Eating green without recipes

I’m back from the mountain.  (I’ve been back over a week, actually, but it’s taken me this long to sort through the pictures.) We spent four stunning days at Mount Rainier, camping and hiking, followed by two much wetter, but still fun, days in Seattle.  At Rainier, we saw the mountain up close and personal.  We hiked about 7,000 feet, where the air so thin and smogless that you can feel it clean out your lungs. We walked up close to glaciers, close enough to feel the icy breeze come off them. And there’s no question that while Rainier wins for mind-blowing scenery, great hiking, and crisp cool air, Seattle wins for tasty food.

You may remember that I asked for ideas of camping meals, a couple weeks ago.  I had some strict conditions: we were flying to our destination and bringing our camping gear, so it had to be easy to prepare with the simplest cooking implements, and composed entirely of things we could buy piecemeal at the grocery store upon our arrival.  Most of the advice I got was the same as we were thinking: that sounds hard. We made some allowances for things we couldn’t live without (we bought a little bottle of cooking oil and tossed half of it), and we had some mishaps, but overall I think we did pretty well.  We certainly felt well-fed.  The key was keeping it very, very simple.

The other key is this: when you’ve spent the day camping, anything will taste like the best meal you’ve ever had.

The biggest food-related “mishap” was the mouse that broke into our car the first night and chewed holes in several of our bags of food. The little varmint didn’t ruin everything, and left some things surprisingly untouched, but that mouse cost us at least a meal out of our plans.

This is not the mouse, but it is one of his shameless, fearless cousins who would happily have done the same:

Here’s what we planned, and what we ended up with.

Breakfast:

• Pancakes (from a just-add-water mix) with dried blueberries
• Scrambled eggs, with pan-fried potatoes and veggies sausage
• Oatmeal with dried blueberries (the oats were an early victim of the mouse – fortunately, we had enough eggs and potatoes for an extra meal)

Dinner:

• Baked beans (from a can) and veggie hot dogs
• Annie’s Mac & Cheese with veggie hot dogs
• “Stew” consisting of a can of tomatoes, a can of beans, some chopped potatoes, and cheese.  Cornbread on the side. (The cornbread mix was another mouse victim – and just as well, because it would have been far too much food.)

All this we cooked on a rented, two-burner Coleman stove with an inexpensive two-person mess kit and a Leatherman.  We used no spices, no odds and ends. It was not the best cooking experience of my life, though it made me feel very resourceful.  The macaroni and cheese very nearly overflowed its pot, and was the lumpiest I’ve ever made. We might replace the mess kit with something sturdier and more practical, before our next camping trip.  But everything came out utterly delicious, because that’s how things work when you’re camping.

But the best part about camping is, you get to watch this while you make breakfast:

And when you’re done, you can go see things like these:

The fun foodie part of the trip was in Seattle.  It rained, but we consoled ourselves with good food. We spent less time there than I would have liked, and I was singularly unprepared to know where to eat. Usually when I travel, I’ve got a handful of restaurants in mind, but here, we just wandered, and stumbled upon some good stuff.

I’d never been to Seattle before, and the one foodie destination on my list was Pike Place Market.  This was like no other market that I’ve been to: part European city market, part Neverwhere-style Floating Market. The descriptions I read didn’t do it justice. It was a maze, spread across several buildings and many floors, with windy corridors and usually no way to get from here to there.  We got very turned around. But most of the food stands, fortunately, spread along one long hallway, and restaurants lined the street just outside, so once we found that, we were fine.

The only thing that prevented me from filling up my suitcase with treasure from Pike Place Market was the knowledge that it was already basically full. And a lot of the best things wouldn’t travel well, anyhow.  But I couldn’t help but bring home a few things.

One stand, Papardelle’s, sold handmade pasta in a rainbow of flavors, most of which you wouldn’t find anywhere else.  If I lived in Seattle, I would stop there in the afternoon to pick up just the right one to go with dinner that night. Picking one or two just to have?  That was hard. I picked some “orzo supreme”, a three-flavored orzo that included porcini, saffron, and roasted pepper.

I also got a bag of chocolate raspberry gemelli.  That’s right, chocolate-raspberry flavored pasta.  How could I not?  Nathan asked me what I plan to do with it, and I admit that I don’t know.  Something excellent.  (Suggestions are welcome!)

We also sampled some incredible vinegars, like an aged blackberry balsalmic. But I’d have been scared to take those on the plane.

Down the hall, tucked in a corner behind a crowd of tourists (who were watching some guys throw fish around, for reasons that escape me), was my favorite store: Market Spice.  Imagine a candy store for grown-ups who like to cook. That’s what it’s like, down to the rows of bulk storage containers on the walls, and the man behind the counter who would fetch your candy… errr, your spices for you. One wall was entirely lined with spices, including quite a few rarities, and many of their own blends. A second wall was all coffee and tea. The shelves held boxed tea, containers, teapots, and various other wonderful things. I restrained myself here, and only got a handful of things: a bag of their signature cinnamon-orange tea (both sweet and spicy, it may be my new favorite incarnation of this flavor of tea), some huckleberry tea, a small bag of dried orange zest, and another small bag of local applewood smoked salt, which smells just like a campfire. All of these seemed unique enough to be worth carting home, and I’m already regretting that I didn’t splurge more, because there’s just nothing comparable here in DC.

We had lunch nearby at Beecher’s Handmade Cheese, where you could perch on a stool (if you were lucky enough to get one at the small counter) and watch them make cheese in tubs the size of three bathtubs, while eating their self-proclaimed “world’s best” macaroni and cheese. I’ve always claimed that I make the best mac and cheese in the world (with the exception of the lumpy boxed stuff from our camping trip), but theirs was so good that I won’t begrudge them the title.

Of course, all these stores do online sales. There’s no reason I couldn’t order anything I like, with no worries about fitting it in a suitcase.  But… isn’t that cheating?