Offbeat Eats

Those that have seen my reviews of Tally’s Silver Spoon, Windigo Store, or Angry Trout Cafe have seen that in the last few years, I’ve done a handful of backpacking trips with Fitpacking, a New England-based backpacking group focusing on “weight loss backpacking”. While most everyone I know will agree that while I’m certainly not very overweight, I could stand to lose a few pounds, but more than few people that know my outdoor experience have asked, “Why is Rich, an experienced and able backpacker, using an guide service like Fitpacking when you could just do everything yourself?”

Those that know me well know that this Covid epidemic has made my food blogging a bit more difficult than usual, since we’re only rarely eating out at restaurants (and, when we do, it’s almost always takeout, especially now that winter’s going strong). But one thing that’s definitely changed in a more positive way during the epidemic is one of my favorite vices: my daily cup (or often, cups) of coffee. So I thought it would be nice to discuss the coffee we’re drinking, where we get it, and how we make it.

I’ve generally paused my reviewing due to the general social distancing orders because, let’s face it, these are some seriously challenging times for restaurants, and we all need to cut them slack. But it’s also been a very challenging time for our regions brewers and distillers, having taken serious hits to their restaurant accounts, and being very limited in their ability to do retail sales. Not content to just sit idly by, several distilleries around the country have worked on converting their normal beverage distilling expertise to a related application: making hand sanitizer, since the normal distribution channels of products like Purel has been extremely taxed, especially early in the pandemic. Indeed, here in Northern New England, several distilleries jumped right in and started making hand sanitizer right away: Smuggler’s Notch announced their effort on March 16th (the day the wide-scale shutdowns in VT and NH were announced), and Vermont breweries Silo and Caledonia Spirits announced similar efforts right away, as did Tamworth Distilling in New Hampshire. Since then, a good half dozen additional VT and NH distilleries followed suit. It’s not rocket science: the ideal hand sanitizer as a viricide simply requires approximately 70-80% pure alcohol (performing better than pure alcohol, which evaporates too quickly). I thought it would be interesting to round up a few different sanitizers and give them all a try.

Well, let’s face it, airport food options always kind of suck. Just by being in an airport, the food is more expensive, the clientele more hurried, and most everyone isn’t even in the best of moods. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not above writing up food joints in airports, since there are a few gems out there, but overall, one doesn’t ever go to an airport looking for great food. At best, they find good food despitebeing in an airport. But all that aside, there are a handful of airports that, while not really caring for the airport in and of itself, at least manage to give me some easy access to some regional food cravings. That’s definitely the case with Chicago Midway Airport. While it is night and day better than it was pre-2000 (when the new concourses and arrival/departure main terminal across Cicero opened), it’s still a sucky airport, dominated by discount carriers, and seemingly having been designed with each gate having about 1/3 as much seating as a typical Southwest flight. But, with a substantial fraction of my cross-country flights connecting at Midway, it’s also a handy place for me to indulge in some of my Chicago-area food indulgences. I’ve prattled on before about the Chicago-style hot dog, and Midway isn’t a bad place to get one of those… but this time, I’m talking about that other Chicago-area sandwich, the Hot Italian Beef.

Like just about everyone else in the culinary and media worlds, yesterday I got the early morning notification that Anthony Bourdain had passed away, by his own hand. No, I never had the chance to meet Bourdain; I would have moved mountains to make it happen if it had been a possibility. But his presence is definitely felt here: a good chunk of why I started this blog back in the first place was that, like Bourdain, I’ve had a love of food and love sharing quirky, offbeat, and interesting places with people, and sharing the underlying culture that makes food one of the great things that brings us together. No, Offbeat Eats will never become anything like No Reservations or Parts Unknown; I don’t have the budget, the time, the talent, nor the personality (although if someone has a spare camera crew lying around…), but it was my experiences with his various books, shows, and commentary that really inspired me to improve my cooking, my travel, and my enjoyment of different food.

It wasn’t that long ago that a cornerstone of having the exotic travel experience was the act of heading off to the travel bookstore and picking up a travel guide, and using that as, well, a guide to your travel. Selecting an itinerary, figuring out the sights, finding hotels and meals… The arrival of the internet didn’t change it much, at first. Indeed, it was mostly positive (some guides, like Lonely Planet, really started coming into their own in the internet age, and Amazon certainly made it easier to get obscure titles). But I’ve noticed that in a few cases in recent travels, the market has shifted a bit. Indeed, when discussing the planning of my recent trip to the Faroe Islands (an obscure destination, at least for the non-Danish tourist), I noticed that when I brought out the travel guide (a rather good one from Bradt Guides), more than a few of my friends and a fellow traveler both made comments about “Wow! You’re still using travel guides?! Don’t you have the internet?”

While we generally had a great time in the Faroe Islands, especially on the culinary front, I would be remiss if I didn’t discuss the broader Faroe Island dining scene from a tourist’s perspective. The Faroe Islands themselves are rather small (about 60,000 permanent inhabitants), and aside from the occasional festival or special event (the Klaksvik Summer Festival or the 2015 Solar Eclipse being good examples), aside from Tórshavn (which gets the occasional cruise ship and regular stops by the Smyril Line ferry between Denmark and Iceland), the tourism amenities drop off precipitously once you leave Tórshavn (with a minor exception for Klaskvik, the second largest town). Indeed, there are quite a few towns where the dining options, and heck, even the food options like stores, are limited. So it’s always important to plan ahead a bit.

Every once in a while, instead of the standard restaurant review, it’s nice to take a few steps back and discuss broader food topics, or those sorts of things that don’t really lend themselves to a review, per se. With this being my first visit to Britiain since 2008 during "summer" (in this case, the trailing edge of it), I was able to finally try one of those British traditions of summer, the "99 Flake". Okay, at this point, my UK readers are probably saying to themselves, “Great, now he’s rambling on about 99 Flakes. What’s next, the finer points of Jaffa Cakes?” While my US and other readers are probably asking themselves, “WTF is a 99 Flake?” Well, the 99 Flake is a standard British dairy treat. At it’s most basic, it’s basically what us Yanks call as soft serve cone, with a large dollop of soft serve ice cream served on one of those wafer cones. And, to top it off, the very pièce de résistance is the insertion of a half-length Cadbury Flake into the ice cream.

Right after getting into Valencia, we had to go strait to our hotel in the outskirts of Valencia in a quiet little suburb known as Alboraya. Alboraya’s claim to fame is being the birthplace to the Horchata (also spelled Orchata, or Orxata in Valencian), the drink common to several Hispanic nations. The proper Valencian version has exactly three ingredients, water, chufa (tigernuts), and sugar. (The related Mexican horchata is generally made from rice or almonds and is spiced). One legend links the origins of the name to James I of Aragon, who after being given the drink for the first time by a local in Alboraya, was said to have exclaimed “Això és or, xata!” (“That’s gold, darling!”). In any case, the town of Alboraya is almost a shrine to the Horchata. The main street is Avenida de Horchata, and there are about a dozen horchaterias nearby, with Horchata Daniel being one of the most revered.

Anyone that has dined with me for breakfast know that I generally don’t do breakfast, usually opting for just a cup of coffee, and maybe a sweet roll or something. But when I get breakfast, I generally go all out. My favorite breakfast dishes include pancakes (yeah, I’ve got to write up my favorite pancake joints as well), waffles (my college roommate Steve still likes to tell people about my late night waffle cravings in college), a proper biscuits and gravy, all things hash brown related, and eggs Benedict…