Travelling Lore

When you're on your honeymoon, you have to treat yourselves to at least one fine dining experience.  We're not typically ones to spend exorbitant amounts of money on food (read: we're not big foodies, though we appreciate a good meal), but given the occasion we gave ourselves the green light. Driving north from Napa, we headed up Route 1 to Mendocino, a romantic coastal town in which time seems to have stalled.  With a population under 1,000 people, this town is built around one main street with local shops branching off the side.  We stayed in the Hill House Inn , which boasts traditional Victorian style rooms and is situated in Victorian gardens and native vegetation.  I absolutely loved this hotel and really wished we had more than one night there; I would recommend it to anyone interested in visiting the historic village of Mendocino. Mendocino is a cooler and more breezy than Napa due to its proximity to the Pacific Ocean.  So we bundled up and w...

While I blog mostly about travel, sometimes I like to mix it up and write about a different topic.  So when I'm not blogging about travel, I blog about food and wine.  Today I bring to you Against All Grain 's amazing recipe for lamb stew with dried plums .  I almost never eat lamb, but this recipe looked too good to pass up and I'm a sucker for stews/soups!  Lamb is more traditionally eaten around Easter, but if you eat lamb for Christmas this recipe would work well for any left over meat. I did make a few modifications to the recipe, though.  The original recipe calls for using a dutch oven, butternut squash, salt, removing the carrots after the first hour of cooking, and making an onion puree.  However, I don't own a dutch oven and I find that using a regular "stew" pot and keeping the lid on keeps the moisture in just as well and has resulted in some quite tasty stews!  I used red potatoes instead of butternut squash because it's what I had on h...

A couple of weeks ago a friend shared a recipe for this Butternut Squash and Beef Stew .  If you follow the paleo diet (which I do not), this recipe is perfect for you.  If you don't follow the paleo diet, this recipe is still perfect for you.  The directions call for the use of a crock pot, but since I don't own one I made stew the old fashioned way: in a regular pot. The first time I made beef stew (using this recipe , more or less) I didn't have the time to let the meat stew for a couple of hours; so while the flavor was great, the meat was still rather tough.  This time I let the whole kit and caboodle stew in a pot for 2.5 hours on low and voila, beautifully tender stew meat! After gathering the ingredients for the stew (see recipe ), lightly brown the stew meat on medium heat. Next add all of the remaining ingredients except for the mushrooms and spinach.  If you're using a crock pot, set it to low and let it cook for six hours.  If ...

Food time!  My basil plants needed a haircut, but I didn't want to waste all of that fresh herb-y goodness, so off to Pinterest I went for a basil-inspired recipe.  I decided to make Basil Quinoa Cakes found on the Greatist .  Mmm, delicious! Although they took a while to make (from prep to finish), it's a super easy recipe.  Just cook the quinoa, combine all of the ingredients, and plop 1/4 cup at a time into a pan.  The recipe calls for bread crumbs, but I took the suggestion of using 2 slices of gluten-free bread and 3 tablespoons of gluten-free flour and it worked great without compromising the taste.  (I don't have celiac disease, but I choose to go gluten-free as often as I conveniently can because it makes me feel less bloated.)  I also chose to fry each side for about 5 minutes instead of 10 because I didn't want my quinoa basil cakes to be super crunchy.  The best part about this recipe?  That it makes about 12 cakes, which c...