Full English

I go the Sunset Valley Farmers Market almost every week. While I'm usually going for veggies, fruit and fresh pecans, other stuff sometimes finds itself in my bag. This can be hot sauce or pesto from Sgt. Peppers or teas from Sesa, but more often it's sweets from Full English.

The booth at Sunset Valley Farmers Market

Owned by a charming couple, Alice Bachini-Smith and Shad Smith, Full English makes traditional English pastries in small batches from scratch, using good ingredients like unrefined sugar, Callebaut chocolate and unbleached flours.

The stall always has a good variety of sweet and savory pastries, and sometimes chutney and lemon curd.

Savory pastries

I haven't tried anything I didn't like there. The cheese pasties are savory and flaky.

The flapjacks are slightly chewy, kind of crunchy oat cakes that are nothing like American pancakes. The sweet and moist cakes have a great oaty flavor.

Flapjacks

My favorite, though, is the rock bun, a tiny muffin-shaped crumbly cake. It's crisp on the outside, and has an amazing toasty, buttery flavor. The light crunch of the outside of the pastry is well balanced by the crumbly texture of the interior, which is chock-full of plump, juicy raisins.

The humble but mighty Rock Bun.

I remember my first rock bun, from when the stall first opened at Sunset Valley about a year and a half ago. I had bought one for me and the man to share, not knowing how delicious it was going to be. After we shared that bun later that Saturday evening, we were both upset that we a) didn't get at least two of them, and b) had to wait a whole week before getting another one.

Since then, we're been buying them in 6-packs, except for when they run out (sometimes early!), when we shake our fists at the sky and hope for better luck next week. For a while, we were getting them once a week. Now it's more occasional, but we usually try to get them when we know we're having out-of-town guests.

Full English sweets are available at:
Sunset Valley Farmers Market
Farm to Market Grocery
Thom's Market
Live Oak Market
Cafe Caffeine
The Hideout Coffeehouse

Tasting Home

A couple of weekends ago (before the Great Motherboard Death of 2009), I escaped the heat of Texas for a long weekend in upstate New York. My sweetie and I visited his family and attended a wedding on Lake Seneca.

The cool breeze off Lake Seneca, and later in the trip, off Lake Ontario was refreshingly crisp, and a kind of chilly I forgot I could feel in the never-ending heat we're been experiencing in Austin.

I attended the large Rochester Public Market one Thursday morning. At the first table, I saw pineapples. Why are there pineapples in a farmers market in New York, I asked myself. I asked someone manning a table where the farm was, and was answered "We don't have a farm." So, this isn't a growers' market, I guess.

I did find plenty of farm tables, including one with a towering pile of fresh sweet corn that I had to sample, raw, right at the market. Coming from the Midwest, I miss big, juicy ears of sweet corn, and that one did not disappoint.

Probably the most abundant fruit at the market were New York apples. There were varieties I'd never heard of, and they were all incredibly inexpensive. Had I had more time in NY, I would have bought baskets and baskets of them.

On the way home, we had a short layover at O'Hare. Being a Chicago native, I miss the airport (or, I miss living in a hub city where I don't have layovers on every trip). It's familiar, and I know I'm in for a treat whenever I visit home or have a connection there because of the Garrett Popcorn shop.

Why I love the airport

When I was a kid, my grandma worked downtown. Sometimes, as a treat, she'd stop by Garrett's and buy a small bag of their Chicago Mix, a sweet-salty blend of their homemade caramel and cheese corns. The caramel is buttery and sweet, and the cheese is tangy and salty and a finger-staining shade of orange. Together, they're one of my favorite foods from childhood.

Salty-sweet goodness

Melon Soup

One of the things I really dislike about the summer in Austin is the heat. It's oppressive, and it feels like it's never going to end.

One of the things I love about the summer in Austin is the fruit. I look forward to melon season all spring long.

This year, one of the first farms to have melon at the Sunset Valley market was Buena Tierra.

Buena Tierra Farms

Fresh melon is crisp and cooling, and I don't think I've ever had melon as delicious as the melon I've gotten here in Texas. Maybe it's the heat?

I've also had melons I hadn't heard of before moving here, my favorite of which is the galia. It's kind of canteloupey, kind of honeydewy, and all delicious.

Fresh Galia

And during these really hot days, a chilled melon soup is simple to make, requires no cooking and is really cooling to eat.

Melon Soup
One melon, preferably galia
1-2 cups vanilla-flavored yogurt, depending on the size of the melon
Juice of 1 lime
2 Tablespoons agave nectar
1/2 inch ginger, grated
1 Tablespoons chopped fresh mint leaves
1/2 teaspoon salt

Cut the melon in half, and scoop out and discard the seeds. Scoop the flesh into the bowl of a food processor. Add yogurt, starting with 1 cup. Add the rest of the ingredients, and more yogurt to taste.

Soup with mint leaves and ginger snaps

Instead of croutons, I like to crush ginger snaps on top.

Chocolate Grapes!

Chocolatey, grapey goodness

It's grape time! Once a year, for only 4 days, Lammes Candies, a fifth-generation, family-owned local chain of candy shops, sells their chocolate-covered grapes.

I usually find myself in a Lammes store when I'm visiting home, or having out-of-town guests coming to visit me. I get a handful of their pecan-packed Texas Chewies, a buttery, chewy praline that everyone loves.

Lammes on 38th & Lamar
Texas Chewies, plain, chocolate-covered, or habanero-flavored

But, come grape time, I am scrambling to get there, thinking, should I get two boxes? Will I be able to make it back to get another before they're over?

See them? Stacked on the back counter?!

Why they're only available 4 days a year is beyond me. They're delicious. Better than chocolate-covered strawberries, I think.

At $8.95 a box, they're not cheap, and the box disappears quickly. The cool grapes crunch under the hard shell of chocolate, and give way to lots of juice.

Half a box left

I've already made my way through most of my first box, thinking of the second to come.

Seattle Weekend

I spent a fantastic few days in Seattle last weekend.

The man and I stayed in Kirkland, a cute little town across Lake Washington and near Redmond. We arrived on Friday afternoon and spent a little while at the Friday Night Market at Juanita Beach. Though small, the market held a wealth of fresh and ripe stone fruit, including a few varieties of cherries.

Yes, cherries. We bought about a pound from one of the first stalls we encountered, intending to take them back to our hotel and eat them later. They lasted about 5 minutes. Seriously? These were the best cherries I've had in my life.

They were soft, juicy, sweet and really complex in flavor. I love cherries, and I thought supermarket cherries tasted good. Well, they're nearly all from Washington, and Washington cherries in Washington are like nothing I've ever had.

We bought another pound to take back with us, along with the most delicious fresh apricot I've tasted.

The next morning, we checked out the University District Farmers Market, where we got even more cherries. There the standard Bings and Raniers, along with varieties I'd never even heard of - Goldens, Index and more.

We brought about a pound or so home with us, and have been snacking on them every night. I'm going to be sad when they're gone (probably tonight).

Sunday morning, before heading to the airport, we ate breakfast at Trellis a farm-to-table restaurant near the water in Kirkland. After checking out the menu, I ordered the cheese plate from the dinner menu.

left to right: Cougar Gold Cheddar with toasted hazelnuts and quince paste, Mt. Townsend Seastack triple creme with orange-tomato marmalade, fresh crisp bread and Point Reyes Bleu with onion jam.

The cheese plate itself was great - the cheeses were delicious, but cold (I totally understand they weren't room-temp. Not everyone wants cheese for breakfast), and the jam and marmalade were really good, too.

There were some doughnuts for the table with some house-made strawberry compote and butter. The doughnuts were fine, but would have been much better warm. They had a slight orange flavor, and were tasty with the compote.

House Pizzeria

I'm picky about pizza. I haven't eaten a lot of it in Austin, and I think that's mostly because the pizza here never measures up to what I'm expecting. And what I expect is a thick and chewy crust with a crisp exterior with a sweet-tart tomato sauce and good-quality toppings.

I've liked Home Slice so far, but I've found a new favorite: House Pizzeria.

I love it for a lot of reasons:

They have great drinks, from local beers to Mexican Cokes and Italian sodas. Plus, the plain table water is served chilled in these sexy glass bottles:

Everything is really fresh. The mixed green salad, with strawberries, chevre and walnuts has great texture and a lot of flavor.

The roasted olives sounded great, but were only OK. And for two people, the large ramekin they were served in was waaay too big. The homemade bread they were served with was good, too.


Most of all, the pizza is fantastic. The crust isn't thick, but it's somehow thin, crisp and chewy. The toppings are fresh and abundant. So far, I've tried the Eggplant, the Potato & Goat Cheese and the Arugula & Garlic.

The crust is nicely charred on the bottom, with great texture. My favorite so far is the Arugula & Garlic, with piles of fresh arugula on top of melty fontina and tomato sauce. The Eggplant and the Potato & Goat Cheese aren't bad either. Next on the list to try: the Margherita.

Tarbouch

Tarbouch opened in my neighborhood about two weeks ago. The small Lebanese restaurant sits next door to Curra's on East Oltorf.

At dinner on Friday night, I was lucky enough to snag the last empty table of the dozen or so in the dining room.

Being new, the service was a little frazzled, but all was absolutely forgiven when the food arrived.

I tried the vegetarian plate, a selection of 5 dishes (chosen from a list of 9).

I got (clockwise from the top left) baba ghannouj, grape leaves, Tarbouch potatoes, tabbouleh and Greek salad. I'm not sure I'd get the Greek salad again -- it looked like a bagged iceberg salad mix tossed with some fresh red onion and topped with feta, but everything else was really good.

The tabbouleh was very fresh and bright, the grape leaves creamy on the inside, and the potatoes flavored with lemon and garlic, but the standout was the baba ghannouj. I could probably eat a plateful of that stuff and still go back for more. It's creamy, lemony and smoky - why isn't my baba ghannouj ever smoky? Whatever they did, I think it's some kind of eggplant voodoo because that stuff is almost too good.

I tried a bite of a falafel, which I thought was just okay. But to get more of the baba ghannouj, tabbouleh and try more, I'm planning a return visit.