The good, the bad and the unknown (part 2).

Turkey
We spent a lot of time looking forward to the food in Spain, so we were somewhat caught off guard at how much we loved the food in Turkey. Much like Istanbul is now one of our favorite cities, Turkish food is one of our favorite cuisines.

Our favorite place was a little fish restaurant just down the street from where we were staying, that had really fantastic appetizers. They would bring out a tray of small dishes and you would just pick and choose whatever looked good. Big winners were green olives wrapped with sardines (tastes way better than they sound), yogurt with garlic and dill, and mussels marinated with some peppers in oil.

Turkey was the first time I was fussed at for not cleaning my plate. Several times waiters took great offense that I was not eating everything and simply refused to believe that I was full and assumed that I must not have liked it. More than once this ended up with complementary tea being served (to make up for what they thought must have been lacking). The funny thing is, I loved the food, but hated the tea. And I had to drink the tea so they wouldn’t be even more offended.

Another place we went a couple of times had vegetables (peppers, eggplants, leeks) stuffed with a dolma mixture, and really great hummus and baba ganoush.

We did also take a cooking class in Istanbul and we recreated some of the dishes for a “photo party” we had over the summer. The lentil soup was a big hit, and I want to try the stuffed figs soon.

I could go on and on about the food in Turkey.

Croatia
Croatia was all about sausage and seafood. Zagreb’s German and Eastern European influence was evident in the food with lots of heavy sausages and meat. We found a really good pizza place which brewed a couple of tasty beers. We also went to one of the old classic restaurants in Zagreb where a rather imposing waitress again chastised me for not finishing all the food. Again, it was good, but they served me a casserole the size of my head—just way too much.

Being on the coast, the seafood in Dubrovnik was spectacular. We feasted on fresh oysters, grilled squid and mussels nearly every day, and I made it a point to always order the octopus salad for comparison purposes.

Spain
While I loved the restaurants in Spain, I think I loved the markets more. It was a killer to stroll through them and not have a kitchen to cook in! Of course, that changed when we got to Salobrena and had an entire house for a week.

The tapas throughout Spain were simply brilliant. The best places were when you could find a little bar, have a beer and they would bring you a small plate of food—sometimes cheese and bread, or it could be paella or shrimp. And at our favorite places, it would be something different each time you ordered a beer. Heaven.

My favorite tapas were the peppers, which I’ve managed to recreate at home, and the Marcona almonds—both of which are very salty and savory. Oh, and the jamon Serrano or Iberico, which was a big cured ham leg from which they would shave very thin slices to order.

One of the most memorable meals was in a very small town called Ecija (pronounced E-thee-a). We had spent the early part of the evening at a great dive bar watching bullfighting and soccer with the locals on the plaza. (Quick aside: this bar was just across a one lane street from a church where a wedding was taking place—and it was full of the men grabbing a drink before being hunted down and pulled back inside for the ceremony.)

Around 10 p.m., which is the beginning of dinner service in Spain, we wandered through an alley and peeked inside a doorway we had seen earlier. It was this charming outdoor restaurant that specialized in Spanish style beef—we weren’t really sure what we were ordering, but just took the recommendations of the waiter. It was excellent, and a lovely place to spend the rest of the evening.

But I have point out that in Madrid I had the worst thing I had eaten since the shrimp in Beijing. We stopped at a tapas bar after spending the day in the park. The menu was Spanish and English, but still had one thing that baffled me—elvers on toast. Ever adventurous when it comes to food I threw caution to the wind and ordered it. Looked like cooked spaghetti on toast, but with some bluish coloring in places, and tasted a bit like it, too, but icky. I ate what I could stomach, but didn’t finish it. It wasn’t until I got home that I found out that elvers are baby eels. That explains it.

Dublin
We had some lovely meals in Dublin, but I think our favorite thing was the full Irish breakfast with eggs, black pudding, tomatoes…the way a breakfast should be!

6 Months Later…
Since we’ve been back there are a few things we make to remind us of the travels—the lentil soup and Turkish appetizers are some of our favorites still. But it’s only been this week that I’ve wanted to eat Chinese food again!

The good, the bad and the unknown.

NOTE: this is the first of two parts on some of the culinary adventures we had on the world tour.

We been back for months now, and are still processing some of the trip. In some ways it seems like it never happened!

This post is something we’ve been meaning to do for a while—it’s all about the food. The good, the bad and the unknown.

China
I won’t go into detail about the place at the end of our hutong or the Peking duck, as we covered those in our earlier posts. But a couple of other dining experiences in Beijing were worth noting as well.

After our first overpriced hotel breakfast Tom started picking up breakfast for us at a bun shop just around the corner. For about a dollar, we could get these two stuffed rolls that would carry us through the day. Not sure exactly what they were stuffed with, but pork and green onions seem like the most likely thing. Just a small example of how kind everyone we met was, the second time Tom went there was during the morning rush with everyone pushing their way to the table set up outside the shop. After waiting patiently while 5 or 6 other folks elbowed their way to the front (the Chinese don’t believe in queuing up in a line) the old woman took pity on him as he obviously didn’t know the drill. She barely glanced up at him (towering over everyone else) handed him two bun took his money and went back to the crowd. We loved taking breakfast to the park around the corner and listening to the caged birds.

The other Beijing food experiences—well, it was the best of food and it was the worst of food. Can’t remember the name of the restaurant, and as we got in the habit of, we ordered a number of dishes on the likely chance that there would be at least one we couldn’t eat. One was a really fantastic beef—crispy, salty, just wonderful. Another was shrimp over crispy tea leaves. The flavor was great, but they were cooked whole—head, shell and tails. While the heads came off fine you couldn’t really take off the shell which proved to be a problem. Tom was only able to eat a couple, and I was determined to eat at least most of what was on the plate but had to give up after 5 or 6—just thinking about the texture still makes my stomach turn a bit.

On to Xian, where Tom was determined to find “hot pot.” We would ask (showing the symbol for it) but everyone would point to one particular restaurant that was outrageously expensive, even by American standards. So we still are not even sure what it is. But as a result we did get some really fantastic soups and meals. But the best story is less about the food and more about the folks. After trying to find the fabled hot pot one afternoon, we finally gave up around 2:30 pm—which is an odd time for lunch as it turns out many restaurants close up at 3 for a break before dinner service. Anyway, we stopped in a place that looked nice, but was deserted. The staff was eating and watching Chinese soap operas, but they sure weren’t going to pass up on customers.

This may have been the only place in China where they didn’t have pictures on the menu. This was a problem.

None of the waitresses wanted to talk to us (or rather gesture with us), so they sent over what seemed like a busboy who knew how to say “hello.” That, unfortunately but not unexpectedly, is where his English ended. The menu was really just an order form and we had no idea where to begin. Tom pulled out the “point in any language” book, and we started pointing to the order form and to the pictures. He got the idea and started showing us what to order: beef, cabbage, broccoli. We were still guessing on the preparation, but settled back with a couple of beers and waited.

After a bit, a waiter came out with an interesting contraption that was quite hot. He sat it on the table and filled part of the top and the bottom with water and some herbs. A few minutes later, there were platters of raw food brought out, and again, they took pity on the clueless tourists, showing us how to drop the beef and vegetables in the hot water until they cooked, and then dousing them in different sauces. The waiter sat about 8 feet away and when he would see us doing something silly (like putting the pickled garlic in the hot water), he’d jump up and come show us what to do. All in all, it was an adventure in dining. And not our last. (Further research has shown that this, indeed, was "hot pot."

Guilin, Yangshuo and Guangzshou were relatively simple (avoiding the dog on the menu) and we generally stuck with “farmer food” (as they called Chinese food) as opposed to Western meals, though we did become fond of the full English and Spanish breakfasts at the Li River Retreat to set us up for the day. And the ramen-style noodle bowls we bought for the train trip were really good as well, though in retrospect, I think we were just really hungry when we ate them. If nothing else, it was fun when we bought them at the shop in the train station where we went through another round of photo ops…and waiting in the queue on the train to fill them with hot water (each coach had it’s own hot water supply for this very purpose)!

Kenya
Much like everything else about Kenya, our dining experiences were very isolated. It was lovely food, but none of it really Kenyan. Except the coffee—and that was amazing. Early morning (5 am) wake up calls were much easier to take when there was a quiet knock and rustling as fresh Kenyan coffee was left in our tent.

There were some interesting juxtapositions with wonderful gourmet 5 course meals in the middle of nowhere. Joy’s Camp in particular was serving food worthy of any fine dining restaurant.

One of the things we enjoyed about being on safari was that we had a chance to meet fellow travelers, usually over dinner. Two of our most memorable days included a riverside breakfast after a morning hike, and of course, the surprise bush dinner we wrote about earlier.