Our Honeymoon, Part 1

We started our honeymoon (Mike calls it our agavemoon; I am calling it our eatingmoon because it is all about food) over the weekend. We went down to Portland on Friday so we could attend the Vegan Beer & Food Festival on Saturday.

Just a note: I got a little overzealous with the photo deleting, so some of these are going to be Instagram photos.

We started off our honeymoon with a wonderful dinner at Portobello. We shared the crispy eggplant with marinara and cashew cheese as a starter. Mike had gnocchi with roasted fennel, fushimi peppers, and broccolini in marsala cream sauce; I had the delicious arrabbiata pizza, which has a chili-fennel marinara, housemade garlic arrabbiata sausage, hot peppers, and cashew cream.

Mike chose the chocolate bombe for dessert, and I went for the tiramisu. I cannot resist a good tiramisu.

We couldn’t visit Portland without making a trip to Voodoo Doughnuts.

We ran over to Food Fight to replace something I’d left in our wedding night hotel room, and I said, “Hey, it’s pretty early in the day – do you want to pop into Sweetpea and see if they have any croissants?” And they did – their amazing pizza croissants with veggie pepperoni (which I think might be housemade?)!

Lilacs still blooming outside of Food Fight! At the end of September!

Breakfast goods safely stored in the trunk, we headed over to the beer & food fest. We splurged on VIP tickets since it was our honeymoon, and while I don’t feel they were worth the extra cost because they didn’t actually deliver what they were supposed to, it was great to get a crack at the food and beer purveyors before it got crowded. We started at Southern Fried Vegan, where we got a bowl of mac & cheese topped with cajun corn and fried chicken.

I’ve seen a lot of negative comments about the food Southern Fried Vegan was serving, but we really loved this!

He was so happy to be shoveling that into his face.

We had told ourselves that we would try to focus on food vendors from places other than Portland or Seattle, but when we saw Snackrilege‘s menu, we couldn’t pass it up. We shared their two sliders: the Anti-Christo (bacon, cream cheese, and spicy marmalade on fried bread) and the Blood of the Wing (hot wing seitan, fried jalapeno, blue cheese, and kale on a bun). They were astoundingly good!

We met up with our friends right after this, so we didn’t take any more photos, but we definitely ate: a bite of our friend Amity’s chicken & waffle melt from The Grilled Cheese Truck (HOLY COW), beer arancini in marinara cashew cream from Portobello (I would eat arancini every day), the chicken & waffle bite from Southern Fried Vegan (yes, we went there twice), and the glorious chocolate boat from Seattle’s own Brown Sugar Baking Company.

Yeah, we said “No Seattle”, but LOOK AT THAT.

We hung out with our friends, we got to try many beers, we ran into a lot of people we knew, we basked in vegan camaraderie, we soaked up the sun and enjoyed the view of the river. I met Holly from Driftwood Magazine and she took my photo for their “Vegan Faces” series. We gave Jeanette Zeis a lot of dollars for her lovely ceramics. The non-food highlight, however, was meeting the charming and friendly Lisa from Panda with Cookie, and bringing lots of her adorable wares home (including a pirate dinosaur onesie for our friend Crystal’s baby).

We’re in Austin now, and we’ve eaten so many delicious things, but that update will have to wait for another day.

Mike’s contribution to the chalk walls at the festival.

❤
Sarra