Kitchen Wench

JFK once described Washington, DC as “a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm”. Irony aside, once you start heading south out of the city, it really starts to look like the south. (To me, anyway. But I’m from the far north.)

Last weekend, I visited Front Royal, Virginia, about an hour or so outside of DC. I guess most people go to Front Royal in order to enjoy Shenandoah National Park and cruise along scenic Skyline Drive. I did neither. Instead, Lee dragged us to a vintage clothing store that turned out to be closed. But the afternoon was not completely lost. On our way into town, I spotted The Apple House. More specifically, I spotted a sign for the Apple House’s fresh, homemade donuts.

In college, we used to always pass an apple orchard on the drive down from Minneapolis. Occasionally, my parents would pick up a bag of hot, fresh apple cider donuts for me to bring back to the dorm. I like donuts as much as the next girl, but fresh apple cider donuts are a cut above the rest. Obviously I wasn’t about the miss another chance at apple donuts.

But this isn’t a story about apple cider donuts. It’s a story about pulled pork sandwiches and apple cider donuts. The Apple House is a quasi-restaurant/country store, selling jams, jellies, maple syrup, sparkling cider, and those horrible Vera Bradley purses. The restaurant only serves 2 things: bbq pork sandwiches and donuts. Seven dollars and fifty cents will get you an applewood-smoked pulled pork sandwich, coleslaw, beans, kettle chips, and a drink.

This is a fabulous sandwich. Pile on the sweet, yellow, creamy coleslaw, and you’ve got a mouthful of heaven. Sweet, smoky, mushy, saucy, creamy, and just a touch piquant. I’ve had a lot of pulled pork sandwiches in which the pork was flavorless, just smothered in some sauce. Here, the meat has a lot of salty, smoky flavor in its own right, topped off by a tomato-y sauce and sweet slaw. (Apparently the secret ingredient in this sauce is apple butter.) This is the kind of sandwich I fantasize about when my tummy starts a rumblin’. Finished off with a cup of cider and a cinnamon-sugar crusted donut, and it’s the perfect meal.

The Apple House
4675 John Marshall Hwy, Linden, VA
http://www.theapplehouse.net/

Labor Day weekend was my first real experience with the Orange County and Los Angeles, CA area. It was sort of everything I was expecting to be, all dry heat and sprawl, palm trees and highways, dirty and slick, revolting and yet strangely captivating as well.

Mostly, it’s not for me. I knew that, but this trip definitely confirmed it. Lee and I booked a cheap flight to LAX, rented a car, and headed across massive highways to Fullerton to attend Inspiration Weekend (not related to Jesus in any way). Downtown Fullerton is pretty cute, but it’s surrounded by industrial office parks, strip malls, and miles of asphalt parking lots. As we rode along in our rented PT Cruiser, belting out what few lyrics we know of “The OC” theme song (“Californnniiiiyaaa, here we caaaaaa-uhhhmme!”), it seemed eerily quiet. No one was out on the street. They were all in their cars.

There are subcultures in America and there are regional cultures. I am fully aware of how stereotypical it all sounds, but I walked away with a strange sensation of being surrounded by a lot of flash, but little actual substance.

But, enough of the creepy surface details. The only real saving grace about the OC (for me, anyway), was the food. Read the rest of this entry »

From some sort of summer vacation that I didn’t really intend to take. But somehow, between visits to Boston, Pennsylvania, Seattle, Vancouver, and two forays into the alternate universe known as Southern California, July and August blew by me in a haze of humidity and eyeball-searing heat.

This weekend was the first tolerable (according to my ex-Minnesotan standards) weather I’ve experienced in months. DC is suffocating in the summer. Now that it’s hopefully over, I’m starting to feel like a human being again. And, while I could go on for pages about how the Mid-Atlantic heat withers my soul, zaps my energy, and gives me pesky freckles under the eyes, it is time to turn my energy back to the subject at hand: Food.