vacation – Fervent Foodie

Big Easy – Part 1

October 15, 2010 9 Comments

Here’s a recap of our first day in the Big Easy:

Jarrod almost fell down the escalator in the airport. Sadly, I did not capture this on video.

We hopped in a cab and headed to the hotel, which is right on the border of the business district and the French quarter.

Our hotel is super old and super charming:

After we cleaned up, we headed to the French Quarter and stopped in at the first restaurant that caught our eye: Jean Lafitte Bistro… though oddly that wasn’t the name on the front of the building… Peculiar…

View from restaurant balcony:

Dinner!

This pasta sauce was RIDICULOUSLY amazing (though both of us weren’t impressed with the sausage).

I love the old-world charm of all of the buildings here:

After dinner we headed to drinks and some live music at the Blues Club:

Then drinks at the Beach:

Hello Bourbon Street!

Next stop, the Bourbon Street Blues Company

Cheese!

Annnnnd then we went back to the hotel and passed out! Long day of fun in the Big Easy!!

Restaurants, Travel

Last day in Charleston

July 19, 2010 6 Comments

Sunday was our last day in Charleston. For breakfast, we nibbled on some of the goods we had brought from home, then headed to the Folly Beach Pier.

We layed out on the beach for a while, then headed to Locklear’s for lunch.

Jarrod got a chicken wrap and I ordered the shrimp burger wrap:

I’m still not entirely sure what a shrimp burger is made of, and I don’t think my belly was very fond of it! That’s ok, that left more room for hushpuppies 🙂 The food wasn’t stellar, but we were really there for the view anyway:

After lunch, we strolled along the pier.

Then back to the beach so Jarrod could catch some rays:

And I could lay under the pier in the shade: Haha…

And then I got pooped on… Second time time that has happened to me. It’s supposed to be good luck, but I don’t know about that. Getting pooped on is pretty crappy in my opinion 😉

Lucky for you, I didn’t take a picture!

For dinner, we hit up the Mellow Mushroom.

This place was, well, trippy, for lack of a better word:

I orderd the field green salad and Jarrod got the ceaser salad and some tortilla soup:

Of course we also got some bruschetta to share:

All of this was delicious, but the Gourmet White pizza we ordered was AMAZING:

Jarrod said he could “eat this for nine days.” Thankfully, we don’t have a Mellow Mushroom near home… though there is one in Columbus….

After dinner, we went to the Vendue Inn Roooftop bar for a drink:

Love this bar. It was really nice and breezy and they had some great live music. We also saw Nick Lachey which was funny.

Today we are headed home. Strike that. Change of plans! Today we are headed to Edisto Beach, then back to Charlotte 😀 Home will have to wait!

Restaurants, Travel

10-Mile-Saturday

July 18, 2010 5 Comments

Saturday morning I woke up around 7am to get my run in. It was already 80+ degrees and 85%+ humidity. Perfect running weather, right? Even though the air was so thick feeling, I was excited to get out and explore some of Charleston on my run. I’m still on week #5 of the interval training, which means I’m doing 3 intervals of 3 minutes walking and 7 minutes running.

Here’s the route I ran:

My time per mile was a lot slower than my Charlotte run earlier in the week — but I’ll crack that up to the crazy humidity!

We were planning to have a late breakfast, and were in search of bottomless mimosas, so we headed to Toast.

Bottomless mimosas:

I took this picture several times, and somehow a bulging bicep kept appearing in the background… 😉

We split the Deluxe French Toast stuffed with apples and apple syrup:

And the all garden omelet (which I added sausage, zucchini, and pepper jack cheese to):

Both of these were delicious, and the mimosa made for a very relaxing brunch 🙂

(Unintentional foreshadowing: we are headed to the Folly Beach Pier today!)

After brunch, we set out to walk along the river banks. We walked, and walked, and wallllkkkeeeedddd…..

On our way back towards the studio, we stopped at the Buccaneer restaurant for some margaritas and snacks. The Buccaneer has a ton of authentic pirate artifacts, which was pretty neat.

I ordered the crab cake:

This was pretty good, but I don’t think my belly is sold on crab meat yet. I could only eat half of this (may have been do to the exhaustion from walking though).

Here’s the route we walked during our Saturday afternoon excursions:

That’s over 7 miles. Add that to the 3 miles for my AM interval training, and you’ve got yourself a 10-Mile-Saturday!

After a much needed 2-hour nap and showers, we headed to California Dreaming for some waterfront dining.

View from our table:

First up was the bottle of wine:

We split the chicken quesadilla appetizer:

SOOO frickin good.

For dinner, we split the blackened chicken pasta:

Pasta four nights in a row? Check. 😀

And then we split the hot brownie with ice cream for dessert:

Of course we were extremely happy with this meal:

We decided to go green on the way home, and called up a Green Taxi:

Jarrod was pretty pumped about this:

Today is our last day in Charleston! We plan to get in a little beach time then head to King street for some grub 🙂

Restaurants, Travel

Italian take #2

July 16, 2010 8 Comments

Yesterday afternoon, we arrived in Charleston. In an effort to save $$$, I booked us a studio apartment rather than staying in a hotel in the historic district. This saved us about $400, but we are about 1-2 miles out from most of the restaurants and sightseeing we want to do. I think the savings offsets the distance, plus with all the eating we’re doing the more walking the better!

We have a full kitchen, washer dryer, and nice dining area too:

While Jarrod was in Belgium he said all he wanted was some decent Italian food, and there was none to be found near his worksite. So, I grudgingly complied with his request to get Italian for the second night in a row…. 😉 Just kidding–Italian is my fav too!

After some googling, we decided to go to Bocci’s in Historic Charleston because their menu had a lot of different dishes we had never tried.

Typically, when I go to the store to buy wine I end up with Cabernet about 90% of the time. So in an effort to keep trying new things we went with Bocci’s special wine of the night:

This wine was FANTASTIC! I’m so glad the waitress recommended it. It was full bodied and had a great spice to it.

For the appetizer, we really REALLY wanted to order the bruschetta…. But we decided to push ourselves outside our tomato-basil-cheesy-bread-goodness comfort zone and instead ordered the Arancini. The arancini is an arborio rice ball made with sausage, parmesan, ricotta and roasted red peppers, fried to golden brown and served with marinara sauce:

And it was absolutely delicious!

The ambiance of the restaurant was fantastic. It was low lit, and had a series of small rooms with sporadic tables of all shapes and sizes. It reminded me of restaurants I visited in Europe back in college, especially with the huge doors that opened up to the outdoors.

For our main entre, we went with the Chicken Conchiglia: Large pasta shells stuffed with chicken, three cheese mix, and herbs, topped with tomato basil sauce and baked:

These were so tasty — and super filling! We ended up brining 3 of the 5 shells home with us. I think we might make them into sandwiches later today 😀

Charleston has so much character (and so much humidity 😉 ).

Since I’ve been gone, two of my friends from home have decided to try out overnight oats (and send me pictures)! I think they miss me 🙂

Tim tried oats + almond milk + cinnamon + brown sugar + banana + peanut butter:

In his words they were: “mmmm OMG perfect!”

Jessie decided to try oats + almond milk + peanut butter + cinnamon + brown sugar + strawberries + blueberries:

In her words: “OMGGGGG. These rocks my socksssss”

😀 So if you haven’t tried them based on my raving, now you have two additional ravers to back up my love for overnight oats! I think that’s the first thing I’m going to eat when I get home!

Ramblings

July 12th

July 12, 2010 6 Comments

Happy day of birth to me!

Today’s morning started off with:

That’s a card from dad and a card from mom 🙂

Last night, I cooked up some of my low-carb waffles. I’ve been tweaking the recipe little by little, and each attempt gets better and better!

This time I mixed the dry ingredients in one bowl:

1/4 Bob’s Red Mill Low-Carb Baking Mix
1/8 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp cream of tartar
1/8 tsp cinnamon

In another bowl, I whipped an egg white light and frothy. Next, I added 1/4 cup of Almond Breeze Unsweetened Vanilla Almond Milk and whipped the two of them together.

Then I slowly and gently mixed in the dry ingredients and added another tsp of almond milk, and cooked them up on the waffle iron for 10 minutes.

At work this morning, I popped the waffles in the toaster then topped them off with some fresh frozen strawberries and blueberries that I heated up in the microwave and some Smucker’s Sugar free syrup.

These waffles just keep getting better! They were definitely fluffier. Definitely tasty.

Good news/bad news:

Good news is it’s birthday and vacation time! Bad news is, I’ll be doing little-to-no cooking over the next week or so :-/

I’m going to keep my blog updated with all the delicious foods and restaurants I get to try, and also my attempts to eat healthy while out of town!

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