Pursuing quality gastronomical endeavors for the general good
I wound up making the moroccan one last night, with some variations due to lack of ingredients, but these all sounded quite good as different options for flavoring braised cow:
boeuf a la mode (beef with onions)
beef and carrot stew with dark beer
carne deshebrada en salsa rojo (shredded beef in guajillo sauce, awesome in tacos)
I have been struggling to actually exercise lately, aside from dragging my butt to the weekly swing dances. There never seems to be time to ride the bike to the store, and words are insufficient to express how much I hate getting up early to work out before breakfast. So tallasiandude has been trying to gently nudge me in various ways, and to his endless credit none of those ways have made me want to smack him (no small task when it comes to the topic of exercising). And one of those nudges appears to have managed the impossible, and I am now undertaking to learn to run.
For now it is “running” rather than actually running, but it does seem to be working. It is Couch to 5K, which is deliberately constructed for people who think they hate running and never exercise. I don’t hate it, and it’s quite pleasant to go outside now that it’s warming up a little, and I am not *completely* couchbound. And the online program and accompanying podcasts are I think what tipped the balance, by making it absolutely braindead-easy to follow the program.
The idea is that you start out by walking for the most part, with very short bursts of jogging in between. This allows you to “run” without getting knee strain or side stitches or generally hating each and every step. 60 seconds of jogging is over before you know it. But even this would never have worked for me if I had to constantly check or set my watch to tell me when the various timeperiods were over, or had to memorize the plan for the week — not gonna happen. This is where the Podrunner podcasts come in.
These are electronica/dance music mixes with the correct BPM for the walking and the running portions, stitched together with little beepy tones that signal you to switch from walking to running and vice versa. No thinking necessary! Just zone out, listen to the innocuous oontsa-oontsa music, look at the flowers, and whenever it beeps, do the thing you’re not already doing. There’s not even any annoying person-voice giving the instructions, just impersonal tones so you can do your thing without any cheerleading.
This means that all I have to do in the morning is get dressed, put on sunscreen, find my iPod, and leave the house. No additional preparation or thinking is required, which is essential for the pre-food pre-caffeine hours. And it seems to be working, inasmuch as I am still doing it in week 2 and my legs ache a lot less when I get home.
No one hates (hated?) running more than I do, so I figure it can help all the rest of the haters find their way too.
My parents just went on a road trip through PA and NJ and VA visiting old friends, and they brought back some treasures.
Snapper soup from Ponzio’s diner, drizzled with sherry: goopy and brown and savory and delicious, just the way I remember it from childhood. Apparently the diner we used to go to has changed hands and no longer makes the soup, but there’s a vaguely affiliated alternate location elsewhere, so disaster was averted.
Scrapples: Dietz & Watson, Hatfield, Ed Hipp’s (made of turkey not pork), and Habbersett. Habbersett was the traditional one we used to get, but surprisingly we found that to be the blandest and starchiest of the 4. The turkey scrapple was remarkably good, so pork-avoiders should seek out Mr. Hipp’s product and enjoy. I liked the Hatfield and the Dietz & Watson the best, as they were most flavorful. All of these 4 were milder and less liver-rific than others I have eaten, and even the tallasiandude liked these pretty well.
Taylor Pork Roll: Presliced thick or thin and ready to go. Comes in the best retro packaging ever; I really should make the extra effort to get a picture up. Pink and porky and full of nitrates and delicious when fried golden in a pan.
Lebanon bologna & sweet bologna: hard sausages, classic with a sweet or spicy mustard and a cracker. We love a smoky in-your-face Lebanon bologna, but the sweet bologna was a surprise hit.
dill pickle Route 11 chips: DUH.
peanut butter opera fudge balls: apparently a regional favorite. Soft and velvety centers with a slight peanutty flavor, dipped in chocolate. They are downright delicate, almost like the fudge is made with confectioner’s sugar.
souse: head cheese pickled in vinegar. Not bad, soft in texture, lightly spicy, and not too many gnarly bits. Good dipped in dijon mustard, but not especially compelling.
relish from Rutt’s Hut: yellow, smushy, slightly sweet & tangy cabbage-based relish. Spectacular with the Lebanon & sweet bolognas.
Last night en route to a dancing weekend, our AirTran flight got delayed 2.5 hrs, and because of some last-minute chaos as we were leaving, we didn’t know this till we got to the airport and parked. Sigh. So the cost-saving measure of eating some dinner before leaving was blasted to smithereens, and we needed to eat some more… airport food. SIGH.
My usual tactic for this in terminal C of Logan is Currito, which is at least recognizably food, if not especially good food. But tallasiandude was feeling cravey and his disgruntled innards and emotional state took him to the asiany rice offerings of Ryo. We got one rice plate with “orange chicken” which looked like standard-issue crappy-chinese-restaurant General Gao’s chicken in the steam table, and we got another rice plate with beef teriyaki, which seemed like a good idea when the place presents itself as mostly Japanese and the teriyakis are cooked to order.
The orange chicken wasn’t terrible, I’ve definitely had worse. It still had a little crunch, and every 4th or 5th bite was detectably spicy, and there was nothing too gristly about the chicken. But when I opened the styrofoam clamshell to behold the beef teriyaki I just broke up laughing. Not that it was especially amusing to find a gravy-soup containing sauteed cabbage shreds and gray bits of the gnarliest beef (sorry, “beef”) I’ve seen in some time, but it hit me funny that anyone would imagine such a thing to be teriyaki. It was more like the chop suey I used to eat from the Kahula Chinese-Polynesian restaurant as a kid, with cabbage instead of celery and a bit more sugar in the gray gravy. Yipes.
We ate most of it, because we were hungry and it didn’t taste so bad you couldn’t eat it. But it did make me sad, and even sadder to remember that this is what most Americans get when they eat Asian food. We’re making big strides in our cities and some suburbs, and urbanites are getting more exposure to genuine cuisines, but if you don’t have that advantage, you mostly get this kind of stuff, sometimes better quality but under no circumstances the real thing. Sigh.