Travel

My Hungarian grandma made the best apple strudel I've ever had. Here in Hungary it's apple season and apple strudel is showing up on many of the restaurant menus. Yesterday, on the Pest side of the Danube, I came upon the Strudel House. I ordered the sweet cottage cheese-filled strudel, mainly because it was served with a rosehip sauce, which I wanted to taste.

During my two days in the countryside, I saw rose bushes heavy with hips. This restaurant served sauce they had made with freshly harvested rosehips. The sauce had the fragrance of fermented grapes, and I think the little cottage I stayed in that was nestled in the middle of a vineyard in the countryside had bed linens sprayed with the fragrance of rosehips.

Well, the strudel had flakey layers surrounding the cottage cheese filling, the rosehip sauce was a delicious complement and one perfect scoop of creamy vanilla ice cream put the dessert over the top. It was a late-night treat. It wasn't as good as the one my grandma used to make, though.

This past summer my boyfriend and I set out on a cross-country road trip from Boston to L.A, a drive whose route would transverse America, and take us to countless places we’d never been before.  With only a few changes of clothes, two sleeping bags and a cooler, we left the East Coast energetic and idealistic about the trip.  The things most looked forward to: upstate New York in August, the peak of wild flower season, wheat fields in Iowa and the Rockies once out west, stretched out ahead of us for weeks on end.  I can honestly say that we did see these things, all of them. Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying much attention… far too busy reading the Sterns. 

My cover of the Sterns’ 2005 edition of “Roadfood” features a close-up of an oozing triple-decker grilled cheese sandwich, the evidence of whose butter-fried preparation proclaims itself from each crispy edge of toast and glistening golden burnt bit. The bread appears to be highly refined, and the cheese orangey processed.  In other words: the cover-sandwich looks criminally delicious, the kind you’d find in a favorite diner, or perhaps in one of the 600 odd restaurants, spanning 48 states, that the Sterns describes within.  Snappily written reviews of places chosen for their honest cooking, lack of pretense and use of ingredients rated high to higher on the bad-for-you index, make for an addictive read.  It’s also a really fun book for sickos to pour over when the trail mix runs out, and the only work of non-fiction I packed on my person when leaving for The Big Move out west.

We’d walked past it a couple of times, a simple storefront set back from the street with a small porch, a glimpse of tables inside, unassuming.  The Key Lime Cafe.  Full at lunch-time, we assumed it was a Maryland version of a diner.  We never even ventured up on to the porch....

We walked across the road to Big Al’s Fish Store the first day for lunch and had a fried clam sandwich, we had fancy hotel food at the Perry Cabin and so much soft-shelled crab that Alan spent an afternoon in bed.

We’d moved my son into his dorms at George Washington University in D.C. three days before and driven to Chesapeake Bay to the small town of St. Michael’s, Maryland (birthplace of Frederick Douglass) for a few days of rest. It was hot and we were tired and the plantation style Inn at Perry Cabin was a lovely place to rest.

Last week I went on a cruise with my family. One night, before dinner I ordered a "Maker's and soda" from the Indonesian bartender.

"Grey Goose?"

She'd misunderstood me. I clarified and she poured me some whiskey.

At dinner I ordered a second drink from another Indonesian bartender. The drink came back looking much clearer than normal.

It tasted like high-end vodka. He'd made the same mistake as his paisano.

Why? Several hypotheses...