Delicious Portland

The eminent philosopher Homer Simpson once said “I discovered a meal between breakfast and brunch.” I think that’s the key to getting the most out of eating in Portland. It is a great food city. Amazing, really. It was a type of city that I had trouble planning out what I was going to eat each day, only on account of there not being enough meals in a day and me not having enough stomach capacity. With Homer’s mantra on my mind and hoping I could walk off all the calories I’d be consuming, I wasted no time once my flight landed in getting my first meal into me.

Lardo (a seriously awesome name for a restaurant) was my destination for dinner. As a sandwich lover, I had too many choices. I settled on their double burger from a menu where everything was “tied for first” in my mind – I mean, how do you choose among porchetta, a bahn mi, a Philly pork sub and about a half dozen other selections? The burger was great, but the star was the crispy pig ears with fennel salt and honey. I’ve eaten a lot of pig parts in my days and these may have been the best ever.

Burger and crispy pig ears at Lardo

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A hankering for seafood

Living in a landlocked city, I have been missing the previously under appreciated access I had to wonderful seafood back in Halifax. On my first grocery shopping trip in Saskatoon back in April, I looked at a frozen Atlantic lobster tail for sale and just shook my head in disbelief. Now, when I’m traveling to a coastal area, my food radar tunes into the seafood selections so I can make up for lost time. My trip to Seattle in November was all about the seafood.

After I dropped my bags at the hotel on arrival, I immediately walked to the Pike Place Market and to the counter of the Market Grill. I was on a mission… it was lunch time, and I had a hankering for their specialty – the grilled salmon sandwich. I closed my eyes for the first bite so I could savour the long overdue taste of the sea. Delicious!

Salmon sandwich at Market Grill

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Five days of ballpark food

I wasn’t intending to almost exclusively eat ballpark food while in Minneapolis, but when you plan a five day trip around seeing five baseball games, you’re not exactly leaving yourself a lot of spare time for dining out on the town. Lucky for me, the choices at Target Field were pretty solid, and quite diverse compared to the traditional hotdogs and Cracker Jacks.

Just beyond the centre field bleachers was one of my favourite concession stands – an outpost of the downtown Minneapolis restaurant, Butcher and the Boar. They served up these outstanding pork rib tips. Delicious!

Rib tips at Target Field

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Alberta beer sampling

With the move from Halifax to Saskatoon and all that entailed, this has been a year of shorter trips and vacations. One of those was a July road trip to Edmonton to see the Tragically Hip play on their last tour. Like all my trips this year, and owing to Saskatchewan’s limited selection of craft beer, I managed to find a way to sneak in some sampling and tastings over a couple of days in Edmonton.

On the afternoon before the Hip show, I noticed an interesting beer and wine store in the downtown and grabbed these two to put on ice back at the hotel. The Blindman Session ale was very tasty post-concert. I should have been smarter and grabbed more to bring back home.

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Bucket list Montreal meals

There were two restaurants in Montreal I had always wanted to visit for a meal – Joe Beef and Au Pied de Cochon.  Feeling like my body was ready for more foie gras in two nights than the previous 41 years of my life put together, I started with dinner at Joe Beef the night I arrived in Montreal.

Sadly, my wife wasn’t able to join me as we had planned as she was tending to our sick dog back on the east coast.  With me having already moved out to Saskatoon, this was to be a catch-up weekend of some good meals in a city we both love.  Without a dining companion, I saddled up to the bar, still eager to sample a few dishes.  And what a selection there was.  I stared at the evening’s menu on the chalkboard for some time before finally deciding on a plan.

Chalk board menu at Joe Beef

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Montreal food favourites

I’ve spent enough time in Montreal to have a few go to food places.  A trip to the city isn’t complete without a couple of staples.  These are mostly things you already know about Montreal, and I’m not ashamed that my list isn’t one of under the radar places.  All of these are wonderful and deserved of the attention they receive (well, maybe all except the last on my list).

First off, every trip to Montreal needs a stop for a Schwartz’s smoked meat sandwich, a dill pickle and a black cherry Cott cola.  I’ve sampled some of the world’s great sandwiches and this is one of my all time favourites.

Schwartz's smoked meat sandwich

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Day trip to Córdoba

I have a bit of a compulsion to include a few day trips on any of the longer trips I take.  If I’m within a two hour train ride of somewhere interesting, I always feel a pull to loop in one extra place or one more location to explore.  On our trip to Spain last fall, we had all kinds of options for day trips out of both Madrid and Seville.  Consciously, we decided to ease up on the day trips so we could kick back a bit more than on previous trips.  For me, there was one day trip that couldn’t be sacrificed – a visit to Córdoba while we were staying in Seville.

The pull to Córdoba was to visit the Mezquita – the religious site that has switched back and forth over the last 1300 years from a Catholic basilica, to a half mosque half basilica, to a full mosque and now to a Roman Catholic church. A straightforward morning train ride from Seville had us in beautiful Córdoba in under an hour.  We made our way to the Mezquita as our first stop and entered the Patio de los Naranjos, the inner courtyard of the site.

Inner courtyard of the Mezquita

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Living off tapas in Seville

In my perfect universe, every meal would be tapas style.  Small dishes, lots of sampling and experimenting, sharing – these form my idea of how to eat.  I’ve already written about a week’s worth of eating in Madrid where every single meal we had outside of our apartment was tapas style.  Well, we continued that trend for our time in Seville too.

On our third night in Seville, we started the night at Bar Alfalfa.  It’s a compact place with the noise of conversations filling the high, arching ceilings.  We were lucky to find a table along the windows on a rainy night.  The draw for us here was their gluten-free friendliness allowing my wife a few more ordering options than at other places.  That alone would put a smile on her face, but on this night, a man at the bar with his pet bird on his shoulder made her, and everyone smile:

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A week of tapas in Madrid

Not one single proper sit down meal in two weeks in Spain.  Honestly.  Zero.  Nada.  I was far too enamoured with the idea of tapas to give away precious space in my stomach to a “normal” three course meal.   See, tapas is the perfect solution to my natural inclination to inhabit more informal and casual eating and drinking establishments and for my desire not to commit to one portion of any food.  If you’ve ever eaten in a group with me, you’ll know me as the person eyeing everyone else’s dish with envy.  For a week in Madrid (and I’ll write separately on my tapas adventures in Seville later – this post will be long enough as it is), I hopped, skipped and jumped my way through some outstanding bars and snacks.

I got started on my first afternoon in Madrid at the Mercado San Miguel.  Jammed wall to wall with people having the same idea as me, I did a circle of the eating stalls before settling on a perfectly perfumed paella served with a rustic Rioja.  The server made sure I had my fair share of the charred rice bits in my dish (those alone should be a snack!).  My first tapas in Spain was a rousing success.

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Gluten-free tapas in Madrid

Prior to our fall trip to Spain, while I was researching tapas joins and all the interesting dishes I was going to be trying, my wife had resigned herself to two weeks of jamón ibérico as a staple of her diet on the account of her Celiac.  Not that plates of jamón ibérico are a bad consolation prize, but for her, she had accepted that she wouldn’t be sampling widely from the menu as we saddled up to bar after bar.

Thanks to Taberna La Concha in Madrid, my wife got the Spanish tapas experience she thought she would miss out on.   On our second night in Madrid, we wandered about ten minutes from our La Latina apartment and  held court at a little table in the basement of the bar.  My wife’s face lit up when she was presented with a dedicated gluten-free menu and I turned the night’s ordering over to her.  The first dish: anchovies in pesto

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