Dylan in Vail

Heading West: Inspiration

As I pack for my road trip, I'm listening to the Rolling Stones...

and Johnny Cash (In truth, I love the entire American V album. I pretend the voice is my grandfather, and that he recorded this album for me, so that I would have it forever.)

and one of my favorite voices: Tom Waits. These days, I feel like most of the music on the radio could have been made entirely by a machine, or by one person who sings vocals and synthesizes the rest. These men's voices are like acoustic songs where you can hear fingers moving on the strings: entirely real, gritty and honest.

The first song I ever heard by Tom was "Cold, Cold Ground." Look it up if you like him.

ALSO: To all of my friends and family members who are at the Kenny Chesney/Tim McGraw concert today, and I know there are dozens of you, if you feel like recommending some country for my road trip, go on ahead. Show me what I've been missing!

The Great Divide Road Trip

The story begins like this: I'm milling around a bar with my friends, somewhere in France, and we strike up a conversation with some Europeans - this was a couple of years ago, so I can't be too much more specific. They figure out (without much difficulty) that we are American, and I debate whether to milk it with a big smile and a loud mouth or to turn my stereotype on its head with a sly smile and a direct, witty response. Both are equally appealing to me, usually. As I play around with my mutable identity, a luxury of travel, my friends pick up the conversation and carry it off.

I tune back in as our new acquaintances mention firsthand knowledge of America, and my friends politely ask where they have visited. What was really memorable about this conversation, despite the fuzzy context, is this: our European counterparts, who can't be too much older than us, have visited several dozen American states between them. When they redirect the question at us, wondering how often and how in depth we explore our own country, I start to feel ashamed. I can count the number of states that I have seen on two hands (I might have only driven through of some of them, making it worse). Nearly all of these states are in the northeast, where I was born and raised. I had never driven further west than Pittsburgh (although I had flown to San Francisco in 2004 and Los Angeles in 2009), and rarely traveled further south than Washington, DC (except for the Outer Banks and Disney World). A cross-country road trip appeared rather suddenly on the top of my bucket list.**

To me, and to a lot of people, really, the great American road trip is an east-west trek from one coast to another. Since Lewis and Clark's expedition to the Pacific aided by Sacagawea, the great journey has been west. Think prospectors, manifest destiny, the Oregon Trail, the Transcontinental Railroad, "California or bust!" The idea of heading west is adventurous but also purposeful; it is how our nation grew and part of our American identity.

The north-south trek is less commonly made, because I mean - who really needs to get from Canada to Mexico? Unless you're running from the law, or something. If you want a meaningful reason to travel north to south, however, maybe you should ask a hiker. The triple crown of American hiking is the Pacific Trail, the Appalachian Trail, and the toughest of all: the Great Divide. The line of the Great, or Continental, Divide runs along the spine of the Rocky Mountains. All water that falls on the east of the Divide flows to the Atlantic Ocean, while water falling on the west flows to the Pacific.

Inspired by my father's desire to road trip to the West on his 50th birthday to see the deserts and mountain ranges of America for the first time, a trip was planned along this imaginary north-south line. In less than a week, I'll be embarking on a 9 day road trip through Big Sky and Cowboy Country with my father, sister, and twin brothers. On our agenda:

Bozeman, Montana

Yellowstone National Park

Thermopolis, Wyoming

Fort Collins, Colorado

Boulder, Colorado

Moab, Utah

Grand Canyon National Park

Flagstaff, Arizona

So stay tuned for updates from the road, or please do comment if you have suggestions or ideas to make this once-in-a-lifetime trip extraordinary.

WESTWARD HO!

**After returning from France in May, I had lined up a road trip to Colorado by August. I drove from Philadelphia to Boulder with a friend of mine. A post for another time.

Things I Learned in Cooking Class

1. How to learn which produce is in season in your area. To find out which fruits and vegetables are in season, check the website of a local farmer's market. Often you can find a seasonality chart online. The Upper Merion Farmer's Market has a Harvest Calendar, for example, and seasonal recipes. We'd all love to be the kind of people who shop exclusively at farmer's markets, but in reality we're getting produce at Wegman's 98% of the time. This will at least provide an idea of what foods are probably growing naturally at this time of year, or don't poussent artificiellement as my French house mother once ranted.

2. How to hold a knife. Most people grip the knife by the handle with a fist, or with their forefinger laid flat along the spine, but for more control here is the proper technique: Hold the metal spine of the knife between your thumb and forefinger just where the metal meets the handle; grip the handle with the rest of your hand.

3. The key to perfect pie crust. Pie crust has four ingredients: butter, flour, salt, and water. The key? Very cold butter, very cold water (even put ice in it), and minimum manipulation. Use only just as much water as you need, because the water must evaporate in the oven: too much water = shrunken crust because, put simply, it prevents the butter from doing its job (Angie, I hope I got this right!). Refrigerate, refrigerate, refrigerate - if the dough sticks to the rolling pin, the butter is melting, and that's just no good.

4. Reserve some of the water after cooking pasta. To keep pasta from becoming dry and sticky, reserve half a cup of the cooking water to add as necessary during preparation. In class we made linguini with arugula-parmesan pesto (pesto means paste) and the topping was already somewhat dry. By adding the cooking water to the linguini we got an even coat of pesto and moist pasta. This is generally a good idea when making pasta, because the water with starch still in it will moisten the pasta without watering down the sauce or making the pasta too soggy/watery.

Our supplies for bacon-wrapped chicken marinated in lemon, olive oil and rosemary and spinach with pine nuts. The name of our class was Essence of Tuscany.

I wish I had photos of the finished product, a blackberry and aged balsamic crostada worthy of a cookbook cover, but my will power and my self control disappeared as soon as I smelled it.

*****

Our head chef, Angie Lee at Sur La Table, is a career changer: she worked at NASA before training as a professional chef. Her insights into the chemical reasons for culinary phenomenons was exciting to learn. For example, here is what she taught the class about gluten.

Gluten is like the metal framework when you pour concrete: it provides structure. As dough is manipulated the gluten, which is more like a coil than a square frame, is wound tighter and tighter. The tighter the gluten, the denser the result. Bread is kneaded and so it is very structured, whereas cake is more delicate and crumbly. With a pastry crust, you want to avoid over-handling the dough so that it can become flaky and wonderful in the oven (see tip #3).

So thank you ANGIE, for teaching a girl who will be living and cooking on her own how to make simple meals of a higher caliber!

The Falmouth Oyster Festival

I REMEMBER driving to Falmouth in Cornwall on the southwestern tip of England for the Oyster Festival with my Mom and stepfather Jamie. It was very crowded inside but the music was lively and the food and drink were excellent.

Nom nom... or slurp slurp maybe?

Afterwards we challenged ourselves to walk all the way up to the erstwhile English fort on the top of the highest hill... The only thing that kept me going was the ice cream vendor three quarters of the way up. I bought my new favorite flavor (honeycomb) and took in the view of the harbor while waiting for the sugar high that would carry my weary legs the rest of the way.

Falmouth Port is the deepest harbor in western Europe

The fortress at Pendennis Castle, built by Henry VIII in the 1540s

Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater

This week I took a little trip to Pittsburgh, and on the way back towards Philadelphia decided to stop and spend the afternoon at Fallingwater, a house designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The house was opened to the public in 1964 with its furnishings and setting intact. The architecture and the interior design (including the art) are both reasons to visit in and of themselves.

The downhill path to the house

The peace sign tree (or at least I think so).

Fallingwater was designed and built for the Kaufmann family as a vacation home in the 1930s. The Kaufmanns had envisioned a rustic getaway with a view of the waterfall on Bear Run creek, and thus were understandably surprised when Frank Lloyd Wright revealed plans to build the house on top of the waterfall. He wanted the infrastructure to be completely integrated with nature.

The original budget for the main house: $20-30k; final bill for the main and guest houses: $155k. Can you imagine? That's the equivalent of several million dollars today - and during the Great Depression, no less!

The Kaufmann family decorated their weekend home with art by Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera, wildlife engravings by John J. Audubon, a Tiffany lamp, three-legged peasant chairs from France, a Madonna and Child sculpture from 1420, a statue of a Hindu goddess from the 8th century, and Japanese woodblock prints by Ando Hiroshige that were a gift from Frank Lloyd Wright himself.

Escape to nature and enjoy a sense of seclusion and serenity at Fallingwater.

Steel City

What I have for you today are some iPhone photos from a three day jaunt in Pittsburgh. I basically took the best parts of my favorite days in the 'Burgh over the last few years and then crammed them all into less than a 48-hour time span.

Breakfast at Pamela's Diner, midmorning coffee in Squirrel Hill, playing in the fountains at South Side Works, escaping the heat of the day at the $1 movie theater in West Mifflin, wine during happy hour at the Porch, dinner at Nakama (and dessert next door at Edward Marc Chocolatier), a ride up the incline at sunset, and drinks in Shadyside (the $3 goblets of beer at Mario's are quite a deal).