we haven’t been making it out to as many food truck events – from what I can tell, it’s a hard business. Trucks break down, rain happens, the cost of the unexpected and constantly chasing the herd must take it’s toll as I have seen lots of these trucks just melt away. We did make it out to a Daily City Food Truck Bazaar where I had a luminous roasted peach, blue cheese and arugula on crispy pork belly sandwich by 5Gastronomy. Sweet and salty with the peaches and arugula giving freshness to the pork.
new fantasyland
first full day of vacation and we thought we’d join ten thousand of our closest friends for the first open to the public weekend at Disney’s *new* Fantasyland. 
A friend had said, ‘it’s really REALLY good.” ….
right. So, I started this blog in, I’m not gonna lie to you, December. Two vacations ago. We’ve since cruised to Grand Cayman/Mexico, jetted to Denver, celebrated Christmas in Sarasota and New Years belated Christmas brunch at home, had out of town guests and walked the Color Run. But, the lingering memories of ‘New Fantasyland’ are these…. The castle is remarkable. Beautiful in it’s somewhat medieval Frenchness of grey stones and far off turrets. They outdid themselves in the humor of the statues and their homely winning faces. We waited in line for lunch and ate in the ballroom where Belle danced with her Beast and with snow falling outside (or is it inside?) the windows and toured the West Wing with a cloched rose dripping petals. We had a Le Fou’s brew (frozen apple juice-don’t bother) in her village at Gaston’s tavern and rode clamshells through Ariel’s home turf. Lunch in the castle had a bit of Disney tax – we had tasty pot roast with French green beans and croque monsieur. It was fun to be served lunch from glass enclosed trolley’s rolling by. All in all, it was really really good.
sometimes I amaze myself
I haven’t been blogging much and have a massive backlog of photos and would be ideas. It’s just the way it goes sometimes. I amazed myself with my dinner contributions tonight on the first night back to work after vacation by preparing a super quick but ambitious dinner gleaned from delicious magazine. It is a UK publication that I love and have a stack of in the kitchen from the weekend clean out of our third bedroom…more on that later. I flipped through and found this recipe for gnocchi. Salty streaky bacon, pesto and creamy toasted pine nuts tossed in a grocery store packet of gnocchi. Easy weeknight stuff in about as much time as it took to boil water and cook a few slices of bacon. To show my chops we also had homemade creme brulee for dessert-divine and comfortable.
one little word…ish
let’s go back a couple of weeks. I read a lot of blogs, mostly food and various others as a means of relaxation, education and inspiration. Several blogs I follow have championed the idea of ‘one little word’ being a word to insert into your year for whatever track someone would want to go down, words like peace, joy, drama – well, maybe not drama. I don’t go in much for resolving and was fairly interested to consider our year in review to see where we’ve been looking through old posts and photos. Last year ended with something of a whimper. Haven’t been so cheered by the thought of a turned calendar page in many years. But where am I going? I’m not always sure and often find myself blown along by the next adventure. I tried to think of a word and was buffeted by the ideas more than words. There are so many things I want to do, see, be. So, there is it. Refine. We can be refined and purified and changed. I can refine my habits, my surroundings, myself. I can consider. I don’t need to bust out an answer just because one is asked for. I can refine relationships, my overflowing inbox and my eating habits. I can be refined in how I act, think and pray. So, in this year, I was to practice discardia and knock off a few of those rough edges and be purified in the process.
Wikipedia says refining (also called affining) is the process of purification of a (1) substance or a (2) form. The term is usually used of a natural resource that is almost in a usable form, but which is more useful in its pure form.
tartini
well let’s just say that the world as we know it doesn’t end today and you need someplace to go for dinner tonight in Orlando. I’d recommend someplace new. Tartini opened about a week ago and says that they are a pizzeria and spaghetteria. (Do you know how to say spaghetteria?) Wood fired pizza and pastas in a not your same old Sysco red sauce joint. We tried to go to this place two or three times before they opened – some confusing lack of real info on their website and long lead time to opening. I didn’t actually think they ever would but then, two weeks ago Friday, I saw it drop into Facebook. Grand Opening. So, we went. It wasn’t too busy yet and I know of a couple people who later commented, ‘that place is never open!” so it may take them a while to rev up. It has a clean contemporary vibe and we were kind of amused to hear them state that they import lots of their food from the server. That’s not a very modern concept when so many tout the buzz of local and seasonal. They did say the cheese for the pizza is domestic buffalo milk mozzarella. I ordered a pizza and Z ordered pasta. He requested one of his favorites, carbonara. It was a good one, creamy and eggy with lovely salty bi
tes of meaty pancetta. I ordered the Diablo pizza-hot sopressata, pepperoni and cherry peppers. It was spicy in a good keep eating me kind of way. But the stand out for me was the crust. Fired in a wood oven it has an amazing crusty sweet wheaty chew with the little hint of bitterness that comes from being slightly charred in places from the intense heat. Can I say more about it. It is the crust I haven’t been able to find in Orlando and that I crave! They did well for their first night. I would definitely recommend Tartini and we will be going back-barring of course, the end of the age.
My Urban Pantry 