We left the bustle of the City by the Bay behind us and spent the next few days in more relaxing environs.

The first order of business was a return to the beautiful, desolate, intoxicating Point Reyes Peninsula. We had spent a memorable day here on a previous trip; it was not to be missed. Point Reyes is isolated and not really as a foodie destination, but it is home to Cowgirl Creamery, makers of Red Hawk and other nationally celebrated cheeses. We acquired some of their cheeses, knowing we were headed to the Wine Country.

Our next stop was the pretty coastal town of Mendocino, near the northern end of the Pacific Coast Highway. Mendocino looks more like New England than like southern California, except the climate is milder so the gardens are extraordinary.

After one more morning in Santa Cruz, we spent a wonderful day in San Francisco. We covered a lot of ground; fortunately we had a plan going in and we hit all of our objectives.

The weather was beautiful, and that's never a guarantee in the City by the Bay.  We parked near Fisherman's Wharf in an all-day garage that was not as expensive as I had feared. Then we walked along the waterfront, looked out at Alcatraz, and did more people-watching than window-shopping.

One restaurant we passed proudly proclaimed itself "Home of the 60-ounce Margarita" or some such silliness. It was really crowded, so we headed off toward the famous Ghirardelli Square.

Along the way it was impossible to miss the fact that Fisherman's Wharf is still very much about the seafood. Seafood restaurants are everywhere, and fresh fish markets with Pacific seafood piled high on great glaciers of ice. It was lunchtime but we were not yet even remotely hungry, and there's plenty of foodie awesomeness in San Francisco to we continued our explorations.

We celebrated Richmond's 2013 birthday out on the beach with a Greek feast. Present were the usual foursome.

We had brought fixings for Gin & Tonics, but that was merely a precaution against the beastly heat and our ignorance surrounding the two Greek wines I had brought. Everything else was Greek in style, if not in provenance.

We opened the festivities with:

•  Saganaki, a festive flaming cheese appetizer. This thriller is on the menu of every self-respecting Greek restaurant, and it always gets plenty of attention, but the restaurants cannot always get the right Kefalograviera cheese. I have had Saganaki made with provolone, with pecorino romano, and with other cheeses that I was unable to discover, but they clearly were not kefalograviera. 
  As with most of the ingredients for this feast, I got the cheese at Bahnan's Market in Worcester. 

We spent the next day and a half in Santa Cruz, visiting with friends, shopping Pacific Ave, and exploring the boardwalk, the long pier, and the pleasant streets of that fine small city.

I posted a smallish (43-photo)  photo album over at Facebook; if you've never been to Santa Cruz, it's worth a look. If you have been there, you might check it out just for the memories.

We arrived late, after a long drive from Morro Bay along Big Sur through Carmel and Monterey to Santa Cruz. We met our Greek friend Hector, who naturally took us to one of my favorite restaurants in California - The Greek!

I went to Greece in 1995, and I remember drinking Greek wine and grazing on little bites at the taverna with my friend's family late into the evening. That's just what we did in Santa Cruz that evening, drinking Greek wine and feasting on dolmas, Saganaki, skordalia, horta vrasta, Spanakopita, and other Greek delights as we caught up with Hector.

Everyone who reads this blog knows how we love scenic drives, and one of the most famous outside of New England is the drive up the Pacific Coast Highway along Big Sur. We knew we would have time in Los Angeles at the end of the trip, so we got a car and hit the road! By lunchtime we were shopping in Ventura, and we spent our first night on the road in Morro Bay.

We stayed at the Best Western El Rancho just north of town and gave it good marks. I have reviewed almost all of the restaurants and hotels and many attractions that we saw throughout the trip; you can find them on TripAdvisor.

Morro Bay is a pretty harbor best known for the island in the middle, often referred to as the Big Rock. You don't see it in all its glory here because of the fog, but that's not unusual in Morro Bay.

Morro Bay is not a big town, but it is scenic and it enjoys close proximity to the celebrated Hearst Castle, which we planned to visit the next day.

The Lake Shore Limited and the Southwest Chief both have termini at Chicago's Union Station, so both coming and going we had some hours to explore the downtown area while we waited for the latter train to board.

There's a lot to see in downtown Chicago. To start with, Union Station is a big, bustling place for people watching (on the return trip we chatted with some zombies from a 5000-zombie flash mob that had just finished) and some fine Art Deco architecture. Just outside the door you can strain your neck looking up at the Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower) just across the canal. And about a 15 minute walk to the east is a string of parks and museums along the shore of Lake Michigan.

After a brisk walk to stretch our legs and work up an appetite, we had a very nice lunch at Russian Tea Time - a fancy establishment with a beautiful collection of Samovars and an extensive bar. I could not resist trying the trio of house-infused vodkas (coriander, black currant, and lime) with a dish of pickled herring and some black bread.

Lorna was able to resist that gustatory delight and contented herself with a stuffed chicken breast and a Coke. 

This is the first of a series of entries that more or less track our Foodie Pilgrim Grand Transcontinental Adventure. I say "more or less" because it won't quite be a day-by-day relation of events, but more a series of possible day-trips that you might enjoy if you some day take a similar journey. This installment describes the trip to Chicago aboard Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited.  

We left Plymouth on the 9am Plymouth &Brockton bus, arriving at Boston South Station after a comfortable and uneventful ride.  Lorna had a light lunch at Cheeseboy, a small chain. I noshed on a kabanoszy from my store of provisions. I had stocked up on goodies from The Cheese Shop in Concord and from Baza Market in Newton because the food on the train can get pretty boring.

We planned a visit to the beautiful Tower Hill Botanical Garden just north of Worcester, and that provided a perfect opportunity to bring about World Peace, or at least some small resolution. You see, a few days ago I created something of an international incident. I feel terrible about it, and have committed to resolving the issue as quickly and neatly as possible.

We had dined at a favorite Chinese-Japanese restaurant in Marshfield, MA, and as we were leaving I spied an interesting food product in the fridge. Kom, our host,explained that it is a special fruit that he had acquired in Philadelphia, but he was unable to communicate much more than that in English. Kom's English isn't great, but my Chinese is worse, so I snapped a photo and resolved to investigate. I posted the photo to Facebook.com/FoodiePilgrim, with a plea to identify it.

Soon it was seen by hundreds of foodies, with identifications ranging from the sweet Jackfruit and Buddha Fruit to Guanabana and Durian, the scary King of Fruits. In the end, it seemed to be one of a couple of members of the custard-apple family with which I was utterly unfamiliar. Sides became entrenched: is it cherimoya or soursop? The solution, of course, is to find one of each and compare them directly.

We went to Salem to see an exhibit of modern Indian art at the big Peabody-Essex Museum, and to view the rest of the collection related to the China tea trade that built so much of that old city.

The Salem waterfront and museum district has some interesting shopping and dining among a host of witch-related shops, but my real foodie interest was excited by the Tea connection.

I like tea. I drink a lot of it. On days that I work from home, I make a big pot of tea to drink through the day. The selection of tea varies with the weather and my mood. That's what I like best about tea: the sheer variety of it.

The tea clippers that came into Salem a century and a half ago were specially-built, high-tech ships. There was prestige and money in being the first to land a cargo of favored teas.

We went to the big Brimfield Antiques Fair on Saturday. It's a three-times-a-year tradition for the past 20 years for us. After prowling the fields for treasures, we go for a scenic drive (of course). Depending on what you're looking for, you can spend all day browsing booths from a thousand or more dealers from all over the country. Lorna looks at everything, often requiring two days to do it. I look only at kitchen gear, dishes, and barware.

Over the years I have stocked my kitchen and dining room with an assortment of neat, good-condition old serving dishes, bowls, and barware like my grandmother might have used. I like them much better than the things you find today at Bed, Bath, and Beyond! I use these things all the time, and I like the color and the homey sense they bring to my kitchen. I posted an album of photos of Brimfield dishes and kitchenware at my Facebook page. 

The forsythia was blooming and that means one thing to this hungry pilgrim: Shad Roe! It will surely kill me one day (it's loaded with cholesterol) but I love the stuff. It is hyper-seasonal and local, and hard to find.

Shad roe is the eggs of the shad fish that used to spawn in prodigious numbers up the Connecticut, Housatonic, Hudson, Delaware, and other mid-Atlantic and New England rivers. The Hudson Valley is famous for shad roe, and it was in great demand years ago in the finest restaurants and hotels in Manhattan. Cole Porter asks for it in "Let's Fall in Love".  

So we set out to explore the Hudson Valley, knowing that even if we missed the roe it would be a fun drive. We make a version of this trip every year, but it's not always during shad roe season. We make a point to visit our old favorite Olana, a grand house built by a wealthy landscape painter in the mid-1800s. It's worth the trip just to visit that house!

The long, sunny spring days are here, and that means long sunny spring drives!

This time we shot up through the White Mountains to St. Johnsbury, VT, then we ambled along the familiar backroads of the Northeast Kingdom to Newport, VT before setting off into unknown territory: the mountain road from Newport to Enosburg over Jay Peak, and then onward to Swanton and The Hero Islands in Lake Champlain.

It was a long drive (635 miles by the time we got home), but a lot of it was through some of the prettiest countryside in New England. Spring comes late way up on the Canadian border, and it doesn't unfold in the same way that we see it in Plymouth and on Cape Cod.

Some plants respond to warming weather, others to the number of hours of sunlight they get. That means that some plants, like the daffodils, were just up, a few weeks behind southern Massachusetts, but many of the trees were not so far behind. The higher elevations were still pretty bare, especially on the northern slopes, but the lakeshores were bursting forth in spring glory.

Boiled beef is sought after by gourmets all over the world. Tafelspit, the famous Viennese version, is made from special cuts and is reputed to be sublime. If I ever get to the famous Plachutta Wollzeile in that city, I'll report on it, but for now my topic is the steamed cheeseburger.

To truly appreciate a steamed cheeseburger, you have to put aside all your preconceived ideas about hamburger.  Forget the sweet, crunchy caramelization produced by contact with the heat of the grill.  Forget medium rare. Then you have to travel to a small area in central Connecticut where steamed cheeseburgers are a local delicacy.  

I was visiting our friend Ina in Meriden when I set out to investigate this phenomenon.  I went to Ted's Restaurant at 1046 Broad Street in that fair city, but there are other eateries in town where you can expand you r culinary horizons and sample the treat. Another restaurant I visited on my stay had to install a steamer to satisfy popular demand.  

This winter seemed very long and reluctant to depart. As much as I enjoy winter cooking, I was just about ready to see the end of the snow and ice.

But we had one more trip planned for the maple studies. As you can see in my earlier posts, I had learned much from several sugarhouses in Maine, but I wanted to get a Vermont perspective too.

Of course, Vermont is famous for maple syrup, so why did we keep going to Maine? Because every weekend it seemed there was more snow in the Green Mountain State. We could get better driving in Maine, and as you saw there is no shortage of sugarmakers in the Pine Tree state.  It's a long way from Plymouth to Vermont, and a blue-sky day makes the drive fun.

This is a delicious version of the more famous Boston Baked Beans. They go well with pork dishes and turkey or chicken, as the maple is a lighter flavor than the molasses of their Beantown brethren. 

I bet they'd be great with fishcakes and a corn muffin for a Yankee breakfast, too!

I made them with Soldier Beans, which are traditional in Maine and much of New Hampshire and Vermont.

It's maple sugaring season! This quintessential New England flavor is enjoyed all year, but it must be made in the fading days of winter when the sap is rising in the trees but they can still freeze at night.

We spent two Saturdays exploring the sugarhouses of southern Maine learning the intricacies of maple syrup making.  We visited Hilltop Boilers in Newfield, Cooper's Royal Heritage Farm in Windham, and Goranson Farm in Dresden. It was a lot of fun, and very interesting. Here's what we learned.

Maple syrup comes from the sap of sugar maples, black maples, and red maples. At this time of year you can see plastic or metal buckets equipped with roofs hanging from maple trees all over New England. A gallon of syrup requires on average about 40 gallons of sap, and each tap produces 10 to 20 gallons of sap, so the buckets must be emptied frequently over the course of the season, which lasts about 6 weeks.

Maple Syrup comes from the sap of maple trees, and now is the time when the sap is running.

Maple Sugaring time starts in late February and extends into early April, culminating for many at Maine Maple Sunday, New Hampshire Maple Weekend, or the annual Vermont Maple Festival away up in St. Albans, VT. 

The sap is collected in buckets, sometimes linked by many yards of plastic tubing, and then boiled down in a shed called a sugarhouse. You can read all (really all) about it in this 30pp Connecticut Maple Syrup Producers Manual.

We took a drive to Quechee Gorge to celebrate the first blue-sky Saturday in ages, but that wasn't far enough so we meandered up Route 5 along the frozen Connecticut River through Thetford and many smaller towns to St Johnsbury, at the northern terminus or I-93 beyond the White Mountains.

Saturday was another dreary day, our third dreary Saturday in a row! Rain in the afternoon, sleet and snow in the evening, and too crummy for a long drive anywhere, even if there were sunshine to be found. We badly needed a dose of whimsy and something very nice.

For me, there's no better store of whimsy than the collection of paintings by Ralph Cahoon at the Cahoon Museum of American Art in Cotuit, on Rte 28 on the Upper Cape.  Ralph Cahoon and his wife Martha were Cape Cod artists active through much of the 20th century, known for their happy, folksy paintings of Cape Cod scenes filled with humor and color.... and mermaids, as in Megansett Tea Room, pictured above.

For Valentine's Day I wanted to make a special dinner, but it was a work day so it couldn't take all day to prepare.

I knew Lorna wanted lobster and champagne, so using that as a cornerstone, here's what we came up with:

• A Winnemere cheese from Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont.
  
•  A fresh salad with goat cheese and toasted walnuts
• Sauteed mushrooms with Madeira
• The centerpiece was a Lobster Cardinal
  
• Chocolate-dipped strawberries for dessert

The Winnemere is my favorite washed-rind cheese and one of my top five cheeses in all the world. It is an earthy, rich, cow's-milk cheese banded in spruce bark. It has awesome complexity that rewards savoring and reflection.  You can buy it during the winter months at some Whole Foods Markets. It worked well with Veuve Clicquot. She was able to linger with the cheese while I prepared the lobster.

Mead is making it big in New England. There's good reason for it to do well, as another artisanal product in a region that hes been very good for foodie artisans. Even Yankee Magazine has noticed.

Mead is not just for Vikings anymore. It is one of the most ancient fermented beverages, known from many cultures around the world. It is brewed from honey, but the honey-sweetness varies greatly from very sweet to very dry depending on how you ferment it.  

Honeymaker Lavender Mead paired very nicely with a savory fresh ricotta tart made by Annette for our mead tasting dinner. It would make a lovely Valentine's Day dinner.  They make a variety of fine meads; I selected the lavender because I thought it especially suited Valentine's Day and because Annette loves the scent of lavender.

I love visiting windy, rocky Pemaquid Point in the winter. The rocks there are dramatic, long banded fingers of stone with crashing surf on all sides. It doesn't look like anyplace else in Downeast Maine. The lighthouse is photogenic, there are picnic tables and rest rooms, and it's easy to reach from Damariscotta and Newcastle, and even from Boothbay Harbor.

Our destination after Pemaquid Point was in the farm country just on the other side of Route 1. I had read about Oxbow Beer and even sampled their flagship Farmhouse Pale Ale at Le Garage in Wiscasset. I knew they brew a line of "freestyle" one-off brews and other interesting brews, taking full advantage of the flexibility offered by their small size and dedicated following.

We were not disappointed! We chatted with Celeste and Jake, two young but very helpful and knowledgeable employees (Lorna also got to meet the cute and furry Director of Security, Matilda Barncat).

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Aioli is a traditional Provencal sauce that is often used as a dip or dressing. It is a strong garlic mayonnaise that is easy to make at home from just egg yolks, olive oil, salt, and plenty of garlic. It is a fine accompaniment to many dishes, especially fish and steamed vegetables. In fact, there is a traditional Provencal meal made from those ingredients; it is called simply Le Grand Aioli. It's a beautiful feast, and an easy one.

In the winter, while I embrace the chill and think of cold-weather cooking, Annette's thoughts wing their way to sunny Provence. Our Grand Aioli was her idea, and it brought us a splash of summer sunshine on the first of February!

Annette steamed the vegetable platter, which by tradition should number at least six, plus hard-boiled eggs. We had:

• Steamed carrots
• Boiled young potatoes
• Cape cod turnip
• Steamed fennel
• Steamed leek (I know - that's only five.

I was meeting with my friend Matt in Worcester and he had suggested lunch at Baba Sushi on Park Ave.

I enjoy sushi, but Lorna's not a fan so I seldom have it, and certainly not at a top-notch place that specializes in sushi.

It was spectacular! How was I to know that owner-chef Wilson Wang had won numerous awards, and not only regional ones...he also took 9th place out of 600 competitors for Overall Excellence in Santa Clara at the 8th annual Top 100 Chinese Restaurant Awards Show last February!

On a snowy day a few weeks ago I got it in my head to make a Russian dinner. As my birthday was rapidly approaching and I would have to come up with a feast anyway, I decided to make it a Russian feast.

I don't know quite what put Russian food in my head that day. I have always enjoyed it, ever since first finding the excellent Please to the Table Russian cookbook, and cold weather makes those heavy dishes more attractive to me. I had most of the ingredients to make some of my favorite dishes, so...

Here's what we did:

The main course was Pork Chops with Apples Braised in Beer. This was naturally accompanied by chilled vodka! None of us are vodka fans, but a Russian dinner demands vodka, so I got a bottle of Berkshire Mountain Distillers Ice Glen Vodka and put it in the freezer. It was delicious! I must learn more about it. At least we did not kill the bottle.