Tasty food

Some tasty places I've been to eat recently:

- Piedmont (Durham)
- Red Dragon (Cary)
- Toro (Boston)

Toro is another one of Ken Oringer's fantastic restaurants, and it's now in my top 5 restaurants in Boston. Maybe top 3.

One of these days I'll write something about the best pizza in the world, which can be found in Praiano, Italy.

Science Debate

What a great idea. That will never happen. Pity.

http://www.sciencedebate2008.com

Still, go sign up to give your support.

Wrapping Up

Well, it's time to wrap things up here in Switzerland. We've got a week left, and I'm ready to go. I really miss my bed and comfortable furniture. And my kitchen.

The summer has been fun, though. We just got back from 3 days in Italy and Monaco with Joy's dad. Our hotel was amazing - it was located 5km up this crazy windy road, most of which was only wide enough for one car. But when you got to the top:



What a view, eh?  Monaco was predictably over-the-top, with more Ferraris, Maseratis, Aston Martins, and Bentleys than you can shake a stick at.  Somewhat surprisingly, we didn't have that much great food, but then, we didn't really research too much.  Plus, these are beach towns, not gastronomic hot spots.  

All in all, I'm glad we came here.  It's been a great experience to be in another country for an extended period of time - you learn a lot more about a place when you start going to the grocery stores and the laundromats.  But, it's always really nice to be home, too.  

Quick post

Here's a link to our pictures from last weekend's trip to Basel : http://web.mac.com/sdwr98/iWeb/Geneva.

Awesome food which I'll write about later in the week.

On things that are better in Europe

In no particular order...

1. Cheese.
   
2. Bread
   
3. Public transportation
4. Museli with chocolate (ask Joy)
5. House wines at restaurants
6. Grocery stores (think 4-wheel steering on carts!)
   
7. Cell phones
   

Now, to be fair, there are some things lacking:

1. Air conditioning
2. Ice
3. Inexpensive anything (well, except bread, cheese, wine and apparently Red Bull)
   

That's pretty much what I've observed over the course of my last few trips.

On another note: tacos with Gruyere cheese? Really tasty. Who would have thought. Bleu d'Auvergne cheese from our local farmer's market on fresh-baked bread from the same farmer's market? Out of this world.

Check out where we're going for my birthday: The Omnia in Zermatt. Whoooo!

Mozzarella Magnifica!

Holy cow - yesterday we went to the farmer's market that's literally 100 yards from our apartment. It happens on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and it was packed. And my goodness. We got fresh vegetables and fresh bread. Both of which were outstanding - super fresh, super tasty, and full of real vegetable taste. And then there was the mozzarella. I've had a lot of good cheese in my time. But nothing has compared to this - it must have been in the buffalo the day before. Unlike virtually all the mozzarella I've had in the US, this had such flavor - a tangy cheese-ness that was unreal. Man. I don't know how I'm going to go home to Target and Harris Teeter now.

In other news, we went out yesterday to run some errands (after the farmer's market) and we discovered M-Ville. So there's the grocery chain Migros (which I wrote about earlier). Turns out they have this shopping center which is essentially a mini-Ikea, Linens-n-Things, Lowes, Circuit City, and grocery store all rolled into one. We bought a toaster, two pre-paid mobile phones, and a bunch of groceries. All at one place!

Coming soon - all the cool things they have here that they don't have in America.

Cooking again

Well yesterday was my first attempt at cooking here at Rue Ancienne 15. We went to the Migros store that's a block away and got all our daily groceries for CHF 57, which works out to be about 48 USD. That covered coffee, bread, jam, filled pasta and sauce, and then 2 smallish steaks, new potatoes, and peas for dinner. Not too bad for around here. Apparently everybody here goes to France for their groceries (if they're on a budget) because it's much cheaper. However, that's about a 45 minute bus ride each way, so maybe we'll stick to shopping locally.

Cooking here is interesting - it's nice because we have a 4-burner gas stove. We did have to find instructions on the internet to decipher the strange symbols on the oven - it's a convection/traditional oven, so there are some funny settings, but it roasted potatoes like nobody's business.

Today we're off to explore the neighborhood. There's a bigger Migros about 3 blocks away, so we're going to see how it is in terms of selection and prices. They also sell budget mobile phones, so we may get a couple of those for communicating when Joy's working downtown.

Tonight was Italian night. We went to Pizzaria de Paolo (sounds Italian!). It was this nice little pizzaria by the lake (on Rue du Lac, in fact) that got good reviews from Frommers and a couple other places. We weren't disappointed.

We started with 3 dl of the house white. It's amazing that every house white here is better than most $10-15 bottles at home. I guess it figures. Then we had prosciutto con melon, with some absolutely amazing melt-in-your-mouth prosciutto and super-fresh cantaloupe. It was even better than the prosciutto that we had for lunch the other day, which was from the supermarket and prepackaged and yet still almost as good as A Southern Season's.

For dinner Joy had tortelloni con panna (cream sauce) and I had the pizza of the day, which had gorgonzola cheese, hot peppers, and spicy salami.

One surprise was the hot pepper-infused olive oil that they had - it was really spicy and really good.

Well chalk up another good meal - this was about as good as the Thai food we had the night before. Good thing we walked almost 4 miles today...

In Geneva

Well after two days of airport and airline food, it was a welcome relief to eat tonight at Cafe de Paris. What do they serve there? Steak. Steak and pommes frites. Oh, and a token salad.

Actually, the salad was quite nice, well dressed and fresh. But the main attraction was the steak. It comes on a plate surrounded by a sea of garlic butter. It's placed over a sterno can and melts the garlic butter and finishes cooking the steak. You get a plate of pommes frites and it's just a glorious heart-attack-y meal. Just the thing to set you right after one too many airline meals.

Good food across the pond

So, as requested, I'm updating my blog - I was recently in Serbia for work - Novi Sad, to be precise. I was there for a week working with our development partner company. I had the great fortune to be led around the city by several of the developers over there. We walked all around the city, visited the fortress, ate some really good food, and had a really good time.

Since this is a food blog, I'll touch on the highlights:

• Pljeskavica
• Urnebes
• Lav and Jelen (Beer)

All together, I didn't have a bad meal! One thing that I didn't try that I will have to come back for is Karadjordje's steak - apparently it's quite the dish.

Hi to everybody over there!