Leaving Curacao

Res ipsa loquitor.

More food porn!

Post-prep, pre-cooking. Clockwise from bottom left: green peppers, sauerkraut, olives, black beans, raw garlic, kale, and ONIONS!

Wrap making central!

For the 5 hour flight tmrw. All the usual trappings with, of course, ONIONS!

The Lufthansa Senator Lounge at DXB

 

This is the small, but very, very pleasant Lufthansa Senator Lounge at the Dubai airport.These are reclining lounges. They felt good after a long day. 

Houston airport vegan lunch!

After an aggregate of around 17 hour on airplanes, and four still to go, the "Berkeley Vegan" from Zpizza was a really nice lunch. Now I have a stupid seven hour layover here at IAH, but fortunately have access to the United Club and its showers.

This, my friends

Is some serious vegan hotel room food porn.

Tofu with wild pickle

Oh, and: bitter melon tastes like shit.

Vanity

I've been wondering for several days what is in the "vanity pack" in my hotel bathroom.

The entire contents, for the vain visitor:

four q-tips
a mini emory board
a single band aids.

Weird.

Today is functionally my last full day in Dubai, as tomorrow I check out of the hotel, wander around in broiling heat and humidity,  then sneak back into the hotel for a present to my seat-mate on the 13 hour flight back to the US: a shower in the fitness club locker room.

Vegan hotel room snackie wackies!

More Dubai style.

The camera kinda washed it out and didn't do this pretty plate justice. Stuffed grape leaves,  hummus, hummus with eggplant,  bread, and Indian "pickle."

The triple whammy of jet lag, intense heat and humidity, and being woken up every fucking morning around 0440 by the call to prayer have really kicked my butt. I had to take a three hour nap this afternoon, so now I need to stay up until midnight or so.

Vegan hotel room snackies - Dubai edition!

All over the incredibly hot and humid Dubai today, and still have to go back out to the souqs in search of the illusive wild coffee mug (most of my readership knows exactly what this is about.)

Today:
Jumeriah Beach Walk (sucked, but putting my feet into the Arabian Gulf was nice)
Burj Khalifa (for being the world's tallest building, the trip to the top is only worth doing if you're a check it off kind of person)
Dubai Centre For Special Needs Charity Shop (total fail: doors locked,  complex deserted)
Ibn Battuta mall (surprisingly beautiful interior architecture, but it's still a shopping mall)
Karama Shopping Centre souq (meh - lots of crap, but no coffee mugs)

Still got a couple souqs to try for mugs, but it's looking dire.

The food is interesting:the hummus is almost more tahini than chick pea, the weird quasi-ganoushj so-so but edible,  the grape leaves eh.

Foot wash at the top of the tallest building on earth

My feet were kinda dirty from the beach parking lot. A bidet is a great foot wash!

Just 'cause

I wanted to figure out how to do screenshots with the tablet.

Confidential: it's hot as fuck here. Time to go wander around again in the heat!

Dubai!

I know,  incredible picture,  right?!? Actually just testing out blogging with the blogger app on my tablet. And about to walk out the door to visit the tallest building in the world. So some better blogging may be on the way!

But it is awfully nice to have a full kitchen in my hotel room. Haven't eaten out yet...

US Virgin Islands! (and stuff)

In the USVI with J, her sister, and sister's fiance. We spent the last three days hiking and snorkeling, so a rainy day is a welcome rest day. It also gives me a little time to catch up on blogging!

These three shots are from some of the worst mountain biking or trail riding I've ever done. I was exploring the powerline cut behind the former Bellwood Quarry site in west Atlanta. Don't ask me why.

It was: terrible. Like, no joke. I fell constantly, my legs were torn to shit by brambles, there were hidden holes throughout the knee to waist high brambles. It sucked. These shots are actually all from laying down on the ground after falling.

These shots are actually all from laying down on the ground after falling. This must have been a relatively early fall, since my legs are only very slightly bloody, and my shorts aren't torn yet.

The angle of the shot isn't an artifact of the digital camera: I was laying down where I fell, backwards in the weeds at about a 20 degree angle.

Another shot laying down backwards after falling.

Hey, since we're here, how about a little FOOD PORN? You wouldn't believe how many search engine hits I get from that term. Or maybe you would. They mostly probably weren't looking for pictures of tempeh and flash fried brussels sprouts.

St. John has a lot of ruins left over from the days of sugar plantations, started by the Dutch in the mid to late 18th century with slave labor. According to one source, there were as many as 109 sugar and cotton plantations, covering most of the island. Fortunately most of the island is part of the Virgin Islands National Park so the sites are protected. This site is great, and only accessible by hiking in.

These are the boiling vats which once produced rum. Yum!

Here is our comprehensively stocked freezer, which shows we're drinking plenty of the modern day product. Liquor is ridiculously cheap due to some weirdness with duty fees. A liter of basic Cruzan rum, made on neighboring St. Croix, costs as little as $4. Yep, you heard that correctly. Fortunately there is also a very generous import allowance of up to five liters of hard liquor per adult, and a bonus sixth if one of them is USVI produced.

This view shows part of the giant steam-powered sugarcane crushing machinery, which the book "St. John Off The Beaten Track" tells of a child getting crushed in:

On March 7, 1908 fifteen year old Maunie Dalmida was crushed in the gear assembly next to the rollers. The following account is taken from... "Boy That Got Caught in the Cogs": The undersigned was sent at Par Force to get information regard to a boy that got caught in the cogs of the mill... With his back toward Dalmida, J Samuel hord the cracking, he then look bahind him saw Dalmida caught in the cogs. Mr. Marsh... was outside of the boiling house, he run and stop the ingin. He was already broken in too. The right hand was also smash, the belly was smash, his bowels was torn asunder...

It's interesting (and heartening) to see the jungle reclaiming many of the ruins. These are the oddly named Par Force ruins. While par for the course, they are not forceful. These are a little over a mile from the Reef Bay ruins above, which are all part of the Reef Bay Sugar Factory Historic District. The Library of Congress has some neat B&W photos of the site before the NPS restored it in the 1960s. Here, for example, are the same boiling vats I pictured above.

C'mon now: you didn't think I'd do this long a blog post with this many randomass pictures without including some ONIONS, did you? Really?

Especially for R and A, here is a video clip of one of the many "Soldier Crabs" that inhabit the entire island, and according to one guidebook make an annual trek in August to the beaches to lay eggs (and presumably find new shells.) We were initially quite surprised to find them, since the first I saw were at least 3/4 of a mile away as the crow flies, with a 440 elevation gain: about a dozen were marching along in a line alongside the America Hill ruins. Yesterday at the Reef Bay Sugar Factory ruins, we saw them as big as an average adult's fist.

Edit: I'm not sure if that video clip is working for y'all out there in Internetlandia, since it's not working for me, so here is a screenshot of the solider crab in question:

Also at the America Hill ruins, since mom loves these shots of me behind signs indicating that it's dangerous and I shouldn't be there.

Okay, I'm going to post this sucker, and maybe, if you all play nicely, you'll get more later.

WV,

Sorry, readers: it's been a wild few weeks. Got back from West Virginia Monday midnight, and fly out to Peru tomorrow morning for 8 days of mountain biking. Yes, yes: life is rough. Or not.

In a likely futile attempt to satiate my readership in the meantime, what's better than some FOOD PORN?

A full on salad and fixins before I left ATL.

Here is some high speed vegan stir frying love in the outdoor kitchen.

Here are some fresh pickles, and some of my very kind and capable sous chefs prepping for the dinner I made for around 12-14 people (wraps and fresh pickles.) An excellent new friend who, shall, sigh, be coined J5, provided a ton of fresh produce, including a case of cucumbers.

OK, it's not food porn, but it is about West Virginia: this is what your tub looks like when you clean your thermarest in it.

Busy busy busy busy: Brief notes from recent travels

photo by Cheshire Tongkat

Just back from a truly amazing, and challenging, and inspirational, and difficult, and extraordinary experience in West Virginia: Appalachia Rising: March on Blair Mountain. I had the privilege and honor and delight of working with some of the most amazing organizers and participants imaginable, and we overcame some pretty extraordinary obstacles. Five days of marching on narrow busy roads through two of the most pro-coal counties on earth to call for an end to mountaintop removal coal mining, culminating in ~775 people marching on Blair Mountain, and around 148 of those walking up to the historic battlefield, one scene of the largest armed labor uprising in modern American history: the Battle of Blair Mountain. Yeah, run-on sentence, what?

Drove back yesterday through some of the worst driving weather I've ever dealt with: it was basically nonstop driving wind, thunder, and lightning from the VA/TN border, all the way back to Atlanta via Knoxville.

Now unpacking, and putting stuff together to ride a century tomorrow with a friend.

Need to book travel to Afghanistan, for which the departure will be very shortly after returning from Peru, in early August. Like maybe the next day.

Lots and lots and lots of pictures to come, I promise. Now I have this burning desire to shower, shave, eat breakfast, listen to public radio, and drink good coffee.

Bike porn, food porn, booze porn

Yep: this post has it all!

My lovely bike. I recently took off the milk crate, and it was kind of amazing how much lighter and more nimble Sitba feels without it.


I used to, uhhhh, hate bloody marys. My sample size? One. Unfortunately, it was after running a hot, fast 10K in Denver some years ago, and they were giving away free bloody marys with some top shelf vodka. I took one sip, and nearly had to spit it out. Then last year, I bumped into my friend J4 at Atlanta Streets Alive, and we popped into the Corner Tavern, where J4 introduced me to how delicious bloody marys can be, if made well. The not so secret ingredient? A little bit of high quality stout! The above bloody mary was at J4's house, before the Inman Park Festival.

This was the bloody mary fixins bar.

Speaking of the Inman Park Festival, yeah, well, it sort of sucks. I'll leave you to judge the above image (hints: yes, that is a Volvo crossover, I think an XC60, and yes, they were an official vendor for the event.)

When was the last time you cooked 10 quarts of coconut vegetable curry on camp stoves? For me it was last weekend. (And this won out of four dinners over two nights in our friendly but fierce little competition.)

This is what happens when you organize a cycling event for 400 people, are are somewhat obsessive about diverting recyclable and compostable material from the waste stream. Yes, that is my kitchen floor.

Busy busy busy. Today Atlanta, tomorrow Costa Rica, next week West Virginia. Whee!

In between

I can't really imagine flying much more than I do. I mean, I do it by choice, and love the travel, but I spend a lot of damn time in airports. This is an amusing article in the Atlanta Creative Loafing, Weekend at Hartsfield: A half-naked man. Two honeymoons. A 48-hour journey to nowhere by a reporter who voluntarily spent a weekend at my most regular airport, ATL.

My body clock still isn't right from the trip back from Australia. I'm not jet-lagged, in the sense of feeling like crap like I did when I arrived in Spain last year, but I'm not synced up yet to US eastern daylight time. I went to sleep the night before last around midnight, felt fine, then was wide awake at 3:00am. I went back to sleep, and was awoke to a phone call at noon. Then last night, I wasn't tried until 2am, went to sleep immediately, and just slept until 1pm.

I'm getting stuff done during the day and being fairly productive, but I'd like to get back on a regular sleep schedule.

Uhhhhh, yeah: more food porn!

Anyone getting sick of all the food porn? My advice: get your own damn blog! Ha!

Here are some avocados in the Mercado de la Boqueria in Barcelona. The market really had some amazing visuals:

These funky mushrooms were all over the market. I have no idea what they are, or what they taste like, but am sad I didn't have the ability to do any cooking while I was in BCN: these would've been fascinating to try.

More funky mushrooms.

A wide variety of funky mushrooms.

Hot peppers!

A general fruit and veggie stall.


Okay, okay, OKAY ALREADY. I've heard the complaints, so here are some images that aren't food porn.

Some fun graffiti near the beach.

Buskers make these really elaborate sandcastles on the beach. Some are truly amazing. This was one of the few where I saw someone actively working on it.

"My first recollection is a day in December... 747 tracing lines through the sky"

Food porn!

Since we're leaving for New England in a couple days, we realized we have a ton of fresh food we need to deal with. So we began a busy weekend of cooking with breakfast:

vegan pancakes with pink lady apples

boiling potatoes (yeah, I know: boring, right?)

but add some baked tofu,

and SHAZAM! it turns into something more exciting

pretty exciting: Thai tofu red curry with yellow, orange, and red peppers, onions, and zucchini

spicy Thai peanut noodles with tofu
(seeing a theme? it was actually accidental)

prepping brussels sprouts for Fresh Brussels Sprout Salad
from Earth Eats, a podcast I love.

adding green onions to the brussels sprouts

Unfortunately, the brussels sprout salad was kinda disappointing.
In fairness, I didn't have the toasted sunflower seeds or the red pepper flakes.
But I did have tofu and a hot skillet, which did wonders.

Another disappointment: Thai peanut cakes from an otherwise normally fantastic cookbook, The Gate Easy vegetarian Cooking , from The Gate vegetarian restaurant in London.

I know what you're thinking: what kinda lameass food porn blogging cooks are we that we need the "easy" version, rather than the full version ? Well, we also have the full version, and it has some amazing recipes, but the dishes can take hours, and the ingredient lists are often super complex and obscure. So many recipes might be feasible if you live in San Francisco or NYC and have hours to shop, but you'll have to trust me: it's much more difficult in Atlanta.

Why a disappointment? Well, they just didn't hold together in frying. At all. And since they're vegan, we couldn't cheat with a binder like egg. I mixed in a bunch of flour, which made them hold together better, but also took away the fluffy texture and made them taste a little more mild. I still have some of the mix, so I might try to work on them more tonight.

Three people, one dinner party: six wine glasses, five pint glasses, one small wine glass (the chef's share!), two digestif glasses.
Among other delicious libations, we enjoyed a 1.5 liter magnum of Anchor's Our Special Ale 2009 , their always delicious xmas ale. Yum.

And here's just a hint of what a three dish dinner party does to your kitchen. (It was well worth it.)