Oahu and Maui
January 1, 2015 § 5 Comments
Soufflé Days went on hiatus for six months, and all you got are some pictures of Hawaii.
We’ve just returned from Oahu and Maui, where we ate lots of fresh poke, hiked to a 400 ft. waterfall, through bamboo forests, and beaches of all colors—red sand! black sand! white sand! salt and pepper sand!—floated over schools of colorful fish, and settled back with our tropical cocktails.
Right now, in the crisp air of Boston winter—about five minutes outside this morning had me chilled to the bone—the colors of the islands are just a memory. From spicy and shoyu ahi poke over fluffy white rice at Ono Seafood, to crispy and light deep-fried red snapper topped with crunchy, briny papaya salad or drenched in spicy drunken sauce at a small Thai hut in Hana, we ate delightfully well. I never could pass up raw fish and avocado, and so we returned to Ahi Bowl & Pot twice to get our poke fix before leaving Honolulu. Later on, we settled into the back of a roadside farm stand for weekends-only wood-fired pizza night. Spicy tomato sauce, juicy, caramelized pineapple, pulled “pork” jackfruit, and fresh, melty cheese, washed down with a Maui Wine red, out of the red solo cups I had tucked in my purse. Don’t you travel with solo cups too?
In addition to eating, we hiked the Pipiwai Trail, scaled the shoreline to get to the Kaihalulu Red Sand Beach, and sunk our toes into the Hamoa Bay Beach at sunrise. If you’ve never seen an empty Hawaiian beach, or felt the fluffy pools of sand beneath your feet at one of the top five beaches in the world, waking up at sunrise for Hamoa Beach is well worth it.
On Maui, we had a house to ourselves in an unkempt but beautiful, five-acre botanical garden. You could hear the rain pitter-patter or fall down in sheets on the thin roof while we lay in bed. We watched geckos scamper around the windowsill, and ate a whole pineapple for breakfast with large cups of coffee in the covered, outdoor sitting room. We wandered the garden, swatting at mosquitoes, in search of the avocado trees. And then, when it was all over, we piled back in our two-door car, up the winding Hana Highway, past the sugar cane fields, to our flight back to Honolulu.
And ended it all with half a dozen tropical cocktails, beachside. After all, who doesn’t love it when your drink—the “Tropical Itch”—comes with a wooden back scratcher? Seriously. I was surprised too.
Lisboa, Portugal
July 12, 2013 § 1 Comment
It feels like a long time since I flew back from Lisbon and our last meal there is now starting to feel distant, as I’m clearing out cupboards of baking pans and cookbooks at home in anticipation of packing boxes. There are a lot of things I could say about our (very brief) time in Lisbon, starting with that, for us, it was the city of second chances. We spent only two nights, one before taking off to Morocco and one upon returning and experienced the city in entirely different ways between the two. Blurry-eyed from the cross-Atlantic flight, I took in the shuttered storefronts, torn-up cobblestones, and dark, empty pastelerias, and each passing whiff of urine and thought surely I was missing something. We walked part of the route of the Tram 28, ducking into a nondescript restaurant just as the rain began, ordering a plate of oily, garlicy shrimps with their heads on and thick french fries, washed down with a pretty terrible table wine.
And indeed, we were missing something. The second time around was like exploring an entirely new city, a city of white stone and street-side bars, where we stumbled upon majestic statues and cozy steps where friends settled in with drinks to watch the ocean shore below them. We ducked into the Taberna da Rua das Flores at the recommendation of a friend of my mother’s and it was hands-down the best meal of our entire week. Starting with a ceviche de corvina, which came cutely accompanied by popcorn and potato chips, followed by a seared fish (the foreign names of fish escape me, even when I understand the language, as they often don’t even exist at home, but we got that “half cooked, half raw” as it was described by the waitress meant seared) served with a seaweed salad and a kick of spicy orange relish. Our third dish was a squid ink udon with charred squid, and, since we wanted to linger a little longer, we finished with an aged goat cheese served alongside a guava paste. The service was wonderfully attentive and caring, ending with some recommendations for the rest of the night from the man with the curled ‘stache. All in all a wonderful meal, and (thanks to Dan!) a lovely graduation present tucked into a small corner in Lisbon.
An aside because you know I love my sugar – the sortidos amendoa from the Confeitaria Nacional on the Praça da Figueira were divine and started off my afternoon with a huge smile (pictured above!).
Soufflé Days 