Travel

Eating America: The Best Food in Chicago, Part 2: High-end Restaurants

June 5, 2012
Hot Chocolate at Alinea

Consider this the food blogger’s guide to Chicago. As I say on my About Page, being a GastroGnome is not about sitting idly on the front lawn of culinary cottages. Each year I tell my stories of trips to Beijing, Hanoi, and Mexico, but sometimes I leave out my favorite places right here in the U.S. No more! This is the latest installment of my ‘Eating America’ series, featuring the best eating around our fine nation. Alinea. Yeah. I went there. We ate at Alinea. It was an experience. It’s ranked the 7th best restaurant in the world (a ranking which, having been...

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Eating America: The Best Food in Chicago, Part 1: Budget Restaurants

May 21, 2012
Eating America: The Best Food in Chicago, Part 1: Budget Restaurants

Consider this the food blogger’s guide to Chicago. As I say on my About Page, being a GastroGnome is not about sitting idly on the front lawn of culinary cottages. Each year I tell my stories of trips to Beijing, Hanoi, and Mexico, but sometimes I leave out my favorite places right here in the U.S. No more! This is the latest installment of my ‘Eating America’ series, featuring the best eating around our fine nation. In my few trips to Chicago, I’ve mostly had the chance to eat at only a few places while passing through the city on the way to...

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Eating America: The Best Food in New Orleans

April 9, 2012
WillieMaes

Consider this the food bloggers guide to New Orleans. As I say on my About Page, being a GastroGnome is not about sitting idly on the front lawn of culinary cottages. Each year I tell my stories of trips to Beijing, Hanoi, and Mexico, but sometimes I leave out my favorite places right here in the U.S. No more! Here is the beginnings of my ‘Eating America’ series, featuring the best eating around our fine nation. I make no secret of my love for the city of New Orleans. I first visited it while on Spring Break from college,...

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Mac and Miso: Inspiration and Failure

April 4, 2012
MacMiso1WM

I broke my blog. I wasn’t paying attention, and I hit update on something, and it overrode changes I’d made that do minor things. Things I’m sure other people don’t even pay attention to, like whether the ads fit in their boxes or not. Whether there is a ‘next post’ button at the bottom of the page. My blog is broken, and while I designed it my self, I’ll be honest, it was a while ago and I can’t for the life of me remember how I made it work before. This was supposed to be a post...

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Beyond the Torta: Exploring Mexico’s Sandwiches

March 19, 2012
20120211-191894-mexican-sandwiches-torta

Thinking the Mexican sandwich is limited to the widely known torta is like medieval belief the earth is flat. Not only is it dead wrong, there are whole other worlds to explore. Proving that once again, someone got there before us, Mexican sandwiches have expanded to fillings and techniques that leave our proud American sandwiches trailing in the evolutionary chain. The Torta At an enclosed street cart called “Tortas al Fuego,” on a corner in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City, a father and his daughter griddle up a typical version of Mexico’s best-known sandwich. The torta is simple...

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My Year in Food, 2011

December 26, 2011
Swimming Fire Fish

Normal is not what I do best. Thus my end-of-year top-ten list will be anything but. For starters, it’s not ten items. Instead, this is a peek inside my brain, where cooking and reading and small creatures in the night all crawl about, mingling and mixing into a delightful stew of tasty tidbits. It’s December, and while I’m more likely to look forward to the next year than backwards on the last, here’s a few things that stuck in my maw, reminding me why the life of good eating is so wonderful. Best non-cookbook: Grant Achatz’s Life, on the...

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Pambazo Lessons from an Abuela

December 17, 2011
Pambazo and Grandma

Among the oddities of my childhood were an avocado green washer and dryer in the kitchen of our house, a mild prodigy brother, and a constant parade of exchange students from as far away as New Caledonia. 25 years later and I still have no idea where New Caledonia is. I do know where San Juan del Rio, Mexico, a small town two hours north of Mexico City, from where hailed many of our exchange students. One of them has become a life long family friend, and on our recent trip to Mexico, his mother taught us how to...

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Donate, Win, Eat, Travel: Passports with a Purpose

November 30, 2011
Caprese Salad Ingredients

I’m back from Mexico with fresh cooking tips from an Abuela (grandma), a passion for pambazos (think tortas, but soaked in chile, then fried) and a few imbibe-able souvenirs. Before I start in on my posts about those, I wanted to give you the opportunity to win a little travel adventure of your own. As self-indulgent as this lovely blog is, I couldn’t help but jump at the opportunity to help out by participating in Passports with a Purpose, to help raise money to build libraries in Zambia. “Zambia? Books? That doesn’t sound like food?” You might be saying. And...

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Where to Eat Mexican Food in the I-5 Corridor: Bellingham, WA to Salem, OR

November 4, 2011
Torta

From the Canadian border straight south to Salem, Oregon, there is Mexican food to be found right off the highway. Food, which, even if not dead-on authentic, beats the ever-loving grandma jeans, diner cleanliness and canned mushroom soup off any other road food you’ll encounter. As might be expected, the food gets better the further south you go, which of course makes me want to commit to continuing this series with an episode 2: Salem to Sacramento. If only I had occasion to ever be in Sacramento. Do things happen in Sacramento? Regardless of the eventfulness of California’s capitol,...

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Dear Seattle Restaurants: A Chicken and Waffles Challenge

October 15, 2011
Chicken and Waffles

 This picture, folks, is the ultimate in chicken and waffle cuisine. Not familiar? Neither was I. I was dubious, to say the least, as all of my friends urged me to try Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles while I was on vacation in Los Angeles. I like fried chicken as much as the next person, and well, who can dislike a waffle, right? But together…I narrowed my eyes in wary judgment. How wrong I was! Now, I’m reduced to chasing this delicacy up the coastline, in search of the same succulence. Seattle restaurant owners, I issue you this challenge:...

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