Last year, I took on an awesome project. The Snohomish County Tourism Bureau decided that for 2012, instead of printing the traditional pamphlet-style visitor’s guide, they wanted to try a full magazine – one for spring and summer, one for fall and winter. They contracted me to write four feature articles, two in each magazine, one for each season. (I don’t want to brag, but I totally got away with quoting The Princess Bride in one of them.)
The “work” included exploring Snohomish Country and having all sorts of amazing experiences – pumpkin festivals, wine tastings, a spectacular Christmas lights display on the beach, meeting alpacas, driving the Mountain Loop…all I can say is, my job does not suck.
The spring/summer issue is out now! My first two articles are below. I want to meet whoever did the layout, because it’s beautiful. I should send them some wine. Or an alpaca.
This isn’t a guide. It’s just a gratuitous food post.
1. Stuffed pizza
We got two slices of pizza stuffed with cheese, sauce, chicken, pepperoni, and sausage, along with the best garlic knots I’ve ever had, at Rocco’s in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. They have a great hot sauce on the counter, too.
2. Chicken roti
Took me right back to Trinidad! This was the real deal, bones (super tiny bones) and all. You can get it, along with callaloo, goat curry, and cow foot, at Rowe’s in Brooklyn on Tompkins between Quincy and Gates.
3. Proscuitto and ricotta balls
Josh and I first visited New York almost exactly five years ago, and one of our fondest memories were these little bits of fried procuitto-ricotta goodness from a cheese and meat shop. When we wandered into Little Italy last week and saw Alleva on the corner of Grand and Mulberry, we recognized it immediately. It was every bit as delicious as we remembered. (And 3 for $2. Come on.)
4. Green curry with salmon
It’s hard to find a place that really cooks salmon properly, where it’s still a bit pink in the middle. Tue in West Village definitely got it right. The curry was amazing, too – nice and spicy.
5. Truffle egg toast and Tuscan white bean soup
That first picture makes me want to cry. Three of the best things in the world – good bread, egg yolk, and truffle oil – all in one dish. Surrounded by asparagus, no less. ‘ino café also makes a pretty tasty soup. But seriously, that truffled toast is the star of the menu.
6. The Tuscan Platter
This was at Le Pain Quotidien in the Upper West Side. The platter included paper-thin prosciutto, shaved parm, black olive spread, basil pesto, and ricotta. A word about the ricotta: Whoooaaaaa. Honestly the best ricotta I’ve ever had in my life. I dream about this ricotta. The things I would dip in it. Strawberries. Chips. Fingers.
7. S’mores crepe
Heat griddle. Pour crepe batter. Add mini-marshmallows, crumbled graham crackers, and melted milk chocolate. Fold. Top with powdered sugar and more chocolate. This is what they do at the Creperie on Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side, and it is stupid good.
8. Ice cream, Part I
Grom Gelato in Soho: organic, “healthy” gelato. It’s healthy, right? Cause, like, the milk comes from organic cows or whatever. On the left is the “Cioccolato fondente,” on the right is “Crema gi Grom” (egg cream gelato with corn biscuits and choc chips).
9. Ice Cream, Part II
Pinkberry has a limited number of rotating flavors of frozen yogurt, and about a billion toppings. And (as you can see) you can get as many toppings as you want. At left: vanilla with brownies, gummy bears, toffee, and strawberries. At right: salted caramel with yogurt chips, carob chips, and toffee.
What’s sad is I ate so, so much more than this, but ultimately failed at taking pictures and notes, proving once again that I have not the patience for food writing/photography. I snarf down what’s in front of me then lament the lack of photos afterwards. But I can assure you that New York City is delicious.
Kim Simplis Barrow, wife of Prime Minister Dean Barrow, invited me to visit the country as part of a special project we’re working on. This trip was quite unlike any other I’ve been on as far as what I experienced.
And not everything was captured on camera. The babies in critical care in the neonatal unit at the hospital. The children and their teachers in the autism classroom, working on some project that involved glue and straws and lots of laughter. The unplanned two hour drive to Cayo just for dinner – and for that matter, ANY pictures of me with Julie Schweitert Collazo and Kristin Fuhrmann Simmons. (Ladies, what were we thinking?)
But some great stuff made it in as well. Hopefully I’ll have more to share about Belize soon!
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Belize is a great place to visit on the cheap! For other affordable trips, check out how you can visit Malaga on a budget.
Last week I took a road trip with a great group of people through Oregon, down the coast and into the desert. Our itinerary was packed with so many incredible sights, eats and activities that it’s a little too tempting to use the word “whirlwind” to describe it. More posts are on the way to zoom in on some of the more amazing parts of the trip – Goonies! Cyclepubs! Deconstructed s’mores! – but for now, here’s how the week felt, in one breath.
Succeeding where Chester Copperpot failed.
Cross the Columbia to a singing seal chorus, round one of oysters (on salad, it’s healthy), count all the shipwrecks, spiraling staircase, nausea and vertigo and great tower views, slide into the front seat and roll down the windows, stare down at Cannon Beach with doubloon at eye level, round two of oysters (raw with champagne!), sleep and wake up to the sound of the waves, biofuel and coffee fuel, cheese flying down twisting conveyor belts to jazz flute musak, cinnamon buns for breakfast in ice cream form, round three of oysters (beer battered!) and six types of beer (holy shit it’s only noon), ankle-deep in the Pacific before a steep sand dune (can you sandboard it? turns out no), coffee and windows down again, round four of oysters (fresh from right down the road!), into the desert with hot latte in hand, pork belly and pizza next to the railroad, turn 360 to see all the volcanoes, cycle through the streets on a pub built for fourteen, waving beers at cops (but don’t high five passing motorcyclists), immense sunset followed by fire followed by sleep, high desert with raptors, porcupines and sleepy otters, calorie-free croque monsieurs and caffeinated coffee cupping, vodka infusions with peppers, basil, and ginger, wine paired with quail and cherries (also calorie free), cabins with tubs that fill from the ceiling, back in the van, back on the coffee, it’s Portland! it’s pork! plus a little ice cream (next to a diet clinic), seat buckles barely click, music blasting and border.
The smell of a crawfish boil sends me straight back to my backyard twenty years ago, on my hands and knees pitting two crawfish together in battle before they joined the others in their jacuzzi tub filled with potatoes, hot dogs and spices. Two seconds of hearing a berimbau and I’m pining so hard for Salvador it brings tears to my eyes.
This week I had the strange experience of feeling nostalgia for a place I’d never visited. My friend Kelly Goodman of Travellious invited me to tag along on a press trip to check out the newly renovated Iron Springs Resort, located north of Copalis Beach.
Our cabin at Iron Springs
Sunset view at the lookout next to our cabin
A brief history
The resort, consisting of 24 private cabins situated on beachfront cliffs so that each has a view, was originally purchased and operated by Olive Little in 1947. Doug and Janet True, Seattle residents, were Iron Springs regulars for over 45 years. In 2010, they purchased the property and started a year-long renovation project with the goal of retaining the original charm of the cabins – each with its own unique floor plan and design – while solving some of the problems that had been making it too much of a challenge to visit the place they loved.
“By the end, it was getting really difficult to come out here,” Janet True told us at the welcome dinner the family had prepared. Over a meal of salmon, watermelon salad and farm-fresh charred vegetables, the Trues explained just what motivated them to take on this enormous project. “We had to pack linens, pots, pans, dishes, food…it was too much of a hassle.” Many other regular guests had the same complaints.
Family dinner
Allie
The renovation
The Trues had a lot of ideas in mind when it came to the overall look they wanted, although they weren’t all necessarily specific. “I told him to make it ‘cabiny’, joked Dustin True, property manager and Janet and Doug’s son.
Define 'cabiny'
“Him” would be Robert Emil Arnesen, the designer in charge of the renovations who came along on a guided tour we took of the property Wednesday morning. The more Robert pointed out the details and callbacks to the old cabins he’d incorporated, the more I started to feel as if I, too, had spent my childhoods summers coming out to Iron Springs in a car loaded down with clothes, sandals, towels, kitchenware and s’mores supplies.
Speaking of nostalgia – s'mores rule
The cabins are modern – granite countertops, hardwood floors, wi-fi, flat-screen TVs. But they’re classic too, with many featuring wood burning stoves, Northwest artwork by locals, wonderfully mismatched furniture with clashing plaids and stripes, knotted wood benches made from Spruce trees fallen on-site. Robert paid particular attention to retaining some of the feel of the old cabins; in one, the newly paneled walls had touches of the original seafoam color.
Beautiful fireplace
Love those chairs
Every seat has a view
Wood burning stove
Take a closer look at the paneling
Not a bad place to wake up
I'd rather eat under this table just to stare at it
Lovely color accents inside the lamps
And I can’t forget the dogs! Plenty of resorts and hotels claim to be dog-friendly. This place is more like dog-mandatory, from the water bowl and mat placed outside each cabin’s door to the paw-printed towel inside for cleaning up wet, sandy paws.
Clearly, the "before" shot
New traditions
Since its grand reopening this past July, most of the visitors to Iron Springs Resort have been long-standing regulars like the Trues. But with kitchens stocked with cooking supplies and bathrooms and bedrooms stocked with linens, getting out to their cabin on the coast is easier now than it used to be.
Like all Iron Springs regulars, the Trues have a cabin that’s ‘theirs;’ the one they rented every year. Doug even told us about a family who’d recently come up only to leave with the promise of returning when ‘their’ cabin was available, refusing to take another vacant cabin.
When I checked into my own cabin, I found a guestbook on the coffee table and flipped through it. “It’s even more beautiful now than when I was a kid,” one guest had written. “This is OUR cabin, and we can’t wait to come back next year!” I hope that guest doesn’t mind sharing, because after spending time with this family and hearing their memories of this place, I wouldn’t mind making some more of my own here.
A draft of this post has been sitting in the backend of my blog for over half a year. It started like this:
Every morning I walk my dog to the nearest park, which happens to be next to the largest farmer’s market in the United States. Cruise ships dock here, and every weekend over the summer hundreds of tourists get their mandatory Original Starbucks coffee, a piroshky or a croissant and take a seat on the grass where Adi does her business to look at the mountains and the water.
I like watching tourists. Awhile ago I started to notice two distinct types. At first, I thought of them as tourists versus travelers, but I don’t think that’s quite it. What I’m seeing is people who go someplace new to see it, and people who go someplace new to say they saw it.
The moment
It’s why most people say we want to travel. To experience things, to see things, to smell things, to eat things. And I do see some of that in my tourist-watching at the market – people genuinely engaged in what they’re doing right now.
But more often, I see something else.
The memory
If I’d started taking pictures of every person I saw getting their picture taken in front of the aforementioned Original Starbucks, I’d have a pretty sick collection by now. But it’s not just the picture taking. It’s the big happy smile picture taking, followed by examining the picture on the phone, followed by uploading it to share online, followed by resuming arguments, sniping, complaining about the heat, the cold, the rain, the wind, the long line for an Original Starbucks latte (but waiting for it anyway).
A sense I get that they’re here just to show they were here.
~*~
I’m sitting at a table in a bar with a friend, watching my husband’s band. The next table over, a group of four is ignoring the music and one another and staring at their phones. I can see one of their screens and recognize Facebook blue and white. Several songs pass without anyone from that table looking up from their phones. I imagine they’re posting status updates on what an awesome time they’re having this Saturday night, tagging the friends sitting right next to them.
In the ladies room, I walk in to find two girls dressed to kill, trying to take a picture of themselves together in the mirror. They ask me to do it, and I do. When I leave, they’re still hanging by the sinks, uploading the photo. I wonder if they realize the toilet stalls are visible in the background.
~*~
I think about quitting Facebook regularly. It would cut me off from hundreds of people who I likely wouldn’t see or speak to regularly otherwise – old friends and classmates, former students, even some family. I would miss out on pics of nieces and nephews growing up, on consoling co-workers from my old job who lost a parent, on just so many things.
I’d also put an end to constantly writing my own status updates in my head, plotting out where I’ll get my own “hey look where I am now ain’t it purdy?!” shot, only partially taking in what’s actually going on around me while that damn blue and white scrolls down in my mind’s eye. We don’t live online, we live in reality, but that line blurs more and more every day. It takes me out of the moment and makes me focus on the memory to come – it’s not about doing it, but telling everyone I’m doing it or that I did it.
Being a travel writer and blogger more or less requires some level of social media participation. Trying to figure out how to share travel experiences and support other writers and bloggers, while still living in the moment of my own experiences, is a challenge I’m curious to hear how others in this line of work are handling.
1) Flailed wildly
2) Read the MatadorU chapters on press trips and preparing for assignments 3 times
And again when I got home. I was so paranoid that first time of coming across as unprofessional.
Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to land several more trips. After each, I’ve receiving glowing feedback from the tourism bureau, both during the trip and on the articles I’ve produced afterward. That sounds like I’m patting myself on the back – I’m not. It’s honestly, truly 100% because of what I learned at MatadorU.
And that’s just two chapters out of twelve (not to mention all the bonus modules). As editor Kate Sedgwick put it:
“It seems like every day, managing editor Julie Schwietert is telling the Matador team about another student who’s landed a job, made a book deal, or reached their goals for page views or revenue on a travel blog.”
And now there’s another awesome addition to the U – a series of educational interviews with the editors of National Geographic Traveler. These vids are only available to MatadorU students, and cover topics like pitching to Traveler, the future of travel writing, crafting a story, and for the photogs – understanding light, getting discovered on Flickr.
Check out the preview above and let me know what you think! I’m happy to answer any and all questions about the U.
I mean, road trips and BLTs, right? What could be better?
While the facts in this infographic aren’t all that surprising, it’s still a good reminder of our collective impact on our planet, for better or worse. Bacon is awesome – but I don’t eat it daily. Travel is great, but it sure does increase our carbon footprint (which, as a travel writer, I try to counteract at every opportunity).
And then there’s the pee thing. Which is just nasty.
1. The beach (duh). Real beach. Warm, clean sand and cold-but-not-too-cold water with waves big enough to stomach-board but not so big you can’t let the kids splash around.
2. The food. Specifically, the oysters. But I also had some of the most amazing pork belly in the history of ever here. Check out my guide for foodies on Matador for some of the best restaurants on the peninsula.
3. The location. The drive from Seattle is less than three hours, and a very pleasant, scenic drive at that. But it feels so much farther from the city. And it’s right near the Oregon border, so you can head across the bridge to Astoria and pay your Goonies respects!
5. The dog-friendliness. I love traveling with my dog, but not all destinations are as welcoming as Long Beach when it comes to pets. Dogs are allowed to frolic on the beach, stay in most hotels, walk the boardwalk, dig for clams, and all that good stuff. I mean, this place hosts a Doggie Olympics every summer.
Having a border nearby always trips me up. I think it’s because I grew up in Texas, where the only place you can drive in a day is still Texas. So don’t laugh when I tell you that I was pleasantly surprised to learn on a recent trip to the Long Beach Peninsula in southwest Washington that hopping over to Astoria, Oregon meant just a few minutes in the car.
Our reasons for leaving the beach for a day were twofold: 1) An opportunity to take an eco-tour of the Columbia River, following some of the routes established by Lewis and Clark and 2) Sloth love Chunk.
Bald eagles and singing seals
I heard Captain Christopher Lloyd speak passionately about his Columbia River Eco Tours at the Travel & Words Conference in Woodinville a few months ago, and was thrilled when that exact tour was part of my Long Beach itinerary. After the chilliest, dampest spring in the history of the Pacific Northwest, we lucked out – the day of our tour was sunny, breezy and in the 70s.
It’s amazing what being on the water can do for your mind. Everyone was in a fine mood that morning, but as soon as the Captain pulled the boat out and picked up speed, the mood changed to downright euphoric. We sailed past Astoria’s historic waterfront and into the Lewis and Clark National Wildlife Refuge, passing pirates, nesting eagles, and a pretty raucous family of seals.
One-Eyed Willy? Perhaps.
Wildlife refuge
Bald eagle!
A vocal bunch. (See video)
Captain Lloyd and his wife were amazing hosts, and incredibly knowledgeable about the river, the community and the surrounding wildlife.
Speaking of pirates
Astoria, for those of you who aren’t children of the 80s, is where The Goonies was filmed. Josh and I made a beeline for the prison (now a museum) as soon as we got into town, then headed up the hill to see the house. THE house. The one Chunk did the Truffle Shuffle in front of! The one where Mouth “translated” into Spanish for Rosalita! The one where Mikey finds the map in the attic! THE HOUSE!
The Fratellis had already bailed
Pinchers of Power!
I’m aware that if you’re reading this and have never seen or have no interest in seeing The Goonies, I sound like a babbling moron. But if you are a fan and you get an opportunity to head down to Astoria, do it! Because up there it’s their time, but it’s our time down here.
Unless of course you just want to ride up Troy’s bucket.
Fellow yaHighwayer, recent high school graduate and newly ordained backpacker Emilia’s recent post on her first grand adventure asked readers – what was theirs?
I think about mine pretty often, as it not only marked the start of my love of travel but solidified my love for my favorite percussion instrument. And I’ve thought on more than one occasion that it was too bad blogging didn’t exist back then, because it was quite an experience to blog about.
But it’s never too late, right?
Trinidad. (This trip was pre-digital point and shoots. Affordable ones, at least.)
The reason
As a music major, I was a member of tons of ensembles and performing groups. My favorite was steel band – I’d been obsessed with the instruments (the only family of acoustic instruments invented in the 20th century, by the way) since high school. The instructor was a doctoral student named Jon Kellis who happened to be a pretty sick steel pannist himself. Just before winter break of my freshman year, he showed us a few videos of when he’d traveled to Trinidad, the nation where steel drums and soca were born, and performed with one of their competitive bands, the Desperadoes. I immediately latched onto the idea of doing this too, and promised myself I would someday.
A month later, Jon and his wife were out to see a movie. He stepped into a street without looking and a woman driving the speed limit (30mph) hit him. His head hit the curb and he was pronounced dead later at the hospital, at the age of 27.
It’s probably unnecessary to say that his death had a huge impact on his students, colleagues, friends and really the entire College of Music. My way of dealing with it was to scrap the idea of “someday” and go for “now.”
About one year after his death Josh and I left for Trinidad, where we spent nearly half of the spring semester of my sophomore year. This wasn’t a study abroad program or anything sponsored by the university. We stayed with a woman and her adult son who used their home as a B&B of sorts, we found the Desperadoes panyard at the top of the hill in Laventille, and we went to rehearsals every night hoping to become members of the band.
Panorama
I’ve been to three versions of Carnival – New Orleans (Mardi Gras), Brazil (Salvador, largest street party in the world) and Trinidad, which is the most raw and in many ways the most beautiful. The main event during Trinidad’s Carnival is the Panorama Competition, held annually since 1963. Dozens of bands meet year-round, each with up to 120 members, and each with an arranger. For Panorama, each arranger chooses one of the island’s current popular calypso tunes and arranges it into a ten-minute composition for a full steel orchestra.
And it’s very much an orchestra. The average Panorama steel band has up to 20 tenor pannists (melody), 10 double tenors (counter-melody) and 10 double seconds (harmony/counter-melody/strumming), guitar pans, cello pans, tenor bass and often two or three different types of bass pans that use anywhere from six to twelve drums per person. There’s also the “engine room” – drumset and various hand percussion accompaniment. At other competitions throughout the year, these steel orchestras perform full arrangements of Beethoven, Bach and other classical compositions. Like the Bartered Bride:
Every evening starting a few months before Carnival, 100+ band members and hopeful members arrive at the panyard to start learning the tune. All this is done without written music – players learn by rote.
In the panyard
Steel bands in Trinidad started as gangs, something that sounds amusingly West Side Story-ish. While not as violent as it used to be, we were advised not to go wandering into other panyards in our Despers garb.
Practice was “scheduled” to start around 10pm every night. Josh and I would arrive at 8 to work on our parts, taking breaks every hour, eating oranges and drinking 7up. The rest of the band usually rolled in by midnight. Sunrise often signaled the end of rehearsal.
I’d been apprehensive about just waltzing in and trying to join the band; it’s not unheard of at all for foreigners to perform with Panorama bands, but the vast majority of each band is made up of locals. But in general, Trinidadians are incredibly proud of the instrument and music they’ve given the world, and the members of Despers were very welcoming to anyone who traveled to their home just to learn more about the drum. I mean, we’re talking about a country that has its indigenous musical instrument on its currency.
The first day was the hardest. Learning a complex, 10-minute piece of music entirely by ear, measure by measure, starts out feeling like an attempt to climb impossibly high mountain. But Panorama is serious business and every band member who worked with us was incredibly patient.
And we were teachers too. After a few weeks of rehearsal, a 12 year old girl named Yvette arrived with her tenor pan. She strung it up next to me and asked me to show her the latest section, which happened to start with a pretty fierce lick. I played it once and she played it back immediately, perfectly, then gave me a bored “so, what’s next?” kind of look.
The travel part
I grew as a musician in Trinidad, and I didn’t know it at the time but I grew as a traveler, too. My pockets were picked for the first time. I saw poverty for the first time. I learned that toilets aren’t a given, and I learned the art of the squat (for the first time, but certainly not the last.) I started to develop that second sense for when you’re turning on the wrong street. I celebrated my 20th birthday competing in the Panorama semi-finals, I learned what happens when you eat too much roti and I learned that machetes are useful both for hacking the tops off coconuts and scaring the shit out of someone at a gas station.
More importantly, I learned that it’s no cliche to say that music and art can supersede other cultural differences.
The Desperadoes won Panorama that year with our arrangement of “Picture on My Wall,” which (if I remember correctly) was the band’s 10th Panorama win, tying them with the Renegades for most overall wins in the history of the competition. The arranger, Clive Bradley, died a few years ago – he’s the one in the tux, alternately smacking a woodblock/”conducting”/grinding with the flag girl. It’s pretty much impossible to see me, but I can tell you just where I am – at 2:34 is a shot of a very nice double seconds player by the name of James, and I am behind the person directly behind him. (I was well hidden.) At 4:47 you can see Ursula in the zebra hat – she was the first member to start teaching me the tune, and weirdly enough I ran into her son in Texas years later. At 6:30 you can see Yvette.
That was my first “grand adventure.” In a lot of ways it was more than I could handle or comprehend at the time, but of course I don’t regret a moment of it.
What was your first adventure? I’d love to hear about it!
Any trip that revolves around music is bound to be a good one, whether it’s Trinidadian soca, Brazilian samba, or flamenco in Spain. Check out these holidays to Majorca to book your own adventure.
TBEX: (noun) 1. Travel Blog Exchange, 2. Annual conference for bloggers, writers and public relations specialists in the travel industry, 3. Excuse to shoot tequila at five in the afternoon
Confession #1: I thought a clam gun was an actual gun.
I mean, not a gun gun. As I listened to my fellow writers, Oregon natives who remember back when razor clam hunting involved a shovel, discuss during dinner how careful you have to be not to break the clam’s shell when using the gun, I realized that shooting likely wasn’t involved.
Still – you say “clam gun,” I picture a tiny pistol and a clam backed up against the wall, shaking in his shell. But clam guns do not require shooting.
The three days I spent on the Long Beach peninsula gave me a nice taste of what words like ‘sustainable’ and phrases like ‘farm-to-table menu’ really mean. They’ve become a trend and are almost losing their meaning – I mean, Wendy’s is touting its “farm-to-table berry salad,” for crying out loud. (Note to Dave Thomas: You cannot just cut out the other 37 steps in between.)
But every meal I sat down to on the peninsula, every bite of food I ate, came with information about where that bite came from. And I mean really, really specific information.
Confession #2: I’ve never grown/caught/killed/cleaned then cooked my own food.
Something that’s changing this year, as I’ve already started an urban garden with a few friends and the greens, herbs and berries are coming along nicely. I vaguely recall fishing once as a kid; I think I caught a catfish. Can’t remember if I ate it, and if I did I can tell you for sure I didn’t clean and cook it myself.
So when, after several days of getting schooled on sustainability and learning about the work that goes into a meal before the kitchen even becomes a setting, I learned that Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife announced the last razor clam dig of the season would be my last day in Long Beach, I jumped at the chance to go.
Local resident Sue Hermanns – who also happens to own some beautiful oceanfront vacation rentals in the area – kindly volunteered to take Josh and I out and show us the ropes. We learned to spot the ‘donut’; a tiny dimple in the sand that gives away a razor clam’s hiding spot. We learned how to operate a clam gun – which indeed did not involve shooting, but a lot of twisting, pushing, pulling and suctioning.
Washington regulates razor clam digs pretty closely; you have to buy a $7 license for three days of digging, each digger is limited to 15 clams, and you absolutely must count every clam you dig – too small? broken? too bad.
Sue dug her limit in about 20 minutes and spent the next hour helping the two newbies hunt. It’s quite fun, actually – like a weird, beach version of whack-a-mole. And when Josh and I headed back to Seattle that afternoon, an ice chest with two limits of live razor clams rode along in our trunk.
Confession #3: I can’t follow a recipe.
In studying music, it took me a long time to embrace improvisation. Once I did, I preferred it to reading the notes on the page. I’m getting to that stage in the kitchen; a recipe is a nice guide, but I like to make it up as I go.
But first, the cleaning. The razor clams survived our little road trip nicely. They wriggled around their temporary home while I started a boiling bath up for them and laid out the scissors, knife and cutting board. I watched a short YouTube video on the cleaning process and got to work killing my own food for the first time.
I’d never made chowder or fritters, so I read through a few recipes for each and began breading, frying, chopping and using more bacon fat than should be allowed in any dish, even for a huge pot of chowder.
There it is – my first self-made farm-to-table meal. Or in this case (since I don’t have a table in my apartment), beach-to-countertop.
While my trip to Long Beach was kindly sponsored by the Long Beach Visitors Bureau, all thoughts and opinions stated here are my own.
