LIFESAVERS FOR THE HARRIED COOK

A lazy weekend is one thing, but a totally lazy week does not get food on the table. Failing take-out, PREP is the key word here: preparedness. Mise en place, to the French: it means getting your stuff in place. To that end, there are things that you can keep in the fridge that'll make life so much easier: hard-cooked eggs, cooked veggies, cooked pasta and salsa, for a start. They can all be cooked in a 30 minute period, slipped into containers, and chilled (3 or 4 days) for that moment when a meal is needed but the will to slave isn't there. Then remove 30 minutes prior to serving, slathered with your home-made vinaigrette, and look like a goddess.
This can also be a nice Sunday late-afternoon activity with your responsible youngsters: the tasks are short but basic, so they're learning how to cook without realizing it. And the satisfaction of helping put food on the table not only makes them feel responsible, but when they're your age they'll tell their own kids about it. A no-lose situation!
Prep green beans, carrots, zucchini, and other family favorite vegetables. My kids liked Brussels sprouts (go figure). Parboil in batches (you can use the same water; do sprouts last). Lift from water with a slotted spoon, and plunge veg into ice water. Then put in zip bags and store in veggie drawer. Zucchini and onions can be sauteed briefly, then put in bags when cool. Boil and peel eggs. And you're ready for a summer salad!
One little hint to make things really zing: just before serving, halve a lemon, stick your fork in it and twist. The luscious juice springs forth onto your salad. Makes everything sit up and sing. Do this only with fresh lemons, it's worse than useless with that bottled stuff.
I keep pre-cooked ground pork and chicken in the freezer. When I'm doing my prep work, I just fry it (no seasonings except a sprinkle of salt, who knows what I'll do with it in two or three days).
When I was a kid, my father used to fry up bacon, then toss in a chopped onion until it was transparent and starting to brown, then add left-over cooked elbow noodles and stir-fry (not that the term was known at that point) until they began to crisp. Serve with ketchup. Not sure I could stand all those bacon fat calories (or the incredible amount of sugar in today's ketchup), but the memories are good. And crumbled bacon improves any dish but strawberry shortcake.
MAKE AHEAD NICOISE:
Prep green beans, eggs, chunked potatoes and mushrooms (optional, diagonally-sliced carrots). Put cans of albacore tuna in the fridge (one can each two adults). Splash lemon vinaigrette on potatoes and mushrooms; refrigerate separately. Rinse and spin red-leaf and escarole lettuce; will keep overnight in the cold drawer. Ditto red bell pepper and green onions.
Make a bed of lettuce on your largest platter or shallow serving dish. Quarter eggs and Roma tomatoes. Arrange the vegetables in groups atop. Drain tuna and put down middle of platter. Sprinkle with Feta cheese and Kalamata olives. I know, the fabled Nicoise olives are the real deal, but they are tiny, unpitted, and hardly worth the work. And the feta is my idea, use it if you want. I like feta. Serve more vinaigrette separately, but do the lemon trick at the table before the platter is passed.
Enjoy.

WASABI...WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Those of us who are sushi lovers are well-acquainted with wasabi, that pinch of pale green paste that sits to one side of the plate and, when smeared sparingly on the sushi, produces a taste reaction somewhere between mild heat and sinus-destroying explosions. Click to read more...

LOOKIN FOR CALAMARI IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

One of my enduring favorite foods is calamari. Despite the furor over pig unmentionables as possible substitutes, I persevere: the perfect dish of calamari is out there, and I will find it. So far, at least to the best of my knowledge, I have not ingested pork you-know-what's, it's all been the real thing.
While in Southeast Asia this summer, I found calamari only in slices in sauce, and that doesn't count. I want unadorned, not smoshed over with sauce and vegetables and atop rice. No, when I say calamari, I mean fried rings and tentacles. Mixed. Frankly, a whole bowl of baby tentacles makes me feel like a mass murderer...

A FRENCH SALAD

We all have our favorite salad. And we can all probably remember some really baad salads. I'll give you an awful memory of mine: in Vernon, France, only steps from the sublime Monet garden, is a small hotel restaurant. I ordered a salad. It came with wilted lettuce, long-ago cut tomatoes and canned corn. What is it with the French and canned corn? They'll put the stuff on almost anything except foie gras, and I'm not even sure of that.

 On the other hand, France makes some of the most sublime salads going. Here's one of my favorites, as photographed in Nantes a little while ago. By the way, Nantes has a twenty foot high mechanical elephant that is absolutely magnificent (silly factoid of the year), some lovely gardens, so there are reasons besides food to visit. But who needs any other reason?
Many times, French salads come in little piles: grated carrots, tomatoes, mushrooms, lettuce, those damned kernels of corn, onions, olives, whatever. This salad, however, is different. You need a generous 3/8" - 1/2" slice (why stint? you won't do this every day) of a good goat cheese for each serving, something about 3" or 4" in diameter. Failing that, in desperation...

VIETNAMESE SALAD FROM HUE

I had this delicious salad for late breakfast in Hue, Vietnam. Obviously, I love salads. You could have it for lunch or dinner as well, of course. It's the perfect way to use up some leftover beef if you don't want to start from scratch. You could even, in a pinch, use thickly sliced roast beef from a deli. Turn the page for the easy recipe...

PASTA: DREAMS VS REALITY

So, seven weeks on the road,  most of the time eating the cuisines of Southeast Asia: Malaysian, Indonesian, Indian, fusion, and Vietnamese. We cheated once, in Bali; had pizza. But this is, for the most part, the land of rice. Every meal begins and often ends with rice. Rice in a myriad of forms, marks the day: soupy rice congee for breakfast, a bowl with a few simple trimmings for lunch, a bowl for dinner. Or maybe rice noodles, or rice paper wrapped around shredded veggies. Outside the door or down the street, the rice paddy, its green like a carpet of emeralds. Always, always, rice....

THOUGHTS ON MOSAICS

I once had a picnic lunch in Julius Caesar's living room. It was back in the day, when Rome's Forum was still a weedy field and nobody was rushing about seeing their day's quota of ruins. There were no fences and no crowds, only me and two cats and a few odds and ends: salami, buffalo mozzarella, some big dark olives, bread and some wine. It was a fall day, sunny and just cool enough. I sat on a large piece of rubble (marble, carved, 1st C BCE), laid out my feast on another stone, and fed both myself and the cats. A little sign, discrete, almost an afterthought, informed me that the mosaics under my feet were part of Caesar's floor. For the life of me I can't remember what the pattern was, only that the background of 1/2" marble tessera was white, and some dark swirls - leaves? fish? - peeked from under the dirt and weeds.
Think of mosaics and that's likely what you'll think of: small squares of colored stone carefully laid, enduring for millennia in some cases. Tunisia and western Turkey, for example, are practically paved with mosaics. Find the Bardo Museum (Tunis) site for some killer examples. Mosaics also come in tiny, detailed form, some of the stones 1/16", which allows amazing detail.
I am in Hue, Vietnam, and went this morning (on a motorbike, picture that) to see the Imperial tombs outside the city. Most of them date to the mid-19th century, and - compared to most funerary complexes - are pretty modest. Part of their beauty is their settings, which are rolling parkland and forests, with long expanses of lotus-strewn lakes. The Minh Mang complex is particularly lovely, with a series of rising and falling pavilions amidst the trees.
And then we have the tomb of Emperor Khai Dinh,  (1916 - 1925, essentially a French puppet), sited on a hillside overlooking rolling hills and rice paddies. The guidebook says mosaics line the mausoleum at the top of the hill, so I climbed the 127 steps and went into the hall where the Emperor is buried. The room, centered by the gaudiest tomb ever built, is thirty by thirty, with twenty foot ceilings. There is not a square inch that does not have high relief glass and pottery figures in it: the Four Seasons, Eight Precious Objects (?), and Eight Fairies (those I wanted to see), dragons and phoenixes, clouds and peonies and plants, birds and flowers. It is in absolutely awful taste and it hangs together beautifully. There are times when nothing succeeds like incredible excess. This is one of those times.
Photos coming, when I can get to a computer that isn't blocked.

AND YET ANOTHER ROADBLOCK...

Who'd ever dreamt that the simple act of typing could be so difficult? I am in Nha Trang, a beautiful sea-front city on the central Vietnam coast. The climate is as steamy as Florida's, the golden sand beach is miles long, rocky islands dot the bay, and beyond lies the South China Sea. One òf the magical phrases òf my life hás beên South China Sea (don't ask; who knows why?). Lodging hểre ís ridiculously inexpensive, food ís even cheaper, and except for the insane traffic I have little to complain about.
EXCEPT the computer keyboard. It's set up to type Vietnamese, which ís completely understandable, after all I am in Vietnam...except that it means every single word hás to be gone òvẻr a multitude òf times to make sure it's right. Seê all thóse little squiggles over the a's and e's, i's and o's? What happens ís that when those letters are typed, the next letter doén't get entered (sê doén't? See hơ it gét typed? Í thí crazy-making ỏ what?). Hard to explain, but perhaps the foregoing sentences help ẽxplain. And thểre ís apparently no W in thís language, so a U póps up until you repeatedly hit the W key! Yikes!
The net result ís that I have messed up my Yahoo mail account so badly that Yahoo hás shut me dơwn for a whole damn week. Suspicious activity. All it is was a Vietnamese keyboard.

NYONYA COOKING

For starters, take a quick look at a map of southeast Asia, present-day Malaysia/Singapore/Indonesia. Use Singapore as the center reference. North of Singapore, along the western coast of the land mass, just to the left (west) of Kuala Lumpur, you will find the island of Penang and below it the Straits of Malacca, once a pivot point and major focus  for trade, exploration and exploitation. Any country interested in this area has instantly recognized that the Straits were a strategically-priceless choke point, giving or denying access to the South China Sea and points east.
In the 15th C, the Ming Emperor of China sent one of his daughters to wed the Sultan of Malacca. The Princess brought 500 retainers with her, all of which were commanded to wed local Malays. The culture of the so-called Straits Chinese is an amalgam of Malay, Indonesian, and Chinese that began with the Princess and continued for centuries.
The cultural melding best shows in their vibrant cuisine, called Nonya, which is the affectionate word for woman, or mother, or even auntie, in Malay (baba is father). You'll hear more than a few references to this style of cuisine in the months to come, so I thought I'd give a little historic background. Why? Because history always affects food: how it's grown, prepared, and eaten.
I know this first hand (and so do you, just cast your memory back to those old days before the creation of the international theme restaurant consortiums). When I was a kid, Italian immigrants to New York made the best pizza in the world; Sbarro's high-sodium fake Italian would've gone bankrupt overnight. When you were a kid, any variation on your local food theme usually came from immigrants, whether they were displaced people of color bringing fried chicken to the north, the Portugese bringing linguica to Rhode Island, or Polish immigrants bringing pierogis to Pennsylvania. And for the ultimate American example, check out Brooklyn, New York, where the melting pot even now is bubbling merrily away.
But, as always, I digress, so...back to Asia. Nowhere is historic influences on food more true - and more visible - than in the area in and around Melacca, and north to Penang. Here, you can easily trace through ingredients the tides of various cultures and how they added their touch to a cuisine. Read on for more history, and a new way of preparing rice...

MEET RITCHIE

We went to Kuching, Borneo, because we had two days left before we went to Singapore and we wanted to see the orang-utans. There are a number of primate rescue centers here, but Seminggoh was reported to be one of the better experiences, as the animals - most of whom had been caged by private collectors, or orphaned when their mothers were killed - roam free in the preserve. We took a car (with driver, nobody in their right mind would try to drive in this neck of the woods), and in forty five minutes were walking from the parking lot down the road to the feeding center. The animals are fed twice a day, and morning is supposed to be the better time. But what we saw exceeded even our non-stop imaginations.
MEET RITCHIE: one hundred kilos of attitude, this 32-year old bad boy is the undisputed leader here in the preserve, and comes down to feed only rarely. We got lucky; he showed up a half hour before the scheduled 9AM banana-fest. The caretakers were amazed as he hadn't come in for two weeks, plus they could see Ritchie wasn't a happy camper, and they kept telling us to step back.

Apparently, the Big Guy doesn't like visitors; he kept his back to us, and made no eye contact at all. We were all within thirty feet of him when he swung down off the feeding platform and headed right toward us. The guards were freaking out, pushing people (we are such silly creatures, wanting our photos at any price, not realizing this guy would happily and very easily tear off a hand or arm). I was less than ten feet when I took this photo, but at least I had a railing between us. Ritchie continued on down the path, then swung onto the road, projecting that menacing, I-can-tear-you-limb-from-limb attitude with every ponderous step.

This, it turns out, was not the 9AM feeding, this was a bonus. We had been among the first to enter the center, and had a front-line view. What happened next...

SINGAPORE!

I have read that Singapore reinvents itself every five years. Our taxi ride, along a wide, immaculate boulevard lined with trees and meticulously-clipped planting beds, from Changi Airport into the city was a marvel of ooohs and aaahs. Once leaving the long boulevard and soaring over the bridges leading into the city, the amazing sight of Gardens by the Bay and Marina Center stunned us. The first, two billion dollars worth of horticultural excess housed in two enormous greenhouses, is right on the Singapore River. Facing it, is what we came to call The Boat, a sixty story triple-tower extravaganza topped by what looked like an airplane fuselage, its prow jutting out a hundred feet into thin air. The photo at right hardly does this massive tour de force justice. All around these architectural wonders were many other

buildings of fanciful shapes. I would think Singapore is an architect's dream-come-true. Just about anything goes here as long as it's different.
Once we'd checked into our Chinatown hotel, we went for dim sum (they call it yum cha here, but it's still one of my faves). Then we took the sparkling clean MRT across town to Gardens by the Bay. Two billion dollars built these immense greenhouses, marvels of construction with outer cladding that looked like pleats. One houses a garden with various climates from around the world, the second a cloud forest with six story waterfall. Outside, a forest of artificial trees (see left), about 15 of them,

house photovoltaic cells and exhaust chimneys; underneath the whole thing is an extensive green biomass converter, part of their much-touted commitment to going green (although that did not extend to commenting, on the signs under the silly airplanes, on how air travel is a major pollutant). The trees were the best part as they weren't jammed with visitors, all of whom took endless photos of each other amidst much shrieking and giggling. With a tourist entrance fee of $28US, this was no cheap exploration (locals pay maybe five dollars Singapore). But a lovely gentleman from Cairns had said it was an epic construction full of marvelous gardens, that all his Aussie friends made special trips to see it. So...we forked over the money, joined the mob, and...

PENANG, A FOODIE'S DREAM

Singapore, that internationally-known foodie mecca, has got a neighbor that says it's better: Penang, an island off the west coast of peninsular Malaysia that's home to a vibrant cultural mix of Malay, Chinese, Indian, Thai, Burmese and Tamil settlers. A strategic trading post since the 1500's, Penang was "discovered" by Englishman Francis Light about the time America declined to be ruled by George III. As the English did in those days, they soon took over, and what came to be known as the Straits Settlements were part of the Empire until World War II.
Penang's main town, George Town, is today a World Heritage site, which puts it on my bucket list. The historic district is crammed with two-story Chinese shophouses that once held a store on the ground floor and housing upstairs and in the back. Today, these narrow, deep shophouses are being converted to hotels and elegant, trendy private residences. Their teak floors and beautiful woodwork, and the thick second-floor shutters on the street side, plus the inevitable architectural flourishes so beloved by the Chinese, make these a photographer's dream. The photo at right is a fairly typical street scene, one of the thousands of area trishaws backed by one of the many temples - this one Chinese - George Town sports.But...hey...this is supposed to be about the food.Turn the page!

BOROBUDUR

The Global Foodie Visits Borobudur!

Twenty or so miles to the east of the city of Yogyakarta, Java, is the ancient Hindu site of Prambanan, which I've written about previously. About twenty miles to the west of Yogya, on a slight rise, lies the once-lost ruins of Borobudur temple. While Prambanan is a grouping of temples, Borobudur is a massive pile of over two million pieces of grey stone. How it ever got "lost" is beyond me, but this enormous site was known only to the locals who canibalized it for their own building for a millennium. "Discovered" in the mid-1800's, it was a ravaged pile of tumbled stones. Talk about your tough jigsaw puzzles!
We stayed in the hotel adjacent to the site, so had easy access across a field to the site. The first photo shows our view from the gardens of the hotel.

PHOTO WORTH A THOUSAND DONUTS

Dunkin Donuts is all over the world. When I was in Bogota, Columbia, several years ago, I noticed everyone who got on our plane for a domestic flight was carrying at least two boxes of Dunkin Donuts. I asked about it and was told that particular outlet, in the Bogota airport, was reputed to ahve the best donuts in the country. When people visited friends or relatives and they flew from Bogota, Dunkin Donuts were de rigeur as a hostess gift.
We were in Solo, Indonesia, where there are also Dunkin Donuits. The photos below, however, are from the bakery department of a Carrefour (a French chain of hypermarches). The other trays were colored brilliant oranges and reds, and a third tray held lime green with orange polka dots. The muffiins were equally brilliant.
Would you eat one of these things?

PRAMBANAN, INDONESIA

A thousand years ago, about the time William the Conqueror arrived in England, long before Marco Polo went to China, maybe about the time Vikings reached North America, the kings of central Java were building these massive stone temples. This elaborately-carved, hundred twenty foot tall tower, the centerpiece of a group of five (four are smaller but still impressive), has survived the fall of dynasties, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and hordes of tourists. As recently as 2005, an earthquake knocked some of the stones loose. Today, if you go inside the main temple, you must wear a hard hat. A half mile away, another temple complex is still mostly piles of rubble, and it should be years before they can piece it back together again. The lower photo of me and Deb was taken in front of the partially-reconstructed north temple, which was hard hit by the same catastrophic earthquake. Given that this site is on the edge of the Ring of Fire, and that the island of Java has about one hundred active volcanoes, its condition should be no surprise. The effort it takes to sort out the thousands of stones, most about 19" square and perhaps carved on one or two sides, is hard to calculate.
The calm temples are perhaps twenty miles east of the frenetic city of Yogyakarta, and inhabit a park-like area with acres of lawns and trees and - of course, as this is Indonesia -  karaoke near the children's playground. Indonesians seem to love noise, particularly music played at levels that will deafen in no time flat. Apparently, being totally tone deaf is no deterrent, and listening to someone who couldn't carry a song in a suitcase is no big deal.
In the States, having a food concession at a major tourist attraction would lead to twelve dollar hamburgers and six dollar French fries, but here at Prambanan the open-air restaurant served the usual Indonesian lunch of rice, stir-fried water spinach with prawns, and a tall glass of iced tea...for less than two bucks. No tipping expected, the waiter delighted to do anything he could to make us happy, and lots of wais when we left.
I guess I'll put up with the karaoke.

TORAJA: BAD FOR BUFFALOS

Many documentaries have been made about the funerary practices of Torajans, who live in the central highlands of Sulawesi, a volcanic island in eastern Indonesia on the edge of the Sulu Sea. Just north of Bali and Lombok, the ruggedly beautiful upland is cloaked with the brilliant green of rice paddies, stands of bananas, patches of coffee and cacao, and punctuated by gaudily-colored roosters, snuffling black pigs, and some of the ugliest dogs you ever laid eyes on.
The star of the show, however, is the water buffalo, prized among animals for its endless usefulness. It's fair to say that the rich variety of Torajan life could not go on without the invaluable buffalo. The guy on the left, about seven years old, led by a ring through his nose (not 100% effective, by the way), is especially valuable because of his coloring. Solid black is not as pleasing to the gods, and animal sacrifice is a major part of Torajan funeral rites.

IN PRAISE OF RICE

The Global Foodie reports in!

Take a good look at your next bowl of rice. Be it boring white, yellow and fragrant with saffron, fried golden brown for nasi goreng or a similar dish, or Arborio in a risotto, bet you never thought about how it got to your table. I'm sitting at an internet cafe in Rantepao, Toraja, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, and have just spent the day hiking through miles of stunningly beautiful rice paddies. I also tried my hand at threshing rice (maybe twenty whacks against a board, four minutes total and that was enough, thank you very much). The women who'd let me try the task laughed at me, and went back to threshing, which they would do for ten hours each day. As pay, they get 20% of the harvest.

CIAO, COLUMBIA (updated)

Here is St. Petersburg, we've had yet another controversial "improvement" latched onto by our muddle-minded City Council. At one point, one worthy woman stated that the voters didn't know their own minds, so the City Council had to make it up for them. I will not go into how stupid elected officials can be, we are witness to too much criminal idiocy from Washington every single day.

This time, for us, it's the demolishing of the not-so-very-old Pier (see photo right)  and its replacement with a Frank Gehry wannabe thing of absolutely no esthetic value (but worth one helluva lot to developers and contrcution companies). This thing is called The Lens, and its sails and  flying protruberances (think of a hybrid with Bilbao Museum and Sydney's Opera House by way of a WalMart committee with the designer of Kim Kardashian's camo gown as chairperson) will make Bilbao's outwardly stunning (I never did get the interior) museum look like very small pesos indeed.

The present inverted pyramid Pier beloved by tourists replaced, two decades ago, an older Spanish style (the basic traditional architecture of St. Pete) edifice. Now we'll go 21st Century. Yippee.

So what's that to you? Not much, unless you have dined at the glass-walled Columbia Restaurant, on the fourth floor of the Pier. It closes in less than two weeks, so we went there for a last hurrah. One of a half dozen branches of the venerable Ybor City (Tampa) restaurant, the food is classic Cuban/Spanish and the house salad is one of the best. And here's why: just before serving (always table-side, bless their hearts), the waitperson takes a fresh half lemon, plunges a fork into its cut side, and twists. The fresh lemon juice falls on the salad. Do this at home. You just dress the salad, vinaigrette and all, then do the lemon thingie at the last instant. Sensational! It makes an amazing difference.

In my ceaseless search for the utlimate calamari, I taste tested the Columbia's. Not so bad. Crisp, a very generous amount (note all the whole critters with tentacles!), a decent although too-bland sauce to dip. On a 1 to 10, I'll give it an 8. My friends each had the crab cakes, said they were good: two big ones with sauce. Too bad the St. Petersburg branch of the Columbia's going to be closed for three years; I'd go back for more. Guesss I'll just have to toodle over to Ybor City for a calamari fix.

SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY

 


Normally, I would not mention a food item by name (I don't think that's my place in the scheme of things), but this one is too good not to share. This, fellow gelato lovers, is special.

I don't know who makes this stuff (please, don't tell me it's Kraft, makers of fine polyester cheeses), but I'd like to shake them by the hand. They have got it nailed. They have made a line of gelato and sorbetto flavors that is nothing short of sensational.

THE GREAT DIM SUM SEARCH, in London

In London's Chinatown, only two blocks square, there are 78 restaurants. Most of them these days serve dim sum, many of them from carts (my favorite way to browse). Let's put aside the insane prices here in The Smoke. After all, dim sum is usually so reasonably-priced that even the hideous dollar-to-pound crunch isn't too bad. I am searching with limited success for the ultimate dim sum; London may not provide my long-sought Nirvana.

I tried, with my friend Alex, Wan Chai: cheaper then Cheung Leung but not as good, the fillings not as flavorful, the downstairs room drafty and noisy (opt for upstairs, very nice, plus the ladies' loo is there), the waiters rushed and brusque (not unusual, but at the Cheung Leung they were relatively attentive and smiling).

For all that, I always walk down from Shaftesbury Avenue along the edge of Chinatown and look for the dragon twining around the overhead "barberpole". Inside, it is always warm and bustling, with the cart tenders calling out their wares. The restaurant is enormous, the clientelle enthusiastic, the carpet well-trod, and the variety of dim sum, while not exactly endless, has never proved boring. As always, I'm willing to look away from the traditional center of things, and am eager to hear from dim sim-ophiles. Talk to me!

SIGN UP PROBLEMS

Hi, readers. I have had feedback from friends that signing up on my blog requires the prospective follower have a Google or Facebook or other social media account. As you don't want to add more stuff to your internet life, you haven't signed on my blog. That's a bummer. For those of you who are very happy with what you have, but none of it is the social media or Google-related sights required, I am trying to figure out how to get a signup that asks only that you give your current e-mail. Simple, hey? Actually, yes...

BURMA SALAD

If you've been slogging down the Irrawaddy River with me, you deserve a break. The only thing I can do for you is to tell you about this salad we ate several times at an open air but very nice (white tablecloths!) restaurant at the edge of town.
But first, a little background on Bagan: a flat plain stretching for miles in north central Myanmar. In sixteen square miles, over two thousands temples were built between the 9th and 13th Centuries AD. Most are standing, some are heaps of old brick, some of them four storeys tall, elaborate stonework; think their version of Europe's gothic cathedrals. (No matter who you worship, it all goes to the same place, you know.)
But to get around to see these ancient sites, some of which are still in use, walking was not sensible. And there was  no bus. And our budget did not allow for car and driver or a dawn balloon ride. So we rented bikes. This was not my first choice, but in the end it was the only choice. I spent a lot of time muttering oops and falling gracefully onto the sand.
At the end of the day we'd go back to the hotel, fix drinks and take them out to the overlook above the river where chairs were arranged. Nice way to spend an hour or two. Hunger always got us moving and we lucked into this place a short bike ride away, just past some old pillars that flanked the road. The restaurant had a brick floor, soaring beams (coconut palm wood, I think, but maybe teak), and a heavily thatched roof, all sheltering a 50' square space. The simple salad was delicious.
On a bed of lettuce, arrange sliced red tomatoes. Sprinkle over diagonally cut green onions, and several tablespoons of finely chopped peanuts. I use dry roasted hot peanuts. Pass a vinaigrette heavy on the lime juice: 1/4 c neutral (not olive) oil; 1/4 c fresh lime juice; 1 tbsp (or more) fish sauce, 1/2 tsp each salt, dark brown sugar, black pepper and chili pepper. Whisk vigorously. Don't bother with this if you can't get fresh limes, it's just not worth it. Ditto the tomatoes; those pink hockey pucks? Yech. I've tried this with yellow tomatoes, and red (more acidic) is better. The chopped peanuts really are necessary, too.
Enjoy.

MENU MOZZARELLA BOOBOOS

My personal first-impression of a good restaurant usually is, unless you're standing in front of a street vendor in Southeast Asia, what it looks like. Secondly, what it smells like. Next, who's smiling at you. But these aspects are, at the end of the experience, not terribly important. I can deal with a not-smiling maitre or maitresse. I can deal with a bare floor, formica tables, and paper napkins (you have to if you want to eat Vietnamese, right?). Dirt, of course, does not please me, unless the place has a dirt floor. But, of course, a clean dirt floor. That Bali beach restaurant, for example...
But what I have a little bit of trouble with is a crappy menu. I'm not talking about a finger-spotted, ripped plastic-wrapped thing, bad though that is. Nor am I raving about over-described ingredients. (I am so over crunchy, aromatic, succulent and pungent...just gimme the nouns, please, and gimme my food. Better yet, lose 50% of the nouns, and just gimme the food.)
No, I'm talking about a restaurant that totally misnames a dish.

LOOKING FOR CALAMARI

The Great Dim Sum Quest is on hold for a while. Not much point to it on the Gulf Coast of Florida (but if you have a fave around the Tampa Bay area, I'm open to suggestions). (Come to think of it, a fave around the South China Sea wouldn't be rejected, either)
However, there is more to life than dim sum, so I happily go on to the next obsession. You would think that, after my "Not a Pretty Post" on Feb. 22, I'd be totally off calamari. Puh-leeze! I am always looking for calamari, I just am a bit cautious around a dish full of perfectly formed ones.
The question to be asked is not only are they all perfectly round and taste a little odd, but: how do you want them prepared? I had thought, until recently, that a perfectly breaded (light, keep it light) and perfectly fried (crisp but not immolated) says it all. Served, of course, with lots of lemon, and will you for godsakes stop with the paper-thin slices and give me real wedges?

Then I ordered calamari at Pia's Trattoria in Gulfport, Florida. And what did I get? An entire beast! What a rush! A photo will follow afer my next visit to Pia's. The thing came on a large platter in a very sharp (in fact, borderline waay sharp) lemon sauce, and lots of parsley. It was excellent: tender, cooked to perfection and (best of all for my increasing pant size) not fried. You know how tough calamari can be when cooked improperly? Not at Pia's. This was done to perfection. A repeatable dish.

The other might at Da Sesto Italiano in Pinellas Park, I continued the quest and again ordered calamari, the fried version. Nice and light, cooked 95% perfect. A tiny touch of flour taste marred the overall taste. But how did this happen? The breading was not at all heavy. Was it that the fat wasn't quite hot enough? Another ten seconds would've been good? Beats me. See photo at right: the usual presentation was okay, not much you can do with the things, is there? The two sauces was a nice touch, but something with some real punch would've been sensational. Overall, I'd try it again.

But I'm still looking.

Stay tuned!

SLOW BOAT TO BAGAN, PART TWO

Well, there we were, on an open-air river ferry in a pre-dawn tropical downpour, the only First Class passengers on the entire ship. We had the upper deck to ourselves. I wondered if those people huddled on the two decks below us had got the better deal: warmth, companionship, shared food, shelter from the storm, and access to an endless card game. Too late to change our minds, the two pale-skinned women were in windswept upper deck purdah for the duration.
    And that was another thing: how long was the duration? We had no idea. We'd imagined four or five hours. As there apeared to be no food available for purchase, it was a good thing we had a couple of bottles of water and a battered emergency stash of Lance's peanut butter crackers. But six crackers (not six packets) wouldn't last long. And then what?
    As dawn came, the rain fled, and we could see the far bank of the Irrawady slipping past: low hills dark with vegetation and heavily sprinkled with the spires and domes of countless whitewashed temples. The near bank, and the tag end of cement block Mandalay, vanished in the mosit air and clutches of temples almost glowed in the moist air. It was an enthralling sight, at least for the first two hours. Then it began to appear as if, judging from the view, we hadn't moved.

    In late morning the ship's bell clanged and the horn hooted. The rumble of the engines changed pitch again and we slowly veered toward shore. The banks were low and greyish with ages of upstream who-knows-what. A mob of people had gathered, and formed a chain. A plank flopped out of the lower deck into the mud. People, bags, boxes, rolls of stuff, going in two direcitons. An impromptu flea market, including hands of bananas and large melons, sprang up. We watched from our balcony. By the time we'd identified some packages as containing food, and decided to give it a go, the gangplank had vanished and the ship was again making its way upstream.
    Same thing an hour later, without the food market. Could we bargain for bananas? Would we have to give up our flipflops or sunscreen or...no, not our paperbacks. Kindle had many years before appearing in our world so we had each a half dozen paperbacks in lieu of too many tee shirts or an extra pair of shoes.
    By mid-afternoon, we were both pretty cranky. When the usual mob standing ankle deep in mud came into view, Lea was ready to move. There were a hundred or more people at this landing. Pooling our change, I gave her my personal food instructions.
    "Buy anything that doesn't have eight kicking legs."
    She returned a half hour later with a string bag of fruits, sticky rice, and some oddly-colored jellyish stuff that, after long discussion, we both thought the better of eating.
    And so the day went: reading, picking at sticky rice, peeling bananas, dodging little rain squalls from our elegant first class seating, and wondering when the hell Bagan would show up. The sunset was gorgeous, long streamers of luscious sherbert colors flung like banners across the purpling sky, all reflected on the pale surfaces of the scores of temples and the tarnished silver of the river surface. A delicious moment, marred only by our belly rumblings. I'd bet they heard us up in the wheelhouse. To make matters worse, someone on the boat was cooking something absolutely sensational.
    It was pitch black when lights began to appear on shore. A few at first, then more and more. Faint noises came to us across the water: a motorcycle, someone shouting, kids laughing. Laughing kids sound the same the world over.
    Then the ship slowed. We could hear a lot of commotion on the lower decks. The horn hooted, long and low, echoing back and forth across the inky water.
    Where were we?
    Then our tour guide popped out of the stairway housing, motioning frantically to us.
    "Bagan! Bagan! Come, come quick! Bagan!"
    We galloped down the stairs and fetched up in a shoving mob. A tiny baby stared at me from its wrapping on its mother's back. The tour guide had vanished. I asked the nearest person if this was Bagan but my voice was lost in the general uproar.
    The mob quickly filtered away. The horn hooted impatiently. The gangplank, ten inches wide, was empty. It stretched into the darkness. I couldn't see the end of it. A searchlight clicked on. Someone shouted.
    "Go! Go! Bagan!"
    We went. The gangplank bounced and swayed and we ran down. No point walking gracefully, this wasn't the QE2. I stepped off the wood and into the river mud. Immediately sank to my ankles. I had strap-on shoes; anything else would still be there.
    We looked up. The searchlight illuminated the bluff: fifteen feet up. A line of passengers struggled through the (let's call it) mud, their belongings held above their heads. They left deep pockmarks angling across the mud. There was no pier, no walkway, no planks, no nuthin.
    Where were our backpacks?
    The tour guide, busy pulling away the gangplank, must have read our minds. He waved his hands, pointed to the top of the bluff.
    Up there. Was it a bluff? Or were our worldly goods still on board the disappearing boat? We lifted our feet - they slurped out of the mud - and slogged upward. An older woman paused in her struggles, put her hand under my arm, tried to help me. How humiliating. She must've been in her eighties, but I think I'd still be there is she hadn't almost bodily hoisted me upward.
    Out of breath, confused, happy to be on solid, dry land at the top of the bank, we looked around. No luggage. No luggage office. No luggage handler. In the scrum of the arriving people and welcoming friends and relatives, amid scores of motorbikes, a dozen battered trucks, tiny taxis and push carts, there was complete chaos. Tiny lights had been strung in an enormous tree that all vehicles swung around and around. Another Merchant Ivory moment. It was cool, a light breeze plucked at my hair.
    Gradually, people met and mingled, got on bikes or into carts or taxis, and went away. We stood, silent, watching. We spoke not a single word of Burmese. The food stalls began to close up. We hadn't noticed them while the mob was there. They were on the far side of the circle and the lights winked out before we could get ourselves moving. Somewhere motorbikes kicked to life and roared away. Silence. The only light came from the tiny ones in the trees. I asked the question torturing me.
    "Is this really Bagan?"
    A tiny truck wheezed into the circle, navigated around the tree, stopped. Its headlights lit up two battered backpacks. We ran for them, checked them out. They were ours. I'd never open a present on Christmas morning with any more glee. A small, skinny man got out of the truck, walked over.
    "Hotel Bagan," he said with a smile as he bent to hoist up our backpacks. "Welcome."
    We were home.

SLOW BOAT TO BAGAN, Part One

This happened a while back. We'd gone to Mandalay, in Burma (Myanmar), to take a boat up the Irrawady River to Bagan. We'd overnighted at an almost-empty hotel the night before, as the boat left at dawn. In the middle of the night a humongous storm broke, the rain so heavy it woke us up.
We were scheduled to be picked up at 5:30AM but the driver apparently preferred to stay warm and dry. The night manager of the hotel managed to find us a taxi but it was 5:45AM and a 20 minute ride to the ferry dock and the ferry left at 6:00AM. The rain still bucketed down, dawn was nowhere to be seen (probably sleeping in). The taxi driver may have been trying out for a Grand Prix team. We got to the river right at 6:00AM. We were in the only car. The driver blew his horn.
It was scene from a Merchant-Ivory film: pitch dark and deserted, with two tiny lights at the top of the bluff overlooking the river, silvery streams of water dripping off the trees, the lights, the archway that led to the boat which we could barely see in the gloom. Frenetic activity somewhere below us. Nobody up top except the two of us peering out of the dry taxi. But the ferry appeared to still be there.
A man rushed into view, coming up stairs of some sort, and beckoned us forward. He must've been an official: he had a shirt on. We got out into the rain and followed him through pouring, ankle-deep water to the edge of the bluff. We looked down. And down some more. A twenty-foot wide set of stone stairs led to the water. We started to edge our way down, water cascading around us. We began at the same level as the boat's wheelhouse. It seemed to take forever on those mossy steps.
The boat, what could be seen in the darkness, was three levels plus the wheelhouse, and appeared to have open sides. It was painted, where it was painted, dark green. Thick groups of people with large bundles crammed the lowest level. Workers shifted and loaded things, clanging and thumping.
We got down to the gangplank. Literally, a plank, one single narrow, sagging stretch of water-slicked wood. Below it, down in the darkness, I could just see the dirty white swirl of the Irrawady. One by one, we crossed, stood facing the packed wall of people already aboard. Everybody was still standing.

Sketch, second level, Bagan ferry

"We've got first-class seats," I said to myself. "Where's the seating?"

The man who'd told us to go aboard, who'd taken our small suitcases, waved from a doorway and  shouted something. The crowd opened a narrow pathway. The man led us up a dimly-lit stairwell to the next floor: again chock full of people and their bagged belongings, most of them sitting, some of them sprawled out in sleep. Babies fretted, mothers stared blankly at the rain dripping off the open fretwork, a group of young men played a card game under one of the few lamps.

The man said, "First class up," and we followed. And then we were in first class. We stared. Dawn had finally arrived, or at least a lightening of the sky so that outlines were just barely visible. We could see the shoreline, almost eye level, almost visible in the still-falling rain. We could see trees, and a group of men carrying huge boxes on their heads, descending the stairs in ankle-deep water. We could hear and smell the river as it slapped past the hull.

And we could see an almost-empty deck, open, with rain drifting in. The rusting metal deck, three feet in from the railing, was puddled. A gust blew more rain into the puddles. There were four once-white plastic lawn chairs, available at any garage sale for a buck each. One chair was broken and tilted toward shore. I was beginning to feel the same way. The man went over to the chairs, tipped the water out of them and moved them a bit farther away from the rail. He pulled a rag from a pocket, wiped the chairs, then wiped his nose and put the rag away.

"First class," he said, pointing at the chairs. "Tickets?"

"Where's our suitcases," we asked, handing over the papers. It was chilly and we wore light clothes.

"Bagan," he replied as he pulled our tickets apart. "You get Bagan."

"When do we get to Bagan?" In time for lunch, hopefully?

"Tonight."

"Tonight?" We hadn't eaten breakfast; the hotel kitchen had been closed, as had every food shop we'd passed. "Is there a restaurant on board?"

He stared at us, as if he'd never seen Americans before. He probably hadn't, not on board this ferry in the rain and the slowly-paling darkness. He grinned and shook his head, waved one hand toward the prow of the boat. Upstream.

The boat's horn tooted, the sound echoing off the bluff. The faint rumble that had been under our feet grew stronger. Clatters and shouts from the region of the gangway sounded. Then the bluff, and the stairs, slid away and the ferry glided away from Mandalay.

"Bagan," the man said. "Tonight."

BOLOGNA, ITALY

In October 2011, my friend Lea and I met in Rome and, after a week trying to live and sightsee on a seriously restricted budget, picked up a car (at Roma's Termini rail station in the city's heart, but that's another hair-raising tale) and, after a couple of hours of wandering in the wilderness of the beltway(s), headed east.
We visited a lot of places which few Americans get to see, including the Adriatic Coast where I had this romantic vision of pristine beaches with the mountains of the eastern shore barely visible. What a delusion! It was mile-high condominiums and not a single sight of the beach for all the solid-fenced concessions. Don't let anyone tell you America's all about money unless you point out Italy's Adriatic Coast; makes Ft. Lauderdale's Galt Ocean Mile look pretty good.
So...a couple of weeks into the trip, staying in youth hostels and no-star hotels as is our habit, we made a reservation through an internet hotel booking company that touted this 4-star place as on the edge of Bologna. We passed it three times on our search, fetching up in an industrial park that had seen waay better days, and at last found the hotel - at 4PM - behind a defunct stripper bar. It was cold and overcast, and the hotel did not show its better face (but how could it with old newspapers blowing across the weedy pavement, and cement trucks crashing past on the near-by road?).
By a miracle of kindness, the hotel staff agreed we should not stay there. But where would we stay? Our internet search (in the despised hotel's lobby) led us to - gasp! - the Hilton Hotel Bologna.
"No, no, no, a thousand times no," I said. "I will not stay in an American hotel while I am in Italy."
"Oh, so you wanna stay here," my friend Lea asked, looking around the empty lobby. "Besides, the Hilton's only 50 Euros a night."
So, we drove another 45 mintues south, asked directions at five or six places, and got to the Hilton when it was just getting dark. The recently-cleaned glass walls gleamed. The building was new, low slung, the immaculate parking lot filled with late-model cars. I was, literally, on the verge of tears. How humiliating! What a come-down! Staying in an American chain hotel!
Parking was free, unlike other places where we'd had to run out every four hours and move the car to an impossible-to-find blue zone (a Euro per hour on the meters, by the way). In charming Treviso, for example, much though we enjoyed the center-city hostel and all the fabulous sights around it, our car wound up stashed twenty minutes away behind a dumpster.
Inside the Bologna Hilton, however, all was polished marble and fresh flowers and faux-rosewood and multi-lingual uniformed staff, and a happy hour with nibbles at the bar. We checked in, trundled our battered rollaboards down the endless carpeted (well-lit! silent! clean! carpet not ravelling!) halls. Two lefts and a right and we were there. The key card (silent! efficient!) opened the heavy rosewood (faux, but who cares?) door and there it was: America, transplanted to central Italy.
Two huge beds with four plump pillows on each. A tiled bathroom with walk-in shower the size of our last no-star hotel breakfast room. Thick towels, white as snow, on the heated towel rack. Refrigerator. TV. Phone, of course. Table with two chairs. Business center en suite. Hangers in the closet. A trouser press. Down the hall, a laundry. And out front, the public bus to whisk us into the heart of Bologna in only twenty minutes.
Welcome to America. We loved every minute of it. Next time I'm in Bologna, that's where I'm staying. If you can get in it, you should too.

COMING SOON!

If your idea of soon is 90 days, we're on the same page. Ninety days from now I'll be on the western edge of the Ring of Fire: Indonesia, Malaysia, perhaps Borneo, little-visited places like that. My first stop will be the spider-shaped island of Sulawesi, whose central core is five active volcanoes. Unlike previous trips (Italy in the fall of 2011, for examaple, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa), I will be keeping you up to date on food, sights, food, sounds, food, smells (especially food), and how difficult it is to get to Torajaland. Among other places.
Other places? Singapore! Home of the famous hawker food stalls and of a cuture that lives to eat (my kind of culture). Much has been written about these open-air stalls, but not by me. It's the only reason I'm going there: the food. As Singapore re-invents itself every five years or so, there's not much history there except in the food. An amalgam of Nonya, Chinese, Indian, and every other cuisine of the immigrants who bilt this economic powerhouse.
Then off to Viet Nam, where in the north the incredible karst formations jut out of the placid waters of HaLong Bay (no doubt you've seen photos, they're on the wall of every Vietnamese restaurant in the country) and, in the central coast region, the ancient Imperial city of Hue (on the Perfume River, just gives me chills to think of it) will whisk us into the distant past.
And finally north and east to Japan, where I'll spend a lot of time in ancient Kyoto, and especially at a sushi bar I've heard of there.
Get ready for a lot of up-close-and-personal: sights, historic and modern; food, from street stalls to sit-down-with-tablecloths; natural beauty (under the water as well as above); indigenous cutltures and their arts and crafts. And who knows what else?
Stay tuned! Meanwhile, there's a new story about a day on the Italian trip you might get a chuckle out of.
Thanks for reading.

NOT A PRETTY POST...

On a recent segment of "This American Life", a reporter and several (overly-adventurous, in my view) participants discussed a heretofor unknown problem: the substitution of pig anuses for calamari rings. Did I spell the plural of anus right? Should I have gone with a more earthy description? But no. Having this discussion at all is, for me, life-changing, even life-diminishing given my fondness for calamari. For the past several years, I have sought out the best fried calamari I could find. Some have been good, some really awful. Oddly, one of the best is still Carraba's, although a street version in Venezia was neck-and-neck with the ubiquitous American chain's offering. And the whole calamari in a sharp lemon sauce at Pia's Trattoria in Gulfport, Fl was really marvelous. But not fried.
But should I be saying neck and neck? Or is anus-to-anus more accurate? Enterprising pig processors have apparently long been trying to figure out how they could use this last (no pun) piece of the porker, and some brilliant if twisted butcher finally remarked on the similarity in looks (if not texture or taste) that these orifices have with the blessed calamari. The question remains: does eating fried calamari put you at risk of no longer really being a pescetarian? How does the four-legged source get into the calamari food chain? Who - here's the big question for me - would consent to adding pig anuses (anusi? anisii?) to calamari? We have been snookered into accepting bogus human being in Congress (vocally born-again Christains with a major jones for high-price kinky sex, for one tiresome example); we have finally accepted that we're running out of everything that makes life worth living (fossil fuel, orange roughy, pure Italian EVOO, tomatoes that have taste, clean air, aigret feathers...the list is endless and too depressing to continue), and now we have to think twice before ordering calamari?
If I could, I'd move to Italy (I'm thinking Lucca, or Bologna, even in a pinch slightly farther west to Dijon)(yes, I know, Dijon is in France). But if I move to Italy, will the problem follow me? Will I have to learn sufficient Italian to ask whether or not there is a percentage of pig anus (I give up, I'm going singular)? "Mi dispiace, camariere, ma ha pig anus in the calamari?"
I hope not.