Travel

Hey, it’s raw. But that doesn’t make it simple.

It’s a commonplace that sushi is a culinary style that comes very close to offering food in it’s natural state. So we expect it to be ridiculously fresh, clean and manipulated only for presentation.

There’s a new-ish sushi place here in Portland, its tiny space appropriately described by many as a jewel. Portland Maine you say? Japanese cuisine in Maine? Then you don’t know just how much of what starts out here in Maine ends up Tokyo’s Tsukiji market – the greatest fish market in the world and a mecca for sushi chefs and other seafood nuts. Ah, but I digress… 

A couple of weekends ago, Martin and I headed out to Joshua Tree for a quick camp-out. Fall in the National park is spectacular. We enjoyed bouldering, dominoes, wine and beans by the campfire, a starry slumber, early morning coffee in our enamel-ware mugs and a wonderful hike to an Oasis.

The hike and camp-teardown got us hankering for a date shake, knowing that we would be driving through Thermal, CA., a.k.a. date country, on our way home.

Thermal is dotted with date gardens – they are not called farms or orchards. Date palms grow in the Coachella Valley and require something like 360 days of bright sun and 90-100ºF a year to grow, and man, do they thrive. You can visit date gardens to take tours and to buy dates. The November issue of Sunset has a great article about date gardens. This one, Brown Date Garden, looks pretty cool.

I’ve always been an icing on the cake kind’a’gal.  You know us: we devour frosting, flee crumbling cake remains.  And desserts with powdered sugar and oozing jellies that all fall down inevitably on clothes never seem worth the lbs. or the dry cleaning $$.  So, when I recently found myself headed to Austria to cover the Salzburg Global Seminar: Cultural Institutions Without Walls, the last thing on my mind was leaky pastries: culinary institutions without walls….that is, until I was asked by Amy Ephron to, if I was in fact going to Austria, write about the infamous Sacher Torte.

We couldn’t have picked a better day to immerse ourselves in Korean tea shops than a day filled with brisk temperatures and a slight chilly rain. It made our check ins of tea houses much more cozy even though we were on a seriously ambitious mission to sip and sit in a combination of traditional and modern establishments.

We started at Miss Lee, a colorful and playful tea house washed in bright colors and natural woods. If I was looking for a quiet austere place for tea this sure wasn’t it! We arrived for an early lunch of bento boxes with a variety of teas. There’s something to know about the world of Korean tea:  it’s not necessarily always based on traditional tea plants and their leaves. It’s a world that encompasses fruits, seeds, twigs, roots and leaves, not to mention some grains and barley and rice.

The flavors of a rainbow are all here, from sour and astringent to candy-like and sweet. One of my favorites was Omijacha, made from the dried berries of the Schisandra chinensis and called the Five Flavors tea because it has sweet, salty, bitter, sour and pungent notes. Served either hot or cold, Korean teas are consumed for health and vitality but to me some are just plain fun: give me a cup of Yujacha (citron) any day for dessert and I’d be a happy man.