Fuji Hibachi

Alright, I have talked about Fuji before, and I have talked about Hibachi's before. I have never talked about the Hibachi at Fuji though for the simple fact that I have never been there. Well, until last night. Let me tell you, I was impressed.
My boyfriend turned 26 yesterday (old. I know) so I decided to take him out to a nice dinner for his birthday.

After discussing a few options, including Grace, Havana South and Buffalo Wild Wings. We settled on Havana South. All excited we looked at the menu, figured out what we wanted, even called for reservations, which straight to voice mail. I just figured they were very busy.

We arrived at the Old Port around 6:30pm and walked about 3 blocks in 14 degree weather (that was fun). Only to discover that Havana South was CLOSED! In all honestly, we still aren't sure why. There were no signs stating anything about them being closed. There was also nothing on the website (that I saw anyway) stating they were closed. A nice sign on the door simply stating (hey, by the way, we aren't open) would have been epic. Of course, being somewhat intelligent people (I like to think so anyway) we figured it out when we approached the building and all the lights were off.
Anyway, cold and a little let down we headed to Commercial Street. A mention of Three Dollar Dewey's came up, but was of course shot down (by stubborn ol' me) because I don't consider it "nice."

We then decided that we would check out the Farmer's Table. We had never been there and heard that it was good. PLUS! it was only one block away. This sounded good to me since I was pretty confident that my nose was going to fall off of my face at any moment.

We walked faster than normal that one block. Only to find, to our dismay THEY WERE CLOSED TOO! What the hell Portland! At this point, I was little, no, A LOT annoyed. And I was hungry. And I was cold. This isn't good. We made our way up exchange street. Trying to find a place to eat. That's when we saw FUJI!

We have been to Fuji about 5 times before this. We had never been to the Hibachi together though. Eagerly, we made our way inside.

To our lovely surprise. We were the only two at the table! This was nice because it made for a very friendly close atmosphere. 

We sat down the table and of course, ordered two Mai Tais.

They were amazing. As usual.

I decided that I would order the Teriaki Chicken and Scallops with Brown rice while Thomas ordered the Tariaki Chicken and Steak. They were both amazing, and there is nothing like watching your food be cooked right in front of you and catching balls of rice in your mouth. Which I did. On the First try. Yup. I am awesome.

 I also ordered the Asparagus-Kappa Roll. OOOOH MMMYYYY

Bitch It Out

Alright, I try to avoid being negative on here because it's not a great color on me. But lately I have found that I just get more and more negative as time goes on. Therefore, I need to bitch it out and get over it... so here we go.


There is no reason to be up your co workers ass while at work. There are very few instances where it take two people to do my job... I seriously can't stand people who can't take initiative and get shit done. It's ridiculous!
I am sure it looks like I am a wicked bitch, and hate everyone... This is the case... but it's because people are stupid. Seriously... stupid.


Also, to people who drive. If you SIT at a GREEN light... DO NOT flip ME off when I toot my horn at you. ALSO, do not go 2 down the road to piss me off... I have no problem passing in the suicide lane, break down lane, or bicycle lane.


People can't drive and they are terrible workers. Period. I feel better.


On a lighter note, I am getting married in 5 months!


OH that's another thing. To people who have been with their significant others longer than my fiance and I.


I DON'T GIVE A FLYING F***.


I do not need to hear your 2 cents about it. Just because I am engaged and you aren't doesn't mean you have to or should judge ME... Just because your boyfriend sucks and hasn't proposed to you in the 6 years that you have been together doesn't mean you need to rain on my parade. Keepeesh?


Alright... I 'm done. Gotta run... literally... run a couple miles to vent it out.... people are stupid and you can't fix stupid.

Okay, Let me explain

Now that my life has settled down, I have decided that I am going to start blogging again.


Let me start by saying that I took that photo of Portland that is being used for the title. I am pretty proud of it. Please don't steal it. It's not yours. :)

I am switching it up though. Mostly because I am bored with just posting about food. Also, we are trying to save money, and eating out doesn't help with that. Also, We have so much more going on in our lives than just food. When I say "we" I am talking about my boyfriend and I.

Together we want to lose 100 pounds. Eating out is not going to help this either.

Also, we LOVE hiking.

We got some new hiking books for christmas, and have every intention of using them. I will tell you all about it.

Beer is another love of ours. Don't read into it, we aren't alcoholics (alcoholics go to meetings). If we have the oppurtunity, we will try a new beer.

I am sure I will write about a lot of other things that go on in my wild and crazy life.

Enjoy the ride.

Shipyard Applehead

While I would love to sit here and tell you this beer is amazing. I can't.


As someone who counts down the days to Pumpkinhead, you can imagine my excitement when I saw there was an applehead beer.


Shipyard Brewing Company is located at 86 Newbury St. Right here in lovely Portland, Maine.

Pumpkinhead is a cinnamon pumpkin malt beverage made by Shipyard Brewing Company.

It comes out just before Halloween  every year, tastes just like a pumpkin pie. When I drink it at hope, I add brown sugar to the rim of the glass. This makes it taste more like a pumpkin pie.

Now, back to the applehead malt beverage.

When I bought this beer, or "malt beverage" I thought for sure it was going to taste just like apple cider. It doesn't.

The mixture of apple and cinnamon is just not balenced. I have not tried it with the brown sugar on the glass rim, but I am sure I will ample oppurtunity to do so considering I bought a 12 pack. Why would I do this you ask? well, because thats the only way they sell it at RSVP. Oh, AND it's $15.99. Yea, we all make mistakes.

Portland Pie Company -- The Revisit

We decided that we would make our way over to Portland Pie Company in Old Port after a looooong dreadfully terrible week. It was the best way to end the week.

We both wish that Portland Pie was with in walking distance of our apartment like it used to be, hopefully we will be able to move back to Portland. Anyway.

We started with a nice cold beer. We both ordered Sea Dog Blueberry Ale. It was outstanding.
Just a little note about the Sea Dog, The original one is in Bangor which is where I am from. We used to have Blueberry Ale and Apricot Wheat Ale (which is actually better and you can't buy it down here) all the time! I miss that!

Despite what most people think, it is not blue. But it tastes like just like blueberry and it is Delicious!

For an appetizer we decided that we would go with the loaded french fries.

They were OUTSTANDING. They were crispy french fries, with bacon, green onions, and LOADED with cheese! They came with sour cream, which I got to hog because my boyfriend doesn't like sour cream at all!

Usually we can agree on one pizza that we want to share. On this particular day though we couldn't decide what we wanted. So, we ordered two pizzas.

I ordered the,

THE CHAMBERLAIN

A layer of General Tsao’s Sauce topped with

marinated Pulled Pork, diced Green and Red Bell

Peppers, matchstick Carrots, toasted Sesame Seeds,

and our Three Cheese Blend.

We add Cilantro at the end for a fresh kick.

IT. WAS. SOOO GOOD. I have never had pulled pork on top of a pizza before, it was the best idea I have ever eaten!


My boyfriend had the

OLD PORT

This traditional favorite features Red Sauce and

piles of Pepperoni woven in our Three Cheese Blend.

This is nothing new. It is his favorite. Probably because it have 5309853 billion pieces of  pepperoni on it. It is amazing!

We both got beer crust on the pizzas.

I would really like to try the Portland Pie in Scarborough and Westbrook, but we just haven't had time.

A weekend in North Conway, New Hampshire

Alright, I know this is a food blog. Which means I go to restaurants and talk about my experience and all that good stuff. However, this is also MY food blog which means I can really talk about whatever I want to write about whatever I want to write. Right? right.


At the beginning of May we decided that we just needed to get away. We booked a room at the comfy little bed and breakfast called The Cabernet Inn.

Location:
3552 White Mountain Highway
North Conway, NH 03860


Because we went during the off season, it was a little bit cheaper than it is in the Summer. It was also much less busy than it is during the Summer. This is good for two reasons, 1. it saves us money and 2. we pretty much had run of the house, which was amazing.   We stayed in a premium room. The Cabernet Inn has many different types of rooms, which are listed on the website. The premium room was huge. It included your own bathroom, a queen size bed, a jacuzzi!

And a gas fire stove!

It was a beautiful room. It also had an entrance from the outside parking lot, so we didn't have to walk through the entire house if we didn't want to.

The Cabernet Inn is absolutely beautiful. I am so so glad that we chose this small little B and B. Not just because of the beauty, quaintness, and homey feeling of the place Inn, but also for the SNACKS and the BREAKFAST!

Everyday at 3PM, the innkeepers, Jessica and Bruce, make a snack. When we first got to the Inn, we indulged in a delicious snack of white chocolate covered pretzels. WHOA!

They were AMAZING! That is all I can say about these.They are huge pretzels with the tops covered in think white chocolate (obviously you can see that) they are OUTSTANDING. I had two.


After settling into our room we decided that we would go exploring a little bit. We got in the car and drove about 400 hundred feet to find this:

MT. WASHINGTON! It was literally in our backyard and it was BEAUTIFUL! If it hadn't been May 1st we would have gone to the top of it. But, because it the auto road was closed, we will have to save that for another day.

In our travels  through the center of North Conway I had picked up a dining guide. This was the most helpful thing in the world!

 When we got to North Conway we were starving. On our way to the Cabernet Inn we stopped at a little restaurant called The 1790 Homestead Restaurant.

It was a small little restaurant that used to be a  farmhouse.

Location: 1921 White Mountain Highway,

North Conway, NH 03860

 

It was very good. Very Good.

When you walk into The Homestead Restaurant you are greeted by a host who escorts you to your seat. The dinning area is a lot bigger than I thought it would be for an old farmhouse.

The picture doesn't really do it justice.

We started with WATER! Mostly because it was free. Plus, I love water with lemon.

My boyfriend ordered The Amos Barn Burger. It came with bacon, cheese and pepperchini's. He ordered it medium and it came medium. I tried it, it was delicious!

I ordered a Cajun chicken sandwich. It came with lettuce, tomato, cheese, a bacon. It had really wonderful flavor. It came with french fries which were very good and crispy. They served it with sour cream. I LOVE sour cream on my french fries.


While we waited for our meal we also got a bowl of homemade chips.

Freshly homemade chips. This means they were still WARM. They were so good! We added ketchup.

After discovering that Mt. Washington was in our backyard, we decided we were hungry again. In the dinning guide we found a place that was about 15 minutes away called Tuckerman's Restaurant and Tavern. It is named after the tuckerman ravine on Mt. Washington.

The restaurant is located at 336 Rt. 16A, Intervale, NH.

I heard a rumor that people ski down this... but I am not sure how true that is.

Moving on....

When we drove in, the place was PACKED. I think there was only one spot open in the parking lot, and there were people sitting outside. This was good because it was the first GORGEOUS weekend we had had all year (this was before the rain that lasted for 4957203 days). We, however, sat inside.

The restaurant was attached to The New England Inn.

At Tuckerman's we were greeted and seated. It was at this restaurant that I had the BEST BEER I HAVE HAD IN A WHILE! Naturally it was my favorite beer seeing as how it was a seasonal, special limited release. Meaning I have NO IDEA where to get a 6 pack or a 95208532909 pack of it.

Is was called Rustic Saison and it is made by Samuel Adams. It is considered a blonde beer and has a fruity taste to it and it is AMAZING. If you have never had it, and you can find it than get it. Trust me, you won't regret it. AND IF you do find it here in southern Maine than let me know, because I will be buying out the entire store. It is by far my favorite as of right now.

 I wish you could sample it through my blog so you could see what I mean. It is the most mind boggling beer I have ever had. Honestly, if we hadn't made a "one beer" deal that I probably would have drank the keg dry that night. I wasn't driving.

My boyfriend decided that we would try the a beer called Rogue Dead Guy. Sounds appetizing eh? ya, no. I personally do not like it at all. It is a very heavy beer, and it reminds me a lot of Guinness, which I don't like at all. He has deemed this his favorite beer right now also.

Naturally, we got an appetizer and naturally THEY WERE WINGS! They were called Tuck's Wings. For flavor choices we could have buffalo, Honey Cajun BBQ, or Thai. We went with the Thai. They were very very good. (nothing like the wings here in Portland though. Actually, none of the wings we had in North Conway even compared to the wings in Portland. But that's okay!) Anyway. They were a little spicy, but nothing major and certainly nothing we couldn't handle. They were very big, which was nice and the flavor was very very good.

 

They were served with green onions on top of them. To me, this was perfectly fine, I love onions. But for the boyfriend... not so much. He won't even eat spaghetti sauce that has itsy bitsy little tiny pieces of onion in it... forget getting him to even THINK about trying a green onion. He got over it though, brushed them off at ate them anyway. He's a trooper. They were also served with celery like most wings and a tub of blue cheese that we did not use.

This is where things started getting "messy." It took a while for our wings to come to us, even though we ordered them with our drinks. I understand they were busy, but by the time we actually had figured out what we wanted the place had cleared out a little. Not only did it take a while for our wings to come out, but when my boyfriend ordered his beer, it took even longer!!!!! We sat there and sat there, FINALLY, the waitress came over to tell us that they had to change the keg for the Rogue dead guy beer. It would have been nice if she had told him that before waiting for 20 minutes. In case you couldn't tell, minus the fact the food was good, the service wasn't.

For an entree, I ordered a Taco Salad with Guacamole and Southwest dressing.

IT WAS HUGE!!! As you can see, it is literally mounded over the the taco bowl. I was going to ask for sour cream too, but our waitress never came back after dropping off our food,  but I will get back to that later. The lettuce was crisp and the chicken was moist with good flavor. The southwest sauce was very good with a little tiny bit of kick. The guacamole was good, but not worth the $2 I was charged for the tiny portion that I got.

My boyfriend ordered a Buffalo Chicken Pizza.

It was delicious! The crust was crisp and reminded me a little bit like the crust at pizza hut (which is the best crust in the world.) the toppings were perfect. The cheese was the perfect amount and the chicken was cut into to sizes that were perfect. Under the amazing cheese and chicken was an amazing spicy buffalo sauce. Because of this sauce the pizza actually had a very heavy kick. It was amazing!!!!! It was also huge and we couldn't eat all of it. So we took it home.

Overall, Tuckerman's was very good. The food was delicious, but the service was actually very bad. The waitress seemed to be way to busy for the amount of people that were in the restaurant by the time we got there. She never once came over and checked on us to see how our food was. She did, however, yell across the room to us while refilling water for another table (which she never did for us). Needless to say she didn't get a very good tip. However, just because the service was bad doesn't mean we wouldn't go there again.

The next morning we were reminded why we chose The Cabernet Inn as the ideal place for our getaway in North Conway. We dragged ourselves to the breakfast dinning room around 8 that morning.

Breakfast is cooked to order and there are little menus that you can choose what you want to eat.  There was another couple in the dinning room and they strongly strongly recommended the Maple Walnut Stuffed French Toast. I should send them a thank you card.

I tried the maple walnut french toast. WHOA. Jessica, innkeeper and cook, softens a handful of walnuts in butter. She then cooks Texas toast in egg batter and makes it into french toast. After "slathering" cream cheese on the inner sides of both pieces of bread she adds the walnuts that are also cooked in maple syrup. Oh. My.

It was served with bacon. WHOA. That is all I have to say. It was literally a flavor explosion of epic proportions. I can honestly say that I have never had such a great breakfast EVER. I added syrup to the top just to add to the maple. It could honestly have been eaten with nothing though.

The recipe is posted online. So, you can make it yourself if you want to. I did. It was very easy.

Maple Walnut Stuffed French Toast Recipe

My boyfriend ordered the regular french toast, also made with Texas toast, and also AMAZING. He ordered his with sausage.

I also helped myself to coffee and an AMAZING blueberry muffin when I first cam upstairs.

The muffin was very good and the coffee was brewed perfectly. I added cream and sugar and it was the perfect way to start my day.

I could not have asked for a better breakfast.

After this amazing breakfast we decided to go hiking in Crawford Notch for the day.

It was in Crawford Notch in the White Mountains that we decided to hike the Arethusa Falls Trail where we saw this:

This is Arethusa Falls, a 175 foot waterfall located in Crawford Notch in the White mountains. It was GORGEOUS.

After spending about 6-7 hours hiking we decided that we were starving, so we headed towards the Almost There Sports Tavern and Restaurant.

Located: 1287 NH.RT.16, Albany, NH

just a note* Albany NH is about 30 minutes from North Conway.

The Almost There Sports Tavern and Pub was a cool little ghetto whole in the wall. We chose it because of there 50 cent wings!

They were YUMMY!

We ordered twelve Minor (hot) wings

Twelve Teriaki

And

Twelve Chipotle Citrus

I bet you have never had chipotle citrus wings before. Because you haven't I am going to tell you, you are MISSING OUT! They had a sweet, spicy, smoky, chipotle flavor and they were wonderful! The other wings were good too. But nothing like the chipotle citrus.

We also ordered sweet potato fries. They were very good, pretty much your typical sweet potato fries.

This is the inside of Almost there. If you can see the biker gang sitting at the table on the other side of the pool table, that should give you an idea of the type of place it was. There was one waitress/bartender and she was WONDERFUL! I wish I could remember he name. She was busy, but she was ON TOP OF EVERYTHING. She did a very very good job and got the tip that the waitress from tuckerman's!

Naturally, after a long day of hiking we went with some great beer. While my boyfriend ordered Sam Adam's Seasonal Summer Ale (left), I ordered Tuckermann's IPA (right). It was very very good. It was a lighter beer, which I tend to like anyway, and it had a great flavor. I don't think you can buy it here in Portland.

After Almost there we headed back to The Cabernet Inn. We stayed our second night there and then headed back to the adorable little dinning room to have our second amazing breakfast! We were the only ones in the inn that night so we sat down and waited for Bruce to head out to meet us.

This morning I decided that I would try something different, so I ordered a full Omelet.

 It was OUTSTANDING! It contained red peppers, green peppers, cheese, onions, and ham...OHHH MY!

It was also served with a side of bacon. I poured syrup on top (which it really didn't need) and it was OUTSTANDING. I would have to say that it was probably one of the best omelets I have every had! EVER!

My boyfriend ordered the regular pancakes. Naturally I wanted a bite it was also EPIC! Jessica makes them with powdered sugar on top of them. AMAZING. Add syrup and I bet you can't eat them all.

 Another cool thing that I want to mention is the syrup dispenser. Weird I know. But I am a fairly simple-minded person and small things amuse me and I think I want to buy one of these awesome syrup dispensers.

It was VERY COOL! you pick it up by the handle, place it over your food, push the button on top and the syrup comes out the bottom! then you place it back in the glass holder so it doesn't leak all over the place! Awesome!

I had to have my coffee too.

And Juice.

And, as a pre-breakfast snack, Jessica made homemade banana bread. It was OUTSTANDING! It wasn't dry, it was just right! I think I had three pieces.

Our trip to North Conway was just what we needed after a LONG week. Bruce and Jessica, The innkeepers at The Cabernet Inn were probably two of the nicest people I have ever met in my entire life. They are very genuine and very nice. They are really really good at what they do and Jessica can cook some outstanding breakfast!

When we left that morning Jessica sent us home with four homemade truffles. Two blueberry and Two Orange Cream. WHOA! they were amazing!

If you ever decide that you need to get away, than book at THE CABERNET INN! you will not be disappointed! I promise!