Eating in a box

It seems that I'm doing more travel than I'm doing cooking this year. Heck, I still have a couple of posts from the last trip that I never finished. (One features a visit to a chocolate museum in Belgium) I still have a couple of cooking posts that I haven't managed to post either. I'm a bit behind.  As you can tell from the title picture we're in Sydney, Australia! This is a view from a harbor ferry of the opera house. This was a two week visit but I'm going to consolidate it into one post and skipped a few of the places we ate at (I left my camera in a few instances). We landed 6 am and since we had time to kill before checking in (and had to keep ourselves awake) we walked down to Chinatown and got some Yum Cha (Dim Sum) at the Emperor's Garden. It was ok, the fact of the matter is it was the only thing open so we couldn't be too picky and since we didn't have a fridge we couldn't order a lot to check out the variety. Here's a p...

Day Three was mostly a restful and un-eventful day. We moved rooms (this would be second of our total three room changes), but this was a planned "upgrade" (re: upsell when we got here) that gave us access to the premium "Chef's Plate" restaurant. This was the restaurant that required an upcharge of $80 per person and you had to dress nice (that's what they said but it turned out some people didn't do that). With the room upgrade all reservations at this restaurant were then free so we decided to check it out, after all we'd already paid for it. I suppose since it was free for us I didn't know what to expect. The restaurant had about 12 total tables and started seating at 6:15pm with the last seating at 9:00pm in 15min increments. The restaurant was quiet, dark, and romantic. They had a maître d to greet you, two waiters serving the tables, bus boy, dedicated bartender, chef with assistant (that were visible) to provide for the experience. T...

Day 2 of our trip to Boston, above is the famous Fenway Park home to the Boston Red Sox. I caught this shot during our first day viewing the panoramic scene on top of the Prudential building.  That morning we were preparing for our segway tour and took a walk thru Quincy Market. Quincy market houses a huge "food court" (much like you would find in any mall just lots bigger) with every type of food you could imagine. Next to it was an open air farmers market. We didn't get a lot of time to linger here since we were heading out to lunch. There were lots of street performances and I could see this being a nice "make a day of" shopping eating and entertainment.  We made our way to lunch at the Union Oyster house. It makes the claim to be "The oldest restaurant in America" and the plaque from the national park service (pictured above) confirms it.  As expected they had fresh oysters as well as littlenecks and cherrystone clams. Sitting in the...

Day 5 of my trip. Did some more snorkeling and got up close and personal with my frowny faced turtle friend. I plan on doing a morning snorkel to see what I can see before all the other guests cloudy up the water. Sorry, the dolphin swim didn't allow us to take our own photos. I got this photo with one of the dolphins and a trainer. It was a fun experience, the dolphins have such great personalities. The two dolphins that we played with were the two newest moms. They would whistle to their young during our session and the little ones would swim across the pools and do a drive by on us. The first two meals today were rather unremarkable. For breakfast we went to the breakfast buffet. The only unique thing was a chicken Jook (congee) the rice was cooked with a seasoned chicken broth that had some ginger in it. I'm going to have to recreate this as it was a very flavorful congee. For dinner we went out to Hawi 45 mins north of our the resort to a great local restau...