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it's all about the food
May. 18th, 2008 11:18 amIn yesterday's post, I forgot to mention the food. Supper here is usually between 9 and 10pm, but when I arrived on Friday I'd had not much for breakfast and a measly airplane snack, and Joel hadn't had much for lunch so by about 5pm we were pretty hungry. So we stopped at one of the various restaurants along the coast and didn't have a full meal but perused the starters and ended up with a fabulous meal of black olives (with garlic and some type of herb I couldn't quite place which I've never had in conjunction with olives before but was REALLY good), soup (I had a vegetable cream, which I think was yellow squash based, he had a mixed fish), bread and cheese (this little round wax-coated cheese where you slice off the top and then scoop the cheese out with a spoon. It's incredibly soft and very tasty!), followed up with melt-in-your-mouth melon and smoked raw ham which we saw them carving off a pig leg a few tables away from where we sat. Wow.
Yesterday by the time we'd made our way over to Cascais we were pretty hungry so we went over to a part of town where Joel had had lunch once during the conference, and found a place that had grilled fish (we'd earlier passed a restaurant on the coast serving grilled fish which smelled wonderful, but it was too earlier to eat then); he had cod with fresh potatoes and I had sea bass with a green salad. We also each had a glass of what is called "green" wine; I guess it's extremely young white wine. Excellent with white fish. We ended up lingering over lunch for nearly two hours. This is exactly my kind of vacation; going some place sunny and warm (well, when the wind wasn't blowing; it was a pretty sharp, cold wind!) where I get to eat good food in the company of Joel. That's just about perfect. We were pretty close to the Cascais citadel by then, and so we went there next as planned, but though we went inside and all the way around, we didn't find the open air artillery museum. Oh well. We'd been out in the sun long enough by then that the top of Joel's head was getting a bit sunburned (I forgot to bring his hat), so we started heading back to Estoril, stopping at the grocery store along the way. We managed an all-Portuguese haul -- some cheese (from the Acores), a smoked sausage (which has stunk up our hotel room nicely), Jonagold apples, and a round bread, which we'll make a picnic lunch out of today or tomorrow whichever day we go hiking, and a box of the best looking strawberries that I've seen in years, which we didn't bother saving but just washed up and ate as soon as we got back. They were large and red (all the way through) and extremely flavorful and sweet without being overly sweet. Quite a treat.
For dinner we went to an Italian place he'd eaten at a few nights ago for pizza. I'm always a sucker for good pizza, no matter what country I'm in, and this was good pizza indeed, it hit all my good pizza buttons. Before that, we wandered through the casino a bit. One of the promotional flyers in the hotel claims that the casino is the largest in Europe, but Joel has expressed doubts about that. It's the first time I've ever been in a Casino. I expected it to be a lot more visually and aurally assaulting than it was; it was really rather subdued. But we wandered around and marveled at the eternal optimism of the human race that against all odds of chance continues to think "maybe next time!"
Yesterday by the time we'd made our way over to Cascais we were pretty hungry so we went over to a part of town where Joel had had lunch once during the conference, and found a place that had grilled fish (we'd earlier passed a restaurant on the coast serving grilled fish which smelled wonderful, but it was too earlier to eat then); he had cod with fresh potatoes and I had sea bass with a green salad. We also each had a glass of what is called "green" wine; I guess it's extremely young white wine. Excellent with white fish. We ended up lingering over lunch for nearly two hours. This is exactly my kind of vacation; going some place sunny and warm (well, when the wind wasn't blowing; it was a pretty sharp, cold wind!) where I get to eat good food in the company of Joel. That's just about perfect. We were pretty close to the Cascais citadel by then, and so we went there next as planned, but though we went inside and all the way around, we didn't find the open air artillery museum. Oh well. We'd been out in the sun long enough by then that the top of Joel's head was getting a bit sunburned (I forgot to bring his hat), so we started heading back to Estoril, stopping at the grocery store along the way. We managed an all-Portuguese haul -- some cheese (from the Acores), a smoked sausage (which has stunk up our hotel room nicely), Jonagold apples, and a round bread, which we'll make a picnic lunch out of today or tomorrow whichever day we go hiking, and a box of the best looking strawberries that I've seen in years, which we didn't bother saving but just washed up and ate as soon as we got back. They were large and red (all the way through) and extremely flavorful and sweet without being overly sweet. Quite a treat.
For dinner we went to an Italian place he'd eaten at a few nights ago for pizza. I'm always a sucker for good pizza, no matter what country I'm in, and this was good pizza indeed, it hit all my good pizza buttons. Before that, we wandered through the casino a bit. One of the promotional flyers in the hotel claims that the casino is the largest in Europe, but Joel has expressed doubts about that. It's the first time I've ever been in a Casino. I expected it to be a lot more visually and aurally assaulting than it was; it was really rather subdued. But we wandered around and marveled at the eternal optimism of the human race that against all odds of chance continues to think "maybe next time!"
