Exploration! Destination: Decorah, IA

We've made it to the East Coast now (in fact, I've been in Richmond for the last three weeks)! I'm just now taking the time to slowly chronicle the rest of the road trip and wax nostalgia for the two weeks on the road and the brief respite from my all consuming fear of (continued) unemployment waiting for me in North Carolina.

But enough of my negativity! Onto the interesting things and Decorah is very interesting. Decorah must be the most interesting town in Iowa. Although I haven't spent a lot of time there (or any time really), I am almost certain that no other Iowan town can beat Decorah. I wish I had more pictures to share on Decorah, and thus better illuminating my point about how interesting it is, but by this point in the trip I started to get photography fatigue and the heat wave washing over the entire area didn't help. You'll just have to imagine the town, aided by my spectacular prose.

Picture taken after we dipped our feet into the cool spring water behind us. I sure hope it's not a drinking water source for people.

The main purpose of our stop in Decorah was mostly to visit our college friend, Steffen. Jack and I hadn't seen Steffen since the end of college, so it was nice to see him and catch up. The secondary purpose of the stop was to eat, drink, and be merry because we quickly discovered there were a lot of good food and drinks to be had in town.

After rolling into town on the back of a cresting heat wave in the Midwest, we dropped off our things at Steffen's place and quickly sought out anyplace with AC. We had some happy hour snacks and drinks ($3 Mojitos and $4 Martinis? Haven't seen those prices since Palomino's changed their menu) at the Tap Room Bar, located in the Winneshiek Hotel. The happy hour snacks would be the first in a string of amazingly delicious foods I would have while in Decorah.

After our 4pm drinks, we went over to the fish hatchery at a nearby park (one of two things we did in town that did not involve us eating or drinking). The fish hatched at the hatchery are eventually released into the local rivers making for an easy capture by local fishermen. At the park you can buy a fistful of fish food to feed the trout, so of course I had to put in a quarter for the food. While I had fun seeing the fish whip themselves into a frenzy for the pellets of fish food I threw in, I also had a small, brief pang of guilt because I knew that all I was doing was fattening them up so they could eventually be "released" into the river just to be captured by fishermen.

After all the fish feeding fun, we headed back to town for dinner at La Rana Bistro, which if you were not paying attention (or somehow got lost for about 2,000 miles) looks like a restaurant found in the Northwest. They have a focus on local foods with a small changing specials board and they offer a nice selection of beers and cocktails. So of course, we all have another round of drinks with our dinners. It was a hot day, after all.

After dinner, we strolled along the main drag and eventually ended up at a Homebrew Contest hosted by a local gallery, the ArtHaus. Seriously, are we in the Northwest? After some good beers and some not so good, it was starting to get dark and the fireflies came out! Fireflies! Or, I guess as they call it out here, lightning bugs. At first I thought my eyesight was being affected from all the beer tasting but, it was just the little bug lights flickering and disappearing as they search for their little lightning bug mates.

The next day, we started out at the local farmer's market. The chef from La Rana had a booth with food and, of course, based on the dinner we had the night before, I had to go and try the offerings. First off, there was the coffee, which was billed as a New Orleans Ice Coffee, and that was ridiculously addicting. Once it hit my lips, it was so good! It was like a new revelation in coffee and I've decided that I must have that recipe, so that I may make it at home by the bucket full and drink nothing but that all day. Second, there was the bagel bomb, which consist of a "pastry" made from bagel dough and stuffed with bacon and cream cheese. I don't even like cream cheese and I thought it was delicious. Holy crap, what a way to start the day.

Afterward, we headed out to Seed Savers Exchange, where Steffen works, to check out their public garden area, take in a tour, and poke around a few of their fields where they grow and maintain different heirloom seeds. I'm not someone with a particularly green thumb (I killed a chive plant, once), but visiting Seed Savers gave me hope (that and Steffen gave me a bunch of seed packets). I also learned a lot about heirloom seeds, how to properly propagate them, and a many other things that I fear have been lost into the folds of my brain.

Just before we left, we stopped to have one last meal at Ede's and the Angry Pickle Deli. It's no Salumi, but it was filling and the perfect send off for another day on the road. I was sad to leave Decorah and the town of delicious foods, because we wouldn't find good food until we hit Richmond, VA. Although there was the hot breakfast at the Holiday Inn in Chillicothe, OH...they had warm biscuits and gravy and all the coffee I could drink!

Healthy food is better when it is made unhealthy.

Now here comes the part where I am going to share a recipe with you. However, I've discovered that I keep track of my recipes the old Asian mama way: That is, I don't know the specific amounts for any ingredient because I make things up as I go along so that when people ask me for recipes I end up telling them the ingredient list, but I couldn't fully articulate how much to put into the dish either because I eyeball it each time or I'm guarding a closely held family recipe secret (and for now, it's mostly the former).

However, unlike an old Asian mama, I tend to drink a bit while I cook.  I find it helps ease off the pressure of making a good meal because when you've got the drunk munchies, everything will taste awesome, dude.

I am actually surprised that I managed to doctor up a dish by myself because I usually rely a lot on my cookbooks or cooking blogs. I've never quite figured out whether it is because I don't trust myself to taste my dishes and feel when it's seasoned perfectly or that I want so badly for a dish to turn out a certain way that I turn to cookbooks again and again to have that consistency. Or it could be neither of those reasons.

At any rate, healthy food is better when there is some element to it that makes it unhealthy.  I like kale more when it is bathed in a pool of cheese and cream with potatoes in a gratin or roasted beets which are topped off with some goat cheese. Quinoa is a fairly healthy grain and I do like it as a substitute for bulgur wheat in tabbouleh, but I've always felt that there was something missing. And that something is: motherfucking MEAT.  I call this my DOUBLE PROTEIN DISH OF AWESOMENESS. The recipe is below:

DOUBLE PROTEIN DISH OF AWESOMENESS:

Ingredients:
-1 cup of Quinoa
-One and a half tomato, diced - I saved the half of one for guacamole that I would make later in the week. Presumably, you could go crazy and use the whole tomato, so that would be two tomatoes.
-Red meat, diced - I used Trader Jose's pre-marinated carne asada steaks. I tried it once with some pork and it was good, but I think I just like the flavor of red meat more. The other time I tried it with red meat was some leftover beef from an Ethiopian restaurant--delicious.
-Lime/lemon juice
-Cucumber or Zucchini, diced - I actually started cutting up some cucumbers for this meal (I had cut up about six slices at this point) and then I decided I didn't want any. So then I stopped, but for the six slices I already threw in, it tasted fine along with the dish.
-Cilantro or parsley or mint--whatever you think complements your red meat more. For the carne asada, I used cilantro--also because I already had cilantro. So, your call.

Er, Directions, I guess:
-Cook the quinoa per the package's instruction...the one it came in.... Unless you bought it from the bulk containers at the store, in which case (and just for your reference) I usually cook it with a ratio of 1 cup of quinoa to about 2 cups of water, bring to a boil, and bring it back down to a simmer for about 15 to 20 minutes.
-While your quinoa is cooking, take out your grilling skillet (or if you have a grill, that would be even better) to cook the red meat. I cooked my meat until it was fairly well done and then I ended up mincing it up to fairly small pieces.
-Dice up the tomatoes, cucumbers/zucchinis, and/or cilantro/parsley/mint and put them into your large bowl. You've got one of those right? Because the quinoa cooks up a lot.
-Oh, by the way, maybe you should probably stir your quinoa once in a while too to make sure that the quinoa at the bottom doesn't stick to the pot and so that it fluffs up like a pilaf.
-After the 15 to 20 minutes, your quinoa should be cooked and properly fluffed. I usually let it cool a bit because I don't like quinoa that's just-off-the-stove hot. So while I'm finishing dicing up the last of the tomatoes or whatever, the quinoa will sit in the pot and chill for a bit.
-Then, when you're good and ready, combine the stuff all together in the big bowl with the tomatoes and cucumbers and cilantro in it and mix it real good. Add in the lime/lemon juice and salt to taste. There's also the option to add some olive oil in there, but I like my quinoa a bit dry-ish, so I wouldn't know how much olive oil you'd want to put. Just eyeball it.
-Finally, take a nice long sip from your gin and tonic and you've got yourself the DOUBLE PROTEIN DISH OF AWESOMENESS.