Visit to Monticello

I received a letter from a reader yesterday.

Do you do travel reports to places like Monticello? — Curious in Massachusetts.

Funny you should ask, Curious, as I went to Monticello earlier this week. I've been wanting to go for years, and a kind reader gave me a trip to Thomas Jefferson's homestead for my birthday.

Charlottesville, Virginia is about two and a half hours away from D.C., and on my trip we first stopped at the University of Virginia, which Jefferson founded and designed, and is extremely pretty. See evidence below:

From UVA we went to Michie Tavern, where we had lunch, then to Monticello. We had over an hour before our tour, but there was still plenty to see:

A huge vegetable garden.

The beautiful west lawn with a circular path lined with flowers.

Close-up of a flower.

Thomas Jefferson's grave. His descendants are still buried there today.

There were also slave quarters, an ice house, and things like that. After touring the grounds, we went through the house. It was beautiful, as one would expect, but Monticello is more note-worthy for what Jefferson put in it. There's an elaborate clock that uses weights to keep a record of what day it is on the wall; a set of doors that when you start to close one, the other automatically closes; portraits and busts of notable individuals of the time so Monticello-residents would know what they looked like; a dumb-waiter strictly for wine; closets built into walls above beds so space isn't wasted.

It's a technologically-savvy house — unsurprising then, that it took Jefferson 40 years to finish it. He began when he was 26 and continued improving it. I've visited plenty of notable houses — presidents, authors, castles, palaces — but Monticello is the first one where the inhabitant has put that much thought into the house. Monticello really is Thomas Jefferson.

Weekend Away: Houston, Part II

The faux mall and reflecting pool in Houston.

The Gulf of Mexico on a visit to Galveston, still clearly ravaged by the hurricane.

The field during an Astros-Dodgers game.

Flowers at Bayou Bend.

The new baby giraffe at the zoo.

The baby elephant at the zoo.

Weekend Away: Houston, Part I

Oh, so much to share from my recent trip to Houston — I had a fantastic time visiting my brother and had some absolutely wonderful food.



My favorite meal was at Feast. I feel like I haven't had a completely perfect meal in awhile, and Feast came through. I didn't try any of the organ meat dishes that Feast does, but from the smooth chicken liver pate and albondigas, Spanish style meatballs, to the fish and scallop pie (below), which was topped with cheesy mashed potatoes and leeks, to the best sticky toffee pudding I've had this side of the Atlantic, everything was marvelous. And they served a perfect Pimm's. Frank Bruni talks about it here.


The next night we went to Hugo's, where Diana Kennedy told me I had to go to when we were talking Mexican cuisine last year. To my delight, it's squash blossom time, and I had some fried blossoms filled with goat cheese. That was followed by shrimp sautéed in lime garlic oil (below), and bites from everyone else's plates, which yielded me tastes of chiles rellenos, poblano peppers stuffed with roasted chicken and asadero cheese, carnitas, and a beautiful seared duck breast and braised leg with mole Poblano.



Dessert was equally as good — hazelnut cake and caramel-filled crepes were both perfect ways to cap off the meal.




Thank you to Dad & Mom for two lovely dinners!

Up next: beautiful gardens, a baseball game, and the Gulf of Mexico.

Weekend Away: Boston

On a recent visit to Boston I headed to the Museum of Fine Arts to see Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice.

The large show explores the rivalry between the three 16th-century Venetian artists and looks at how they each often painted the same exact scenes during the four decades that their careers overlapped. The paintings are grouped by subject, which makes it easy to see how much they influenced each other, as in Supper at Emmaus — Veronese's version is smaller and all are focused on Christ's hand, and Titian's painting is static, with a gloriously detailed tablecloth. In Tintoretto's the other figures dance around Christ; though the center of the painting, only one person is focused on him.

Highlights include a Tintoretto painting, Contest Between Apollo and Marsyas, which is set into the ceiling, and a room devoted to x-ray studies that were done on some of the MFA's paintings. Having finished The Lost Painting shortly before my visit to the museum, it was really interesting to see how artists changed the direction of paintings simply by painting over them.

I went into the show knowing that Titian was my favorite of the three, and the show didn't change that. But I did leave knowing more about each artist, as wall text describes how a contemporary said that Tintoretto was "like a peppercorn who overpowered other flavors."

A mini-show, Mad on Color: Paintings of 19th-Century Venice, coincides with Rivals, and includes Monet's lovely Grand Canal, Venice and Ettore Tito's ebullient Breezy Day in Venice.

Tickets for Rivals are $25.

The museum was followed with an excellent lunch at Legal Seafoods, highlights of which were lots of fried seafood and crab salad.

Past Weekends Away
Upcoming Weekends Away: New York, Houston

Weekend Away: Mardi Gras

St. Charles Ave., where we watched most of the parades.

A float

Elizabeth's serves up fabulous...

Praline bacon!

The back of a pretty float.

Trees dripping with beads

Bourbon Street, approximately 12 a.m.

Bourbon Street aftermath, 5 a.m.

Weekend Away: Southern Road Trip

I'm back in D.C. from my road trip, which was even more fun than anticipated. Though I didn't find boiled peanuts, I did eat plenty of gumbo and bread pudding in Louisiana, bbq, okra and cornbread in Tennessee and delicious Mexican food in Texas. Many of my northern-elitist sensibilities fell away as well, and I'm already anticipating my next trip South. Below are a smattering of photos, but I've loaded more of them on Facebook.

Virginia, the first state we hit

Entering Tennessee, where there are giant guitars and crosses on the side of the road

Amazing jambalaya at the Andouille Festival in Louisiana

A swamp in Texas

The Lone Star State