bothered talking to other people.  I'm going to take a stand and say that Austin has a problem with the homless, but the homeless apparently do not have a problem with Austin.

I'm also going to go out on a limb and say that Austin has a drinking problem.  I have never seen so many bars and clubs in such a small vicinity.  Many of the homeless carry coolers that they keep their cheap beer in, and I saw one man just tossing his empties in the grass.  Drinking seems to be the local hobby, which is fine with me since I'm on vacation and not driving.  When in Rome, do as the Romans do.  But I worry for Austin as you would worry for a friend that's hitting the bottle too much.  If there were an AA meeting for cities, Austin should go.

More guitar art.  I couldn't get a full shot of it due to an unusually high concentration of homeless people congregating here.

Another pic of one of the horse-drawn carriages.

Another thing Austin has a lot of is really neat old buildings.  They were built with style, and they have been well preserved.

By this time, I was getting pretty hungry, so we at a Vietnamese-Thai restaurant called Mekong River.  Whenever we're out of town, Strix and I try to find cuisine that we couldn't get back home, and Vietnamese fits that category.  After perusing the menu, however, we both got dishes that could be better described as Thai food.  Strix had the pineapple curry with tofu.  I had a dish called the "Rated R Shrimp."  I think the "Rated R" part of the name refers to the spiciness of it.  It's shrimp and vegetables, served in a sort of hot and sour sauce.  It was very tasty.  Strix enjoyed her curry, too, but had them box it up so she would have room for an order of sweet sticky rice, which we shared.  If you've never had sticky rice desserts, you should.  It's rice cooked down in a coconut milk mixture, and in this case it was topped with custard and a coconut cream sauce.  Very good.

If you don't think you would like Vietnamese or Thai food, Mekong also has a New York style deli, right inside the restaurant.

We went back to the hotel for a while, mainly just to get out of the humidity and to nap off our dinner, then went back out at nine to a place called Antone's.  Antone's is a dirty-looking blues bar, but it boasts a history of some pretty impressive performers and draws an eclectic and generally clean crowd.  Ten bucks a head got us in to see Gary Clark Jr.  He was truly amazing, and his bass player Nick Current also sang on a couple of songs, too.

Nick, by the way, looked like he wasn't sure if he wanted to be Brian Setzer or David Bowie, but he did know how to play and belt out the songs.

If you go to Antone's, don't bother with the mixed drinks.  They're overpriced and taste a little watery.  Stick to the bottled stuff.

Another good reason to come to Antone's: this is where some of slams are going to be.  My bout is slated for a different venue, but I hope they have a bar.  My poetry will probably sound better if the audience if half-sloshed.

More later.  Ciao!