farm life in gorham

while we’re working away on our future house, we’re staying with my parents in gorham for a while… enjoying a spectacularly beautiful maine summer and doing fun country stuff like helping out in the garden and learning about bees… my mom just got her first hive of bees! actually they’re on loan from her friend Joanne, who stops by to check up on them now and then. We got to taste the honeycomb when they opened up the hive, it was SO GOOD.

lettuce row, and garlic scapes

amazing BEES!

wildflowers in the pasture

roses by the front door

blueberries!

Maine Maple Sunday

cauldrons of boiling maple sap steaming in the cold morning air

Sunday was Maine Maple Sunday, a day when all the maple farms open up their sugar shacks for visitors to come see the steamy maple-syrup-making process. They use taps and hoses to gather sap from lots of trees, and pour it all into a giant vat, then build a fire underneath and boil and boil and boil and boil until the watery sap cooks down into a concentrated, sticky, tasty syrup. It takes around 30 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup, and 1 cord of firewood to make 25 gallons of syrup! We went to visit a few neighborhood farms, Merrifield Farm in Gorham and Morin’s Maple Farm in Limerick, which is close to our new house in Limington. Our friend Paz came with us to visit Merrifield’s. Over the course of the day, we tasted pure shaved maple sugar, warm maple syrup on vanilla ice cream, maple cream on crackers, leaf-shaped maple sugar candies, and chocolate cupcakes with maple cream icing.

inside the steamy sugar shack

at Merrifield Farm in Gorham

a pail of sap, Paz and Mike

old maple syrup tins at Merrifield’s

pad thai noodles

and Tom Yum. delicious!!!

http://www.thaitable.com/Thai/recipes/Pad_Thai.htm

http://www.thaitable.com/Thai/recipes/Tom_Yum_Goong.htm

korean food!

For years we’ve been talking about going out to Flores (a slightly-off-the-beaten-track barrio of Buenos Aires) and searching for Korean food. Apparently there’s been a Korean community in Flores for decades, but it isn’t a touristy destination like Chinatown; it’s totally the opposite. Most of the restaurants are not well marked, most of the neighborhood’s signage is only in Korean, and we heard that outsiders are not overly welcome and restaurant owners are reluctant to unlock their doors for non-Koreans (in Buenos Aires most restaurants are locked and you have to ring a doorbell to be let in). Apparently there is a notoriously impoverished and dangerous shanty-town right next to the Korean neighborhood, which means it’s not the safest area to go wandering around aimlessly. Additionally, it’s a long-ish trip to get out there and we didn’t even know exactly where to go, so it’s been hard to get motivated to make the trip out there, knowing that we might never find a restaurant, or might get turned away hungry. Then a few weeks ago my friend Heather mentioned she’d had a good meal in Koreatown and gave me some directions for how to get there.

So, Saturday morning we did a bit of online research (see helpful links below) and we set out with high hopes and only a bit of apprehension. It turned out to be an easy and DELICIOUS trip! We took the A line of the subte (blue line) out to the end of the line, the Carabobo stop. We walked down Carabobo towards the autopista 25 de Mayo and crossed under the highway, and soon started seeing signs in Korean and a few restaurants with their doors open! The neighborhood was definitely quiet and felt kind of deserted, but there were delicious lunchtime smells wafting about. We ended up at Han Gu Kuan, 2135 Saraza just around the corner from Carabobo. The old guy at the door gave us a bit of stink-eye (perhaps because we arrived at 2:00, which is a bit late for lunchtime) but he let us in, and the friendly waiter immediately started bringing us food! They have a set menu, which makes it easy, no decisions to make! We started out with a bowl of medium-spicy soup with tofu, then came a plate of deep-fried sweet potatoes, a small iceberg-lettuce salad, a platter of delicious rice noodles with beef and shredded veggies, and the usual huge array of small dishes with kimchi and Korean tapas-style snacks: eggy potato salad, fried fish, spicy bean sprouts, VERY spicy watercress salad, mysterious fishy things and oniony things and savory things and spicy things, plus a large bowl of cold, cloudy liquid with slices of giant-radish-like things in it. I probably should know what that was but I have no idea. THEN arrived the MOUNTAIN of marinated beef! I honestly think they gave us lunch for 4 people, even though we were just two. There was SO much food and a WEALTH of beef. They put a bucket of hot coals into our tabletop grill and we spread our own raw beef strips on there and it was SO DELICIOUS! the other Korean restaurants we’ve been to in Buenos Aires gave small portions of beef Gulgogi and we always leave wanting more beef! This time it was difficult to finish all the beef, but it was so so so delicious we managed to eat it all. Finally, they brought a few mandarin oranges for dessert. All this, along with a half-liter of Quilmes beer and a huge bottle of Sprite, turned out to cost $100 pesos even. Not terribly cheap, but totally worth it. We kind of had the feeling that we got the old “Gringo Tax” (that is, the same meal would’ve cost less if we were locals!) but it was still a great deal. I really want to go back again, like, tomorrow! I could totally see myself going back every single weekend, it was soooooooo good. Definitely even better than Bi-Won, which was previously our favorite Korean place in Buenos Aires.

here are a few relevant links we came across:
http://randompanda.blogspot.com/2008/08/korea-town-barrio-coreano.html
http://www.saltshaker.net/20060128/protection-of-the-cabbage
http://www.tableconversation.com/2008/09/korean-food-in.html

We were advised that Avenida Castañares is the avenue that divides the Barrio Coreano from the nearby villa, so one might want to think twice before wandering further in this direction.

cooking class

for my birthday present, Mike gave me a vietnamese cooking class! it was fun and delicious!! we made sweet potato fritters, spicy sweet dipping sauce, pho (that’s the delicious beef noodle soup), and coconut sticky rice.

YUM. I will definitely use these recipes in the future!

Buenos Aires eats

I was thinking I should really make more posts about Buenos Aires and life here. The easiest thing to start with is food. We started going out to eat a lot more when we moved here. Of course it’s cheaper to go out to dinner here than it was in New York, but I think we also didn’t know many people or things to do when we first got here, so hunting for great restaurants was like our primary entertainment for the first few months. It still is, sometimes. Also, I’m a little homesick for the world-wide cuisine of New York. Porteño cuisine offers some of the world’s most delicious steak, malbec, empanadas, dulce de leche, etc, and i’m sure lots of people can write about porteño foods much more knowledgeably than I can, so my list reflects my fondness for variety and international flavors. And even most foreign restaurants in Buenos Aires have lots of Argentine influences, such as a focus on great beef and not much spice. We don’t go out to eat now as much as we did in our first months, but we love it when people come to visit from out-of-town so we can take them out to our favorite eats. I’m starting a short list of our favorite restaurants and I’ll keep adding on as I have time (or discover new yummy places!).

BiWon: a Korean restaurant in Once (Junin 548, 4372-1146, cash only, closed sundays). I think it’s pretty authentic Korean but i’m not an expert. The star of the show is Korean barbecue, unbelievably tender and delicious marinated strips of beef or pork. They’ll bring you a grill to cook it yourself on your table, or they will cook it for you in the kitchen. There’s also tasty noodle soups, dumplings, bi-bim-bap, soju, and lots of other stuff I’ve never ordered. As soon as you sit down they will bring you a delicious array of 10 or 12 little dishes, like Korean tapas, ranging from pickled spicy cabbage kim-chi to potato salad to seaweed and sometimes a dish of tiny crispy whole fishes. It’s a little expensive but totally totally worth it. The ambience and decor are a bit weird, but the waiters are always really nice.

Green Bamboo: a fancy spot in Palermo Hollywood that serves an Argentine version of Vietnamese food. They have lots of special cocktails; try the Green Velvet, a basil-ginger-saki-vodka cocktail. The entrees are huge and very tasty, though they are more “vietnamese-inspired” than authentic. Mike has gotten excellent beef dishes, such as “Bo Luc Lac, sauteed tenderloin beef cubes marinated with lemongrass, honey and sweet chilli,” and I’ve tried a few seafood and vegetable dishes which are all delicious. There is a dessert, ripe bananas wrapped in thin super-crispy warm fried flaky dough, involving chocolate sauce, vanilla ice cream, and an awkward cloud of hair-thin spun-caramel perched on top, which is unbelievably delicious! I am drooling just thinking about it. The prices are a bit expensive ($35-$50 pesos per entree) and the kitchen is VERY VERY VERY slow and it’s painful having to wait an hour for the food to arrive, but it’s always really tasty when it does turn up. We really only go to this place when we need a place to bring guests, since it’s too expensive (and slow) to eat here all the time. It’s a comfy place with kind of cute and kitschy decor, a few fake bamboo plants and beaded curtains and pretty paper lanterns.

Antigua Querencia: our favorite basic Argentine parilla. It’s right around the corner from our house in Almagro, and delicious and cheap. We can share one bife de lomo, a punto, with sweet potato fries and a lettuce-tomato-onion salad. They serve ice cream with chocolate sauce for dessert. Everything’s perfect, the only sad thing is that (like almost every other restaurant in BA) they don’t have ketchup for the fries. We usually make a reservation because it’s pretty popular.

Artemisia is a vegetarian-and-fish restaurant on Cabrera in Palermo Soho. It’s great to visit an oasis of flavorful, fresh, healthy, veggie-centric food in a city of steak and pizza. The best part is before dinner you get a plate with different kinds of warm, freshly-baked homemade bread! and some tasty white bean spread to put on top. The ginger lemonade is really really delicious, sweet and tart and spicy! We’ve loved the salmon raviolis (no dough – each ravioli is made of two thin slices of salmon, stuck together, with a little packet of mushrooms and veggies inside) and had a few delicious polenta dishes, one of them included sauteed greens, tomatoes and brown-sugar-candied garlic. The salads are always great. The only mediocre thing was an “indian rice” or “hindu rice” or something like that which was salty, boring and bland. But everything else is always great. They have a nice list of organic wines and an impressive selection of herbal teas. The menus are cute but a little hard to read; they are handwritten on a stack of small brown paper bags.

Olsen is a “nordic” restaurant in Palermo Hollywood, one of the few places here that we’ve found a satisfyingly huge and tasty weekend brunch. They offer a long list of imported vodkas, but I have little interest in vodka so I’ve stuck to the food. My favorite favorite dish here (i think it’s only available on the dinner menu) is smoked pork neck with cranberry sauce (or maybe it’s lingonberry sauce, to go with the Ikea theme?) which is more flavorful and tender than any pork I have ever tried before. If you like bacon, you will be very happy with their pork neck. It’s not all chewy and greasy like bacon though. It’s just purely awesome. For brunch, they have a cute and tricky menu/placemat which offers different-sized combinations of tasty brunch options. Their crispy golden chunky potatoes are my favorites, although (of course) i wish they could give me ketchup with that. They have a pork option for breakfast which is basically as delicious as the pork neck dinner entree. I have good luck ordering the daily special for brunch, it’s always been super tasty and very very big. Last time we ordered waffles but were a little disappointed with small, hard, waffles and of course no maple syrup (why am i so obsessed with sauces?). They have nice fresh green salads, and a cute “smorgasbord” which is 5 little nibbles, small bits of bread with spreads and toppings, it’s expensive and not filling at all but it’s cute. Olsen is kind of pricey in general but it’s always really satisfying! The scandinavian-modern design of the space seems kind of overly dramatic, but I do like the feeling of walking in off the street into their front garden, which has some tables and seats in it, and usually if the weather is OK they open up the front wall of the restaurant so that the front of the restaurant feels kind of like it’s in the garden too.

Carlito’s (sorry, no links!): Corrientes 3100, close to Abasto Shopping (there’s a whole strip of Peruvian restaurants here, but we were told this is the best one and we are willing to believe it). A very popular Peruvian greasy-spoon serving amazingly delicious and cheap rotisserie chicken with spicy sauces on the side. They also serve aji de gallina (shredded chicken in sauce that’s actually spicy), ceviche, jalea (an enormous mountain of fried seafood), lots of seafood, fried-rice dishes, and even salchipapa, a giant platter of french-fries mixed with hot dog slices. Really, though, it’s all about the rotisserie chicken. I think it’s around $18 pesos to get a half-chicken with salad and french fries, which can easily feed 2 people and probably three. How do they make that chicken so juicy and tender and flavorful?! Everything is served with two different creamy sauces on the side, a sweet tangy watery one, and a hot spicy exciting one that tastes like green jalapeños. Mike is so obsessed with Carlito’s that he actually wants to eat there every day. Really. Every day. My favorite thing is chicha, a thin sweet dark purple clove-flavored drink which is supposedly corn-based. It reminds me of Christmas-flavored kool-aid, plus little sweet fruity chunks in the bottom. Only $1 a cup. The eating experience at Carlito’s is usually a little intense, it’s one big room, brightly lit, plastic tables and chairs, always completely packed, lots of kids running around, loud cumbia playing on the jukebox, guys squeezing between tables selling bootleg DVD’s and the waiters somehow scurrying through it all, bringing your tasty chicken very quickly.

Sudestada is an uber-minimal, clean, modern place in Palermo Hollywood that serves slightly-more-authentic Southeast Asian food. It’s one of my favorite places to eat, although on a few occasions we’ve had serious disappointments there. Dinner is pretty expensive so we mostly stick to the reasonable lunch special. $28 pesos gets you a drink (choose the tangy Thai lemonade!) and a salad or dumplings, plus your choice from a limited menu of entrees. We always always always go with Bo Xao which is a smoky lemongrass stir-fried beef with potatoes and peppers over rice, and the noodle dish, I forgot the name but I think it’s the only noodle dish on the lunch menu. Sometimes I get the battered, deep-fried sweet & sour fish, which is actually REALLY delicious despite its alarming raspberry-jam color. The waiters here are so serious and the decor is so serious, the whole package initially came off as cold and inhospitable, but after many many many happy lunch-hours spent here, I have grown to love almost everything about this place. Except for the vegetable fried rice, do not order that unless you are a fan of the cubed-carrots-corn-and-peas veggie mix from the freezer section, plus rice and no flavor.

Cusic is a cute, quiet, homey cafe with some lovely outdoor spaces. It’s on a quiet block in Palermo Hollywood, and you have to ring a big old metal bell to be let in. You enter through the front patio, passing under the boughs of a beautiful willow tree (when the weather is warm you can eat at one of the tables under this tree) and inside is a nice big open space with plenty of tables, the menu is hand-written on giant chalk-boards and there is also a pair of comfy couches around a coffee-table with magazines, an upstairs loft with larger tables, and a sweet little backyard with an herb garden and another table where you can eat outside. I think the drinks are the best thing here – they have great fruit juices and smoothies, ginger lemonade, iced tea, a great big frappuchino, hot teas, submarinos, coffees, etc. The food is pretty simple cafe / comfort food, not amazing but decent. I always get the Frida Wrap, which is cream cheese, american cheese slices, tomato, cilantro and avocado, inside of a homemade flour tortilla, with a generous green salad or delicious potato wedges. They have great breakfasts with eggs and smoked salmon and the potatoes are always great. They have nice cinnamon rolls (uncommon in argentina!) and bagel-like things. The prices are okay, if not very cheap… like $8 or 10 pesos for a big smoothie, $20 for a sandwich with salad, or $20 for an enormous breakfast with eggs, salmon, tea, juice, etc.

ok, got to get back to work. coming soon:

el cafe del libro
Thymus
milion
sarkis
status
osaka
La Cabrera
ocho 7 ocho
Home
Olivas i Lustres
enfunda la mandolina
Providencia
La Reina Kunti
thymus
Los Sabios
La Parisiennne
bio
la dorita
cafe tortoni?

if anybody’s actually coming to Buenos Aires, it’s good to know a few things about restaurants here. Few restaurants accept credit cards, so bring cash. Try to make reservations, as lots of the best places will be booked up if you just wander in at dinnertime. Prices go up all the time because of inflation. Service is generally slower than it is in the usa, and people usually spend a long time over a meal, drinking coffee and chatting afterwards. Waiters will never bring your check until you ask for it, and you should hand money to the waiter rather than leaving it on the table. Sometimes a place can have great service and food one day, and poor service and bad-quality food another day! I think these things are not as consistent here as they are in the usa. www.guiaoleo.com is a great resource to help you find almost any restaurant (or type of food) you’re looking for.

family in Buenos Aires

This past week my parents, Judy and Richard, and my sister Amy and her husband George came to visit Buenos Aires! It was really fun.
I had a great time planning how to fit all of my favorite things and places into one week. I feel like I could write a tour guide now. Here’s the general outline:

SUNDAY
we had a big brunch (fresh raviolis filled with cheese and nut, and squash, mmm!) at my house and then went out to San Telmo to see the Sunday festivities and the flea market in Plaza Dorrego. There were lots of great tango groups and dancers performing along Defensa.

After a little rest time, we had a giant steak dinner at La Cabrera, in Palermo Soho. Aside from the typically delicious Argentine steaks (especially the thyme-rubbed bife de lomo!) they serve a zillion little side-dishes, such as squash puree, couscous, vegetable salads, and candied garlic, with every meal.

MONDAY
we went out for coffees and lunas con jamon & queso, and then set off on a self-guided walking tour (from this website) along Avenida de Mayo, starting at the Congress building and Plaza Congreso and continuing past the Barolo Building, across 9 de Julio, until Plaza de Mayo and the Casa Rosada.

We ate lunch, of course, at Cafe Tortoni.
After lunch we had some tasty dark-chocolate-and-candied-orange-peel ice cream! and then did some resting, shopping, and wandering.
We had delicious and exciting tapas for dinner at De Olivas i Lustres on Gorriti in Palermo Soho, near our old apartment.

TUESDAY
we went to Recoleta Cemetery and then visited the church next door, the Basilica de Nuestra Señora del Pilar. There is a neat little cloisters museum upstairs with a nice view looking out over the cemetery.

We had lunch at one of the cafes on the terraza at the Design Center (but avoided going inside!) and then looked at a few of the many interesting contemporary art exhibits at the Recoleta Cultural Center next door. Then we squeezed in a quick trip to the nearby Decorative Arts Museum, housed in a historical mansion on Libertador, before heading to the Alvear Palace Hotel for a very very very fancy afternoon tea, served by waiters wearing white gloves.

Stuffed with 14 courses of dainty sandwiches and fanciful, divine desserts and champagne (and, of course, tea), we dragged ourselves to tango classes at Luciana’s house.

I had never seen Judy and Richard dance, ever. As far as I know they have not danced in at least 30 years, probably more, but they seemed to have a great time at their first tango lesson with Luciana. This is an amazing testament to our dear Luciana’s delightful enthusiasm and skill as a teacher.

WEDNESDAY
we got up early and took an 8:30 ferry across the river to charming Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay.

Most of the day was spent wandering the shady cobblestones and lunching in a leafy courtyard at El Mesón de la Plaza. After sitting by the water for a bit and climbing the lighthouse for a view of the town, we headed back to the ferry.
Back in Buenos Aires, we stopped at Milion for mojitos at the alabaster bar, and ended up staying for a very tasty dinner in the courtyard under the full moon.

THURSDAY
In the morning we went to the Japanese Gardens in Palermo, and then walked over to the Botanical Garden, which was a huge hit with Judy. It is pretty exciting to realize that we’re way down in South America and all the plants and flora and fauna are completely different from what we’re used to!
We had a disappointing lunch at Sudestada, while a wild rainstorm turned the streets into high seas. Amy and George explored the fancy shops in Palermo Soho and found a truly amazing suede jacket at the Mariano Toledo store. We had another great tango class with Luciana and a tasty vegetarian meal at Artemisia.

Then some of us went on to La Catedral, where Amy and George danced! There was a surprise tango music performance by two guys, one singing and one playing guitar, they were really good!

FRIDAY

on Friday morning we went for a walk in the Ecological Reserve. I thought it would be a great opportunity for everyone to enjoy some natural beauty and bird-watching without leaving the city – but in fact it was pretty hot and muggy even in the morning, and there’s really no shade in the Ecological Reserve – it’s all tall grasses and shrubs but not many trees. We enjoyed cool breezes when we could get them by the waterside – then made a premature retreat back to civilization, feeling rather wilted and beaten by the heat.

We decided to just drink tea and rest for the afternoon, then in the evening we had a dinner date at Casa Saltshaker, a “closed-door” restaurant in Recoleta. The chef is Dan Perlman, a transplanted New Yorker who concocts a menu and cooks and serves dinner in his home, two nights a week, to a group of about 12 people. We chose to do the wine pairing menu, which was a great choice, we really enjoyed the various wines with each of the six courses. I can no longer remember exactly what we ate!! But I do remember was a fun evening, the food was tasty and Judy and Richard really enjoyed the experience.

SATURDAY

We took a trip to Tigre, one of my favorite areas around Buenos Aires. We went out for a boat ride around the delta on one of the beautiful wooden tourboats, and had a nice wander about the market. We took the Tren de la Costa home, which is supposed to be the fancier, touristy option, although I don’t really understand exactly what’s so special about it (except that it costs about five times more than the normal commuter train). Anyway, it turned out to be a bad choice, because our train struck a motorcycle and rider at one of the street crossings! So we got stuck waiting in the train for a long while, as the police came and cleared the wreck. It was sad and a bit confusing because the train conductor didn’t tell anybody what was going on, and all the train passengers were kind of freaking out while we were stuck there waiting. We finally got back to Buenos Aires later than planned, just in time for dinner in Palermo.

And then Sunday morning… everyone headed back to the USA! What a great trip! It was really really fun hosting the whole family here in Buenos Aires, I wish we could all do it again. Now that we’ve seen all the basics in Buenos Aires, next time I would definitely try to get out of the city and see more of the natural wonders that Argentina has to offer…

sauces of Buenos Aires

Aderezos

I thought i would be writing more in this blog about design and art and projects and creativity, but it turns out I am too obsessed with food. Hopefully I’ll make more entries about visual things in the near future. Meanwhile, living in a foreign country has made me realize how much my life revolves around SAUCES.
There is a limited range of sauces available here. They do sell ketchup in grocery stores, but it is not reliably available in restaurants, even ones that serve hamburgers and french fries. At first, I was puzzled to see 4″x6″ pocketbook-sized ketchup pouches for sale at the grocery store, but now I realize, due to the lack of ketchup in restaurants, this is for Americans and other ketchup addicts to carry around at all times in case of a french fry emergency.
Salad dressing is a bottle of vinegar or lemon juice and a bottle of olive oil and a salt-shaker. Everyone here can dress their own salads! It seems incredibly sophisticated and civilized, but I can never seem to get my oil/vinegar balance quite right and I do miss the wide variety of creamy options available back home. I saw a bottle of Newman’s Own creamy ranch salad dressing at the Jumbo Almagro mega-supermarket, but it cost $18 pesos which is ridiculous because $18 could buy you at least 3 salads, complete with oil & vinegar, in a restaurant.
Salsa Golf is a gluey, bright-orange-pink creamy sauce, vaguely simlar to a mixture of ketchup plus mayonnaise, or more like a very thick Thousand Island dressing without the pickle chunks. People eat this on raw vegetables, sandwiches, fries, whatever. It’s not a bad stand-in if you’re really missing some ketchup, and it’s got a nice tangy sweet flavor though the consistency is kind of thick and gluey. If I had to choose one sauce to be The Sauce of Buenos Aires (like the state bird or national anthem), it might be Salsa Golf. Wikipedia offers a plausible story about the origins of the sauce with Nobel Prize-winning chemist Luis Federico Leloir.
hot sauce is hard to find. Most restaurants will bring you something they call “salsa picante” if you ask for it, but it’s not hot!! even at the mexican restaurant, the hot sauce was not hot at all. If you’re willing to pay a high price, you can buy tabasco sauce from the import section of a big grocery store.
Chimichurri is a delicious mixture of chopped parsely, oregano, garlic, onions, peppers, oil and vinegar! It’s primarily used for steaks and sandwiches or spreading on bread. It can range from soupy to thick, sweet to spicy.
Mayonnaise is everywhere! I noticed the same thing in Mexico, perhaps this common to all of Latin America? There is a huge mayonnaise section in the grocery store, they sell it in giant vats (or in big squishy foil pouches), and it is served quite generously in all kinds of circumstances. Last week I ordered an “Ensalada Gregory” which was a bowl with vegetables on one side and on the other side, a wide quivering lake of mayonnaise, at least 2 cups of it. I stirred it all together and added salt, but then it was just salty mayonnaise soup. I do like mayonnaise a lot, but not that much. Yuck.
Mustard nuff said.
Lemon Slices are served in many situations when I would expect some sort of sauce or dressing, for instance with a breaded chicken filet. It’s good!
that’s pretty much it. In bigger grocery stores, you can also buy Salsa Barbacoa, Salsa Ingles (that’s worcestershire sauce, sort of), and Salsa Soja (soy sauce!). The sauces/spreads I miss the most are peanut butter, hummus, sweet pickle relish, real hot sauce, maple syrup, Annie’s salad dressing in a bottle.