jamisons's blog

Eating It Up

2009-03-31T10:38:11-05:00

A Photo Slideshow

We've been sorting through our trip photos and thought you might enjoy seeing a few shots from along the way.

Thanks for joining us on this latest adventure. You might have guessed by now that both of us truly love to travel.

Despite always returning to mountains of work assignments, mail, and laundry of our food-stained clothes, it refreshes us. The happiness starts well before the trip’s beginning and lingers long after the trip’s end.

Bill relishes the details, and can spend portions of many days immersed in the planning. We talk about the options for many evenings, allowing us to look forward weeks before we hit the road.

Cheryl sorts the photos at the end, and delights in organizing them into albums and sharing them. This process keeps both of us thinking about the many things we did, the people we met, and the meals we shared long after their completion.

Travel keeps on giving. See you next time.

Check out the photos!

Cheryl and Bill Jamison write about food and travel, always with mouthwatering results. Among their best-selling books are Smoke & Spice, American Home Cooking and The Big Book of Outdoor Cooking & Entertaining. They are also frequent contributors to Cooking Light and Bon Appétit. Married 22 years, they live just outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The Jamisons’ newest book, Around the World in 80 Dinners: The Ultimate Culinary Adventure, regales readers with a tasty account of their global travels in search of great local fare—from Bali to Brazil.

Learn more about Cheryl and Bill at cookingwiththejamisons.com. You can sign up to join them on a future trip by clicking on “culinary adventures.”

Eating It Up

2009-03-27T10:49:37-05:00

All About Boulder

Coming from the northwest, as we did, to reach Boulder, Utah, you take a right turn at Capitol Reef National Park and head south toward the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, just a few miles beyond the town, and then the nearby Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks.

Highway 12 to Boulder slowly climbs a mountain pass that peaks in elevation at 9,600 feet before dropping down to a high valley inhabited by one hundred or so Mormon farming and ranching families as well as two talented, bold Buddhist cooks.

Despite being right in the center of the country’s most majestic natural glory, Boulder is as remote as any spot in the nation. Just ask the United States Postal Service, which kept using mules to bring in the mail later than in any other area.

Blake Spalding and Jennifer Castle came to this wilderness wonderland 10 years ago to open a restaurant, the Hell’s Backbone Grill, named after a prominent local landscape feature. They chose the town because it offered ample space for a kitchen garden—now supplemented by a full farm—plus locally raised meat, considerations most chefs ignored at the time.

Blake and Jen thrilled the residents so thoroughly with their food and their respectful character that the town council actually awarded them a liquor license to sell wine with meals, an incredible accomplishment in a small Mormon community. The Mormon servers don’t drink wine themselves, of course, but Blake and Jen give them samples to sniff so they can describe a wine’s aroma to customers.

We made a long detour to enjoy the cooking again, having visited once before five years ago. Our dinner was simply splendid in all respects.

On a cool spring evening we started with two warming appetizers, a cup of lamb posole (like a southwestern hominy stew) and a Utah goat-cheese fondue with house-baked crackers and dried local fruit.

For one of our main dishes we decided to try the daily special of shredded-beef enchiladas topped with Monterey Jack cheese and a generous ladling of green chile cream sauce. For the second entrée we debated between several options on the regular menu, including grilled trout and an arugula-pesto pasta, but ultimately chose the chipotle meatloaf. It arrived with a mound of fluffy mashed potatoes, flavored intensely with bits of lemon, the perfect counterpoint to the spicy meat mixture.

Even though we were stuffed already, we ordered two desserts. The dark chocolate pot de crème, enlivened with a dash of New Mexico red chile, we ate at the table.

The second selection, a pear bread pudding with butterscotch sauce, we wrapped up to take to our motel room. We finished it off on the last morning of our trip, just before leaving heavenly Boulder to return to Santa Fe. With it, we relived our wonderful dinner with Blake and Jen and celebrated other cheery memories of our grand tour of the American West.

Learn more about Cheryl and Bill at cookingwiththejamisons.com. You can sign up to join them on a future trip by clicking on “culinary adventures.”

Eating It Up

2009-03-25T15:00:13-05:00

From Reno to Boulder

Roads from Port Townsend don’t go much farther north in the United States, so we made a U-turn to head back south on the same highways that brought us to Washington. In Oregon we turned inland and traveled high-desert country down to Reno, Nevada.

Reno served as the host city this year for the big annual trade show of the Hearth, Patio, and Barbecue Association. As a tie-in to our books and other writings on outdoor cooking, Cheryl has started doing consulting work on outdoor kitchens and entertaining areas. She needed to attend the expo to stay current on new trends and products.

Our large, busy Reno hotel has the advantage of being next door to the convention center, but otherwise it’s seriously overpriced for the level of quality and service except in its smallest restaurant, the sixteen-seat Sushi Bar. The spot offers an all-you-can-eat special for $23 per person.

We expected some sort of Nevada-style stale buffet, but actually the sushi was pretty good—freshly prepared to order from an extensive menu. We went both of our nights in town and left feeling modestly pampered.

The next and last stop on our western road trip was Boulder, Utah. Mountainous terrain on the route makes it a two-day drive, but we planned an interesting stop for lunch on the first day in Winnemucca, Nevada, a town with a solid Basque heritage.

We ate at a “Basque Market and Eatery” oddly named Partners in Wine. We didn’t see anyone drinking wine, but we did enjoy a big platter of Spanish chorizo, olives, and Manchego cheese plus a daily special of fisherman’s stew.

Even during the lunch, and especially on the long hours on the road, we looked forward eagerly to our return to Boulder, a way-out-of-the-way gem totally different than Reno.

Learn more about Cheryl and Bill at cookingwiththejamisons.com. You can sign up to join them on a future trip by clicking on “culinary adventures.”

Eating It Up

2009-03-21T08:38:13-05:00

Seafood in Port Townsend

“The fish and chips, please,” Cheryl says.

“Two?” our seasoned waitress asks.

Three of us are dining today, so it seems most likely that she’s asking about how many pieces of fish Cheryl wants. Cheryl responds, “I guess, is that about right?”

“Well, most of my girls have two,” she says, then adds, “unless they’re my dockworker girls, and then they have three or four.”

So begins a delightful lunch at Sea J’s, a pint-size joint hard by the dock in Port Townsend. We’ve come this far to visit our longtime friend Lynn at her new retirement home, near the northeastern tip of Washington’s rugged Olympic peninsula.

Lynn asked if we wanted to check out a real locals’ lunch favorite, one where dockworkers can get their fill of freshly caught, value priced seafood, fried crisp and served with slabs of griddle-cooked garlic bread and mounds of tangy coleslaw.

While waiting for the fish, we take in our odd but honest surroundings, pink walls slathered in local business cards and bumper stickers, and, sandwiched between them, serviceable communal picnic tables. Most travel materials on Port Townsend focus on its vibrant literary scene and Victorian-era charm, worthy pieces of the town’s heritage. We feel privileged to experience another slice of local life as well.

Our other top meals in Port Townsend were at Lynn’s home. Our last morning we had a breakfast of handpicked, frozen blackberries from the past season with freshly shucked oysters right out of local waters. If it doesn’t sound like a tempting breakfast to you, just try it the next time you’re in the Northwest.

Dinner the same night featured seafood pasta, with fresh Dungeness crab and local clams, asparagus, oyster mushrooms, tarragon, Washington wine, and parsley from Lynn’s garden. Two of Lynn’s friends joined us, and all of us worked together on the shopping, cooking, and clean up.

It was a glorious day to cap a glorious visit to a remotely romantic corner of America.

Learn more about Cheryl and Bill at cookingwiththejamisons.com. You can sign up to join them on a future trip by clicking on “culinary adventures.”

Eating It Up

2009-03-19T08:45:48-05:00

From California to Oregon

From Paso Robles we drove over to the Pacific coast and took the dramatically scenic Highway 1 north along the shore to Santa Cruz.

Then we turned inland to skirt the eastern fringes of the San Francisco Bay for a quick one-night stay in the town of Napa, where we met up with close friends for dinner at Ubuntu, perhaps the most daring and exciting vegetarian restaurant in the country today.

All of us loved our meal, which consisted of eight small servings of different dishes that we shared. Our favorite plate, ironically, was the one that most mimicked a carnivore’s dream, grits than had been smoked and pooled under meaty local mushrooms.

Early the next morning we continued north more than six hundred miles to Portland, Oregon. Our first dinner in the city was at meat-centric Beast, every bit as bold and popular as Ubuntu but totally different in orientation.

Beast delighted us with its forthright name and set-dinner offerings of lamb, foie gras, and all manner of pork, but the dish we walked out talking about was the most delicate and vegetable-based, an almost custard-like silken soup of hedgehog mushrooms topped with shavings of Oregon truffle.

We had two other good meals in Portland—a Cuban breakfast at Pambiche and a Thai street-food dinner at Pok Pok—but then both of us caught bad colds at the same time. One day we could barely get out of bed, much less enjoy food or anything else.

When it was time to leave Oregon, we had to push ourselves to drive up to Port Townsend, Washington, where we went to see another close friend whose unfailing good cheer perked up our moods.

Learn more about Cheryl and Bill at cookingwiththejamisons.com. You can sign up to join them on a future trip by clicking on “culinary adventures.”

Eating It Up

2009-03-17T10:49:04-05:00

Paso Robles

The first day of our visit to California’s beautiful Central Coast wine area we felt like characters in Sideways, the popular 2004 film.

We stayed in the same motel as Jack and Miles, the main characters, ate dinner at their local hangout, the Hitching Post II, and stopped by the Los Olivos Café where they took Maya and Stephanie on dates. Unfortunately, no one except ourselves mistook us for movie stars.

So we bailed out of the cinema scene and went to Paso Robles, a less celebrated, lower-key part of the same region. Bon Appétit magazine convinced us to visit the town in a recent article on the best small cities in America for food.

Paso Robles was one of the runners-up to top-ranked Raleigh-Durham, making it a place we definitely wanted to check out.

True to the advance billing, we had three good meals, each quite different from the other. Breakfast at Vic’s Café featured hearty home cooking, dinner at Villa Creek offered an international array of dishes to complement its own line of wines, and another dinner at Artisan showcased the sophisticated talents of the young Chef-Owner, Chris Kobayashi.

Chef Koby, as he is known, didn’t bowl us over with our first dishes, fried abalone and crab cakes, but the following courses got progressively better.

A smoked Gouda fondue with porter warmed the spirit and taste buds on a cool March evening. Bloomsdale spinach salad with winter chicory, rustic croutons and bacon vinaigrette offered a symphony of contrasting flavors and textures.

Then the kitchen delivered a knockout punch, agnolotti pasta bathed in black truffles and highlighted with ricotta, chanterelles, broccoli romanesco, rapini, and dried red chile. We left Artisan dizzy with delight.

Paso Robles remains off the beaten tourist path for now, a slow-paced town comfortable in its own skin. That probably won’t last. If you have an inclination to go, this is a prime time.

Learn more about Cheryl and Bill at cookingwiththejamisons.com. You can sign up to join them on a future trip by clicking on “culinary adventures.”

Eating It Up

2009-03-16T11:51:35-05:00

Los Angeles, Part 2

On our last night in Los Angeles (check out the first part of our L.A. visit) we celebrated Bill’s birthday at a delightfully plucky new restaurant called Animal. Despite the name, Chefs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo love vegetables, fruits, all kinds of seasonings, and probably anything else edible.

They just put meat, often pork, in the spotlight in most dishes, using other foods in creative and playful support roles.

As we frequently do, each of us ordered three appetizers and passed on the entrees and desserts. Many American restaurants in our experience make better starters than main courses, and besides, a meal of appetizers gives us a greater variety of tastes.

For the first round we shared a salad with Middle Eastern flavors and crisp, tempura-fried hominy kernels that reminded us of a potent popcorn.

Our second courses ranged from Asian-accented sweet-and-sour veal sweetbreads to a southern-style smoked pork belly with a butterbean salad.

We wrapped up with foie gras topped with maple sausage gravy and Canadian poutine (French fries) covered with a rich short-rib gravy and Vermont cheddar. For both of us, but Bill especially, it was the perfect birthday blowout.

The next day we got up early to drive north on the California shore for a three-night stay in the Central Coast wine area.

We followed the contours of the Pacific up Highway 1 on a brilliantly clear, sunny morning to the lovely city of Santa Barbara, where we had planned lunch at one of our favorite Mexican restaurants in the country, La Superica. It’s only a humble stand outside the ritzy areas of town, but the food is so delicious (as the name claims) that a line for ordering usually extends down the block at almost any hour.

We arrived 10 minutes before the opening and were already behind several groups of eager eaters. Since most plates are moderately small, we chose five dishes, including one of the daily specials, a vegetable tamale.

From the regular menu, we picked a bowl of whole pinto beans cooked with bacon and spices, a melted, milky cheese, and a couple of tacos, one made with pork adobado and the other with rajas, strips of poblano chile cooked with onions.

The meal made the day seem even sunnier than before, providing a superb start for our Central Coast sojourn.

Learn more about Cheryl and Bill at cookingwiththejamisons.com. You can sign up to join them on a future trip by clicking on “culinary adventures.”

Eating It Up

2009-03-11T11:06:49-05:00

Dining in Los Angeles

“At the table, one never gets old,” the menus announce at Osteria Mozza and Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles. If this bit of Italian folk wisdom is true anywhere, it’s got to be at these twin new restaurants that sit side-by-side in Hollywood. Most of the cooks, servers, and diners are having so much fun with the food they don’t have time to age.

The two places are joint ventures between Nancy Silverton of La Brea Bakery fame, restaurateur Joseph Bastianich and superstar chef Mario Batali. Their combined talents and experience practically guarantee long-term success, though the kitchen right now still needs to work on maintaining consistent standards of quality.

At Osteria we and two friends started with four antipasti selections. The ribolitta and the milky burrata cheese with speck and English peas were wonderfully conceived and executed, but a sheep’s milk ricotta and a burricotti with braised artichokes tasted pedestrian.

For our next course the group shared two superb pastas, an orecchiette with sausage and chard and a maltagliati with wild boar ragú. Among the four entrees, we loved the sweetbreads and the grilled whole fish, but thought the rabbit and veal preparations required further tinkering.

The Pizzeria, with a simpler menu, was right on target with everything we tried, including a mixed salad, a chicken-liver bruschette with pancetta, two pizzas, and a delightful butterscotch pudding. The pizza crust is extraordinary, perhaps the best either of us has tasted, and the toppings sparkle with fresh flavor.

We had other good food in Los Angeles at smaller and less prominent restaurants—such as Dumplings 10053 and Animal—but the double whammy of the Mozza duo left an indelible impression. Since we didn’t age at two long meals, we must have an extra day sometime to return.

Learn more about Cheryl and Bill at cookingwiththejamisons.com. You can sign up to join them on a future trip by clicking on “culinary adventures.”

Eating It Up

2009-03-09T08:43:08-05:00

Spring Training in Phoenix

This is a great time of the year to be in Phoenix. The sun shines brightly, bringing the desert alive with color, but the temperatures stay moderate. No one wants to be indoors, especially major-league baseball players and their fans.

Our favorite team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, moved its spring training this year from Florida to the Phoenix suburb of Glendale. Along with the chance to see family in the area, we came to the Valley of the Sun to watch a couple of games and help inaugurate the new Dodgers stadium.

Spring training is baseball at its best, played in the original spirit of the sport with small crowds and a relaxed atmosphere. Everyone has fun, on the field and in the stands, which isn’t always the case after the regular season begins.

Baseball food, along with so much else in the sport, has changed considerably in the past decade. Vendors still sell plenty of hot dogs, peanuts, and Cracker Jacks, but the options range much more broadly today. Deep in heartland America, enjoying what used to be called our national pastime, we found Greek salads, German bratwurst, Italian gelato, and Asian noodle and rice dishes.

Since we were visiting family in the Phoenix area, we ate mostly at restaurants that appealed to appetites of all ages. Pizza experts rate the metropolis just behind New York for great, thin-crust pies, and we had superior versions at a couple of Scottsdale branches of small, local chains, Grimaldi’s and Sauce.

Breakfast was even better two mornings in Phoenix proper at Over Easy and Matt’s Big Breakfast. At the former, Cheryl ordered the “Wolf Pack” (scrambled eggs, bacon and cheese between layers of hash browns) and Bill chose “The Disaster” (a spicy sandwich with a fried egg, hamburger patty, cheese, pepper and onions). At Matt’s, a humble diner that we loved, we had fantastic eggs Benedict, home fries and extra-crispy hash browns.

Popular lore praises the glories of springtime in Paris. For this year at least, for a quarter of the cost, we were thrilled to be in Phoenix instead.

Learn more about Cheryl and Bill at cookingwiththejamisons.com. You can sign up to join them on a future trip by clicking on “culinary adventures.”

Eating It Up

2009-03-05T10:06:58-06:00

The Turquoise Room

Taking Interstate 40 west from New Mexico to Arizona is not the most scenic way to drive from Santa Fe to Phoenix, but it’s definitely the tastiest. We headed this direction yesterday to start a three-week road trip through the West that will land us eventually as far from home as Port Townsend, Washington. As always on this drive, we stopped to eat in Winslow, Arizona in the Turquoise Room at La Posada Hotel.

Being restored slowly by new owners, the hotel sits in slightly tarnished splendor just off the busy I-40 on the old Route 66. In its heyday in the 1930s and 40s, it was one of the grandest hotels in the country, the last and most remarkable of the famous Fred Harvey collection built by the Santa Fe Railroad.

Architect Mary Colter designed it as a magnificent Spanish hacienda and it still retains the feel, especially in the public areas. If you stay overnight, you might end up in a room once occupied by Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, or another of the many Hollywood stars who made La Posada a favorite retreat.

If you can’t manage the overnight option, at least come by for a look at the hotel and a meal in the wonderful Turquoise Room, separately owned by Chef John Sharpe.

For lunch yesterday we started with “The Signature Soup,” a blend of creamy corn and spicy black bean soups swirled together in the same bowl. We then shared portions of a “Southwestern Caesar” salad and a hearty stew made with local Churro lamb, posole (like a southwestern hominy), and green chile.

The dinner menu features other fine dishes, including “Native Cassoulet” and Colorado elk medallions, but our favorite meal is breakfast. The Fred Harvey hotels specialized in baked egg preparations, which were popular in the early 20th century. Sharpe and his staff recreate several of these delights and also put their own regional inspiration into other tasty concoctions, including beef machaca chilaquiles and cornbread pudding with prickly pear cactus syrup.

Before leaving home, we debated whether we should cancel this long trip for financial reasons. It just didn’t seem like a great time to take off and spend money, though much of the travel involves business. Lunch in Winslow ended our hesitations, convincing us we were meant to be on the road again.

Learn more about Cheryl and Bill at cookingwiththejamisons.com. You can sign up to join them on a future trip by clicking on “culinary adventures.”

Eating It Up

2008-11-05T09:30:27-06:00

A Photo Farewell

Thanks for joining the two us on this Southern road trip. We hope you'll enjoy a few more shots from the adventure. Look for a new blog from us later this winter. Until then, wam wishes and happy trails, Cheryl and Bill

Epcot International Food & Wine Festival

Appalachicola Gibson Inn

Appalachicola Local Oysters

Crescent City's Farmers' Market Mushroom Stand

Neely's International Barbecue, Memphis

Tabasco's Avery Island Headquarters

Smoky Mountains National Park

Longfellow-Evangeline Park

Halloween with our grandchildren in Austin

Learn more about Cheryl and Bill at cookingwiththejamisons.com. You can sign up to join them on a future trip by clicking on “culinary adventures.”

Eating It Up

2008-11-04T09:29:29-06:00

Austin, Texas

The Texas Book Festival, one of the largest and most prestigious events of its kind, lured us to Austin for our road trip’s last stop. We leap at any opportunity to attend this weekend celebration because of its all-inclusive “big tent” approach to literature, served up with a hearty helping of Texas music and panache. This year one of the featured books was our latest work, Around the World in 80 Dinners: The Ultimate Culinary Adventure.

Any excuse to visit Austin thrills us anyway because it’s the home of our daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren. The highlight of the festival for the entire gang was the presentation and book-signing by R.L. Stine, master of the scary Goosebumps series of kids’ literature. What could be more entertaining on Halloween weekend? Mr. Stine enthralled the large crowd with tales of his childhood Halloweens, including the time when he desperately wanted to be a vampire but his mother bought him a duck costume instead.

Our whole family, especially the grandchildren, love Tex-Mex food, so we grazed together through a few of the city’s many renowned spots for fajitas, cheese enchiladas smothered with beefy Texas chili “gravy,” and five-year-old Chloe’s favorite, a bean burrito covered with chile con queso.

As always, we stopped at the original downtown Chuy’s, something of an Elvis shrine cum eatery, where the two of us love the fish tacos topped with spicy green salsa. On Saturday evening, on the way to a party celebrating the joyous Mexican Day of the Dead, we dropped by Jorge’s for the restaurant’s memorable charro beans, earthy whole pintos long-simmered with bacon, onion, tomato and a generous handful of cilantro.

On our own one day at lunch we discovered Torchy’s Tacos, locally popular but new to us. In three no-frills locations, it offers an artful array of signature tacos, everything from The Republican (grilled jalapeno sausage) to The Democrat (shredded beef barbacoa). Avoiding politics so close to an election, we settled on two other options, the Trailer Park Taco, Trashy-Style, with strips of crispy fried chicken and green chile drenched in chile con queso, and the Green Chili Pork Taco, featuring slow-roasted carnitas topped with fresh cheese, cilantro, onions and a green chile sauce. We can’t wait to come back and sample more of the menu.

Even if the Texas Book Festival shuts down some day, even if our family moves away, Austin will remain special to us. It’s not just the capital of a state, it’s the world headquarters of great Tex-Mex cooking.

Learn more about Cheryl and Bill at cookingwiththejamisons.com. You can sign up to join them on a future trip by clicking on “culinary adventures.”

Eating It Up

2008-10-29T10:25:19-05:00

Cajun Country

In the Cajun country of southwestern Louisiana, gas stations compete with each other through sales of boudin, the favored local sausage, and a multitude of small meat markets proudly tout their fried pork cracklins. Distinctive regional flavors abound, but special versions aren’t easy to find on restaurant menus.

Most people told us to go to Breaux Bridge. We did three times, once to find Mulate’s closed due to recent hurricane damage and twice for so-so lunches at Café Des Amis. Our only really satisfying meal was at D. I.’s Cajun Restaurant, way out in the country west of Lafayette on a crawfish aquafarm between two bayous. Some folks come partially for the music and dancing in the evening, but the crawfish étouffé—served on either rice or seared catfish—is ample reason on its own.

Instead of getting acquainted with the local culture through the food, our usual way, we ended up relying mainly on a wonderful state park, the Longfellow-Evangeline Historic Site. The Visitor Center tells the story of French and African settlement in the area, and an adjacent plantation house and an Acadian farmstead illustrate differences in the lives of upper-class Creoles and other residents in the 19th century. The guides at the lovely park know their history and lore.

Longfellow romanticized the heritage of Cajun country in epic poetry. The truth of the remarkable legacy, however a visitor discovers it, is even more enthralling.

Learn more about Cheryl and Bill at cookingwiththejamisons.com. You can sign up to join them on a future trip by clicking on “culinary adventures.”

Eating It Up

2008-10-27T10:23:46-05:00

New Orleans

It’s still disheartening, even three years after Hurricane Katrina, to approach New Orleans from the east. We left the interstate near Biloxi to drive along the Mississippi coast, where everything except the major casinos remains devastated. Even the palm trees clinging to life on the beach arch awkwardly northward from the fury of the hurricane wind.

The first neighborhoods visible in New Orleans show some of the same damage, but also more signs of revival. A majority of the homes along the highway appear repaired and some large apartment buildings look new. The closer we got to the center of the city—including the French Quarter, the Arts and Warehouse District, and the Garden District—the better everything seemed. Finally out of the car and walking the streets, we felt life was as vibrant and carefree as ever. If you’ve been waiting for normalcy to visit again, your day has arrived.

Our main interest, as you might guess, was eating around. We wanted to return to favorite places from past trips—Commander’s Palace, Upperline and Central Grocery (for the best muffuletta sandwiches on the planet)—and to try some new restaurants, particularly Cochon, MiLa, Lüke and Herbsaint. A few dishes disappointed us, but on the whole the food was magnificent, as good as (and maybe better than) we’ve had any time before.

Perhaps our most memorable meal was way off the beaten path, at La Provence on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain in the small town of Lacombe. It’s both old and new, a lovely, long-established restaurant recently purchased by John Besh, a rising star of New Orleans cuisine.

Our appetizers were an egg tartine with asparagus and chanterelles and a salad of several kinds of beets with lump blue crab and wedges of pickled eggs. In both cases the eggs came fresh from hens roaming and roosting just outside. For main courses, Executive Chef Randy Lewis prepared a brilliant seared redfish with a crab brandade and artichoke and an equally satisfying plate of slow-cooked chevon (goat), enriched with Creole tomatoes and set on a bed of white grits. Stuffed, we hardly made it through dessert, a great bread pudding with a buttered pecan whiskey sauce.

After four days of lunches and dinners like this, we left New Orleans full of good cheer, sad only about the need to move on.

Learn more about Cheryl and Bill at cookingwiththejamisons.com. You can sign up to join them on a future trip by clicking on “culinary adventures.”

Eating It Up

2008-10-24T10:22:07-05:00

Mobile, Alabama

The original downtown location of Wintzell’s Oyster House in Mobile, Alabama. Worth a detour from anywhere remotely close.

Learn more about Cheryl and Bill at cookingwiththejamisons.com. You can sign up to join them on a future trip by clicking on “culinary adventures.”