Cold Brew Coffee: Compromise

Posted on October 10, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

So, cold brew coffee.  As I reported a couple of months ago, it is a gigantic pain in the ass to make.  Despite following the same steps every time I make it, each batch varies in strength and flavor.  But, oh, my gosh, it tastes SO GOOD.  I made cold brew coffee religiously from a few days before I wrote about it until about three weeks ago, when my work and leisure travels and what I now suspect was a sinus infection (diagnosis courtesy of WebMD) prevented me from being able to engage in the process.  It sounds sad (ha) until you remember that I own a Nespresso machine, which churns out reliable, swoonworthy coffee with the push of a button.

I figured out why I love cold brew so much, and it has to do with its concentration and the amount of milk the concentration invites.  A couple of years ago, Jane, my college roommate, posted a link to a story about adult chocolate milk.  Apparently, somebody added booze to chocolate milk and bottled it or canned it or whatever (the concoction looked gross, so I refuse to look up the original article or search for the product and provide a link) and called it “adult.”  Cold brew

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Gluttony: Sinful and (Almost) Sinless Versions

Posted on October 7, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

I eat out more than I should, especially for someone with not enough willpower when it comes to eating things that she shouldn’t.  Given how much I travel, I can’t avoid eating out, and there’s a limit to the number of grilled chicken salads that one woman can eat before she wants to set something on fire (I’ve never set any fires outside of candles and fireplaces).

In the last ten days I’ve eaten at two new restaurants that I fell in love with because they facilitate making good choices.  I succeeded more than I failed on the good choices front, so I’m going to call both visits wins and vow (again) to do better in the future.

In DC, I met my friend Heather for dinner at Range, a creation of Bryan Voltaggio.  I don’t watch Top Chef, but the Wikipedia article on Bryan Voltaggio informs me that he and his brother, Michael Voltaggio, competed against each other in the same season.  Michael won, but you shouldn’t let that prevent you from visiting Range.

Go click that link I added above and check out the menu.  Delicious, right?  Heather had fish, I ordered lamb, and we shared squash and
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Travels with the Viking: Buenos Aires

Posted on October 3, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

[My writing teacher advised me to try to sell this piece to a magazine, but I can’t find the right one, and the freshness is fading.  Also, my horrible cold has drained all the energy and creativity out of me, so this is the post for today.  I think this is not the way to become a successful freelance writer….]

In the fall of 2012, Loraine and I planned our long weekend to Buenos Aires in December in about the same amount of time it took us to plan our trip to the Willamette Valley:  ten minutes.  It started out as a mileage run, of course, a trip that each of us needed to maintain our respective statuses with United Airlines.  Originally, we were considering flying to an airport in Asia and turning around, but our friends shamed us into a trip that involved fresh air.

As the months went by, Buenos Aires transformed into a lifeline because we each needed a break, and “Buenos Aires” was a talisman that made the stress of work and personal obligations bearable.  We were so buried under these obligations that we didn’t actually plan much beyond a thorough wine-tasting.  We weren’t worried about it because our hotel had a pool, and sometimes a pool is all you need to come back to life.  A friend once said in a moment of drunken clarity, “Water’s life, man.  It purifies the soul.”

It turns out that two women can go to Buenos Aires only knowing about twenty words of Spanish between them and still have Continue reading →

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Fish or Cut Bait?

Posted on September 30, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

One of the hardest things about visiting a place where I used to live is that there is never enough time to see everyone I want to see.  And so I find that when I visit these metropolitan areas, instead of announcing to my friends on Facebook where I will be, I sneak into town instead, letting people know individually that I’ll be there and want to catch up.  My most recent trip to a former city of residence was to Washington, D.C., and I prioritized friends and family with babies I hadn’t met yet.  As a single woman with no children, I understand how unfair this is to my friends who don’t have kids, but I expect to be in DC again later this year, and I try to cut myself the same amount of slack that I cut other people, so I am going to assert my innocence in this matter.

I babysat a twenty-one-month old boy on Friday evening so his parents could go to a special farm table dinner for their anniversary.  I cheered for my 5-year-old nephew at soccer practice and scrimmage and coaxed a smile out of his ill seventeen-month-old sister on Saturday morning.   Continue reading →

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Battle of the Sexes: I’m Furious

Posted on September 26, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

I’ve noticed over the last five years or so that my rage is quicker to ignite when I see sexism in social media or the news.  The swirl around Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg because they’re women irritates me.  It’s 2013 – why are there so few women CEOs that there’s so much curiosity about them?  And why do we always talk about their looks?  Why does it matter if a woman CEO is pretty?  I don’t remember anyone looking at James McNerney, Robert Nardelli, and Jeffrey Immelt when they were in the running to take over for Jack Welch at GE and wondering whether any of them were handsome enough for the job.  I don’t remember their looks coming up as a topic at all.

I experience rage when I hear about the misogyny that seems to be rampant in the gamer and technology worlds, where the “cognoscenti” hold assumptions about the inferior skills and abilities of women that are ridiculous holdovers from five decades ago.  The casual acceptance of these attitudes and the false beliefs that underlie them exacerbate that rage.

I had the chance to catch up with a dear friend of mine from 10th grade.  She was Continue reading →

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Bartender Trouble Resolved

Posted on September 23, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

I figured out my bartender thing.  I definitely have a preference for bartenders who mix cocktails over bartenders who draw beer or pour slugs of hard liquor into shot glasses.  But I had a revelation last week when I was in Austin that revealed my attraction has almost nothing to do with their alcohol-related expertise.  (Apologies to everyone in Austin I did not call – I was only there for a couple of days, and I was there for a couple of specific events, which left me with no free time, and I didn’t have a car, which left me stationary, because even though it’s Austin, it’s still Texas, and you can’t get anywhere without a car.  Anyhoodle.)

One of the events I attended was a special wine-pairing dinner at Siena with Loraine and our friends Beth and Lowell.  I’d never been to Siena before, and when Loraine and I walked in, we both said, “It smells like Italy.”  I think it’s because we associate the scent of burning wood with Torre del Tartufo, which is what we mean when we say something smells like Italy.  Once we got all the way inside, we noticed that it looked like Italy, too.  Whoever Continue reading →

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Travels with the Viking: Australia, Part 3: Wine in the Barossa Valley

Posted on September 19, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

When you only have a week in Australia, one of you has been before, and the one who hasn’t wants to know everything there is to know about wine, you have to make some hard choices.  Do you stay in Sydney and New South Wales, where your flight from the U.S. will land, and visit the nearby Hunter Valley wine region?  Or do you take a domestic flight in Australia to Adelaide in South Australia and visit the nearby Barossa Valley, where all the sommeliers on the sommelier forums (fora?) tell you to go?  There’s no wrong answer, really.  We chose the Barossa (this is an example of code switching – the Aussies shorten everything, as far as I can tell, so the Hunter Valley becomes “the Hunter,” the Barossa Valley becomes “the Barossa,” and lipstick becomes “lippie,” which is actually not any shorter, but you see what I mean).

Our winery visits in Australia were very different from our winery visits in the U.S.  I’ve written before that when Loraine and I visit wineries in the U.S., we tour the winery and see their vines, where they press the grapes, the equipment they use in creating the wine, and the Continue reading →

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Travels with the Viking: Australia, Part 2: Forced March

Posted on September 16, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

Yet another reason that Loraine and I are good travel companions is that we are the exact same kind of lazy.  There was a five year stretch of time when I had to worry about getting from a meeting at 9am on one side of a strange city to another meeting at 10:30am on the other side of the strange city and then crossing my fingers hoping to make it to the airport in time for my flight to the next strange city.  When I’m on vacation, my goal is not to rush or hurry.  If I fall in love with a place, I am more than happy to return.  I don’t have to see everything there is to see in a single visit.  It’s more important to me to relax and enjoy the experience without stress.  The Viking knows this and is the same way, and it’s why two individuals who hate people can travel together two to three times a year for a week at a time in close quarters and still be friends.

I give this as background to a puzzling, then maddening conversation we had in Australia.  It was our last night in Tanunda after tasting
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Travels with the Viking: Australia, Part 1: Transportation

Posted on September 12, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

One of the things I love best about traveling with Loraine (aka, the Viking) is that it doesn’t take us long to decide to travel somewhere.  Our “planning” for our trip to Australia at the end of August consisted of me calling her at the end of May and saying, “Flights to Australia have dropped by about $1,000.  We should go,” and her saying, “YES.  I’ve never been to Australia.  Let me get my calendar and we can pick dates.”  All in all, it takes us about two minutes to decide to go somewhere, find mutually convenient dates, and then call the airline to coordinate flights.

It’s easy to be excited about going to Australia, because, come on, it’s AUSTRALIA.  It’s on the other side of the world, and everyone speaks English with that beguiling accent.  Here are some things that happened to us while getting to, from, and around Australia.

Global Entry
Loraine and I had an additional reason to be excited about heading Down Under, which is that Australia recognizes the Global Entry program of the U.S.  If you’ve stood in line for customs and immigration coming back from an overseas trip, you’ve probably seen the kiosks and the

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Marissa Mayer and Deadly Sins

Posted on September 9, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

The week before I left for vacation in Australia (and more on this in future posts), I came across a long article about Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo!.  She’s in the news a lot as she tries to turn Yahoo! around, with many articles noting that she’s a woman, that she was employee number 20 at Google, and that she’s prettier than some people would expect a software engineer to be.  (You’ve probably seen all the brouhaha about her posing in Vogue.)  The “unauthorized biography” I read went into detail about what Mayer was like in high school and college, and how she’s chosen to spend some of the $300M she is reportedly worth.

According to this article, instead of living a quiet, simple life, the way rich Google engineers are supposed to, she took some of her Google IPO millions and bought herself the penthouse on the top floor of the Four Seasons in San Francisco.  She also bought herself a house in Palo Alto to be closer to the Google HQ campus in Mountain View.  She started out pre-med at Stanford, thinking that she wanted to be a doctor, but found that the rote memorization involved wasn’t
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