Travel

In our effort to downsize but continue to have fun, we scrambled together all our frequent flyer miles and managed to put together two return flights to London and Italy. Then, by making a small investment on a home exchange site, we found a young woman in Prato (twenty minutes from Florence), willing to do a non-simultaneous exchange with our desert house in Joshua Tree.

Our first stop was London, where a kind friend loaned us her house. Although I grew up in London I have not lived there in over 30 years. The minute I walked off the plane, I was surprised by the intense 80-degree heat, a byproduct of global warming, and something I had never encountered in my childhood, where you were lucky if it reached the mid 70’s in the summer.  After struggling with the new monetary denominations and a new subway system, I began to feel like a stranger in my hometown,

Yet, one area that has vastly improved since I lived in London is the food. But like everything else, it is very expensive. Fortunately, another ex-Brit friend had recently visited London and her sage advice was that bargains could be had at posh restaurants if you went at lunch, rather than dinner.  Following her recommendation, backed up by “Time out”– still the best magazine to tell you what is going on in London – I made reservations at Gauthier, a French restaurant in Soho.  

New Orleans, founded in 1718, has many long standing traditions. During the holidays, many of these still exist and there are even a few new ones! There is always a reason to have a celebration in New Orleans but from November - January, traditions and celebrations truly shine.

The sound of the trumpet heralds the opening of New Orleans' holiday season at the Fairgrounds Race Course on Thanksgiving Day. The Fairgrounds is the third oldest and continuously operating thoroughbred racetrack in the United States. It's first race was in 1852. Turkey, hats, horses…it's off to the races!

The Roosevelt Hotel opened in 1893 and has seen a number of famous people walk through it's lobby from politicians to royalty. Beginning in the 1930s, The Roosevelt Hotel became a destination of delight for children and parents alike with their beautiful lobby filled with holiday lights. At one end of the lobby is Domenica Restaurant run by Chef Alon Shaya, an Israeli-born chef who has created a special Hanukkah menu for the holidays. Shaya's latkes, short ribs and Hanukkah doughnuts are a new tradition not to be missed.

We arrived this morning in Italy, which makes us very lucky people.

Everything is different here. It’s like Brigadoon. You would think that air is air, sky is sky, light is light – it’s the same wherever you go, the same world, right? Nah. Italy is enchanted. They even speak a different language over here. Crazy, no?

Today – to tide over my jet-lagged body until dinner – I had half a salami sandwich. That’s all we had in the house at that point. I sliced a thin piece of whole grain bread off the loaf, slapped three or four slices of salami on it, folded it in half and took a bite. It’s not the same, baby.

Nowhere else in the world does a salami sandwich taste like this.

I took my sandwich outside to look at our vegetable garden and I noticed that our cherry tree had ripe cherries on it. Crazy, no? The problem is that it’s a big tree, which means that most of the good fruit is ten, fifteen feet off the ground.

Last week, when Saveur Magazine arrived, I immediately started reading the many articles on "greatest meals ever" with great curiosity, all the while thinking what would be my greatest meal? A meal of a life time. What makes a great meal different from all the other wonderful meals that you have eaten?

I decided that a great meal is about all the minutes of your experience that are saturated with tastes, smells, the room and the people lovingly cooking it with only you in mind. My memory flashed back to a dinner that I had almost fifty years ago in Madrid that had shaped my life as an eater and a cook by being jolted by the intense smell of food cooking, but that wasn't the meal of all meals. That meal took 30 more years to happen...

The meal of all meals was lunch in a tiny little town in the mountains of the South of France, a village that is nameless, but that seems unimportant as I am sure that it could never be relived. It just wouldn't happen that the restaurant would be empty and the same women Chef and son would cook it all in the same way again. It's is best preserved in the past.