Pop Up Market Downtown & Point State Park

Last Friday afternoon, I read a few tweets from the local food trucks I follow that there was a pop up market happening downtown from 6-11 PM. I texted Adam to tell him we were going for dinner. We were looking for something quick, inexpensive, and delicious anyway.

I wasn't sure what to expect exactly and I was pleasantly surprised when we walked up to see about 20 vendors (about half of them were food, half were arts and crafts) in a small lot just a block from the Theater District parking garage. It was an amazing night, so there were tons of people out taking advantage of the market and the Gallery Crawl, which they run in conjunction with one another (we overheard someone say there was free beer at a few of the galleries, no wonder it was so popular).

Adam and I decided that we would be sharing our food (we didn't want to eat too much) and we got in line for the Meat and Potatoes tent, which had smoked pork tacos. We grabbed 2/$7. Not too shabby.

Another booth we visited was BRGR, which we've been wanting to try forever. We got an Average Joe burger to share. The bun was amazing and the burger was really good too.

I promised Adam we didn't have to stick around too long, so we grabbed a few goodies from Bluebird Kitchen to go. We decided on the banana dulce de leche bar and the campfire cupcake. OMG the banana bar was sooo yummy.

After the market, Adam and I decided to walk down to Point State Park, since we were in the area, neither one of us had been there and it was a gorgeous night (and sunset).

A lot of the park is closed for renovations and restoration of the fountain, which is supposed to be opening again this June after 2 years of work on it.

We didn't really stick around long, just walked down to the river and then headed back to the car. It was getting pretty late and we were tired. I can't wait to check it out again when all the fencing is gone and the fountain is working!

San Francisco: Monterey

Our last few days in California were spent down in the Monterey/Gilroy area. One of my college friends was getting married and I was so excited to join her on her special day!

We drove down to Gilroy, where our hotel for the weekend was located. It was about an hour and a half from the airport and the drive was really lovely.

Our first night, we mainly just checked out Gilroy and ate dinner at In-n-Out (yeah, that's a total of 3, or err... maybe 4 times, who's counting?). The next morning, bright and early, we headed out to Monterey. We had a few hours to kill before the wedding and I really wanted to see the town.

It was a 45 minute drive from our hotel and we saw some interesting things along the way including the artichoke capital of the world and a little Carly Rae Jepsen sand writing (Call Me MYBE?).

Not gonna lie, parking in Monterey was a nightmare. It's SUPER expensive and hard to find. Eventually, we found a spot in some lot that cost us a fortune. Live and learn. After parking, we kind of just wandered around. Our first stop was to see the harbor seals, who definitely had the right idea about chilling on the beach on this gorgeous day.

We headed over towards the main drag and walked by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I was kind of bummed that Adam didn't really want to go check it out and we really didn't have all that much time. I probably should have gone anyway, I've heard such awesome things about it. Those little can labels were all over the town incased in the cement. I think I saw about 4-5 different ones.

Cannery Row, down the road from the aquarium, was basically just a bunch of knick-knack touristy shops and restaurants, but it had a lovely view from the little park area. We had lunch at the Cannery Row Brewing Company.

We really didn't do too much in Monterey, since we had to head back to the hotel before the wedding to get dressed and pick up another friend from college to drive together. The wedding was at this gorgeous ranch near Gilroy. The whole thing was exactly how I imagined a California wedding would be.

We nabbed the bride so that the four alumnae, Lauren, Almut, Me, and Katie, could pose for a picture with her! And yes, it was soooo hot out that day - we were melting. I looked like a hot mess. I have no idea how Almut (the bride) looked so amazing still (share your secrets girl!)!

Adam and I had great table mates and I had really lovely time catching up and meeting Katie and her fiance (we somehow didn't meet in college).

How amazing is that view? California has some of the best sunsets for sure!

On our way back, we stopped at the Apple Campus in Cupertino. Adam had visited for his interview just a few days before and he wanted to show me what the place looked like. It's like a small city. Adam got to travel back there again last month for his first day of work.

We stopped at this place called "The Melt" in Stanford for lunch. It kind of made me laugh that California has a restaurant called Melt and Cleveland has a restaurant with the same name, but they're so different from one another. One is very obviously healthy and the other is, er, not. both are so good though. I had a delicious apple and brie grilled cheese.

Right next to Melt, was Sprinkles Cupcakes. We've been wanting to try this cupcake place since we've been on our cupcake crusade. We said the passcode of the day to get our free cupcake (chocolate peanut butter) and we bought a key lime and a red velvet. The chocolate peanut butter were SO good. I think it was because they had a lot of frosting on them, which the key lime and red velvet were lacking. I like my frosting. It was a good ending to our trip to Northern California.

The next day we headed home. Stay tuned for my trip to Pittsburgh and visit with Adam!

San Francisco: Our First Full Day!

We had a few reasons that we booked our trip in June during what was probably one of the busiest weeks in San Francisco. The first reason was that my very first friend from college was getting married about an hour outside of San Francisco in mid-June and I really wanted to attend her wedding. We both happened to have January admission to the college we attended (there were only about 30 of us in this admission class), we lived in the same dorm and had a lot of the same classes together. We lost touch a bit after college (what can I say, things get crazy when you leave school!), but we've been fortunate to reconnect a few times over the last two years in San Francisco where she had been living and I was visiting.

Adam and I have been to San Francisco three years in a row now. Adam attended Apple's WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) the first two years we visited, but unfortunately he wasn't able to get a ticket this year. We decided to go to San Fran during the same week as the conference anyway and Adam agreed to take a real vacation and tour the city this time. I was pretty stoked since he hadn't had the time the last two years and I had so many things I wanted to show him.

We got an early head start out of our hotel (the only nice thing about jet lag from the East coast) and decided to walk the Embarcadero to Fisherman's Wharf to grab some In-N-Out burgers for lunch. We figured if we walked the whole way there we wouldn't feel guilty about eating those delicious burgers and maybe some cupcakes after.

We walked down Bush St., the street that our hotel was on, and headed over to Market St. to catch up with the Embarcadero at the Ferry Building. I had actually never been this way before, but Adam had on his first trip to San Fran three years ago. The Ferry Building was built in 1898 and survived the earthquakes of 1906 and 1989. It's amazing to think that 100 years ago they could build something so solid.

The walk from the ferry building down the Embarcadero was a nice one. It was breezy and lovely out that morning (although when is San Francisco not lovely?). From the Embarcadero you can see few of the cities landmarks like, Coit Tower and Treasure Island, which was home to the 1939-1940 World's Fair.

It was a leisurely 45 minute walk to get to In-N-Out burger from the Ferry Building and we got there just after they opened at 10:30 AM. It's kind of become a tradition that when we visit the West Coast, we stop at In-N-Out as soon as we arrive. It's kind of become a running joke with my family and we even got In-N-Out t-shirts as a wedding gift from my family in California (Thanks Aunt Sharon, Uncle Brian, and Kira!).

After lunch, we trekked up the hill to Ghirardelli Square to grab some Kara's Cupcakes (our favorite!!) to bring back to the hotel for our late night snack. They have THE BEST s'mores cupcake e-ver. I have dreams of the fluffy marshmallow pillow topping and the graham cracker crust. Adam went with a strawberry cream cupcake, which was their seasonal special. We also picked up a red velvet and a peanut butter milk chocolate ganache for later.

Speaking of cupcakes, after we had checked in the previous night, we headed out to Bristol Farms on Market Street to grab some drinks and dinner. On our way over we passed a cupcake stand that we hadn't seen before called Cako. We decided to check out what they had to offer and ended up bringing two cupcakes, a snickerdoodle and a maple bacon back with us. I liked the snickerdoodle cake it was all yummy and cinnamon-y. Adam really enjoyed the maple bacon one, but he likes the one from our local cupcake joint, Kayce Cupcakes best. ;)

Ok, so back to business. We kind of felt disgusting after eating a burger, fries and a cupcake, so we decided to walk back to our hotel via the Embarcadero so we could check out the Ferry Building Marketplace on the way back.

On the way we saw a blimp, which was sponsored by some vodka company, flying overhead. Since we were kind of walking slower than before, I was having fun looking at all the different styles of the piers. This one in particular, Pier 17, was home to a chocolate company and was my favorite. I was crushing hard on those huge wooden doors. Gorgeous.

We finally made it to the Ferry Building and decided to walk around inside a bit to check out what it had to offer. There was everything from restaurants to pottery to mushrooms. Yes, there was a store dedicated to fungus.

After we felt that we had seen enough, we headed back to the hotel to relax a bit before dinner. We were going to walk down to the Ferry Building for dinner, but about twenty feet from our hotel, I saw a sign for The Irish Bank restaurant, looked down at my aching-still-not-recovered feet, stopped to check reviews on Foursquare and told Adam, this was where we were eating dinner.

And it was good. I had a Boddingtons and shepherd's pie, by recommendation of a few people on Foursquare. I don't even remember what Adam had, but both he and I scarfed our dinner down quickly and were satisfied.

It was definitely a fun first day! Be sure to stay tuned for our trip recaps to Golden Gate Park and Alcatraz!

Boston: Food Truck Festival of New England

I'm interrupting my final Cleveland post and postponing my San Francisco/Northern, CA trip recap (which is a month overdue) to talk about our awesome time at the Food Truck Festival of New England! I guess the two kind of tie together, because we did eat at a few food trucks in SF and I'll talk about those when I get around to writing those posts. :)

We headed out to Boston this past weekend to celebrate our second wedding anniversary a few weeks early. We honestly weren't sure what we were going to do on Saturday until a few days before we left. The conversation went kind of like this:

Kristin: (On Monday) Hey Adam, you should check out this website for the Food Truck Festival of New England.

Adam: (no response)

2 days later...

Adam: (comes downstairs and looks excited) I found something I think you should look at. Open up your web browser. OK, now go to www.foodtruckfestival...

Kristin: (thinking this looks familiar) Um, do you realize that I sent you that address like 2 days ago?

Adam: Ohhh... I thought it looked familiar!

We were cracking up and it was our running joke up until we went to the festival this weekend.

We got to the festival at about 11:30 AM and decided to purchase 30 tickets for $37. They had some sample menus available to give you an idea of how many tickets you'd have to pony up for different types of items. For example, most things were between 4-6 tickets, this included everything from sandwiches to chowders to noodle bowls. We figured that between the two of us we'd probably use 30 tickets and not feel disgusting afterwards. Looking back, we probably should have bought the next level up, to factor in for some drinks which were in the 2-4 ticket range.

Our first stop was Gabi's Smoke Shack. Adam loves BBQ so this was a must try for him. He got the pulled pork sandwich with cole slaw. We both thought this was really yummy. He didn't even offer me any until I asked if I could try it, so I guess it was just that good. They had containers of different BBQ sauces on tables next to the truck so you could add some extra flavor to your sandwich.

While Adam was enjoying his BBQ, I headed over to the Paris Creperie truck. I thought about getting a crepe "sandwich" from them, but when I saw Nutella and strawberry crepes, my heart skipped a beat and I instinctively went with that.

It was heavenly. I didn't really want to share, but I figured Adam should have a bite of this messy, but delicious crepe (you can see the patches of Nutella all over my face).

After we finally finished with the crepe, we headed towards the second section of trucks. In this section we grabbed some braised beef dumplings from Mei Mei Street Kitchen. Wow. These things were seriously delicious. I probably wouldn't have given one to Adam had I eaten one first. If I had extra tickets I probably would have bought another order of these.

I noticed on the pathways around the trucks there were signs sprayed basically saying "free Sabra hummus" -->. I moseyed on over to check out what the deal was. The were giving out a free container of hummus and two bags of parmesan and herb Sunchips. By this point, I was starting to get full, so I only really tasted the hummus and ended up putting the bags of chips away for later. I buy Sabra hummus a lot at home, especially the ones with roasted vegetables in the center. So good.

We walked around a little before heading over to check out the last section of trucks. Between that time, we ended up getting samples of Starbucks Via and Izze soda. Those were definitely welcome, as it was getting pretty hot out.

For our last non-dessert food, I picked the spice rubbed chicken sandwich from Bon Me Foods. Adam wasn't too excited about getting a sandwich, but I reminded him that I hadn't really eaten any non-dessert foods, except for the dumplings. The sandwich had carrots, red onions, daikon, cucumber, cilantro and spicy mayo. I picked chicken, but you could also pick BBQ pork or tofu with shiitake mushrooms.

Funny enough, this ended up being Adam's favorite food out of everything we ate.

We found a bench and just chilled for a while. The bench we picked happened to have a clear view of the Charles river, so we watched people boating and paddleboarding while we ate. You could rent a boat or board from the Paddle Boston launch at the festival.

After we finished our sandwich and had relaxed for a little while, we decided to hit up Kick Ass Cupcakes as our last stop before heading back to our hotel. We definitely like our cupcakes and make it a point to find a new shop where ever we go.

We picked the "Lucky Cupcake", which was a lemon cupcake with white chocolate buttercream and candied ginger. Well really, Adam picked this one. I'm not a lemon cupcake kind of gal, I would have rather tried any of the other flavors (I tried to get him to buy the cookies and cream with our remaining 3 tickets - no dice). I really liked the frosting though. It was sweet, but not super sweet.

I totally give them bonus points for adorable cupcake decoration.

We definitely had a great time and wish we were sticking around MA a little longer so we could go to another event. Maybe some day we'll get back to Boston to try some more trucks!

(Early) Birthday Cupcakes!

Adam and I have become cupcake fanatics these past few years. Any time we travel to a new city, we try to find at least one cupcake joint. Our obsession with cupcakes started 2 years ago back in San Francisco. Adam and I were wandering around Ghirardelli's Square when he pointed out Kara's Cupcakes and mentioned he'd seen them compete on Cupcake Wars. We decided to forgo a sundae at Ghirardelli's and instead had a cupcake from Kara's. It was love at first bite.

We ended up going back 2 more times before we left and since that first time we've probably visited Kara's at least 10 times total. We will always love Kara's.

On our anniversary trip to Boston this past year, we were roaming around Harvard Square, when our cupcake-sense directed us to Sweet. The shopfront is adorable and the cupcakes were so cute. I ended up with a pink lemonade and Adam had a strawberry shortcake cupcake.

We were craving cupcakes this past January when were were back in Boston for Frozen Fenway, but unfortunately Sweet on Newbury Street was closed for remodel. We're not giving up and we'll be back again to sample more deliciousness, probably this summer.

I've also been to American Cupcake in San Francisco and brought a few of their mini-cupcakes back for Adam to try (along with another Kara's cupcake, which flew all 10 hours with me!). My prize for the cutest cupcake was their cotton candy cupcake, which had a little cotton candy on a stick on top (unfortunately, they took the stick off when they put the cupcake in the to-go box).

For my birthday this year, Adam decided to get some Wicked Good Cupcakes for us to try. You know, the cupcake company of this fame. They send their cupcakes in mason jars, which is just about the cutest thing ever. I like that they layer the cupcake with the frosting, so you're not just grabbing a huge hunk of frosting or cupcake; you get to experience it as you're supposed to. Unfortunately, by the time my birthday came and went I was pretty desserted out.

So naturally, since Adam's birthday is coming up next month and I didn't want to deal with another dessert disaster (seriously, we probably have 3-4 parties for each of us between family and friends), I ordered cupcakes a month early from Georgetown Cupcake so we could enjoy them.

Adam had to wait until I got home. There was no way I'd let him eat them before letting me sneak a peek!

Considering they traveled from DC to us in MA, I'm super impressed at how they arrived. They definitely took a lot of care and put them into an insulated pack, with an ice pack on top, stuck cut-off lollypop sticks in the icing (most likely in case of a plastic shell collapse), and put each cupcake in the plastic clam shell container. There was hardly any icing carnage (you know, when the icing leaks all over the place) and the little fondant cuties were still on top!

After I was done photographing the beauties, I finally let a very patient Adam try them out. We sampled the red velvet and the cookies and cream to start. Both were absolutely delicious and I seriously can't wait to try them all!

Looks like we'll be heading to their new store in Boston (opening in May) whenever we make another trip there!