A baby boomer, born in rural, northern Italy right after the Second World War, families my mutter grew up with knew how to utilize food and how to maximize to feed as many mouths as possible. Every usable part of everything is incorporated into the final meal. My grandparents still try to instill this philosophy in me and my brothers, which is something that in some countries remains the same, and in others has sort of been forgotten. In a country like the US, where food is plentiful and constant, there’s a lot of wastage, plain and simple. In a third world country, and even some European countries by comparison, food is purchased and composed more carefully, with greater economic consideration  factoring into the recipes. (That is, until the recent economic crisis has encouraged everyone purchasing in the US dollar to be slightly more thrifty, overall.) For example, the cut of meat used to make the soup is later taken out, cooled, sliced and becomes the base for the first course of Vitello Tonnato. It should be noted though, because I’m no lush when it comes down to it, that since veal was not always readily available in the countries we’ve lived in, I’ve come to actually prefer beef in its place. The ravioli filling is made up partially of this meat, and a mix of others, plus a healthy handful of flat leaf parsley, and can be made in advance, allowing time for the different flavors to fuse.

I’m hoping that this economy will inspire more “economy” (stay with me, I’m about to explain) in the sense of being clever with what you’ve got to begin with. That out of this period, which we will call a “World Depression” no doubt, this necessity will breed delicious family traditions that people will pass on to their own families (like I did this year, teaching my mother in law, her sister and my husband’s cousin how to make ravioli from scratch), and talk about, and blog about, ad infinitum.

Homemade Christmas ravioli I made the other week.

Junk food is comfort food and when we’re in transit, we’re in need of some serious comforting. While traveling itself can be a joy to experience, the antichamber of airport terminals is similar to a birthing process. You have to squeeze yourself through crowds and wait in cramped lines before you can gallop down a deserted beach on horseback at sunset. Ok, that was a disturbing analogy, so let’s just forget about that and move on.

Healthy packed lunches aren’t hard to do, but airport-friendly ones can be a challenge.  Regulations on importing food varies from country to country, but the general rule is that wherever you’re going, they don’t want your foreign produce to come in with you. Add to that the limitations on liquids you can carry through security, the number of hours between what you make and when you want to eat it, plus the hassle of carrying it with you, sometimes literally, halfway across the planet.

The alternative? Oh, how I laugh. I still haven’t even mentioned the multitude of times I will specify at reservation time “Lactose Free” and either get a vegetarian meal, laden with cheese, or, as United does, hand me a tray with a cup of Mott’s apple sauce on it and some crackers that has whey in them. (Whey, people…a byproduct of curdled milk…) Nice going, United. There are some airlines you can count on to take your dietary needs seriously: Singapore Airlines, Garuda Indonesia, British Airways (sometimes), Virgin, to name a few. But times are tough and we can’t always choose which airline we want to fly with if we want to get the most bang for our buck. Is a small portion of warm food every few hours really worth the extra hundred dollars for your ticket? No. So…

5 Travel Essentials for the Lactose Intolerant and Hungry

Classic PB & J’s:
Handbag friendly and still tasty when squished between your laptop and magazines. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are hassle-free, take a second to put together before you leave your house, and in a moment of panic, have the uncanny ability to make you feel like you’re standing in your own kitchen again. Bliss.

Fresh Salads:
You know where it’s from, and you know its been washed. Dressing can pose something of a problem unless you can find those single sized portions and stick one in your Ziplock beauty bag for liquids. (Another contribution to the death of style and luxury in the travel industry — who needs a Prada makeup bag when you have to pull it all out and put it in a Ziplock anyway?)

Pretzels
A movie-watching staple at home, these make an awesome sleepy food, as a bunch of carbs and a glass of wine usually puts me right out to sleep. Pack these ahead of time and it won’t cost you $6 in the airport shop, either.

Fruit
Aside from not welcoming your local produce from wherever you’ve come from, flights to Australia will even walk down the aisles with a spray of disinfectant to kill anything you might be breathing, too. So try this: bring fresh fruit for the first leg of your journey. Eat what you like, and leave what you don’t eat on the plane before you leave. For your connecting flight, have a pack of sealed dried fruit ready. If you can find them, dried nectarines are a sweet burst of summer happiness after the saltiness of the pretzels, plus they gave me a much-needed burst of energy on my last trip, too.

Cuppa Noodles
This last item comes with a caveat — a lot of instant cup noodles have lactose in them, and thus do not belong on this list. But in the past when I’ve come across lactose free instant noodles, asking a flight attendant to fill it up with boiling water has never been an issue. Easy peasy, and satisfactorily warming and comforting.

Bonus Packing Tip:

If you’re traveling to pastures unknown and/or places with bathrooms unfamiliar, you may want to pack a ziplock with these handy items:

• packet of travel tissues
• antibacterial lotion
• moisturizer for face and hands
• bandaids

Ziploc, I salute you! You’ve made my life a haven of organization. Click here for Real Simple magazine’s ’10 New Uses for Ziploc Bags’. In particular number 9 that reminds you Ziploc bags can actually be used to store food in your fridge. But try to remember Ziploc makes reusable containers, too. (Captain Planet signing off here.)

Click here for more dairy free recipes, survival tips and foodie heaven in general at my other blog, BellyHealthy.com

Lavender flowers are mostly seen only in luxurious restaurant dessert menus, but if handled carefully, using culinary lavender can bring a deliciously sweet and elegant hue to you own cooking. Because of its perfumey and slightly musky scent, culinary lavender is commonly used in Herbes de Provence mixes, which alongside basil, thyme, savory and fennel adds a summery flavour.

Cooking with lavender pairs exceptionally well with lemon, so naturally brings out the flavour in many fish dishes.

A word of caution on cooking with lavender: lavender oil is considered mildly poisonous, and should not be added in place of any ingredients listed in these recipes. Also, if you are making the lavender for cooking purposes on your own, make sure the oils are completely dried out form the buds. Follow the instructions, and you shouldn’t have any problems at all. Symptoms of lavender poisoning include headaches, decreased appetite and constipation, but should clear within 24 hours. Also, if purchasing culinary lavender, you have nothing to worry about as these are buds that have been dried out before being sifted of impurities.

This is the Lavender Sugar Recipe I was looking to make during that visit, courtesy of theherbgardener.com:

How to Make Lavender Sugar

2 Tbsp. Dried lavender flowers
1 C. White sugar
Red and blue food coloring (optional)
Jar with a tight fitting lid
Muslin fabric

Place two tablespoons of lavender flowers in a length of muslin and wrap securely. Place lavender packet in a jar and cover with a cup of white sugar. Seal the jar and set it aside for two weeks, shaking it occasionally. After two weeks, the aroma of the lavender will have permeated the sugar, and the lavender packet can be discarded.

If you would like to color the sugar, create a shade of lavender you like using red and blue food coloring.

Once mixed, add the coloring slowly to the lavender sugar, stirring well to incorporate. Place the slightly moist sugar mixture on a cookie sheet to dry. If you live in a humid area, the sugar may be dried in the oven. (Use the lowest setting you can.)

A link to the original site and recipe can be found here.

For more recipes on cooking with lavender, visit The Hop Shop’s UK website.

Emeril’s Almond Butter Cookies with Lavender & Lemon ice cream

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/emeril-lagasse/almond-butter-cookies-with-fresh-lemon-and-lavender-ice-cream-recipe/index.html

http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/search.asp?search=dried+lavender

Lavender Lemonade from http://www.mccormickgourmet.com/gcrecipedetail.cfm?id=13042

Lavender Lemonade

Prep Time: 5 minutes
Cook Time: 10 minutes

Ingredients:
5 cups water, divided
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon McCormick® Gourmet Collection Lavender
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice

Directions:
1.  Bring 2 cups of the water, sugar and lavender to boil in medium saucepan on medium heat, stirring occasionally to dissolve the sugar.  Reduce heat to low; simmer 5 minutes.  Remove from heat.  Let stand 10 minutes.  Strain mixture, discarding lavender.

2.  Pour lavender syrup, lemon juice and remaining 3 cups water into large pitcher; mix well.  Refrigerate until chilled.  Serve over ice.

I can comfortably credit a lot of stuff I’ve learned outside my field to movies, and cooking is no exception. Food and cooking is an integral part of storytelling. When I recently watched the Disney/Pixar film Ratatouille, I was struck by how wonderfully instructional it is. In the story, Colette is a chef at Gousteau’s, a famous Parisian restaurant, and is showing Linguini, the new guy, the ropes around the kitchen. The late Chef Gousteau had published a book titled ‘Anyone Can Cook’ that inspires the main character of the movie (a charming rat named Remy) to be a cook, too. The movie is inspirational and I challange anyone to watch it and not head straight for their kitchen afterwards. But as with anything else you watch, the instructions she gives should be taken with a grain of salt.

Colette’s “Rules”

1. Energy and Time

A good chef knows how to time her (or his!) cooking. She should map out the road to dinnertime carefully to maximize efficiency, minimize disaster and still have enough verve to clean up and look good sitting down to enjoy it. Before I start sounding like a 1950′s Home Economics textbook, it is a talent you have anyway. Everyone makes lists, and for someone particularly concerned with timing, all it takes is reading the recipes an thinking: “If this take X minutes to bake, what am I doing while the oven’s on?”. You honestly don’t need a sous-chef and a plongeur to make an edible, homecooked three-course meal, just good organization.

Example: When making an omelet for my nephew, I’ll ask him to beat the eggs while I’m chopping some veggies. This is great for him because he actively takes part in the food making, and understands from such an early age the importance of cleanliness by washing his hands before and after handling raw food.

2. Clean As You Go

I learned this from the signs behind every cafe counter in London, which probably replaced the “Keep Calm and Carry On” signs after the Second World War, and haven’t been replaced since. Colette delicately reminds Linguini that his sleeves look like somebody threw up on them, which could lead to someone who eats your cooking to throw up on you. As a novice in the kitchen, this was the first rule I followed strictly saving both energy and time. (See above.) Keeping your “station” clear means you’re also constantly thinking about how to clean-as-you-go, thereby saving yourself hours by the sink after the cooking rush is over and the actual dining is all done.

3. “…hands and arms IN minimizes cuts and burns!”

This rule goes arm in arm with “Know Your Tools”. A sturdy work surface and quality chopping board will avoid the slips and sliding around that are the cause of most of my own cooking scars. Keeping fingers tucked in while chopping should keep you from attacking your nails with that knife, and as your mother always told you, a good posture will keep your activity under control *and* make you look confident, too. Double whammy.

4. “Judge the quality of bread not by smell or look but by sound…”

…and there, the sound of gorgeous French bread being crushed. All I need to start drooling with longing for a proper French baguette. My own rule of thumb while living in England was to see if the bread would bounce back to it’s original state in a few seconds. Stale or second day bread was unlikely to do this, even when it looked like it was fresh out of the oven. In California, I find it a little harder to judge, as most bread has a sourdough flavour to it, and thus has a longer shelf life anyway. (More on the bread topic to come as I believe much of this bread controversy also has to do with longitude, latitude, or at least altitude. Stay tuned.)

5. Getting First Pick Of The Day

Colette’s rule to “grow it yourself or buy a grower’s direct from the market” isn’t always feasible, but she’s right that the early bird gets the worms here. Hitting your local farmer’s market first thing in the morning is a good idea on a number of levels: a) it gets you up early and finishing this first errand quickly, b) it’s not crowded in the least, nor is there any traffic on the way and c) (oh, that’s right, we’re talking about food) you’ll see the freshest of the lot, probably picked or plucked from it’s natural growth environment only hours before.

HOWEVER, there is a point where my path and Colette’s diverge in the woods: I don’t agree with her hard and fast rule to follow the recipe. As she learns from Linguini, a little imagination will take you a long way. Just like Colette describes the cooks in the kitchen, as a chef you have the liberty of being The Artist. Don’t use an ingredient if you don’t like the taste of it. Use more of an ingredient you do like. Replace one ingredient with one that isn’t in the recipe and instantly, you make it your own. You might hit disaster once or twice and end up ordering takeout, but who cares? You’re learning and it’s a life skill. (And, Frost fanatics, that makes all the difference.)

Andre Organic Lavender

My love affair with the smell of lavender began in Provence when I was sixteen. With plenty of purple fields, gorgeous sunshine and blue skies, I thought I was in heaven at the time, and I swore when I left that I’d go back to live there some day. So imagine my surprise when on the road to Sanford I found a lavender field and the Andre Organic Lavender Shop.

With a particular recipe in mind, I visited this shop in the middle of the Santa Ynez Valley and was amazed at the variety of lavender products I had never seen before. Among them, a Lavender Breath Spray, which packed a strong punch of refreshment and woke us right up and out of our wine haze. Lavender, amongst its many uses is also a known natural anti-inflammatory and antiseptic. So, if a bit powerful, a good lavender breath spray should clear you of bad breath for life!

I was looking, in particular, for culinary lavender. Culinary lavender is collected from the flower buds, picked before blooming, dried, and sifted through carefully for any impurities such as dirt or leaves. The buds are what contain essential oil from which commercial scented oils are derived, and the collection of culinary lavender is a careful process that requires good timing and patience, of which I have neither.

A lavender-essences selling shop in Kent in the UK, has this to offer on cooking with the herb:

“Lavender softens the tartness of acidic fruits. Even just a few drops of cooking essence added to a saucepan of stewed fruit can make a big difference to the taste. The flavour of lavender in savoury recipes is enhanced by being used in combination with coriander seeds.  Fresh lavender spikes make an unusual garnish for meat and fish dishes and the flavour is particularly good alongside fennel, oregano, sage and coriander seed.”

Which plainly outlines what you need to know about cooking with it for both sweet and savoury dishes: Use it sparingly!

The Andre lavender farm grows at least 10 different varieties of lavender, and my nose is not yet fine tuned to distinguish different lavender scents by name. Coming from England I am more used to the scent of English and French lavender, whereas many of these scents seemed to contain a higher level of camphor. There are at least 39 known species of the plant. For my recipe (available below), I chose a “Vera” kind, which was the mildest of their culinary varieties available for sale.

Tending the store was a very knowledgeable and very friendly lady called Barbara, who informed me of their picking processes and the ins and outs of culinary lavender for my cooking. She also cautioned the strength of the culinary lavender buds I purchased. Too much, and your baking will turn bitter, or choose the wrong kind and have the adverse reaction of making anything you’re cooking taste like soap. She did this while, with the patience of a saint, she sifted through a box of lavender buds in front of her to ensure the end product is a pure as possible. So keep that in mind if you purchase anything from there: Each product has been sifted through by Andre Organic Lavender, bud by bud, by hand.

The first time we passed the Lavender Shop on the way to Sanford‘s* wine tasting room, Brian actually refused to stop. I guess it was getting dark and the shop wouldn’t have been open anyway, but it can look suspicious from the outside if you aren’t really looking for it. I put it down to the reindeer outside, which reminds me of Christmas but seems out of place in the month of May. Walk inside and you’ll be delighted you did. Aside from being a very relaxing scent, I’ve never seen a shop so original and so inspired by their craft.

* Sanford Winery, which has undoubtedly profited from its appearance in the movie Sideways, was a little disappointing for us. Although it claims a long history of positive reviews, we didn’t feel particularly at ease in the tasting room, which was newly refurbished and largely impersonal. For the price of a bottle, I’d easily recommend other pinots or chardonnays for less than $15. However, Sanford does have a fascinating series of monthly webisodes if you’re curious about the winemaking process.

(A "hodad" is a 50's term for surfer groupie.)

It started, as it has for so many since, with Guy Fieri’s show on The Food Network.  The show, plus the appeal of seeing something on TV one Saturday morning, liking it, and driving 3 hours to go and see it for myself. It also starts with a literal starvation for a decent burger while living in London (a matter not addressed by English restauranteurs until relatively recently).

A good burger shouldn’t be hard to make. I’m not for over-seasoned beef, over-cooked or processed into perfect looking, 12 cm diameter patties. Good bread, good meat, good salad and good ketchup should be all that is required.  And, generally speaking, the number of napkins used to eat a burger with any kind of social etiquette is directly proportional to the excellence of the flavour. My order of 1 hamburger, 1 side of onions and 1 strawberry milkshake took approximately 11 napkins to consume gracefully, scoring Hodad’s an 11 on a normal scale of 1 to 10. Good job, guys!

The inside of the restaurant is laid back and the walls are plastered with license plates from around the country as well as a sign that accurately reads “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem” (hardly any of the men in there had shirts on). I liked it on my first visit because it was sunny outside and there were plenty of surfers who had just popped in for a bite to eat before heading back out to the waves. The second time, the day wasn’t so clear and I noticed that either it was a lot more popular due to reruns of Guy Fieri’s ‘Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives’ and his raving review on the show, or I’d been kind of blind to the neighbourhood the first time. This burger joint is a brilliant novelty stop on your route through SoCal. So by all means, stop by, chow down on their deliciously grotesque looking burgers, and then try something else if you find yourself back in the area.

On my second visit to Hodad’s, there were so many customers the queue went out the building and down the street for the whole block. Although the line moves relatively quickly, Newport Avenue is not the nicest street in San Diego to wait around on: although there are a number of cute souvenir shops, there are also an inordinate number of the homeless (and inebriated, and foul tempered). Nothing of note particularly happened, but as I said, it’s just not the nicest street to hang out on. Instead, I’d suggest passing the whole line and walking straight in to order food to go. They’re pretty quick and you can hop back in your car and head for a quieter beach, or wherever you like.

Hodad’s is located in Ocean Beach and open from 10AM to 10PM alllll summer long.

5010 Newport Ave.
Ocean Beach, CA 92107
View Larger Map

My first (of probably many) trips to Bakersfield was for a fundraising poker night my future brother in-law was organizing for his son’s baseball team. We drove up Saturday night, where Brian gave everyone a run for their money at the tables before losing his $100 buy-in. (So what? Its for a good cause and the taco bar was both home cooked and amazing.) Gladly, I have not yet fallen into the Los Angelean mind-set that everything is too far to drive with too much traffic involved. In fact, I loved the hour-long drive through farms and fields and beautiful landscapes so much, I couldn’t stop taking pictures on the way there, or the way back.

So we’re driving along Highway 126 and I’m literally drooling at all the fresh fruit and veggie stalls since we left all our cash in Bakersfield. Assuming these stalls won’t accept credit cards, we resigned ourselves to redirecting our route home via Los Olivos for a bit of Sunday relaxation. Then I start to see these signs for a “Honey Tasting Room” and decide to make a stop.

MMmmm, honey! Bennett’s Honey Farm & Tasting Room is surrounded by orange trees and farmland, has a teeny little parking lot and a shop where their honeys are laid out on the center table. I tried the Sage (musky aftertaste), Eucalyptus (softer aftertaste), Orange (bittersweet aftertaste) and the Cactus (best of all, chunky and sugary). The shop also had a small display of hundreds of live bees working in a glass case. If you’re like me and generally hate to see bugs of any kind, I still recommend a closer look at the “secret life” of bees. Some interesting honeybee facts:

• Honeybees communicate with one another by “dancing” so as to give the direction and distance of flowers.
• A single hive contains approximately 40-45,000 bees.
• Theoretically, the energy in one ounce of honey would provide one bee with enough energy to fly around the world.
• The honeybee is not born knowing how to make honey; the younger bees are taught by the more experienced ones.
• A queen can lay her weight in eggs in one day and 200,000 eggs in a year.

Great start to our afternoon! Next, our favorite game: punching in “Wineries” into my GPS to see what’s in the neighbourhood. But the only winery to be found within a few miles was listed as the Geissinger Winery. Never heard of it? Who cares, we drove on anyway…and what a diamond in the rough.

As we walked in, I was put off a little by the “Bistro Menu” that claimed “authentic French” fare and started the list of sandwiches with a Turkey Club. Now I’m no expert, but I have been to France often and I don’t recall ever seeing turkey top a menu over there. Not even for Christmas. (They leave that to the British.) The Geissinger wines had beautiful labels that were reminiscent of 19th century designs: painted grapes on a background of musical sheets, and whether intentional or not, the bleeding ink gave it all a soft look and feel to compliment the bizarreness of the names and smells. Most notably, a red that smelled of the ocean even though the tasting notes said “pomegranate and cherry”.

Directly opposite the tasting room is an historic train depot, the Fillmore and Western Railway. With cars permanently stationed housing a creepy antiques store and shameless amounts of Thomas the Tank Engine merchandise, the F&W tourist train still operates year-round. It was getting late for us to take the time to take a ride, but I picked up a flyer and marked a date on my calendar to come back. If anyone is interested in joining us for a ride to “Ichabog” pumpkin patch next October? How about the Wizard Express Murder Mystery Dinner for Harry Potter fans? I’ve had about all I can take or Murder Mystery outings after a night with “Murder on the Orient Express” at the Prince Charles cinema in London, where I think I actually fell asleep…

Last recommendation for this trip: Pyramid Lake. If you happen to be on your way back to LA from Bakersfield, don’t forget to look right as you drive by. Pyramid Lake is located in the San Gabriel Mountains along Interstate 5, approximately 60 miles north of Los Angeles and 50 miles south of Bakersfield. According to FishersNet.com, Pyramid harbors a wide variety of fish species; most popular are the huge 30+ striped bass, but at the very least you’ll see those wacky manmade pyramids from the road.

For Fillmore Visitors, Geissinger can be found here:

365 Santa Clara Street

Fillmore, CA 93015

Ph.(805) 524-5000

Tasting Room Hours:

Mon – Thu:     11:00am-5:00pm

Fri – Sun:         11:00am-6:30pm

Bennett’s Honey Farm can be found here:

3177 E Telegraph Rd (off Hwy 126)

(805) 521-1375

Mon. – Fri.  8 am – 4:30 pm

Sat. – Sun. 9 am – 6:00 pm

For train info:

Click here to find out more about the Pumpkinliners tour we’ll be taking in October and to book tickets.

My new fiance and I have been setting up our own business, which has taken off quite well. But as new pilots of our independent business, we’re in no place to be spending large amounts of cash on a trip, however special the occasion. Hooked on finding the cheapest hotel available, we scoured all the AAA and United Mileage deals we could, and settled on Best Western Pea Soup Andersen’s.

The room itself is just fine. Clean, roomy, comfortable. The bathrooms were kind of strange and only had those tiny soaps and an assortment of oddly sized towels. What’s to complain about when you’re staying in Buellton for less than $100? Most of the other hotels we passed along the way looked like prime locations for a Psycho shot-for-shot remake, and quite frankly, I didn’t want to die.

After a night at The Hitching Post II, we decided to check out this self-proclaimed World Famous Split Pea Soup. Who was this Andersen, and why should he think his Split Pea Soup is the best? Compared to whom? From the hotel, you can literally roll your way over to the restaurant for breakfast, which is kind of what we did, still being full from the night before. Totally deserted on this sunny, bright, Sunday morning in May, we appeared to be the only guests until I noticed a troupe of leather-clad motorcyclists wandering in a similar state of wonder and disbelief. You know, the way the kids look when they arrive at Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory?

As we walked in the door, I flashed my fiance* a melon-sized grin. This place can only be described as a House of Extreme Tat: Wall to wall tacky souvenirs and pea soup memorabilia (is that the right word? I hadn’t experienced it yet, but now I really, really wanted to.) There is a Christmas gift shop, a jewelry gift shop, a sweet shop, and tinned goods piled on every shelf, all over the place. Postcards, t-shirts, magnets, pens, pencils, little boxes of crayons, all emblazoned with the bold alpine font, “Pea Soup Andersen’s Split Pea Soup World Famous Since 1924″. There was even a display reading “Try our famous Cheddar Cheese and Crackers”, but as I had no clue how long it had been sitting there, I backed away slowly.

In the restaurant, I ordered the Travelers’ Breakfast which consisted of a bowl of split pea soup, and a plate of bottomless pancakes (of course), eggs and a choice of breakfast meat. And whaddaya know – it wasn’t half bad. In fact, it was pretty good for a soup I don’t care for and still won’t order anywhere else. How’s that for a review?

Leaving what I thought was the dining room of the restaurant, I noticed a series of other rooms and seating areas, all decorated differently. Presumably they use different rooms for different occasions. And clearly myself, my fiance and our fellow diners who were on a Harley Davidson tour of Central Coast did not qualify as reason enough to be seated in the Room of Chintz. (My own title applied there, at Andersen’s they call it the Pavilion Room.) Everything in this building and in the decor of the hotel next door bears a remarkable resemblance to the colours of a breakfast danish. Which is why I think the Danes are to blame for this cultural sediment.

All in all, I was not shocked in the least to find that Buellton is the setting for the final sequence of Death Proof. The Pea Soup Andersen’s website says it “remains a slice of Americana”, but I would tack a word on to that sentence to ensure its accuracy: “Congealed”.

* The gratuitous use of the term “fiance” is entirely intentional and justified because I am extremely excited about our new state of affairs. If you don’t like it, you’re a Scrooge.

Think I made this up? See for yourself!:

http://www.peasoupandersens.net/

An old video I found with a Split Pea Andersen’s Commercial: See 1 minute 22 seconds to about 2 minutes 22 seconds

I have a bee in my bonnet. It’s called Buellton. Possibly the creepiest town I’ve ever visited in my life. I can’t put my finger on what it was exactly that made me feel weird to begin with, but I can tell you that by the time we made it to the Hitching Post for dinner, I was pretty creeped out. If you want to eat the most amazing steak in the world and be literally scared shitless while chewing, visit The Hitching Post in Buellton, CA. Me and my fiance (of 2 days- hooray!), checked into our hotel, hopped in the car and headed straight for the excitement of the famous “Sideways” restaurant.

We knew there would be a wait, because I called beforehand and they said there would be. Also, if you’re reading this and planning a trip, they won’t take reservations over the phone. So we went anyway and after a few minutes a seat opened up at the bar, so we decided to wait there instead. I read a review on TripAdvisor that said, “the decor very dated” which puts it kind of politely. Overall, I had the sense of the place being a little too worn, as in, not terribly clean. Both the service and the side vegetables confirm that this is a place that is famous for its steaks and wine, and the fact that an unusually good movie was filmed there (for three days), and not much else.

Our neighbours at the bar were pretty friendly. Maybe too friendly. Some guy flat out ordered my husband-to-be a Pinot Noir HIGHLINER, at $14 a glass. He didn’t even start a conversation first, nor pursue one afterwards. (Am I weird to find that creepy? He was sitting right next to us. And no, he didn’t work there.) The menu at The Hitching Post has this to say about it’s oeuvre: “Aromas of berries and sweet Frenchy oak, bright young fruit tastes rich and round, poised to improve over the next 5 to 10 years”, and it was indeed, brilliant. But the feeling of claustrophobia and impending doom persisted.

Sitting down at our table didn’t improve things: On the wall to the far right of my fiance’s head, a gigantic post-modern, Andy Warholesque, slightly-out-of-focus and extremely brightly coloured painting of Saddam Hussein wearing a safari sun hat was grinning at me inanely. At this point, I thought I’d been drugged for sure, which was making the visible flames from the kitchen alarming. But I will also point out that I seemed to be the only person there who was alarmed by anything at all. It had been a crazy two days (did I mention I’m engaged now?!?). I thought, “You’ve had too much wine. With all the excitement, you should just go to the loo, splash some cold water on your hands. You’ll be fine.”

What a fool I was. The ladies room was like some nightmare maternity ward. With pink tiles all over the place, it had curtains for cubicle walls and doors on noisy, rattling chains hanging from the ceiling. I honestly couldn’t tell if this was meant as a sort of tongue-in-cheek joke, or if the owners were tripping when they ordered this. I would have run out of there screaming if it hadn’t been for the food.

You honestly cannot beat a plate of fresh mussels and a steak grilled over an open fire of red oak with a glass of their Highliner. At excellent, and I mean excellent value for money. Double whammy. Will I go there again? DEFINITELY. Will I order food to go? Probably. And it actually turns out that Saddam was really a painting of the owner, who looks utterly charming and friendly here:

More on The Hitching Post II:

http://www.hitchingpost2.com/

For Reservations:

http://www.opentable.com/single.aspx?rid=4495&restref=4495

For more pictures of the owner of the restaurant where he looks nothing like Saddam:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=rLz&q=Frank%20Ostini&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi