Jennifer Jeffrey, Writer & Editor

Random Photo Friday: Inside the Elevator at The Scotsman, Edinburgh

One of my sisters and I traveled together to Scotland a couple of years ago. We hopscotched all over the country, from Glasgow to the Isle of Iona and back, and stayed in something like 7 different hotels. We had a fabulous time.

Some people are tough to travel with, but this one - she's a peach. She never lost her cool, even when my arms were shaking as I tried to get used to driving in the UK for the first time (on the wrong! side of the road, in the wrong! side of the car), and when I reversed into another driver on a busy road near Oban. Oops. (Hint: Always reserve rental cars with a credit card that offers collision coverage. You'll be ever-so-glad you did.)

Near the end of our trip, we drove into Edinburgh and stayed at The Scotsman Hotel. After days in the (gorgeously green) countryside, we were thrilled to be back in a big city.

"I love cities," I said to her, as we climbed into the elevator.

"Me too," she smiled.

We spent a good chunk of our time in Edinburgh in the hotel pool, which was located on the basement level. It was a huge, stainless steel rectangle in a soothingly dim room, surrounded by walls of trickling water. Float, submerge, float. Yummy.

I chose this shot for today because I loved the smoky, over-exposed colors, and the foggy glow of the lights on the elevator ceiling.

Happy Friday, peeps.

I, for one, am NOT going to be at my desk this weekend, and you shouldn't be either! 

Step Inside My Other Living Room (the Ace Hotel in Portland)

There's a place in Portland that I like to think of as my Other living room: the main floor lobby in the Ace Hotel on Stark Street. If you could see it, you would want it to be your Other living room, too. Here's why:

- It is lined with cushy, olive green couches and has funky salvage-y pieces scattered around just so.

- It has a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf filled with books.

- It has a Photo Booth. Who doesn't like a Photo Booth?

- It has a door that opens into Stumptown Coffee, which might be the best coffee on the planet. The espresso is smooth and creamy, rich and dark without a hint of bitterness.

- Stumptown Coffee sells a cookie that might be the best cookie on the planet. When I wrote that I wasn't that interested in food these days, I meant to write "... with the exception of the chewy dark chocolate cookie at Stumptown in Portland, Oregon." This cookie has a crackly top and a chocolatey, walnut-studded interior that resolves into ooey-chewy goodness inside your mouth. Is it worth booking a trip to Portland for? Oooh, yeah.

This is the lobby-living room inside the Ace Hotel:

This is the counter at Stumptown, above which swirl the aromas of roasted espresso beans and smoky dark chocolate and pine needles:

Okay , it doesn't smell like pine needles. But this is Portland, land of pine & fir trees, and doesn't it sound poetic?

Chef Richard Näslin of the ICEHOTEL in Sweden

Richard Näslin

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you know that I was at the ICEHOTEL in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden last year, where I met with Chef Richard Näslin. I've been intending to write about our chat ever since, but somehow I let a whole year slip away without doing it.  You might also remember when I wrote that Richard reminded me of Matt Damon, and I'm finally posting the pictures to prove it.

See? Wasn't it worth the wait?

While I was twiddling my thumbs, the rooms that I walked through and slept in last year softened into slush and melted away; the ground was leveled, and blocks of ice from the Torne River were dragged to the site. A different group of artists arrived with hammers and picks and saws and created a new temple of ice filled with freshly imagined shapes and three-dimensional structures.

Daydreaming about what it might look like this year, I checked in with Richard via email to make sure that he was still at the ICEHOTEL and doing well - he is, and fabulously happy, it seems. The restaurant is packed, he reports, and they've built out a brand new kitchen and dining room. 

But now - at long last - let's rewind to 2007. The night before I met with Richard, I had dinner at his restaurant, located across the street from the temporary ICEHOTEL. The restaurant is a permanent structure, warm and cozy, with a huge entryway full of parkas, coats and boots that people shrug off when they come inside from the -30°C air.

While the snow fell outside the dining room that night, we began the meal with a piece of arctic char alongside a quenelle of smoked arctic char ice cream in a pool of beetroot sorbet. The ice cream was creamy and smoky, enlivened by the salt-flecked fish and perfectly balanced by the tangy-sweet beetroot. Next came a terrine of foie gras with smoked reindeer, accented with gently dried grapes and drizzled with a honey-grape juice reduction. Served with lightly toasted brioche, it was a knockout.

But I might have been most in love with the reindeer joint that arrived on a simple white plate with a single morel mushroom to one side and a judicious drizzle of wild game gravy. An ice glass filled with bright red cranberries cooked in port wine was delivered alongside. Tender and rich and wild, the dish was like nothing I had ever eaten.

I was thrilled to find that the menu didn't have a single piece of lettuce on it; not one watery tomato; nary an option for pasta with cheese. I loved that it was so distinctly, vividly different, and very much at place in its surroundings.

Needless to say, by the time I met Richard the next day, I was over-the-moon impressed.

Adventures of an Italian Food Lover: Bellinis in Venice

When I heard about Faith Willinger’s new cookbook, Adventures of an Italian Food Lover (With Recipes from 254 of my Very Best Friends), I was immediately intrigued.

What interested me most was that the format of the book; rather than focusing on a particular way of cooking, or using the standard “Starters, Main Courses and Desserts” format, Faith offers a glimpse into her adventures around Italy over the past few decades. I'm all about stories, and this cookbook weaves one story into another. Faith has traveled widely and has eaten well along the way, and here she introduces readers to people she has met in towns from Sicily to Venice, from hoteliers to artisan cheesemakers and restaurateurs. Some of them are charmingly depicted in quirky watercolor portraits done by Faith’s sister Suzanne. The whole book has a friendly, informal tone, as if you were peeking into someone’s journal.

It smartly includes contact information for many of the places mentioned, making it one of the resources I’ll be using when I plan my next trip to Italy.

Meanwhile, I’m dreaming of my first trip to Italy, and especially of the first stop on that trip, which was Venice.

The Best Meal in Morocco

Today's NYT article about communal ovens in Morocco brought back fond memories of my trip to Morocco in January, and especially of a meal we ate at a nondescript roadside stand on our way to Marrakech.

The stand was set behind a gas station, of all things. Imagine walking into a Chevron station in the middle of... say, Nevada... and instead of being greeted with sickly-pink hot dogs rotating inside a Plexiglas case, you find a butcher stand and a wood-burning oven, and people standing at the ready to cook your order as soon as you decide what you want.

We felt like we'd walked into an alternate universe. There we were, smack in the middle of the desert, tired and hungry, and minutes later we were sitting down to roasted lamb and hot, char-flecked bread, breathing in the heady scents of cumin and mint and hot, sharp peppers. To say that it was a restorative experience wouldn't do it justice.

I blogged about it then, but since I had so much fun going back through my pictures, I thought you might enjoy another peek as well.

P.S. I unwittingly had my camera on the wrong setting for most of the trip (grrr!), and many of the pictures came out grainy. Sigh. Guess that means I'll have to go back...?

I Can't Teach You How Pitch to Gourmet

Towards the end of last year, in preparation for our big trip in January, I contacted two people I wanted to meet and asked if I could sit down with them when I came to town. One was Richard Näslin, executive chef at the Ice Hotel in Sweden, and the other was Choumicha, the foremost food television personality in Morocco.

They both agreed to meet me. Our meetings (one in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, and one in Casablanca) were delightful; both Richard and Choumicha were warm and smart and engaging. They graciously responded to all of my questions. I typed furiously on my laptop as we spoke, and snapped a few pictures before we said goodbye.

I’ve been feeling guilty about it ever since.

See, I told them I was a freelance writer, and that I was going to turn our chats into articles that I would then send to magazines, with the hope of getting something published. I didn’t promise them anything, and neither of them seemed to care one way or the other.

But I cared. I really, really wanted people to know about these two. I felt like they were special, and that there was a compelling story in both of them.

Story or no story, there was the pesky issue of getting through to an editor who felt the same way. The whole business of magazine article writing has always been something of an enigma to me. Several years ago, when I decided to write for a living and not just as an incidental part of a job, I naturally thought that I would write for magazines. Isn’t that what writers do? Write articles? I envisioned opening up the latest issue of Saveur or Food and Wine or Vanity Fair and seeing my name in perfectly set type, nestled among pretty pictures and riveting words.

Then I sent out a few queries. I waited.

The Morocco Journals: Ksar Char-Bagh

We found Ksar Char-Bagh on the recommendation of a friend who is building an enormous maison just outside Marrakech.

“This place is something to see,” she told us, describing a small, exclusive palace outside Marrakech that functions as both hotel and restaurant. “You must go.” We agreed, and she made dinner reservations for the following night. When we asked for directions, she narrowed her eyes. “What kind of car do you have?”

A Clio, we told her. She shook her head dismissively. “You’ll never make it in that. You need a quatre quatre.” She explained that only way to get there was an unpaved dirt road, with no streetlights or signs to guide the way. She was adamant that we couldn’t make it on our own, and arranged to have her driver pick us up.

The next evening, the driver picked us up from our hotel, as arranged. Safely ensconced in the 4x4, we quickly left the paved streets for a pitted, dusty track that led straight into the desert. The headlights revealed the ridged trunks of palm trees all around us; small rocks pinged the windshield. I gripped my jaw to keep my teeth from clacking.

"Just you wait," the driver told us as we bounced about. "Next time you come to visit, this track will be paved, and all this land will have houses on it."

Twenty minutes later, reached a high wall lit with lanterns. A guard opened the enormous wooden door, and we stepped through onto sand-colored gravel that crunched beneath our feet. A small grove of olive trees led to a series of broad stone steps lit with candles. We walked up the steps to another door, this one made of dark wood decorated with silver studs. The door swung open just seconds before we reached it, this time by a man dressed in a flowing white jellaba and a red cap.

After the Suitcases are Unpacked

Travel stirs up my insides. When I am completely and utterly outside of my element, I find that aspects of my life – my habits and thought patterns, even my conscious and unconscious beliefs - become clear to me in ways that they otherwise would not.

I usually discover the most startling insights during the low points: after three flights in one day, after running out of clean underwear, after a night of tossing and turning in a too-soft bed with a lumpy pillow, while being utterly frustrated by my lack of agility with languages: these uncomfortable moments reveal parts of me to myself. Kind and selfish, smooth and warty, flexible and unyielding: it all rises to the surface.

This trip taught me many things – some of them new, some of them reminders of things I knew once but forgot along the way.

Among them:

The most universal language is neither written nor spoken. We are a culture that leads with our heads, that will happily tear someone apart based on an ill-spoken phrase or a poorly written sentence. We forget – I forget – that the most authentic communication is non-verbal. I noticed in Morocco that the people there are skilled at reading faces, motions, body language. They’re adept at reading situations before a single word is spoken. It made me realize that words are a kind of shield for me, a cover that I frequently hide behind. When I don’t have them – that is, when I can’t speak the language – all I have is who I am.

If I had no way to explain myself, would it change the way I live?

On the Way to Marrakech

We've been on a whirlwind tour of Morocco. We're only halfway through, and already I'm sorting through so many thoughts and impressions that I can't possibly sum them all up just yet.  The juxtaposition of past and present here is so intense as to be almost painful. We've spent the past couple of days in Casablanca, where the streets are a chaotic tangle of cars, bicycles, motorcycles and people, with the occasional burro thrown in for good measure. I saw a man balancing a crate full of live chickens on his moped yesterday morning.

The air is thick as chowder with diesel fumes and smoke - this in January, when the temperatures are still relatively cool. I can't imagine how it must be in the summertime. Traffic lights and street dividers are mere suggestions. There is no such thing as a pedestrian crosswalk; people stream across the streets at random, playing cat and mouse with the vehicles. Several times, I had the urge to fish my sleeping mask out of my bag and strap it on so as not to keep clutching the armrest in abject terror.

And yet, amid the mayhem, there is great beauty. We toured the jewel of the city, the  Hassan II mosque, built literally over the top of the Atlantic Ocean. Gorgeous. I wished, yet again, that I was a better photographer. We left Casablanca around noon today and began the drive to Marrakech, about 210 kilometers south.

It was quite a drive.

Waking from an Arctic Dream

I’m about to gush about the Ice Hotel, and I’m finding it somewhat difficult to begin. I don’t often gush about places I go or meals I eat. I’m not sure why; perhaps I like to keep my peak experiences to myself, to reflect upon in quiet moments. Perhaps I feel like the best things should be kept under wraps, in order to keep them special. It's silly, I know. The best things should be shared, not kept secret.

But the Ice Hotel isn’t a secret. It has been covered in documentaries and written about in destination magazines so many times that it has long ceased to be news. Everyone has heard of it. Been there, done that.

Perhaps that’s why I was so blown away; I honestly did not expect it to be so exceptional. I thought it would be like so many other things: overrated.

Only it wasn’t. It was a sumptuous feast for the senses, from start to finish. Taste, touch, sight, smell… the Ice Hotel engaged my entire body, and I was dazzled on every count.

For the sake of brevity (ha!), I'll just list three: