I love the mix of familiar and unfamiliar when we travel. We bring food from home, but we shop in new markets. We rent an apartment so we can cook most of our own meals, but we also eat out and learn how to translate menus written in different languages. Our first night in Sintra, we went to a school fair (very familiar) but the theme was medieval Portugal (brand new!). Unlike most fairs, where plastic (or, more recently, cornstarch-based biodegradable) cups are standard, here we were given small clay mugs, which have now made their way safely home and become indispensable for breakfast drinks:

The boys shared a candy apple (familiar):

While I was more interested in the skewers of wine-poached pears:

All of our stay involved this fascinating push-pull of new and different. We ate familiar kinds of snacks (cookies and granola)…

…with amusingly new names.

We set the table for dinner outside:

But our table had a view of a castle:

So this is why we travel, even though it can be so complicated, and the rewards so simple: cereal you address with a honorific; a view of a castle. It’s enough to get me packing again.

For the third summer in a row, people we love were in Europe, offering us a reason to visit and, even better, a place to stay. There is always a moment (sometimes quite a long moment) when, contemplating a trip like this (3 cities and 17 days), paging through guidebooks and counting up the number of restaurant meals, I wonder if we shouldn’t just stay closer to home: rent a beach house with family and friends, do more home cooking, spend less of the summer in museums. But I also know these opportunities aren’t going to come again, and I know we’re lucky that we can take advantage of them now. And we have become pretty adept at traveling in a way that minimizes the upheaval and maximizes family harmony and comfort (that is, we pack food). So for the third summer in a row, we counted our lucky stars, booked plane tickets, and packed our bags.

First stop: Sintra, Portugal, the small city outside Lisbon that Byron described as “glorious Eden,” and where my friend Ursula is living in a beautifully rambling home with her daughter, her Portuguese husband, and her mother-in-law. The house is perched on a hill surrounded by a big yard and lush gardens.

the neighbor's horses, grazing out the kitchen window

The boys quickly got used to the backyard chatter of chickens and geese:

feathered friends

And they learned how to use a familiar tool — the mortar & pestle — in a new way: to crack nuts. In the past, their nut-cracking has been with my dad, whose hickory nuts are so hard-shelled he starts them off with a good whack of the sledge hammer on the garage floor. Portuguese hazelnuts offer a much easier entry:

A familiar snack — yogurt with nuts and honey — was the perfect way to start our time away from home.

The table on the Lanai

For some reason, things are easier on Kauai. Take dinner for instance:  grilled fresh fish, rice, local vegetables or salad.  Fast, easy, delicious.  Both Ella and Finn insisted on maybe our second night that things tasted better in Hawaii. They had a point. It might have been the weather. It might have been the lanai. It might have been the ease of it all, or having all of us together, or the pre-dinner watercolor painting in the secret spot. Regardless–family dinners are  a highpoint of vacation partly for the new food (ono, fiddlehead ferns, local pork and beef from just a few miles up the road) but mostly because we all gathered happily together on our garden lanai.

And more to the point:  every night we ate at home,  the kids happily and eagerly set the table. Can I repeat? They set. the. table. With alacrity. Without complaining. With lovely care to attention and detail.  They worked peacefully together. They cooperated. They set the table at home, too, with some regularity, but not nearly with such good cheer and eagerness.  At home, this is a chore that interrupts the very ebb and flow of their life. But on the Island? It’s a Fun Thing To Do.   Go figure.  Personally, I think we need more orchids on the table.  Perhaps that would do it.

We were on Kauai for two glorious weeks and before we went, the kids told me that one of the reasons they love vacation there is because I’m “super-nice” the whole time. Apparently this has a lot to do with the fact that I let them eat shave ice almost every day. This is easily the Hawaiian equivalent of gelato, with a lot less fat.

Jo Jo’s Blue Raspberry

Their flavor picks evolved with the trip, for example:

Day 1= lime and cherry (Ella); mango and guava (Finn)
Day 2=guava & li hing mui/root beer & cotton candy
Day 3=vanilla & coconut / peach & pineapple

After that,  I lost track, but Ella was often seen eating coconut and vanilla to match her toweling shirt.

Finn was the wild card. One day it would be tropical, another day candy-sweet. They liked things that turned their tongue unnatural colors.

Sometimes, we had ice cream on the bottom–vanilla or macadamia nut, which is a real treat.  I dusted mine with li hing mui powder, or tried the haupia (coconut) cream topping.

With Li Hing Mui (salty preserved plum powder)

Not all shave ice is created equal.  There was a decent roadside stand on the way to Koloa, and Jo Jo’s, a shack in Waimea, has terrific syrups (60 in all), and Shave Ice Paradise in Hanalei is open long hours and is good, too.  But the Wishing Well in Hanalei still takes the prize.

Wishing Well’s Local Girl:  Li Hing Mui + Coconut

Grape + Vanilla

Lime + Coconut + Whipped Cream (for Ella’s local girlfriend)

Vanilla + Coconut

Pineapple + Coconut + Guava

It’s in a truck, and it’s almost never open as far as we can tell. Her posted hours are flagrantly wrong (in our limited experience) and she runs out of ice regularly. The owner is ageless, tall and thin and tanned and usually clad in draping island wear.  She is secretive and dictatorial–you have to order in a prescribed way and you can NOT substitute anything in the specials. She will not let you hold the kids up to the tiny screened window so they can see how she works.  But she is amazing and her shave ice is glorious. It’s light and delicate and melts in your mouth. But it does not melt quickly in the cup like some other shave ice does.  I don’t understand how she does it, and when I asked if she had a different machine and she answered cryptically, “No, I just take my time.” She claims her syrups are the same as everyone else’s, save for 4, but I’m not sure I believe her.  There is something mysterious about this truck and magical about just how good the shave ice is.  So if it’s open when you drive by, stop immediately.  While pretty much any shave ice will hit the spot, this is what ice was made to do best.

At Jo Jo’s

I’ve written here before about the food my family takes to travel, the food we’ve eaten on journeys, even the food that has greeted us on our return, but not yet about this particular food/travel issue: cleaning out the fridge before leaving on the trip.

Tonight, on the eve of our 2+-week vacation, and with friends coming to stay in our house ten days from now (and so a week before we get home), I had to think carefully about what we should use up and what could stay put. When the eggs ran out late last week, I didn’t replace them; that half loaf of sandwich bread goes in the freezer, as does that end of baguette, sliced into cubes for croutons and tossed into a bag. We’ll use up the milk in the morning, but the last stick of butter will be fine. It’s the produce that’s trickier, of course. Tonight I found myself adding lots of vegetable sides to our pasta dinner: green salad with shredded carrots; roasted zucchini; roasted potatoes; fresh snap peas. The meal looked a bit like this, the kids ate a ton, and the crisper was nearly empty.

Nearly! I still had a bunch of beets to deal with, so quickly pickled them using the recipe recommended by a reader (my sister!); the recipe was fast, and the pickles will keep until our friends arrive.

Last up: zucchini, which our CSA has been providing at a rate faster than we can handle. I’ve made them into pancakes, fritters, and soup; shredded them into salads or tossed them, roasted, onto pasta with walnuts. Tonight, running out of steam, I grated four cups and stuck it into the freezer for a future soup. Then finally, because I always have time to make muffins, made these lemony zucchini muffins from the fabulous King Arthur Cookbook:

2 c flour (I use a mix of all-purpose and whole wheat flours)
1/2 c granulated sugar
1 scant T baking powder
1 t salt
grated peel of 2-3 lemons (the recipe calls for the peel of just one lemon, which just isn’t enough for me)
1/2 c chopped, toasted walnuts (optional)
1/2 c raisins (optional)
2 large eggs (I’d run out of eggs, but luckily still had egg replacer from when my vegan niece lived with us last year!)
1/2 c milk
1/2 c vegetable oil
1 c shredded, unpeeled zucchini

Preheat the oven to 400.

Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and lemon peel in a large bowl. Stir in the walnuts and raisins.

In a 2-cup liquid measure, combine the milk, oil, and eggs. Pour into the dry ingredients and stir until just barely combined. Fold in the zucchini.

Spoon batter into a 12-cup muffin tin and bake for 20-25 minutes, until a tester comes out clean. Let cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then turn out of the pan to finish cooling.

Some of the muffins will come to the airport with us tomorrow, and the rest will wait in the freezer for our friends, because if we can’t greet them ourselves, at least we can greet them, in absentia, with muffins.

Every Sunday morning, just two blocks from my house, our neighborhood farmer’s market lets me witness the seasonal cycles of California produce and other farm products. Valentine’s Day was the last day for satsumas, for instance, so I bought several pounds for our trip; the woman who sells me eggs explained she’d run out earlier than usual because “The ladies are slowing down.” Our farmer’s market, like many, is made up of small family farms: they bring their kids; they borrow change from the neighboring stand; they may run out of produce and close up early. California agriculture as seen from my farmer’s market every week is low-key and pretty casual.

The California agriculture I saw out the car window last week on our road trip is an enormous machine; it’s the California that feeds this country. One statistic I read says that the state grows “more than half the nation’s fruits, vegetables and nuts from less than 4% of the nation’s farmland.” Driving across that less than 4%, as we did on our drive east and south to Yosemite, and then south some more and west to Santa Barbara, is hugely educational and although I’ve done the drive before, doing it with the kids this time I paid even more attention than usual. I highly recommend loading up the car with the kids, snacks, and books and doing it yourself some day if you can.

This time of year, the orchards are just starting to bloom; we passed almonds, walnuts, peaches and other stone fruit (it’s hard to tell the difference between all the different trees from 70 mph). We saw orange groves that stretched out to the horizon, the trees heavy with big orange globes, and then, as we got closer to Santa Barbara, the spreading branches and shaggy leaves of avocados, their fruit hanging like so many heavy green rain drops. We passed farm stands advertising lobster tails and avocados at 10 for a dollar but because we were nearing the final miles of a six-hour drive and a stop would have made it hard to get the kids ever back into the car, I thought a little sadly of lobster tail burritos with guacamole, and we drove on.

In southern California I was lucky enough to visit two farmer’s markets: a small one in Montecito, and a much bigger one in Santa Barbara. I counted five different kinds of avocados (Pinkerton, Fuerte, Bacon, Hass, Zutano) and was amazed to see that it was already spring, from a produce perspective: the farmers offered snap peas, asparagus, strawberries and loads of tender herbs (at which point I finally remembered to take out my camera):

Then there was the small slice of California agriculture we saw out the window of our cousins’ home; they’re renting a place where the backyard is planted with a half dozen avocado trees. The New Yorker in me was amazed at the bounty (sadly none of it ripe):

The kids just loved playing with the great sticks and the dried-out pits that had fallen from the trees. Our cousins have a lemon tree, too, and this again, for someone who is tending one small potted lemon tree and finally got one planted in the ground this spring, amazed me; even the kids were notably impressed by the size of some of the fruits:

Driving from Santa Barbara back home, our car now fragrant with a grocery bag full of lemons, we crossed miles of grape vines, producing for both wine and table; acres of romaine and other lettuces; and plenty more fruit and nut orchards before the landscape gave way to the beautifully soft, uncultivated green hills of the South Bay. The farms represented at our neighborhood market aren’t visible from these big highways, but now that we’re home I can’t wait to see what they’re selling this week.

It was a hot day. We’d been exploring the Storm King Art Center by foot and by tram; we had picnicked and sculpted and now it was time to refill our water bottles and drive home. We could see, near the water dispenser, a vending machine with ice creams. OK, we told the boys, you can each choose an ice cream.

Tragedy. The vending machine was broken.

Plan B: We’ll stop for ice cream on the way home, we promised. The boys were skeptical, hungry and tired. I wracked my brain, thinking of all the fast food joints we’d passed on the way, but couldn’t remember seeing a single decent ice cream place. We needed the Red Rooster. We got in the car and drove, fingers crossed.

And then I saw the sign: Rita’s Ice Custard Happiness. Perfect!

I have to admit, it wasn’t immediately happiness. This:

grand as it is, was a little overwhelming at first, and there were tears from one boy before there was happiness. But I made the supreme maternal sacrifice and ordered one of the two things he wanted (the lemonade ice custard, which I have to say was excellent, with chewy bits of lemon zest), and then we all felt like this:

What’s a summer without ice cream? No kind of summer at all. Last week we made our own It’s-Its, this week, we stopped in at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk (where everybody has a good ti-ime) and tried out the ice cream treats on offer there.

Ben, no doubt still dreaming of It’s-Its (and also realizing that everything tastes better when served on a stick), went for the chocolate-dipped “sandae”:

Eli just went for sheer size, choosing the Super Sundae Cone:

He even ate the maraschino cherry off the top, and declared “This is the goodest moment ever!” Which made it a really good moment for me, too.

We decided to drive to San Diego so my husband could attend ComicCon, and once we figured out that it was too late to reserve a camping spot halfway down, we decided to stop in Solvang.  For us, if it’s a toss up between a tent and a great deal on a hotel with an excellent restaurant and spa, we’ll take the hotel any day.

We left at 5 AM. That’s right, before dawn, because 1) we wanted to be in Solvang for breakfast and 2) Ella gets carsick, so we figured the more hours asleep in the car, the better.  I had a bag packed with boxed milk, strawberries, and bagels to tide us over until breakfast.  Of course, the kids were so excited that once we were in the car there was No Chance in H— of Sleep.   To combat Ella’s carsickness, I gave her Seabands, which proved miraculous. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a pair for Finn, and about halfway into the trip he moaned, and turned green, and threw up.  So that was the end of the food on that leg of the journey.  He eventually slept, and we did, in fact, arrive in Solvang in time for breakfast at Paula’s Pancakes. I was basically underwhelmed by the restuarant, but the kids quickly got over the sleep deprivation and Finn bounced back from the queasiness, and they loved this place. They both ate impossibly huge stacks (adult servings, actually) of pancakes and blueberries…

which kept them fueled for the rest of a really fun day visiting the Hans Christian Anderson Museum (ok, not their most favorite part of the trip):

riding a bicycle surrey with  fringe on top(really!):

and taking funny pictures of windmills and other such Germanic-Scandanavian things:

We tried to think about eating ebelskiver, and fudge, and ice cream, which everyone around us seemed to be enjoying, but we had no appetite for anything after all those pancakes, not a single one of us.

That evening, we had a really lovely meal at the Hadsten House, which I enjoyed all the more after a terrific massage/body treatment, and then it was on to San Diego.  The kids ate breakfast at the hotel, which made me quite nervous, naturally, but we got Finn a pair of Seabands at the local CVS, and they worked miraculously for him, too. No carsickness for either child for the rest of the trip, which left them free to munch on the granola bars, plums, and piles of pistachios I had packed.  Yes, the car was a mess, but they were happy & not too junk filled.  On the way home, we ate lunch at In ‘N Out burger, the one fast food we allow ourselves, and for which we all, admittedly,  have great weakness.

The trip was not supposed to be about food, but it was about me not having to cook for nearly a week (which was an excellent vacation in itself, mind you).  I was wary of theme park food (which was only truly horrible on one occasion), and I had brought cereal, milk, juice, fruit, bread, peanut butter and jelly, and snack crackers for our hotel room, which proved a really efficient and economical way to deal with breakfast and the occasional lunch.   The food at San Diego Zoo was more than tolerable, at SeaWorld was abysmal (and you can’t bring a lunch in), and we avoided the crowds and junk at Disneyland by making reservations for 2 sit down meals (Blue Bayou and Big Thunder Ranch BBQ, both of which were pricey, but we found worth it for the decent quality food and the down time both places afforded us).

For most of the rest of the trip we visited with beluga whales & dolphins:

where the kids (& I) were truly smitten at the Shamu show:

enjoyed very cute pandas who really did eat bamboo:

met various Superheros & other denizens of the 2 & 3-D world:

consorted with fairies in Pixie Hollow:

rode rides with abandon (including every roller coaster at Disney & Space Mountain (twice), with both kids, and no, for some inexplicable reason, Seabands were not necessary…):

and just generally enjoyed watching Finn vanquish Darth Vader (which video I can only link to for size restrictions, but below is a preview…):

But we did have a few absolutely memorable family food experiences, which will be chronicled here in the coming days, including two excellent local San Diego spots, the kids’ first exposure to truly fine dining, and then the antidote to fine dining:  room service.

Who needs a house, or even a yard, or even a few pots when you have a truck? This one parks in front of my friend’s home in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where they let him use their water.

He’s got lettuce, arugula, squash, basil, nasturtiums, tomatoes…all ready to go from truck to table…