Posts Categorized: Travel

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Friday Cocktail Hour: Key Lime Martini

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  So cold, so much snow, can’t get Key West off my mind. I must, but before I do, one final post and a cocktail, the Key Lime Martini (shot with my iPhone in a dark bar). Donna and Abby (of Spaceman Spiff) once tried to recreate this but couldn’t get it right; we all got too drunk trying and had to give up. I thought it impossible to make outside Key West, but one of the boys, Jason, said he makes these for himself and his wife Kristi every weekend. His recipe is below. Or you can watch below as the wonderful Ramsey pours one at the White Tarpon, a beloved watering hole in Key West, if you don’t mind the poor lighting. The sweet and sour mix Ramsey uses is Daily’s, Jason tells me. Read On »

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Key West Reflections

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The return from Key West is always a hard reentry. At least I wasn’t Mark Wiss, who returned to Newport! Hi, Mark, how’s the snow?! But it’s cold. And I’m alone in my office and not with the sailors who are all so much fun. Really, it’s kind of like being in college again, all the diligent work during the day and drunken camaraderie at night (ok, maybe just the latter plus sailing), and good food. Spaceman Spiff came in second to My Shirona in the J-111 class, alas, but a good show in all. I relive the glorious days through the food, so, for posterity, the menu: The first full day is rough, as we’re all rather, um, exuberant when we reach Key West the night before, and so with woolly brain, I and Read On »

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Road Food: Red Rice Salad

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For forty of the past seventy days I’ve been on the road, with another two weeks to go before I can settle into the holidays, and perhaps the biggest thing I learned was how hard it is to find good, nourishing food when traveling, especially when you live in a Marriott Courtyard. I spent ten days, for instance, at one such Marriott in the infernal (temperature-wise) San Fernando Valley while filming a new cooking competition show. (Kitchen Inferno airs this Wednesday on Food Network—let me know what you think!) True, there was a Whole Foods within a fifteen-minute walk, where I could buy grapes and almonds for the room, and I could have hit the salad bar, but I don’t like to eat out of plastic clamshell containers. By myself. In a shitty hotel room. Sorry Read On »

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Pigstock TC 2014

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Re-posting this because I can’t be there this year and it is such a valuable event. I’m sorry to be missing it, and miss very much my dear friends Brian and Kate Hill and Christoph and Isabell. -MR Christoph Wiesner, the Austrian butcher who raises Mangalitsa, is always tense before the kill. Last year, he told me, yes, he was nervous because it wasn’t his pig, the pig didn’t know him, he couldn’t know what the pig would do. Under normal circumstances the pigs have spent their lives with him and the week before they are done in, he brings the captive bolt, the stunning device, into pens so the pigs are used to even that. The pigs are calm throughout. This year, at Pigstock in Traverse City, MI, Christoph was not only unfamiliar to the pig, he was miked Read On »

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Eat Retreat

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After my assistant, Emilia Juocys, returned from a food-related trip to California, I asked her how it was. I’d heard about Eat Retreat but didn’t have a clear sense of what it was. I said, “Why don’t you write a post about it.”Though what she sent me was considerably more personal than I’d anticipated, it also underscored what we all recognize: the power of food to connect us to one another. —M.R. By Emilia Juocys With all of the changes I have experienced in the last 12 months I needed to do something different and meet some new people, especially in the culinary world. Chicago had been great to me but I left in the fall to return home because I was getting divorced after nine years of marriage. Never expected it, but life happens, people change, and the Read On »

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