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Given that I’ve written on this blog at the snailish pace of one post a year for the last couple, it shouldn’t be so hard to admit the thing is dead. But since I became a full-time freelance food writer three years ago, writing for free for myself has lost some of the sheen. Why would I write here when someone else will pay me for it?

That’s not to say I’ll never write anything here again, and I’m going to keep springing for the hosting fees so I can check my personal recipe book and travel guide. But I wanted to make sure that I offered you, my loyal readers, the chance to keep up with the writing I do all the time. Here’s how!

I’ve started a newsletter to keep people informed of my own writing, as well as all the great food writing I see on the internet

I have a website for my work

Follow me on Twitter

Follow me on Instagram

The post The Blog is Dead, Long Live the Blog? appeared first on The GastroGnome.

Thank you to Blacklane for sponsoring this post. Scroll down for more info.

Eight years after my time in Uruguay, on vacation 4,500 miles north of Montivdeo, I curled up in pain on the tile floor of a Puebla, Mexico hotel room. A voice came on the TV: “Proximo por canal seis…” Next up on channel six… It didn’t matter what show it introduced, the voice alone relaxed me like a shot of morphine.

Living abroad brings new joys such as learning to order the local liquors, seizing the opportunity to be the exotic, mysterious foreigner, and flirting in a tongue where you haven’t heard that pick-up line a thousand times before. But—as anyone who’s lived in a second or third language knows—it’s also exhausting. Sure, it’s fun to speak Spanish with a swarthy stranger at the bar, but directing the cab driver home when tipsy and tired is not. But when I got back to my room in Montevideo, there it was, that voice: “Proximo por canal seis…los Desperate Housewives.”

Television brought me to a place where I understood the language while lying in bed half-asleep. To where—though I might not identify with Terri Hatcher’s facelift or Eva Longoria’s constant look of faux-outrage—I at least knew why they were supposed to be funny. For that final hour of the day, I could consume pop culture without mentally flipping through my index of Uruguayan culture, searching for a reference. For a few minutes, I could forget the subtle difference between the English “ha-ha-ha,” and the Spanish “ja-ja-ja.”

As a tourist in Puebla, near fluent in Spanish, getting around took little effort. After a day of touring churches, volcanoes, and tacos, I needed no respite from the local language. But today, I was in pain. Whether it was from eating the wrong taco, or perhaps just too many tacos, something in my digestive track was burning like the hot sauce made in nearby Cholula. I sought cool relief, pressing my cheek to the blue and white ceramic tiles for which Puebla is famous. I turned on the television to distract from the pain and true comfort came when the voice—which seems to be the same on every channel throughout Latin America—announced, “Proximo por canal seis…”

I uncurled a bit and repeated it, doing my best impression: I deepened my voice and drew out the “o” to two syllables: “Pro-o-oximo.” I swallowed the second word and let “ca-nal” plunk delicately from my mouth, like a quarter dropping into a pinball machine. “Seis,” it hit the bottom with an inviting bounce. I didn’t need to listen for what show was coming next. It didn’t matter. My comfort came from the announcement, the expectation. Instead of drool, my Pavlovian reaction induced warm fuzzy feelings of a home away from home.

Exploring Uruguay had mostly meant eating oversized steak-burgers called chivitos (not, as the name would imply, made of goat) and learning to steep my mate (tea) properly. But—as is always true in a foreign country—there were some cultural differences that required stretching more than my stomach: I’m not sure I’ll ever live down the mortification of having “Panties don’t go in the washing machine” explained to me by a near-stranger.

At the end of a day like that, escape came in the form of television, specifically the slightly out-of-date dramadies from the early 2000’s. After a long day of trying to make sense of Uruguayan accents—a “zh” sound replaces the letter y, masking the sounds that follow—TV was how I survived. It was in English. I could understand it. It was predictable. At the end of the day, whether navigating Uruguayan bureaucracy to join a gym or staring down a toilet bowl in a Mexican hotel, I’m hit by a wave or relaxation when I hear those words, “Proximo en canal seis.” Next up, on channel six: comfort.

A word on sponsorship: Blacklane, a global professional driver company, supported me financially and in services to be able to put together this post, without dictating the content. Companies like this help blogs like mine survive. Give them a try!

The post Proximo por Canal Seis: Next up on Channel Six appeared first on The GastroGnome.

Is this the real life? / Is this just fantasy? / Caught in a landslide / No escape from reality…

I am as susceptible as anyone to a fantasy. Words like “gourmet” and the name of a fancy chef flying into town were peppered throughout the email invitation. I was in: sign me up for a week of relaxing at an all-inclusive resort by the sea, eating desert fruit and fresh Caribbean seafood, and interviewing the star chef. Was this real life, I wondered, as I dug out my bathing suit from its winter hiding spot? Or was I counting my freshly caught mahi-mahi before it came anywhere near the line? The answer, I’m afraid, comes with the reality that I just now had to Google what kind of fish might be caught and served off the coast of the Yucatan in order to write that sentence.

I convinced my husband to come with me. In hindsight, I’m sorry to have subjected him to the food, and even sorrier that there was nothing separating the bed and the toilet in our room besides an open-topped clear glass panel, nice as it was to have someone with whom to commiserate. But I did wonder, scanning the faces of all the honeymooning couples we met on the trip: was this romantic to them? Did lifelong bonding and the starting of a family come with reminders that yes, in the paraphrased words of the children’s book, everybody does poop? (Had I wasted our honeymoon staying in places where the bathrooms had doors?)

I contemplated this the night we arrived, when we thought we’d start with a bang: the resort’s fancy Italian restaurant. The first sign of trouble at dinner was not the elaborate but bland Caesar salad, nor the crouton that garnished it, which seemed to have been fashioned from the type of foam rubber used to make the cheap mattresses on the beds at summer camp. It was the waiter coming to crumb the table.

Yes, I’m complaining about the food and service at a place that crumbed my table. It’s just gilding the lily of my terrible-person reputation, since there’s simply no way to complain about a free stay at an all-inclusive resort on the beach in Mexico without sounding like a complete ass. So let’s just clear that up right away: I am an ass.

All-inclusive resorts are famed for their lackluster buffets, but this, this was going to be different—I thought naively from my couch in Seattle. This gourmet spot served each meal individually (at least in the dining room—I have my doubts that it wasn’t pulled from a buffet back in the kitchen). Perhaps it was the lingering chill of winter clouding my brain, but I truly believed I was headed to Mexico to uncover a gem of resort dining, a place where food-lovers and drunken honeymooners alike could down endless glasses of bottom-of-the-barrel pinot grigio.

Soup or melted sorbet? You make the call.

The waiter got there between the grainy melon soup—so sweet that I suspected it was last night’s melon sorbet, melted and garnished with shrimp—and the oddly flat pear tart, and whipped out his table crumber. It quickly became obvious someone taught him how to make the motions of crumbing the table, but he either didn’t understand or was not motivated to actually remove any crumbs from the tablecloth. He skimmed over the surface with the fancy metal tool, the few crumbs he actually touched barely rearranging themselves.

It became a metaphor for the resort: the food would look or sound like something you might want to eat, but the reality was that it appeared to have been cooked by someone who had, perhaps, never eaten. The spaces seemed designed by someone who had seen a nice design, but never been taught the principles of design. Or, at the very least, not by anyone who ever had to spend an evening with his or her significant other in a room where not very much separated bowel movements from bedsides. (When I brought this up to the hotel’s PR rep, she said I was not, in fact, the first to mention their distaste at having no visual, olfactory, or aural barrier from their partner’s toilet time.)

The best meal we ate as it appeared on a menu–and also the least overwrought.

On the second day, we found slight improvement at the open-air Caribbean restaurant—I watched a whole fried fish special walk by and could tell instantly that it was going to be the way to go. As my husband scraped some sort of sickly-sweet guava sauce off his (otherwise decent) steak, I knew I’d made the right move—especially when it struck me that my fish would go well with hot sauce. We flagged down a server and asked if there was any hot sauce. This prompted a conspiratorial smile and an increase in service level—it was, if nothing else, a secret handshake. The server joked with us as we dipped the fresh-fried fish in the lip-searing habanero-spiked sauce. Sure, it was still served with the vegetables that looked like what you’d serve a sick person in Edwardian Britain, but for a few bites, my taste buds were awake again. However, given that hot sauces were never mentioned on the menu anywhere, never discussed, and ridiculously hot, our assumption is that they are something the staff kept around for their own meals.

For dinner, the Mexican restaurant had finally opened up. This, we thought, would be the ticket to good food: the cuisine of the people actually cooking the food. The Mexican restaurant was at the far end of the resort—a full ten-minute walk from our room. Walking, however, seemed to be frowned upon. Perhaps it detracts from the sated and sedated feeling of fullness from gorging themselves on free food that keeps the guests from noticing the poor quality?

In the stroll from our room to the dining room, we were asked at least three times by golf-cart driving employees if we’d like a ride. And that’s by the ones that stopped—others zoomed by, bringing their precious cargo of day-drunk honeymooners to dinner as if they were driving an ambulance full of injured children. They came careening close to us, almost as if to punish us for walking: that’s just not done here.

On the third day—having suffered through two full days of meals that were something like hospital cafeteria food in a prom dress and a bit of Wet n’ Wild make up—I couldn’t face having to order at one of the restaurants. Today, we’d eat our food in our room, where we could do so without clothes (it’s actually a proven fact: the fewer clothes you wear, the better any food tastes). We’d lie about and feed each other grapes; it would be sexy—at least as long as nobody needed to use the glass-fronted facilities. In our ongoing effort to find the best of the bad food, we decided perhaps our tactic of trying to find good, interesting food had been wrong. We went with a cheese plate and Buffalo wings.

Allow me to pause here to discuss the cheese plate in depth. Have you ever wondered about the term flatbread? Perhaps it has become so overused in our world that we haven’t stopped and really considered what it means: bread that is flat. Here we are trying to remake pita breads, delineate foods that aren’t quite pizza, and increase the global appeal of naan, but really, the resort demonstrated, flatbread can be much simpler. The cheese plate came with a back-to-basics kind of flatbread that was new to me: Instead of baking an entirely new bread to be the flatbread, they simply took the same sliced toast that came with breakfast and rolled it flat with a rolling pin. Genius! The cheese, meanwhile, I was impressed to see, was served at proper ambient temperature (though that guideline may have been declared in places where the ambient temperature wasn’t 95 degrees). The selection also showed an awareness of the international clientele of the resort: the plate included both American and Swiss cheese.

Highlight of the stay: the cleaning people folding my towels into animals.

When we’d arrived in our room, we’d noticed the previous tenants had kindly left us the dregs of their champagne bottle and their glasses—maybe thinking that, after our long journey we’d want some refreshment. Since our room was clean and we had been walked to the door, that meant at least two different staff members walked right by the tray of drinks, so we assumed they must have also thought we’d like to toast our new digs. I suppose that means we should have known just how great they were about making absolute sure your room service wasn’t taken away from outside your door before you were done, but still I was surprised when, hours after we’d wiped the last of the Buffalo wing sauce from our own hands, something else got its paws on those bones.

In my mind, I remember the raccoon as friendly and cute, like something out of a cartoon—napkin tied up around his neck, licking his little lips. That he was thankful that we’d so kindly left him a snack. In reality, none of the photos we took (through the peephole) of our new friend raiding our leftovers in broad daylight show either a smile or the use of a linen napkin.

That could explain why our new friend wouldn’t listen to us when we politely asked him to move so we might leave safely. My husband armed himself with a towel (which seemed alternately brave, that he was ready to fight the wild animal, and really dumb, to do so with a weapon made of cotton). I called the front desk. I am assuming that whomever they sent over to help me was also unable to ingratiate himself with the raccoon and was probably dying in the trees, well short of our room, of some sort of new instant-onset rabies.

After about an hour, Rocky finished his meal, wiped his little buffalo-sauce paw prints on our hallway (unless that was blood from the resort staff sent to help us?) and wandered off on his own. Despite what I’m sure was a sunny disposition—after all this was a raccoon wandering around in the middle of a beautifully-clear 95-degree afternoon—I’m still glad that he didn’t want to stick around our room. The only thing worse than being trapped in a hotel room for eternity by a small mammal might be my having to watch, hear, and smell my husband use the restroom for all eternity.

It was an exhausting week—defending ourselves against raccoons, deciding at each meal which cuisine we’d like to see crimes committed against, and dodging speeding golf carts as we walked around—but it had finally come to an end: our final meal. The thought of one more sweet sauce, one more goopy topping or droopy protein was unbearable, so I went with a new technique: I ordered the fettuccine with shrimp in Alfredo sauce (ironically, from the Caribbean restaurant), but hold the shrimp and the sauce. What arrived, pleasantly enough, was a bowl of noodles. Plain, ordinary noodles. They weren’t handmade, they weren’t fancy, they were not, in any way, dressed or ready to go to a party. However, at that particular moment, they were my own fantasy—especially since by the time they made their way through me, I’d be able to relieve myself in the relative privacy of the airplane bathroom.

The post Raccoon Battles and Bowel Movements: The Fantasy of the All-Inclusive Resort appeared first on The GastroGnome.

Thank you to Blacklane for sponsoring this post. Scroll down for more info.

My hometown fish market, the Pike Place Market, is not too shabby itself.

The chaos of an early morning clamor for seafood is balm on my jet-lagged soul. The hours match up with my skewed body clock, giving me something to do besides count the flies on my hotel ceiling. Rows of freshly caught fish, stacked and ready to sell give me something besides empty roads to feast my eyes upon and the strange hours of fisherman and fishmongers mean the promise of a hearty meal at all hours.

As I semi-professionally wander about the world, the fish market is often my first glimpse of a new place. Into each market you can read both everything (how aggressive are the sellers, how clean and organized is the market, what type of food is served) and nothing (when the market is wholesale and doesn’t target consumers, when it’s spotless because it’s sanitized for tourists, and when the restaurant serves the food of the immigrants doing the fishing, not the locals).

Join me as I wander the world of fish markets.

Provence, France (Various)

Passikudah, Sri Lanka

Mexico City, Mexico (Mercado San Juan)

Dubai, United Arab Emirates (Fish Souk)

Gulf Coast, Alabama (Billy’s Seafood)

Seoul, South Korea (Noryangjin)

Negombo, Sri Lanka

A word on sponsorship: Blacklane, a global professional driver company, supported me financially and in services to be able to put together this post, without dictating the content. Companies like this help blogs like mine survive. Give them a try!

The post Fish Markets of the World: A Photo Essay appeared first on The GastroGnome.

In March, Café de Colombia—the Colombian National Coffee Federation—brought me to Colombia to learn more about coffee. It was awesome. Though they paid for my trip, they didn’t require me to write anything or dictate what I wrote. Still, that is why this post is about coffee. And illustrated with photos of Colombia.

The view from the coffee farm I visited in Colombia

In March, Café de Colombia—the Colombian National Coffee Federation—brought me to Colombia to learn more about coffee. It was awesome, but I wish my husband could have come. Not because I’m one of those weird co-dependent people that can’t bear a few days without my spouse, but because what I learned on the trip is that for all the effort my husband puts into engineering the perfect cup of coffee, there is an equal (or greater) amount of effort going into engineering the perfect coffee bean.

If you were to have told me, at any point before the age of 28, that I would have the kind of husband who brought me coffee in bed, I would not have believed you. For starters, I’d already been dating the man I would eventually marry, and not only had he never once brought me anything in bed, I have high standards and the only coffee I’d ever seen him turn down was some we’d bought from a tourist stand in Laos that he’s pretty sure had been stretched with woodchips.

Green coffee beans in the weathered hand of a coffee farmer

But traveling opens eyes. And we went to San Francisco and walked into Blue Bottle, Ritual, and Four Barrel. We went to Chicago and stopped in every morning at Intelligentsia. We started bringing home beans from all these places, but it wasn’t cutting it. First, the Mr. Coffee was tossed in favor of French press.

I should have seen the signs. It was like the kombucha, and before that the pasta, and to an even greater extent, the seven bikes that live in our basement, receiving tiny upgrades, tweaks, constant improvements. Don’t get me wrong, if the man can’t use the right “your,” at least he can fix the furnace.

Coffee beans, on the tree, ready to pick

But I’m a writer: when I’m writing a blogpost or editing a photo, I try to get it good enough. I look for that balance between time and quality. He’s an engineer: everything requires continuous tweaking in search of a perfection that doesn’t exist. There’s always something else that can be done.

Soon enough the French press found a new permanent home, unused on the top shelf. If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have mourned the last moments in which I was capable of brewing a cup of coffee in my own house.

Don Arilio, the coffee farmer whose farm I visited

Last week, my husband complained that our kitchen scale didn’t do decimal points to accurately measure his coffee beans. I told him to use grams instead of ounces. He responded that he already was. The kettle we now have, on the other hand, not only has numbers after the decimal point for the temperature, it can hold water at precisely that tenth of a degree for as long as necessary. A time length for brewing that I don’t know, but which is programmed into his cell phone.

Meanwhile, in Colombia, I walked the grounds of a coffee farm. I visited a research center that tests beans to identify the specific chemical compounds that made up each region’s crop so that they could get DOP status—like how Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese can only be made in Emilia-Romagna, and Champagne only in Champagne. I watched researchers test trees to figure out which seed grows best in the soil of each part of the country. Despite an earthquake happening while I stood in the mill, I watched what a quality control check in a rural co-op looked like. And through it all, I wished my husband could be there.

Watching coffee beans get sorted–pre-earthquake

In part because I love him and know he’d be interested in seeing what goes into his coffee beans before they get to him, and in part because I can already see him thinking through his new-found information to figure out just how he can use it to brew an even better cup of coffee.

The post Engineering the Perfect Cup of Coffee appeared first on The GastroGnome.

Bang, bang. Biang.

Do you hear that? It’s the sound of of handmade noodles. They’re knocking on your door, telling you to get off your lazy butt. That they’re as easy to make as they are get at a restaurant—and that’s only an option if you live in one of the few parts of the world where there is a Shaanxi restaurant.

Biang.

That’s the sound of your jaw hitting the floor. Give me an hour, and I’ll give you the best bowl of noodles you’ve ever made at home. The texture alone of these noodles sings a siren song from the province of Shaanxi, broad swaths of bouncy dough, a canvas awaiting an artistic brushstroke of spicy sauce

Biang. BIANG.

That’s the sound of me hitting my knee on the desk as I crawl under it in embarrassment when I have to admit that I just copped a lot of my recipe from Martha. Danny Bowien went on her show, showed her how to make them. The video and the recipe differ somewhat, and it took me a few tries to find the happy medium between the two and figure out how to make the high-gluten flour required. The magical formula for a noodle that is easier to make than most pastas, that can be made in an evening, that doesn’t require strange ingredients.

Biang, biang, biang.

That’s the sound of you plodding off to try my recipe.

MATH SIDE NOTE:

You want your flour to have about 15% protein. So you need to look on the back of your flour and see how many grams of protein you have per gram of flour. Then you need to look on the vital wheat gluten and see how many grams of protein you have in that. Then you have to do math to figure out how to make that 15%.

If the last bang I hear is you smacking me in the head because I’ve asked you to do math to make this, just use King Arthur all-purpose flour. That’s what I used to make these calculations. You can try with a different flour without calculating, but the first time I did that, it resulted in floppy noodles. Ewwww, floppy noodles. Aside from not having the trademark chew, they were hard to get a satisfying “whomp” of biang noise from when I made them.

With King Arthur AP, it had 4 grams of protein for 34 grams of flour (11.8%) and the Bob’s Red Mill vital wheat gluten had 23 grams of protein in 30 grams (76.7%). 1 Cup is about 128 grams of flour, which has about 15 grams of protein—and needs about 20 to be at 15%. A tablespoon of wheat gluten weighs about eight grams, which is a little more than 6 grams of protein, which is just what you need. I’d love to pretend that I set up some amazing algebra equation to get to 15% total, but I’m fairly certain, looking back at the maze of numbers on my recipe notes, that I did some rough estimating, then rounded to the nearest tablespoon, then went, HEY GUESS WHAT, IT WORKS. Ummm, this is why I’m a writer, not a mathematician.

The post Bang, Bang, Biang: Amazing Chinese Noodles appeared first on The GastroGnome.

Barbacoa Taco at Pujol in Mexico City

This year was filled with tacos (both Americanized and authentically Mexican), island vacations (Lummi, Sri Lanka, Lummi again, Hawaii, Whidbey, Hawaii again, and San Juan), and some of the highest highs and lowest lows I’ve ever experienced. I won’t deny it’s easier to deal with tough times while sipping a cocktail out of a pineapple on Kauai, but I’ll also tell you that if it weren’t for my wedding in May, I could just as easily have skipped this entire year.

Fish Tacos from Ono Tacos in Maui

Thrown out the many hours I spent in and out of hospitals on both coasts (for myself and for family) like they were rotten poultry. Whizzed them down the garbage disposal of my sink, with the pieces of my knee I said good-bye to in March and the hours of stress from the summer as I tried to balance multiple full-time jobs.

Taco Time Crisp Beef Burrito

Part of that was good. In January, I took on a weekly column for the brand new lifestyle site for Seattle’s ABC affiliate, called Seattle Refined. They let me write fun odes to my favorite fast food, serious complaints (mostly about why Seattle has no Burmese food), and interview people doing really cool things.

Bunny Chow in London (there were no tacos in London, but this South African street food made a perfect stand-in).

In February, I became the Seattle “Chief Chowzter,” which led me to London in April, and will be taking me to New Orleans in January. There’s hardly anything I like more than the opportunity to promote Seattle’s best affordable foods, and Chowzter is an incredible platform for that. It’s the same reason that, come June, I signed on to be the Seattle writer for Gayot, updating the site’s library of Seattle restaurant information.

In May I got married, and the chef of one of our favorite restaurants cooked the wedding feast. We toasted to his second son and my nuptials in the basement of the venue with tiny bottles of Underberg before I tottered down the aisle in hot pink heels.

Over the summer, I exploited the awesomeness of my honeymoon by writing an epically long and in-depth piece on the food of Sri Lanka—and a short but sweet essay expressing my love for the place.

A woman in Sri Lanka makes hoppers: bowl shaped pancakes that could easily double as tacos.

By the fall, I was pretty ready to quit. Everything. To curl up in my bed and not have to see what came next. To sleep for months. But, hey, I didn’t. I did, however, quit my day job in order to write more.

So I wrote about cheese for a cruise-ship in-room magazine.

A market in Kent, Washington. Which is where they hide the good tacos around here.

And a local alt-weekly let me explore my favorite markets for a story.

Things looked up enough I could even write things that made me (and hopefully a few other people) laugh. Because turkey is comically gross, you guys.

I returned to my absolute favorite eating destination, Mexico City, and fell yet more deeply in love with it than I was before. Look for some writing about that in the near future.

Now, as we approach the end of the year, I am back to having almost more than I can handle on my plate—but in the best kind of way. I can say no to stories that will cost me more in time than they’ll pay me. I am working with a local grocery start-up to help them bring a new concept to market. I have been working on a noodle recipe for six months that changed my world–and could change yours, too.

My noodle recipe is amazing. I’ve been working on how to post it for 6 months. Look for it…soon?

The post This Year in Tacos and Other Things, Too appeared first on The GastroGnome.

As one of the only places in the United States where raw fish is considered a completely normal breakfast, Hawaii is one of my favorite places to eat in the country. So obviously, when the Kauai Visitors Bureau invited me down to find the best bites on Kauai, I wasn’t about to say no to a free trip to the land of Spam musubi (don’t even try to challenge me on the tastiness of canned lunch meat wrapped in seaweed, over rice) and tropical fruits. As the rain starts to fall and drizzle and pour here in Seattle, there is no better time to start dreaming of island cuisine.

Best Bites on Kauai–Breakfast

Nothing on Kauai escapes the filter of island life, from the local apple bananas (it’s the type of banana, no apples involved) on diner-style pancakes at the Ono Family Restaurant to the ones in the special Hawaii-only banana pies at McDonald’s. I tried only one of those two. Guess which one.

Coffee during the work day is slurped down in a hurry, if it’s good, that’s great, but if it’s bad, it’s still hot and caffeinated. Coffee on a trip is a long, slow treat to be lingered over. Ha Coffee Bar in Lihue serves the kind of coffee you want to linger over. My cup was full of pour over drip from Ka’u (which is an area of the Big Island where I’d visited a coffee farm a few years before). They had a variety of other options, including a few from the Kauai Coffee Company, which I visited the previous day. If you’re a complete coffee nerd (hi!) KCC won’t do much for you, but if you’re driving by and interested in learning a bit–and trying about different 20 coffees–it’s worth a stop.

I didn’t make it to the Kauai Juice Company‘s own shop in Kapa’a on the eastern side of the island, but as part of the Kauai Culinary Tour the the Visitor’s Bureau arranged for me, we stopped in at Merriman’s Fish House and they served us the most refreshing glass of juice–then told us it came from the Kauai Juice Company.

I warned you that one of the greatest things about Hawaii is that raw fish is a totally acceptable breakfast, so you shouldn’t be surprised that the seasoned idako–marinated baby octopus–that I found at Ishihara Market in Waimea was one of my favorite breakfasts. The market is worth a stop, even if you’re not ready for raw fish, for all sorts of local snacks, bento boxes, souvenirs, and any groceries you might need for the trip. If you’re on the other side of the island, I also found good poke at Pono Market in Kapa’a and Ara’s Sakana-Ya in Lihue.

Best Bites on Kauai–Lunch/Dinner

The loco moco from Garden Island Barbecue from the Chinese/Hawaiian restaurant in Lihue is not much to look at, and definitely not after it survived my grabbing this to-go on my way to the airport. I’m not sure if I was more excited that the gravy didn’t get it stopped at security or just how dang good that gravy was once I finally opened it on the plane. And then there was the kim chee revelation: I know it goes against the traditions of Hawaii, but the fact is, I’m not a huge macaroni salad fan. So I love that Garden Island let’s you pick kim chee in place of mac salad on their plate lunches. In fact, with the thick, rich gravy poured over the hamburger patty and eggs that make up a loco moco, kim chee was just what was needed to balance the plate.

I also need to unequivocally, no holds barred, tell you that you must get to Hamura Saimin when you’re on the island. When a place is as recommended as it was to me, followed with “proof” like its James Beard award, I’m usually pretty wary. It’s not that I don’t trust people, but by the time something is that popular, I expect nothing but Guy Fieri wanna-bes and food that long since ceased to be as awesome as it once was. Thankfully, that was not the case when I slipped into a seat at the table that snakes around the room. Instead, the saimin (Hawaiian-style ramen) was calming. “Relax,” it told me with its clear, salty broth. “We know what we’re doing,” it said with the chewiness of the noodles. “Don’t take yourself so damn seriously,” it finished with the sprinkling of lunchmeat-style pork. Nobody in the room seemed to look up from their own noodles and sticks of barbecued meat much, but I did catch the eye of a local to get him to pass the home-made hot sauce (chiles in vinegar). He nodded approvingly, then said something I didn’t catch as I poured it into my bowl. I poured in some more. Whatever it was he said, his enthusiastic grunt after my second pour leads me to believe it was “you’ll want more of that.”

Yes, I’m going to recommend you go to a fish market and by pork. Koloa Fish Market in Koloa town does sell fish, and you can get a fine poke there, but their plate lunches are everything a Hawaiian plate lunch could ever want to be. The lau lau (pork stuffed with vegetables and a bit of fish, then wrapped in taro leaves) was juicy and tasted like the islands. The lomi lomi salmon, like a salmon salsa is as fresh as that pork is cooked. The combo plate is like a greatest hits of local food–a little ahi poke (in the cup), the lomi lomi salmon, chicken long rice (the clear, noodle type stuff in the upper right corner), the lau lau and rice. Also, there’s enough food for a family of four on this plate, which is as typically Hawaiian as it gets.

Best Bites on Kauai–Dessert and other Miscellaneous Snacks

Lappert’s Hawaii now has locations around the islands, but when you’re on Kauai, you can visit the original location in Hanapepe for a scoop of roasted banana salted caramel ice cream. The local bananas are roasted with brown sugar, which basically increases the caramelization exponentially–and then salted caramel caramel comes into play. The local ingredients–bananas and sea salt–are what makes the flavor, but it’s Lappert’s creamy, small-batch base that makes the texture.

What the hell is this? That’s what I was wondering, too, when I saw it at the Kauai Culinary Market. I was there as part of a Tasting Kauai Tour, again, thanks to the visitor’s bureau, and we spotted this, in among the cherimoyas, guavas, and various other tropical treasures. It’s called an ice cream bean, and that white fluffy stuff is what you actually eat. I’m not sure it tastes as good as its namesake (definitely doesn’t compete with the Lappert’s above here), but it was like a slightly acidic cotton candy.

Another find from the same market was the Monkeypod Jam lilikoi curd. It tastes like sunshine. Sunshine with the texture of cake frosting. Could the world get any better? Not only did I buy a jar after sampling at the market, I got home, panicked that my jar would run out soon, and sprung for the pricey shipping to get more to my house in Seattle. Since the shipping was $15 for up to six jars, I clearly had to get enough to last me a long time. Right?

I’d gotten a tip that there was some good stuff at the Lawai Menehune Food Mart, and also that it was “sort of like a 7-11.” I disagree, only because what came to mind after shopping there was the old AM/PM slogan, “too much good stuff.” I left the market with malasadas (like doughnut holes), butter mochi, peanut butter mochi, an ensemada (which is like a cinnamon roll, only instead of goopy cinnamon, there’s butter), their famous manju (crumbly pastry filled with red bean and other flavors) and this manapua. Like a Chinese char siu bao, it’s a steamed bun stuffed with barbecued pork. It’s also the type of thing that it’s hard to define what makes a really good one until you realize it’s become the version to which you compare all other manapua. That is this one. And so far, none have managed to come close to how good it was.

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Looks like finger food to me

Midway through most of the meals I ate on my honeymoon in Sri Lanka, a smile and a pile of napkins started coming my way. I would swipe at my face, realizing that it once again looked like someone gave a drunken toddler one of those finger-paint-with-curry sets.

Other brides count down the weeks before their wedding by practicing dance steps, reciting their vows, or fretting about décor. Something else occupied my mind: eating with my right hand. Immediately after the ceremony, my new husband and I were jetting off to Sri Lanka. (“Why Sri Lanka?” people ask. The answer: it’s as far from Seattle as you can go on Alaska Airlines miles.) The tiny island nation off the southeast coast of India has sprawling, sandy beaches where you can stroll into the bathwater-warm Indian Ocean. It’s also one of those places, I gathered from online resources and television shows, where the polite way to eat is with the first three fingers of your right hand, up to the second knuckle.

“Uh-oh,” I thought, upon learning this. My right hand has the approximate coordination of a baboon using one of those spring-loaded garbage-picker-upper tools. Having been raised in a city where Asians are the largest minority group, I can use chopsticks like Mr. Miyagi, but having to scoop up rice and curry with my fingers seemed to be a daunting task.

My head filled with nightmare scenarios of accidentally using my left hand in front of locals, of the whispered giggles, of a sage-looking elder storming off in disgust at my using the “bathroom” hand to touch the food. I imagined myself picking up the rice, grain by individual grain, dunking it in the curry, and bringing my infinitesimal meal to my mouth.

I try to abide by local culture when I travel: I do my best to meet locals, and to learn from them, rather than offend or appall them. For months before we departed, I sat on my left hand while eating with my far less-dexterous one: whether pizza or dhal, it all went in from the right—except for the large amount that landed on my lap.

It’s not that I am normally a neat eater—the remnants of my last two meals can generally be found on my shirt at any given time. It’s just that eating with my right hand made it seventeen times worse. Luckily, Sri Lanka is an exceedingly friendly place.

Sure, the locals I dined with usually ate with their right hands—except when Christopher needed to tear the coconut bread called rotti with both hands. And maybe the old guy we asked directions for in the mountains outside Ella was only using up to the second knuckle, but he was definitely covered in rice down to his wrist.

For the most part, when my pale face graced a table, the local hostess would offer a fork, but she was clearly pleased when I turned it down or ignored it in favor of dining in local style. Pleased, yes, but also amused, watching me aim rice and curry into mouth, as if it were one of those carnival games that are rigged so the ball is larger than the opening. It was at this moment, generally, that those aforementioned napkins would come my way, accompanied by an appreciative smile.

I would smile back and doggedly accept the napkin. At first, it felt like a sign of defeat, like I’d lost the battle of fitting in. But I’m a white Jewish girl with a voice that carries like a megaphone, I’m unlikely to fit in too well anywhere outside a Long Island mall. The napkin wasn’t a sign of defeat, I came to realize through a conversation made up entirely of looks and hand motions (our language barrier too great to overcome). It was a sign of silent mutual admiration: me of the food, she of my futile but enthusiastic attempts to respect local culture.

While we couldn’t understand each other, the same thing was making us both happy: that I thought Sri Lankan food was delicious and wanted to get as much of it as I could from the plate into my mouth. I need not have worried. Rules are made for being broken, and food is made for being enjoyed—however it gets from plate to mouth.

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Would you like a scobie? They’re legal, I promise

Certainly, I did not fall in love with kombucha because it is cute and cuddly. Mention of the fermented tea often garners the same looks as when I tell people about the time I ate uncleaned pig intestine in Laos. Commercial kombucha can often be sour or spicy; it often has too much bite. The flavored versions are unappealing and sometimes seems as if they’re trying to cover something up. So it’s amazing that I ever found out that homemade kombucha was my McDreamy of beverages.

“Would you like a scoby?” sounds like something a teenager would ask his buddy under the bleachers, but in fact, when a friend offered, I knew enough to accept the clear, jelly-like disk. The mother, as it is also commonly known (especially in vinegar-making circles), sits in a batch of brewed tea with sugar, eating away at the sugars, fermenting the tea, giving it deeper, richer flavor, and a little bit of zing. It looks like somebody dumped an oversized Petri dish out into a jar of piss on our counter. So why do I love my kombucha (and its mother) like it’s my daughter?

I like how it tastes, and I like having a morning beverage option that is quick, easy, and wakes me up with flavor. Coffee is a slow process of enjoyment for me, one I like after I arrive at the office, to sip as I work through my emails. Kombucha tees up the day for me—pun intended—so coffee can hit it out of the park.

But kombucha was not a homerun right away—and it’s not for everyone, as I still can’t even get half of my friends to go to first base with it. It took months of experimenting with teas, the placement of the jars, and adjusting the sugar levels to get my homemade kombucha where I want it to be. And by me, I mean my engineer boyfriend: this is not a task for freeform cooks like me, throwing a this-in-here, and a how’s-about-a-little-of-that. Over the course of nearly a year, he experimented with the two-week fermentation process of our kombucha. I tasted a lot of gross stuff (“this one looks like it has brains in it”). But I also got totally accustomed to my morning glass of kombucha.

There are a million people online who will tell you how great kombucha is for your health. I’m not convinced I’m any better off than I was before—other than the fact that there’s two more feet of counter space I can’t cover with ice cream makers or a deep fryer. It’s our darkest corner, where the jars sit, resting on top of a towel to keep them insulated from the cool granite countertop. Brown cardstock shields it from the light (for something called a mother, it’s really quite a baby). Every two weeks (or so, temperature and sugar-level dependent), when the kombucha tells us with its flavor that it’s ready, it’s poured into a growler for a second fermentation overnight in the bottle. This is a nice stage, because before the growler goes into the fridge, I’m not yet forced to play “beer or breakfast” with amber-colored drinks in clear containers at six in the morning.

After that, some people add flavors. I tend to like it as is, tasting the green tea, the oolong, or the rooibos with which it was brewed. The sugars have long been gobbled up by the fermentation process, so the resulting beverage is as if iced tea and pickles had a child. Come to think of it, how has this not become a thing in the South? A new batch is brewed, and the scoby goes in to start the whole process over again. The kombucha life has come full circle. How could you not want a hug from that?

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