Milwaukee

Hue Vietnamese

I'd never had spring rolls with grilled pork sausage, so I was a little skeptical; the ones at Hue in Bayview were delicious, so I shall never doubt the wonder of sausage in a spring roll again.

Spring rolls with pork sausage

Oshkosh

Kristine and I ventured to Oshkosh for a conference not that long ago, and we were pleasantly surprised to find a Filipino restaurant called Manila Resto near our hotel. You don't often come across Filipino food, so we gave it a try. They also had sushi, and while we didn't try it, we heard rave reviews from other diners. We started with a fresh spring roll, or lumpia in Indonesia and the Philippines. (Fresh seems a bit redundant because I think of spring rolls as unfried. That's not always the case, though. Here's Wikipedia's take on the fried vs. unfried debate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_roll). The roll was nice, but the sauce could've taken down the sweet a notch and added more spice.

Fresh spring roll

Lumpia, or spring roll

Umami with Mara

Summer rolls

When Mara was visiting a few weeks ago, we went to Umami for dinner. We had the summer rolls, the sesame seaweed salad with shiitake mushrooms, the mixed greens salad, and the tonkatsu ramen with a garlic bomb. The summer rolls were a tad bland, but, as always, the seaweed salad and tonkatsu ramen were marvelous.

Seaweed salad

Tonkatsu ramen

Noshing in Phoenix

Mmm...pho

Fair readers: I have been neglecting you. I'm so sorry. What can I say? It's summer.

These picks are from a few of the places I ate during my last visit to Phoenix in May...I think.