Finally, the tickets are booked! We are going on January 15th for ten days! I can not wait to take photos of EVERYTHING I do and eat and to be able to write in the moment. So far everything I have written about Ireland has been on memory; writing while I am there is going to be so much more fun and detailed! So the next few months for me look crazy. November 6-11 – San Francisco/Sonoma/Napa for the Foodbuzz Festival, Timber Cove Inn, Bouchon, and other wine country amazingness November 19-22 – San Diego for work November 24-27 – New Jersey for Thanksgiving December 23-27 – New Jersey for Christmas January 8-12- Scottsdale, AZ for work and some nice winter runs! January 15-24- Ireland and perhaps Spain 😉 Speaking of travel, I was recently asked to write a post for CheapOAir. I am not sure when the post will be up, but I will keep checking their site: Cheap Flights and their blog, cheapoair.wordpress.com, and I will let you know. One of the many things I love about Ireland is the food. Yes, the food in Ireland is good. Despite what you may have heard, Ireland has some incredible, comforting dishes and products, and I always manage to lose weight when we are there because our activity levels are so high! 1) Smoked salmon – The West of Ireland is well known for its salmon supply, and really other than in the Pacific Northwest, I have never tasted fresher or more delicious salmon. 2) Brown bread – Made of wholemeal flour, brown bread is hearty, crusty, and crumbly and goes perfect with everything. Favorites include open faced smoked salmon sandwiches with salmon and Kerrygold butter on brown bread, or prawn cocktail sandwiches on brown bread. It’s not always easy to come by in the US, but you could make your own. I found a good recipe at 101 Cookbooks: http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/000151.html 3) Irish cheese – Ireland, like England has a lot of great cheese choices. Again, Kerrygold offers a variety of great cheeses that are sold here in regular US grocery stores. Their Dubliner cheese is readily available and offers a nutty and delicious flavor that pairs really well with fruit or in sandwiches. Their cows are grass fed which makes all the difference in Irish dairy (and beef I am told!) In Ireland, you can get a variety of great local cheddars for a couple of Euro. We often pick up a variety of cheeses, red cheddar, white cheddar, Cashel blue, and make a nice cheese, fruit and bread plate for the family to eat while we are whipping up the rest of the meal 🙂 
Photo courtesy of kerrygold.com 4) Proper breakfast- Picture this, you have been flying all night, it is 6 am and you step out into the dark mistiness that is Shannon. Driving home to Galway, the sun is coming up, and you can see little swirls of black turf smoke, accompanied by the best smell ever, coming out of chimneys as Ireland wakes up. We arrive at my in laws house, and despite the god awful hour they left the house to pick us up, they somehow have all of the fixings for an Irish breakfast ready. Eggs, mushrooms, rashers, sausages, toast, tea, and juice. I just eat the eggs, mushrooms, and toast and may have to steal a piece of rasher after smelling its pungent saltiness as it sizzles in the oven.
To 90% of you this probably looks really unappetizing, but it smells SO good, and to my husband, it is home. 5) All things potato – yes the Irish love their potatoes, and when we are there we eat them boiled with butter and parsley, roasted, baked “jacket style” and stuffed with great things like veggie curry (if you go to Galway check out Couch Potatas, they have every variety of filling for jacket potatoes imaginable!), and fried. I looooooove good chips! In the US I rarely if ever eat fast food, but when we are in Ireland I go to the Irish chain, Supermacs, several times in week. My in laws probably think I have a problem! I always get garlic and cheese chips, which are French fries with a creamy garlic sauce topped with shredded, not melted cheddar cheese. There is something about the contrast between the hot chips and the cold sauce and cheese that is heavenly. A night out in Galway, even if we have been to a nice, fancy dinner, is not complete without them! Because of Ireland’s mild climate, potatoes and other root vegetables grow year around and are available in the wonderful local farmer’s markets. I love getting carrots that are covered in inches of dirt in a bucket. They are so sweet and just out of the ground fresh. There is nothing like it! I will be counting down the next couple of months and looking forward to the second that we touch down in Shannon. Until then, some more Ireland photos below, because I love it. 😉 One of the search terms for my blog today was “where to find pumpkin puree in Galway”. If you are reading, try McCambridge’s!
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Well, I tried to take the day off, but spent the first 3 hours of the morning on work emails, accompanied by tea and whole grain toast with Blue Diamond honey almond butter. I can not get enough of the stuff! Not sure what the rest of the day will bring, but it is shaping up to be another beautiful fall day here in Boston. Tonight we are heading to our neighbors’ house for a fire in the backyard and to share one of our bottles of Domaine Moulin Tacussel Chateauneuf du Pape from the last Bin Ends fine wine flea market. Heading to another one this Sunday! But before I head out for the rest of the day, a restaurant review! I had plans on Wednesday night to meet up with an old friend at Post 390 which I have been dying to try again after our good experience on their third night open. Apparently they are doing quite well, as it was a 2.5-3 hour wait! Hungry and not really able to eat dinner at 10 on a work night, we decided to talk a short walk to Coda, conveniently located at the corner of Dartmouth and Columbus in Boston’s South End/Back Bay area. Coda is a friendly neighborhood place. I had only been there once before for drinks and an appetizer during the last summer Olympics. At the time, a woman came in with two small children, a little panicked because her car had broken down in the city. The bartender sat the kids up at the bar, made them Shirley Temples, and put on the Olympics for them. Other Coda staff helped the woman with her car, and a neighbor stopping in to pick up food also took a look at the car. I instantly loved the way everyone at Coda went out of their way to be helpful. Wednesday night, we were ravenous and looking for a cozy place to catch up. Coda turned out to be perfect, not too crowded when we arrived so we got a great corner window seat, complete with comfy pillows in the booth. To celebrate mid-week, I ordered a glass of Mionetto prosecco, one of my favorites. My husband ordered a Nitro Stout which was sooooooo good! It tasted like coffee and chocolate, all toasty and delicious. I love my prosecco, but the stout was definitely more seasonal. For my meal, I ordered two appetizers which I often do. I like smaller portions, and ordering two small dishes allows me to try a couple of different flavors. I was very happy with my choices, sugar pumpkin soup with sage brown butter and brioche croutons and the zucchini beer fritters with paprika aioli.
The soup was creamy and delicious, exactly what I wanted on a cool fall evening. The brioche croutons were slightly crunchy, but softened in the soup, making for a yummy bready-ness. The fritters were to die for. They had tons of shredded zucchini and a nice dough. Dipped in the smoky, spicy aioli, they were super comforting and delicious, a very nice treat indeed! My friend got Coda’s signature mac and cheese which was a very large portion, enough for lunch the next day, and the hubs had steak frites which he devoured. The fries were SO good, very thin and crispy, heavenly little bits of salty potato. I hope you are all having a good kickoff to the weekend! I will be back tomorrow with a post on my favorite Irish foods to celebrate the fact that we booked our tickets to Ireland for ten days in January! Yayayay! If you missed it, please check out my entry for Stonyfield’s Na-Moo-Ste sweepstakes. I am really excited about the theme and spirit of the post, and I hope you will be too! Are you doing anything fun this weekend? I hope so! See ya soon 🙂
Do not resent growing old. Many are denied the privilege.
This week officially began the last five months of my twenties. After realizing that my half birthday had passed me by a month ago with no celebration, being a little upset, and getting over it, I spent a little bit of time thinking about what the end of a decade means. The first thought that I had about this actually came a couple of months ago when, stacking a pile of magazines, I looked at a headline that said something like “Look great in your 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s” and realized that in a few months’ time, I would be moved from one category to the next, just like that. Nutritional, fitness, relationship, and fashion advice for ladies in their 20’s would no longer apply to me. Of course, I don’t take these sort of things seriously, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about what I DO want to take seriously as I enter a new decade. I came up with the idea to do a series of Thankful for Thirty posts all about reviving the commitment to being my best self. Thankful for Thirty will be a common thread through some of my posts throughout the next few months, and post topics will include food, fitness, fun and adventure, and career goals, all meant to help jumpstart my life and to make the best of every minute that I am given.
Post one of Thankful for Thirty is about giving back. One of the lessons I have learned over the past decade is that when I am not doing something to make the world a better place, my life feels really empty. I live by the idea that “Much is expected of those to whom much has been given” (last quote of the post, I promise!). I do my best to be involved in volunteering, fundraising, and supporting charities whenever I can, and as I get older I hope to only be able to do that more.
These five months (plus one) also mark my journey to the finish line of the 2010 Boston Marathon. I couldn’t let such a milestone birthday pass without doing something big, and it is not an accident that I chose to run this year’s marathon for Team ALLY. Alexandra Zapp was thirty when her life was taken from her, and in cases like hers, you just can’t help but wonder what amazing things she would have done if she had been allowed to live. My participation with Team ALLY this year is a great way to incorporate my own love of life and desire to make a difference with the work of The Ally Foundation. Through Team ALLY, I hope to be able to work with many others toward making society safer for all of us and to providing victims of horrible crimes and their families peace.
Running the Boston Marathon for the third time is also for me. Being in top physical shape and meeting new people are only two of the many benefits that the marathon will give me. And I absolutely get shivers when I think of the athlete’s village in Hopkinton, the crack of the gun and the slow movement of the thousands of runners around me, the deafening, but motivating tunnel of screaming Wellesley College women at the halfway point, all of the supporters in Newton who line Heartbreak Hill, the elderly from their nursing homes along the route, high fiving passing runners, the downhill into Cleveland Circle, the Citgo sign with one mile to go, and the yellow and blue balloon marquee that embraces that beautiful finish line in Copley Square.
Training and fundraising for a marathon, volunteering every weekend at the MSPCA, working 50 or more hours a week, studying Spanish, and taking writing classes make for a busy and sometimes stressful life, and in order to be my best self for me and for others, I need to just say “Ohm”! That is why I am entering this post in the Stonyfield Farms Na-Moo-Ste Giveaway (http://www.facebook.com/oikos). Stonyfield is graciously providing the opportunity for bloggers to enter the chance to win a trip for two to the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. As we all already know, Stonyfield makes delicious products that help us to commit to being our healthiest selves, and they also have their own commitment to community and to the planet. After dealing with one running-related stress fracture, I know that I will need to bone up on calcium rich Oikos yogurt during my training, and since I love its deliciousness, I know that part won’t be difficult! I can’t think of a better company to mention in my first Thankful for Thirty post than Stonyfield, and I can’t think of a more life giving prize than a trip to the Kripalu Center. If I won, I would bring my sister, who has always been wonderful to me and now gives so much of herself as a teacher of special needs students and a mom to the best baby in the world.
Up next, your turn to tell me about an age that was a turning point in your life and why. And it doesn’t have to be the standard “life-changing” ages that Hallmark makes special cards for! I would love to be able to post your stories along with mine throughout the next few months. You can either leave your story in the comments section or email it to me at traveleatlove2009@hotmail.com. When published, your story will of course link back to your site if you have one.
Wishing you all a wonderful night, it is ALMOST the weekend!
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