Sunday, September 30, 2012

Farmer's Market Bounty

I hate going to the farmer's market.  It's as far from my house as you can get and still be in Raleigh, the parking lot is terrible to get in and out of, and if the weather is nice, it's packed with wall-to-wall people meandering aimlessly.  It's basically my worst nightmare.  So that's my excuse for why I only get there about twice a year, even though every summer I swear I'm going to make better use of it.

On Saturday I had a panicky feeling realizing it's almost October and I've only been there once this summer, so I got up and trekked through town, trying to maintain a positive attitude.  It did not start off well: it took me a half-hour to get through downtown Raleigh, which is about seven blocks long.  The combination of a 5k and broken stoplights and construction projects created total gridlock.  At 8:45 on a Saturday morning. About three times I almost turned around and went home.  BUT I PERSISTED.  And it was a pretty awesome feeling when I finally wove my way around the streets and found a way onto the road leading in the right direction.

OK.  So I got some food at the farmer's market.  (And, incidentally, I am not going back there again for a very long time.)  (At least, not on the weekend.  Maybe I will try to go one day on my lunch break.) I have to say, after all that stuff I just complained about, that it was sort of worth it.  We ate some awesome stuff this weekend.  Here it is.

This is what I made for lunch on Saturday - quinoa, french lentils, and roasted eggplant, tomatoes, red pepper, and zucchini, over which I drizzled some tahini miso sauce.


Then last night for dinner, I made one of my favorite PPK recipes, Hottie Black Eyed Peas & Greens, with farmer's market collards, and served it over Veganomicon's Messy Rice.  It was a great combo!  My one complaint about that PPK recipe is that I'm not a huge fan of sweet potatoes, so the savory rice was a nice change.


I also got some eggs.  As you know, I'm not vegan anymore but I still draw a hard line at supermarket eggs.  Farmer's market eggs, though, which come from chickens living truly freely and scritching around in the grass, are something I can feel good about.  This morning I made a (not pictured) breakfast burrito with scrambled eggs, some leftover lentils, hot sauce, and mozzarella Daiya from the freezer.  Daiya is not the best when its flavor is prominent but it's perfect in something like that.

The eggs were super small, with blue and brown shells.  That's because they're real food!  Not factoried!


I got a ton of sweet corn and tomatoes, and was searching for something to do with them that wasn't a salad, when my friend Beth suggested this Smitten Kitchen recipe for Tomato and Corn Pie and I knew instantly that was going to be in my belly within 24 hours.  Yeah, it calls for cheese, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.  I did use lowfat mayo, and soy milk rather than the whole milk it calls for.


Obviously the Smitten Kitchen lady's pictures are a lot better than mine, but here you go anyway.


I almost took the easy way out and bought pie crusts rather than making it from scratch, but I'm glad I didn't - this crust is more like biscuit than pastry.  It was outstanding.  


So, with that, tomorrow is October, which is traditionally a internet-wide blogging event called the Vegan Month of Food (or Vegan MoFo).  October is also the month when I decided, two years ago, to try being vegan for a month and see how it went.  So, for October, I'm going to really commit to cooking healthy vegan dinners every day and doing a better job of blogging it.  We've still been eating vegan almost all the time anyway, but it's been getting a little junkier and lazier and, probably not coincidentally, my jeans have mysteriously shrunk a tad.  Time to get back on track!

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Trip Report! Days 7-8: Magog & Vermont

We left Quebec City bright and early to drive to Magog, which was on the way back toward Vermont.  Unfortunately I told Ben to go the wrong way on the highway and didn't notice for thirty kilometers, so it took us a little longer than expected to get there.  We finally arrived in the early afternoon and were starving, so we went straight to The Owl's Bread for lunch.  This was the only restaurant listed in the guidebooks for Magog so we figured it had to be good.

It was perfect. I got a roasted vegetable sandwich.


Ben got an open faced goat cheese sandwich.


And we both got the dessert of the day, which was lemon pie.


Once we were not starving, we went to check into the B&B, which was Au Manoir de la Rue Merry.  It sat up on a hill about a quarter mile from Magog's small downtown.



We had a little attic room which was nice and cozy.  At this point, however, Ben did say, "Do you think you can request that we not be on the top floor when you book these places in the future?"  Ha.  The stairs were always steep and carrying suitcases up three flights of stairs is not fun, I have to admit.


After check-in, we walked around the downtown area of Magog and over to Lake Memphramagog, which goes all the way to Vermont.  "All the way to Vermont" is not actually that impressive, because Vermont was less than 10 miles away.  




Magog, however, was thoroughly French, the Frenchiest place we went on the entire trip.  Most of the people we ran into spoke very little English (if any!) and everyone had a very strong French accent.


We saw a cat there.


We ate Mexican food at some random place on the main drag - I should have taken a picture, as my "spanish rice" was plain white rice with some peas mixed in.  Overall, the food was pretty good, although not authentic.

The next morning we drove a few miles to the Abbey of St.-Benoit-du-Lac, where their Gregorian chanting ceremonies are open to the public a few times a day.



It was a weird experience - it's hard to imagine the monks who live there going through the routine every day, living such a simple life in rural Quebec.  They probably don't even have Google!  Gosh!


They make blue cheese and apple cider at the abbey, as well as some honey and preserves, so we got a few things and had a little picnic just outside the grounds.



And then we got in the car and headed South toward the United States.  It was kind of a confusing trip through rural southern Quebec - our maps were less than stellar and sometimes the roads abruptly ended or turned to gravel.  We were relieved to finally reach the border, where we sat for a good 45 minutes for no reason we could discern, as there were only about 10 cars ahead of us.


Heading South through Vermont back toward Burlington, there were a lot of touristy sights and little stopoffs.  We decided to go to the Great Vermont Corn Maze, which turned out to be in the middle of absolutely nowhere down miles of gravel roads.  Thank goodness for Google Maps.


When we arrived at the Corn Maze we discovered that they stop letting people in at 3:00 because it takes between 2 and 3 hours to get through completely.  Naturally, it was 3:15.  We didn't feel super up for a 3 hour corn maze experience, anyway, so we just paid $5 to get into the petting zoo.

Baby cows!


Baby goats!


The goats were insanely friendly.



This sheep hated us, though.  He would not allow himself to be touched and kept giving us dirty looks.



Ben decided to play this weird miniature golf course they had.  I tried the first hole but got too bored.


The corn was ten feet tall at least!  I have never seen corn that tall that I remember.


On the way to our dinner reservation just outside Burlington, we got pulled over for speeding!!  44 in a 30!  Naturally we had no idea what the speed limit was and the policeman was sympathetic and only gave us a warning.  I took this picture of a Vermont cat while we were waiting for him to run our plates and such.


Official warning!


We had dinner at The Kitchen Table Bistro in Richmond, VT.


It was fantastic, but we were seated outside and it got dark too quickly to be able to take food pictures.  Coincidentally, our friends Art and Leanne were also in Vermont, visiting from Massachusetts, so we met up with them for dinner!  It was a great way to end the trip.


I must say, in closing, that I feel compelled to tell you all to avoid the Motel 6 in Burlington at all costs.  I hadn't realized until late in the game that our last weekend on vacation was also Labor Day weekend, and wasn't able to find anything decently priced in the area that would accept a one-night reservation.  I am generally not too choosy about hotels, but this place was extremely noisy, to the point where I had to go out and yell at drunk people in the middle of the night, and all the lighting in the room was insanely bright fluorescent.  It felt like we were in a bus station.  I wrote them a strongly worded email suggesting they gut and renovate the entire building.  I mean, seriously.  It was bad.

But, except for that, a great trip!  I recommend you all visit Quebec!

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Trip Report! Days 5-6: Quebec City

On Wednesday morning, we got up and drove the 90 minutes from Trois-Rivieres to Quebec City.  In case you didn't know, Quebec City is beautiful.


It is very old, and the oldest part of the city has maintained a strongly European feel and the battlements that protected it initially from the Indians and other colonial powers trying to seize the location back in the 1600/1700s.

We stayed at the Hotel Cap Diamant in Upper Old Town, which was really more like a B&B than a hotel - each room was individually decorated, they gave us a key to the front door, and provided a full breakfast in the morning. The location was absolutely fantastic, on a quiet side street one block from the Citadel and just up the hill from the more commercial parts of Old Quebec.




When we first arrived in Quebec City we did our usual thing of wandering aimlessly to check out the general layout of the city.  The Chateau Frontenac Hotel dominates the skyline of Old Quebec.  It is huge and awesome.


There is a really steep hill separating the upper and lower parts of Quebec City.  The lower part is older, and almost seems fake - it's extremely cute but I think what makes it feel weird is that it's also very, very clean, unlike the European cities I've been in which are grungy.  



There is a funicular railway you can take up the hill if you don't feel like walking, but we are troopers and always took the stairs.


This is Place Royale in the lower town, which is one of the oldest parts of the city.


Most of the buildings around there date to the late 1600s.



There are cannons all over the place in Quebec City, lining the city walls.



Self-portrait by the cannons.



We got lunch at some random little place in Old Quebec, which was probably a mistake because all they had were these weird pizza roll up things.


They were good, but overpriced.  


There were some more graffitied election signs across the street.


After lunch we walked back up the hill to The Citadel, which was built to protect the city from the invading English.  By the time it was done, though, the war was over.  It's still a functioning military base but the troops have never actually had to fight to defend the city.

The view from the Citadel walls is pretty amazing.



We walked over to see the Quebec parliament building, which was being refurbished.  It seemed like there was a lot of construction going on virtually everywhere we went in Quebec, probably because they have to cram all that stuff in during the summer months.


I was starved by this point and once again our dinner reservation wasn't until late, so we stopped in at Le Commensale, which is a small regional chain of vegetarian buffet restaurants.  I need them to build one of these places in Raleigh.  This afternoon snack was so good that we decided to go back for lunch the next day.


Here is Ben reading a French newspaper.  He picked up the local paper everywhere we went, which doesn't make much sense because together we know about 30 French words.  I guess it's fun to try to figure out what's going on, though.


Quebec City is the only city left in North America with existing city walls and they were pretty impressive.  You have to drive through gates to get into Old Quebec.


This part of the city wall overlooks the plain to the north of the river, and the old battlements and armories are still there.  The white building is an old barracks for the soldiers.


Ben is the champion of the Chateau Frontenac!


We saw a double rainbow from the hotel room - it only rained for about five minutes.  We got really lucky with the weather on this trip.


That night we had dinner at Le Moine Echanson, which was one of the food highlights of the trip. The menu was written on a large chalkboard and was all in French, but the waitress brought over a small version and tried to explain what all the things were.  We basically had close to no idea what she was talking about, though.


We ordered a shared appetizer to start, which turned out to have a whitefish salad type thing, some incredible hummus, and a tagine of something??  I'm afraid it might have been lamb.  I only ate a few bites of it.


I ordered this item because she said it had fish and no other meat.


It turned out to be a flatbread pizza type thing, with olives, anchovies, and arugula.  I am a pretty vocal olive hater under most circumstances, but this thing was so great.  The flavors all worked so well together and I just loved it.  Amazing.  I had read a bunch of reviews about how you can tell the people who run this restaurant really love food and care about putting together excellent dishes, and all those reviewers are absolutely correct. 

Ben ordered BLOOD SAUSAGE.  What.  


I don't even know what all the other things are.  He had a hard time with the first bite or so but he said once he got used to the idea he pretty quickly was able to appreciate that it was totally delicious.

The next day we decided to do the nature walk through the Plains of Abraham National Battlefield/Park just on the other side of the Citadel from our hotel.  It was maybe an hour walk through the trees overlooking the river.


There were more cannons at the end.  These were captured German cannons from World War I.  



OH LOOK more cannons.  This is at the edge of the Plains of Abraham, where the British and French fought in 1700s.



There were four of these towers built at one time, but one of them as been torn down.  


We went to Le Commensale again for lunch!


Mmm, desserts.






So, uh, yeah, we had kind of a big lunch.

Then we walked back to the old city because Ben felt we had not adequately explored every single street.  Here's another of the city gates.




He was right - there were some pretty cute areas we hadn't seen yet.




This is the deserted courtyard of the Quebec Seminary, which was very peaceful.


After this we went back to the hotel for some relaxation, but then Ben made me leave on a death march back across the Plains of Abraham to the art museum.  On the way there we passed another of those defensive towers.  This one is in a residential neighborhood today.


We also saw this black squirrel, who showed off for us for about five minutes while I took a bunch of pictures like an idiot.  He was so fat!


Most of the art here in the Quebec City Museum of Fine Arts was Quebec-related, either historic stuff or modern art by Quebecois artists.


We sat on the patio for a while and had some coffee.


Half of the museum used to be a prison, which may still be under construction or something because there was almost nobody in there and we also couldn't find any information about why there were clearly what used to be prison cells in a museum.  We had to google it when we got back to the hotel.





Can you spy what Ben wrote on the wall?


They were setting up for a Madonna concert near the Citadel the entire time we were in Quebec City.  It was a huge operation - hundreds of people everywhere with heavy machinery and dozens of tents.  I'm seeing Madonna in Charlotte in November and this got me all pumped up!


It is impossible not to take a million pictures of the Chateau Frontenac.  It's one of the most picturesque things I have ever seen in my life.


For dinner, our last in Quebec City, we went to Panache, which is considered one of the top restaurants in the city.  It was the fanciest meal I have had in quite some time.  They gave us oysters as an amuse bouche, which we were both a little iffy on but ate because we are nice.  They were interesting.  I don't think I will ever order oysters on purpose, though.


I ordered the appetizer that said "Duck Egg: Corn, Coriander" and this is what I got.  Kind of a soup or a foam or something?  It was one of the most amazing things I have ever eaten in my life. The flavors were incredible.  I have no idea how they made this, though.


Ben got the tomato appetizer, which was chilled but had been slow-roasted for ten hours, according to the waiter.  He was pretty impressed with it.


So at this point, no more food showed up for about forty-five minutes.  Our water was extremely professional and apologetic; apparently there was some kind of "problem in the kitchen."  We didn't really care all that much, as we had nowhere to be, but I thought the American dude sitting at the table next to us was going to lose his mind after a while.  Eep.  Anyway, it finally showed up and was great.  I got the arctic char with bok choy three ways, and Ben ordered Nova Scotia lobster. 


Ben's lobster came out on one main plate, and then another smaller one with exactly the same items on it.  For extra fanciness, I guess.



We decided to forgo the $15 desserts in favor of another ice cream cone, so we walked back through old town to find an ice cream shop.  It was a blue moon!  On our tenth anniversary!


I couldn't stop taking pictures of the Chateau Frontenac!


Quebec City is awesome.