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Category: Review

Skate America and a Wedding – and all I’m telling you about is the food

Skate America 2007 was in Reading, PA
The plan was to get to Reading, PA in time for the 9am start of the ice dancing practices. Hah! I found out later, though, that because they were practicing for their compulsories that getting there on time would have meant listening to the same short piece of music played eighteen billion times, but by missing it, I was able to not kill anyone during the actual competition.

Here is the schedule – warning, PDF

Also, missing it meant that I hit the patisserie in the turnpike rest stop just as the chocolate croissants were coming out of the oven. MMMmmmmm!

But, woo! Skating!

One of the joys of parking in the farthest lot: having walked past a real restaurant

dinner
We were kicked out of the rink after the practice sessions and weren’t allowed back in for another 2 1/2 hours, so [redacted] (did I mention she was the one to hook me up with the awesome last minute tickets?) and I headed off for the only non-fast-food restaurant in walking distance of the rink (or so it seemed), which I had passed on the walk from the parking garage.

The Ugly Oyster looked like your average Irish pub, but the food was quite tasty. I had possibly the best fish & chips I have ever eaten (all really crispy and flavorful on the breading and absolutely melting inside), and the chips were greasy and hot from the fryer and all kinds of lovely. And I’ve had fish and chips in the UK and Boston and Baltimore’s Inner Harbor – these really were the best.

Wedding – Saturday
After the ceremony, my coworkers and I went off to get drunk – and since the bar was organized by my friend, in addition to wine there was good Belgian beer which I didn’t even get to because there was incredibly tasty hot cider (spiked with apple jack).

I wandered out to enjoy the grounds and the view and was soon joined by all of the other guests who also worked in the library – and we giggled about how the ceremony was very typical of our friend. We also giggled about our friend’s brother who had been given money to buy a suit for the wedding but hadn’t managed to take all of the tags off (we were betting whether he was just unaware or planning to return it – turns out both, he was thinking that the label with the designer’s name would be kinda classy to keep on, but he took off one of the other tags).

Then there was food (tasty, but completely barren for the vegans (including the bride’s ex-girlfriend) who had been invited). I ended up sitting next to the photographer and his assistant/girlfriend. I did my best to bond and ask whether he usually did photography for wedding or other artistic purposes, but he ended up not admitting to me that he was a fetish photographer (which the bride told me later).

When she had first been deciding on favors for the table, I had suggested little mice from Burdick chocolate, but her mother had wanted to do something more arts&crafts – so they ended up getting small wooden boxes that would just fit little jars of jam, 2 shortbreads, and a little spreader. But there were also chocolate truffles from Burdick’s for every table. Oh, man! After people started leaving, I went around checking to see which tables had left these behind – because they were worth dropping a little dignity. And there was wedding cake. And someone, who couldn’t attend the wedding, had sent homemade italian cookies dipped in insanely rich chocolate, but that was far less impressive than the tasty coffee and tea with whipped cream & chocolate shavings.

Sunday
Back in Philadelphia for some Yum Cha
6 people this time.

So I had hopes for trying to chicken feet this time, since I’d missed them last time, but there weren’t any to be found.

We did have tofu skin wrapped dumplings that were dubious looking, but tasted yummy.

I don’t think there was anything I didn’t like – well, maybe the sweet and sour pork because I had trouble finding any meat around the bits of bone.

I’ll have to remember to get the taro rolls next time, they hadn’t caught my eye before because they looked like room-temperature pastry. And it ended up being incredibly affordable. Group consensus: we are so doing this again!

Trying a new chocolate

fancy
I bought a Black Pearl Chocolate Bar at my favorite coffee house in philly. It’s 55% cacao with a layer of ginger, wasabi, and black sesame.

This was definitely a one square at a time kind of bar, even though I am usually all about devouring chocolate. Just the week before, I had been eating chocolate covered ginger from Trader Joe’s, and that would be a much more economical version of this bar (if I’d realized it was $7, I might never have tried it), but I have to admit that the fancier chocolate was both tastier and mellower. Even with the addition of wasabi, the chocolate was such good quality and the ratio of chocolate to goody was such that it ended up being a wonderfully balanced chocolate bar.

and not as fancy
One of my coworkers brought in a whole case of Hershey’s Whole Bean bars. Now I will eat regular Hershey’s with no hesitation because while I like fancy stuff, I also like sleazy stuff. But this was better than your average Hershey’s bar. I think it was greatly improved by being just slightly less sweet. On the other hand, it is also higher fiber, so after eating four of the (1.3oz/36g) bars I was a bit flatulent, but hey.

For those interested in nutritional information: And how healthy was this new kind of candy? Well the serving sizes for these two bars were just 1 gram off, so I can do a fairly easy comparison – and the Hershey’s one is almost exactly the same, except for the weirdly high fiber (6g fiber/36g serving). Same saturated fat, only 10 fewer calories, and only 3 fewer grams of sugar. (note: this comparison is with fru fru dark chocolate rather than with regular Hershey’s) On the other hand, I was happy eating a third of the serving size of the fancy one, but wanted several serving sizes of the sleazy one.

What I did with my summer weekend – failed whole wheat banana peanut butter chocolate chip cookies

Read books
Element of Fire by Martha Wells

I really liked this book, but I spent the entire time I was reading it wishing it were Science Fiction instead of Fantasy. See, one of the things I like most about some of this author’s other writing is that she writes science fiction that is believably otherworldly where I am neither pointing the the earth culture some author blatantly ripped off nor am I wincing at the implausible technobabble. Her stuff is the closest to good hard sci fi that I have read in a while. So I went into this book looking for that itch to be scratched, and I got fantasy.

Still, there’s wonderful political intrigue, and an amazingly understated and limiting system of magic that feels wonderfully plausible. Every single character has dimensions and motivations and regrets. I ended up wanting to spend a good deal more time in this world.

The Wizard Hunters by Martha Wells

Luckily, I already had another book set in the same world as Element of Fire. Only this one – is set in the future of the other book – possibly a steampunk future. So there’s that rich texture of fantasy, but the magic has faded a bit in the way of technology and there are whizzing gadgets and whamframits and legacies of wizards and the ways different cultures have been shaped by developing in a world with magic. It’s almost an anthropological study, but it’s also swashbuckling and quirkiness. There are so many elements in this world, but they are all clearly defined and interesting and I need to go buy the next two books in the trilogy right away.

Watched movies
Stardust

There were times when I was grinning uncontrollably, thinking, “Awwww… Neil Gaiman, your message is showing.” Geek boy makes good! People love you, even if you’re different! Overconfidence will do you in every time. N’awww!

But aside from that, totally aside from Neil Gaiman’s input, this was an awesome movie. The visuals were stunning! The acting was wonderful – there was just the right balance of scenery chewing and subtlety. And I have never seen costuming and special effects work together so well before – with the way they did the witch’s magic, her incredibly awkward dress totally worked because it matched the smokey magic effect and made it looks like she was trailing off into vapours at the edges – and both were enhanced by the other. I loved that the pretty pretty princess looked like a real person, and beautiful. I loved that one of the essential parts of becoming a hero was acquiring Keanu Reeve’s hair – I had never understood before. Robert De Niro was great, but I really wanted to squish his first mate’s cheeks – who was he? OH! – well, this movie really suited him.

Kiss of the Spider Woman

This movie has been available for me to watch ever since it was released and we had a copy on Beta. Finally got around to it.

First off. I hate William Hurt. Far too many times, I have gone into a movie really excited that it will have John Hurt in it, only to be tricked into having to watch William Hurt, instead. Not a fair substitution, I tell you! I think he managed to single-handedly ruin the last third of History of Violence, which would have been one of my favorite movies, if only they had cast someone other than William Hurt. I don’t like his voice, his mannerisms, the way he manages to be smugly modest, and he has stupid hair. Or I might just be projecting that all because I am bitter that he isn’t John Hurt.

And the movie starts off with William Hurt’s voice talking painfully slowly he’s really savouring his own nasal tone, and I almost turned it off right there. But my mother has been trying to get me to watch this movie for years, so I kept going.

I sure was glad that my closest neighbors have moved because I was a bit embarrassed at times to have, “Faggot,” shouted out through my windows so frequently – not a polite movie.

But it was a good movie. I liked how the characters developed and didn’t compromise. I liked how the story was built up in layers that seemed superficial but weren’t.

I have an urge to rewrite bits of it. On the other hand, I like that I have to fight the text at that point.

Baked… badly
Saga of the whole wheat banana peanut butter chocolate chip cookies

It all started with overripe bananas. And I was going to make banana bread, but I always make banana bread. So I looked through my cookbooks for something new to bake with bananas.

I have checked out from the library a cookbook for Clueless Bakers, and it had a recipe for whole wheat banana peanut butter cookies. What could go wrong?

So I started off following the recipe exactly, and the recipe said that throwing in chocolate chips would cause nothing but good things, so I did that.

The result? Lumpy, grainy, yucky cookies of blech!

I thought back to the best peanut butter cookies I have ever had, and they had been made from a fairly thin batter with melted chocolate drops on top. So I went to the store to buy Hershey’s Kisses, and I set out to thin the batter.

I looked in my fridge and decided that the small cup of vanilla yogurt would be the perfect choice, after all I was planning to put yogurt (plain) in the banana bread, if I made it, and a bit of vanilla would do wonders for the taste. I also decided that a teaspoon of powdered ginger would also do wonders for the taste, so I added that.

The batter was thin and spread out just the way I wanted, but it didn’t get crispy at all. The outside was cooked, but the inside was still mushy – and they were thin now!

Apparently, yogurt was the wrong choice. When I called my mother to whine about my cookies, she said that I should have used an egg but that a dairy product would trap too much moisture.

The Hershey’s Kisses were also not as charming as the chocolate drops made special for the other recipe because they didn’t melt – the just got a bit droopy around the edges but maintained their shape perfectly even after baking. Creepy. Possibly, I should have been tipped off by the paper tags under the foil that said, “Oops,” and, “I hate Mondays!”

At least the dough was tasty. If it weren’t for cultural indoctrination against salmonella, I’d prefer to eat most cookies as dough.

Nevermind, I packed up the entire lot of them and left them in the staff room for people to try.

I’m good at savoury food, but for some reason I am bizarrely incompetent at baked goods.

ETA: The free cookies at work were not tempting enough at all – at the end of the day, I ended up throwing out half of them.

Not quite a restaurant review – Bump

I snuck out (with permission) between ushering shifts for the film festival, and tried The Bump because it was close and looked interesting – all appetizers, all the time: sounds like my kind of place.

So I was sitting there overhearing a couple who disparaged the film festival flier and then proceeded to *eat my food!*

No, really!

After I’d been sitting there half an hour with no food, they mentioned to my waiter that they wanted to make sure the sampler platter they had happily eaten wouldn’t be on their bill since they hadn’t ordered it…. And that was my dinner!

The couple and I ended up finishing and leaving the restaurant at the same time, and the guy put his hand on my shoulder (touched me!) and said, “You are much more patient than I would have been.”

And because I was wearing my volunteer shirt from the festival, I did not turn around and whine, “OMG, you ate my food!” Instead, I just stood their with my mouth hanging open as they walked away.

(Yes, I did get food eventually, but I had been very hungry and then I had to rush through the platter – which despite sounding like a decent sampler only included 2 shrimp, 1 potsticker, and 2 eggrolls, and while they were tasty and gourmet, that was not the size of a selection of 5 of the appetizers that I had been expecting – and I ended up being late to my next volunteer assignment)

And they ate my food! And then they tried to commiserate with my over the bad service when there was 1 waiter working the full restaurant.

And they were nasty, smug people.

Fancy Hershey’s

I had a coupon for a free bar of Hershey’s attempt at upscale chocolate: Cacao Reserve

From only 2 choices at the pharmacy across the street, I picked the 35% cacao milk chocolate bar because I have a stash of 4 bars of tasty dark chocolate in my desk already.

I think I chose poorly – because while the flavor was somewhat reminiscent of luxurious milk chocolates of Europe, the primary characteristic of both taste and texture was wax.