Champuru: From the city to the coast

Now that we’re caught up, we can finally tell you a bit about our vacation! Micah flew in from Wisconsin to join us. The first night he was here, we went out in the city for some delicious Ethiopian food and thought about all of our friends who have ties there. We got a bit delayed in the subway coming home and encountered a very funny scenario involving subway employees, a leaky hose, and a bucket that we’ll have to tell you about sometime, but basically the delay turned into a very late night which turned into a very lazy morning, which meant that we started our vacation at the very slothful pace of hitting the road at about 1pm. I love vacation.

And so our road trip began. Sort of. We ended up sitting in traffic for a lot of the first part. We sat behind this van for about an hour in New Hampshire on our way to Maine. Interesting.

None of us had ever been to Maine, so we really wanted to see what it was like, but the maine (yuk yuk) reason why Maine made the vacation cut was to be honest, the food factor. I think I need to take a minute to explain about my New Years resolution. I don’t normally make a big deal about New Years resolutions, but this year I decided to make a few fun resolutions of things that I really wanted to do. I love to cook, and I’ve always felt that cooking a lobster is just something that I needed to try; a kind of rite of passage or something. So, I told Ian that in order to do this, I thought we had better go to Maine to eat some of their famous lobster so that I could really get a good feel of what it was supposed to taste like (wink wink). Here are a few pics of some of the delicious food we ate in Maine:

I started out with a lobster roll at a local cafe

Micah was excited about the shrimp

The award-winning lobster pie from the Maine Diner, which was featured on The Today Show. We had some fabulous seafood chowder to start and followed it down with some homemade blueberry pie ala mode! Hungry yet?

Chef Ian’s campfire steak and grilled veggies with fresh, pan-fried Haddock. Yum town.

We decided to take advantage of the outdoors and camp during our time in Maine, so we came well equipped with everything we needed to attempt the lobster-cooking. (By the way, thanks to everyone who lent us stuff! This lobster is dedicated to you!) It was quite an experience going to the fish shack to buy our guys, then trying not to bond too much with them while we prepared for their imminent death, then putting them in the pot and eating them. It was a bit sad, to be honest, but they were just so delicious.