Two weeks ago (Patriot's Day/Marathon Monday in Boston) I had planned for us to go up to Vermont and explore the Vermont Cheese Trail. Artisanal cheese making is very popular in Vermont right now, and even though it's winter, you can still visit a number of the farms and cheese makers. Combined with a baking class at the King Arthur Baking School, this was to be a fun weekend of cooking and eating. But then in typical New England fashion, a spring noreaster rolled in. We had to cancel our plans, but the the innkeeper at the place we were staying at wouldn't cancel our reservation. He'd only let us postpone AND we had to show up by the end of the month. So we ended up going this weekend. This turned out to be a mixed blessing. It was great cause the weather was gorgeous. Sunny and 75F both days. But since I had originally planned on visiting all the cheese places on a Monday, I was disappointed to discover that most businesses in Vermont are closed on Sunday. I discovered this after arriving in Vermont. It took a bit of scrambling and replanning, but we were able to redraw our plans for Sunday. Unfortunately, this meant that we couldn't visit those artisanal cheesemakers and even the Cabot Factory was closed on Sundays!
We drove up Saturday afternoon, checked into our inn and explored the tiny town of Montpelier.
It wasn't more then 10 blocks long and 5 blocks wide. After an ice cream cone at Ben and Jerry's (hey, it is Vermont after all). We had dinner at a local pizza joint called Girasole (after all the driving we weren't looking for anything fancy).
The place was not fancy. The booths and tables looked like they were from a different era (the 80s), but they did have a brand new wood fire oven that looked pretty spiffy. It was staffed by teenagers who weren't too attentive, but that was ok. We ordered two "small" pizzas and an appetizer of friend calamari.The calamari wasn't too bad. It was fried and rather tasteless. I just liked the fact it was crunchy.
And here are our pizzas.
They were much larger than we'd planned. Actually, we could've ordered one pizza between the two of us and been fine. I ordered a special pizza of the day, that had chicken, asparagus, onions, tomatoes, portabello mushrooms, pesto and asiago cheese. I thought it was quite yummy, especially where the asiago had melted onto the crust. Tom ordered a pizza with roasted vegetables, asiago cheese and a spicy roasted pepper spread. I wasn't a huge fan of it, but he enjoyed it, though he wished that the veggies had been roasted more before they were put ontop of the pizza. We took the rest to go, thinking we might snack on them later, but that never happened.We had been up earlier, so retired for the night, looking foward to maple syrup and cheese the next day.
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