Some pretty pictures of food. For a change.

Peppermint stick milkshake at Lunchbox Laboratory in Seattle. 

Cheeseburger plate at Lunchbox Laboratory.

 Bacon cheeseburger at Lunchbox Laboratory. 

I apologize for this nasty picture, but can you see how much bacon is on there? That sounds like a good thing, but wasn't. Too smoky. It's the right kind of mistake for a restaurant to make. We loved this place.

Golden Grahams milkshake from a food truck in Portland. I couldn't get the kids to order this so I had to order it myself.

Okay, so this is not pretty, but we ate it all up: pandan ice cream on a bed of warm sticky rice showered with a pound or so of chopped peanuts. Served to us at Ping restaurant in Portland's very petite Chinatown.

I was going to say that the food in the Pacific Northwest is the best in the country, but once you leave the big cities it deteriorates sharply. A few years ago, when Owen and I were visiting the town of Fossil, Oregon, the waitress asked him to break open one of his chicken fingers to make sure it was cooked. The sad part is, we had to go back the next night because the only other restaurant in Fossil had been shut down by the health department. Above is a "sundae" Owen ordered in a diner in the town of Phoenix, Oregon. I thought it was funny, but he was totally fine with it. "I don't like rice on sundaes," he said. It does make the Ping sundae look like a little grotesque.