This August I spent a weekend at Mt Rainier National Park, as I’ve done for more than 15 years. It’s the most breathtakingly beautiful month for wildflowers, with broad sweeps of purple lupine and high-altitude magenta paintbrush. I love hiking there, and so do Sherpas. Near the Nisqually entrance to the park, I stopped at […]
A couple of weekends ago, 70 of my relatives traveled from across the US to gather in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains for our Jorgensen family reunion. We’ve been doing this every other year since 1965 and honestly it’s a blast! We do the same things every reunion: go-carting Friday night crashing into relatives we haven’t seen […]
I’m back in the US after traveling to seven countries and learning about local foods and agriculture. What a blast! Thanks for joining me on this journey. In all the countries, several threads showed up time and again. No matter where we live, we all have some of the same basic wants and needs. One […]
Maja’s cheese with seaweed, other with carrot juice
Maja Beaujouan holding a wheel of her cheese
Contented cows breathing the North Atlantic Ocean air
Stickers denoting Irish cheese at Supervalu
Irish cheese purchased stateside
Before going to Ireland, the iconic foods that I thought about were corned beef and cabbage, and the history of the Great Famine of 1845-1852 when potato crops failed. I hadn’t really thought about Irish cheese. After tasting many, I think their cheese is in that pot of gold at the end of the Irish […]
Drop-in musicians in a tiny pub playing traditional tunes
Lamb stew, also beer and whiskey
Black-faced sheep with their lambs on the Isle of Seil
Haggis bon bons – a tasty version of a traditional dish of sheep innards
Bagpiper in Edinburgh
After spending about a week in Scotland, I must say that the Scots are some of the friendliest, feistiest people on the planet. The folks I met don’t take life too seriously, and they enjoy poking fun at each other (and visitors, too). Going to pubs with friends, drinking beer or whiskey, singing and playing […]
All because of rye bread, I had to buy a second suitcase. In Denmark, it’s typical to have rye bread once, twice, three times a day. For breakfast, Danes smear a slice with butter, then add cheese or jam, or both. Rye bread is packed into kids’ school lunch boxes or in a sack for […]
For the past two weeks I’ve been in Denmark visiting my extended family in Thisted and Klitmøller in Northern Jutland, Roskilde, and Copenhagen. We’ve spent many hours at the dinner table and I must say that hygge is the real deal. In the US there’s been a lot of hype about hygge (pronounced HOO-geh, not […]
A top destination for many travelers to Italy is the Cinque Terre (Five Lands). Tourists are lured here to visit the five isolated villages clinging to steep hillsides rising from the Mediterranean Sea. I’ll bet some of you reading this post have been there! Likely you hiked the Sentiero Azzuro (Azure Trail) from town to […]
Pane Canasau (thin bread) with tomatoes and Pecorino Sardo
A cent’anni! May you live to 100 years! That’s a toast you hear throughout Italy, along with salute! and cin-cin! In Sardinian dialect, it’s A Kent’Annos! and they honestly mean it. Sardinia, an island in the Mediterranean Sea, has more centenarians per capita than anywhere else in the world except Okinawa, Japan. In most populations, women […]
Before coming to Genoa, I knew only that it was the birthplace of pesto and Christopher Columbus. I hadn’t known that it’s the busiest commercial seaport in Italy. Genoa is the capitol of Liguria, sitting roughly in the center of the crescent-shaped region that arcs from the French Rivera on the west to through the […]
Traveler's Table 