Cooking in Paradise

Undoubetedly our favorite evening on our recent family trip to Mexico was the night we took a cooking class at Robert & Dolores Brittingham’s house.

Formerly from Seattle, Robert & Dolores have called Puerto Vallarta home since 2002, starting Essence of Cuisine, Dolores’ cooking school, in 2006. We girls in the family had taken several cooking classes in the past and knew it was something we wanted to take advantage of on this trip to Mexico. After months of searching online, I was growing frustrated. Of the many different types of classes offered around town, none of them seemed to suit our group. A couple were perfect for me, 6-7 hours of total immersion, beginning with shopping for ingredients at the market, but deemed much too intense for mom and Wendy. A few well-known classes had great reviews, but were extremely expensive and mostly featured simply watching the chef cook.

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Puerto Vallarta in Review

Puerto Vallarta is a magical place for us and over the last twenty years we’ve eaten our way all over the city, from food carts and street stands to five star restaurants like Cafe des Amis. Having just returned from yet another vacation in paradise I thought I’d give a rundown of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

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Beaches

“Knee deep in the water somewhere, got the blue sky breeze blowing wind through my hair, only worry in the world is the tide going to reach my chair” – Zac Brown Band with Jimmy Buffet

It’s not news to anyone that we love the beach. Not only do we camp there regularly here in the Pacific Northwest, but we’ve made a point of visiting great beaches wherever we travel around the world. This week, in honor of our upcoming vacation to the beaches of Puerto Vallarta, we bring you some of our favorites from near and far.

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Puerto Vallarta – Almost Like Coming Home

Some places call to you, fill a place in your soul, and make you feel like you’ve come home; sometimes even if it’s the first time you’ve been there. I’ve had several of those experiences over the years; Vernazza, Italy on the Cinque Terre, Istanbul, Turkey, and Chiang Mai, Thailand, but the one place we’ve been to more than anywhere else in the world, and the place we keep finding ourselves going  back to, is Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

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