AWOL

Where is Roadsnacks?

She is busy with her annual multi-day catering gig, feeding these people:






Recipes later...

The return of recipe Wednesday (again)

Recipe Wednesday is back! Here's one of our potluck staples:














Mama Jo's Tofu Salad

- Place one or two blocks tofu (from San Jose Tofu, if you can get it) on a platter. No need to cut it or anything.
- Scatter some baby salad greens around it. Make it pretty.
- Put a handful of alfalfa sprouts on top.
- And while you're at it, some halved cherry tomatoes.
- How about some sliced scallions?
- Now drizzle with your favorite Asian-style salad dressing.

Nihonmachi 5K

First race of the year! And me with swine flu. Well, not really. I hope.

I finished in 29:04, which is better than last year, but still pretty slow. I'll be faster next time, I promise.



























It was Rina and Matt's first race! The first of many, right?



Come on, guys. I have a lot of fried chicken to run off.

Seriously.

Augusta, GA

Cafe 209, downtown Augusta.

The chicken's so good, even Yurika has some.

(Click on her photo to read her t-shirt.)








Seriously, the fried chicken was great, as were the field peas and cornbread dressing. I'd skip the desserts, though.



Sconyers BBQ.

An Augusta institution.



























After our vegetarian stay in Tennessee, we are happy to see some actual meat...





...and overeat, as usual.

Finally updated

New Hanover photos. See March 9th post.

Collegedale, TN

Southern Adventist College: beautiful campus, friendly faculty & students, brand-new sports center, and a vegetarian cafeteria. And vegetarian grocery store.













































This makes some of us really happy...






















...and some of us really sad.

Durham, NC

First night in Durham: dinner at Bahn's Cuisine on 9th Street, near Duke U.

Vietnamese & Chinese eats, not bad at all. Bahn's is a tiny hole-in-the-wall with a short menu, and a mom-type at the register with a grandma-type in the kitchen. On Saturdays, they have specials like pho and the vegetarian plate, which had a spring roll, sticky rice, and tofu with black bean sauce and fried shallots.














I don't know if I'd go for the typical American-y things on the regular menu (sweet & sour this-n-that, kung pao chicken, etc.), but go on Saturdays for the specials!


Second night: dinner at Twisted Noodles, a most excellent Thai place.














I had the red tofu soup, which was screaming hot and awesome.

Reston, VA

The two-buck chuck here is actually $3.29.















And I got to see my former housemate (Nate) and his dog (Vago), the smartest, handsomest, most talented, and most adored dog in the world.














He's aged a bit since I last saw him, but I'm convinced he's going to live forever.

Hittin' the road

Leaving next week. Going out a day early to spend some time with my most wonderful friend, Amy. We were randomly matched as freshmen roommates in college and have been sisters ever since.

Also, am thisclose to getting rid of this !@#%!ing flu. Plus side: 5 more lbs gone. Woot!

Friday, April 17
The Center Stage
Reston, VA

Sunday, April 19
Fletcher Hall
Carolina Theatre
Durham, NC

Tuesday, April 21
Iles P.E. Center
Southern Adventist University
Collegedale, TN

Friday, April 24
D. Douglas Barnard Amphitheatre
Augusta State University
Augusta, GA

NOW where is Roadsnacks?

She has the flu.

But she will be hitting the road again, next week!

Here's something from the New York Times op-ed pages, in the meantime. It made me cry a little.

Iowa's Family Values

By Steven W. Thrasher

Published: April 8, 2009

IF it weren’t for Iowa, my family may never have existed, and this gay, biracial New Yorker might never have been born.

In 1958, when my mother, who was white, and father, who was black, wanted to get married in Nebraska, it was illegal for them to wed. So they decided to go next door to Iowa, a state that was progressive enough to allow interracial marriage. My mom’s brother tried to have the Nebraska state police bar her from leaving the state so she couldn’t marry my dad, which was only the latest legal indignity she had endured. She had been arrested on my parents’ first date, accused of prostitution. (The conventional thought of the time being: Why else would a white woman be seen with a black man?)

On their wedding day, somehow, my parents made it out of Nebraska without getting arrested again, and were wed in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on March 1, 1958. This was five years before Nebraska would strike down its laws against interracial marriage, and almost a decade before the Supreme Court would outlaw miscegenation laws throughout the country in Loving v. Virginia.

When the good state of Iowa conferred the dignity of civic recognition on my parents’ relationship — a relationship some members of their own families thought was deviant and immoral, that the civil authorities of Nebraska had tried to destroy, and that even some of my mom’s college-educated friends believed would produce children striped like zebras — our family began. And by the time my father died, their interracial marriage was seen just as a marriage, and an admirable 45-year one at that.

That I almost cried last week upon reading that the Iowa Supreme Court overturned the state law banning same-sex marriage will therefore come as no surprise. I’m still struck by one thought: over the years, I’ve met so many gay émigrés who felt it was unsafe to be gay in so-called flyover country and fled for the East and West coasts. But as a gay man, I can’t marry in “liberal” New York, where I’m a resident, or in “liberal” California, where I was born, and very soon I will have that right in “conservative” Iowa.

Of course, the desire to define relational rights and responsibilities with a partner, to have access to the protection that this kind of commitment affords, is rather conservative. But it’s a conservative dream that should be offered to all Americans. Though it takes great courage for gays to marry in a handful of states now, one hopes that someday, throughout the nation, gay marriages, like my parents’ union, will just be seen as marriages.

It’s safe to say that neither the dramas of our family, nor its triumphs, could have been possible without the simultaneously radical and conservative occasion of my parents’ civil marriage in Iowa. And so when the time comes, I hope to be married at the City Hall in Council Bluffs, in the state that not only supports my civil rights now, but which supported my parents’ so many years ago.

Steven W. Thrasher is a writer and media producer.

It's official

You do what?

Some of you know that I used to write for this magazine.

I left that job when I moved to the left coast but still work on cookbooks now and again. So what is it exactly that I do?

Sometimes, I write articles for food mags or contribute recipes to a cookbook.

Other times, I test recipes for cookbooks, usually ones written by restaurant chefs. The chef will get a book deal, send their recipes to an editor who pares them down to serve 4-8, and the editor will send them to me to test.

Why would the recipe have to be tested, you ask? Normally, restaurant chefs don't have any of their recipes written down, and if they do, it'll most likely be a set of vague directions with no concrete measurements or cooking times. If recipes weren't tested, they might look like this:

Marinara (serves 4? 6? 127?)

- enough tomatoes to fill a fish tub
- two cups mirepoix onions
- maybe some rosemary or marjoram, about a handful
- lots of garlic
- salt, sugar
- evoo

Cook together until it makes a sauce.

Er - what kind of tomatoes, and what's a fish tub? Seeded? Chopped? And cook it in what kind of pan? In the oven? On the stovetop? What do you serve this with?

So that's what I do.

All righty, back to the kitchen...

Where is Roadsnacks?

Loyal readers will note the absence of Recipe Wednesdays. That is due to a temporarily busier work schedule, which is a good thing, I assure you.

What is not a good thing is that I no longer have time for my daily runs, which is going to suck, come race season. Sigh.

By May 1, life should return to normal.

Now, back to the pork chops...

Sort of a snack

I know, I know.

Still have Hanover photos to post. But watch this for now.

Home

Final Hanover posts coming shortly...and Recipe Wednesday is on hiatus for until the end of April, due to current work schedule.

In the meantime, has anyone read this?



I read this on the plane.

Good lord.

Amazing book, but incredibly disturbing. Not in a violent or yucky way, but in that quiet, desperate, British manner that Ishiguro does so well.

Go find this book.




Update: Gack. Just found out this is being made into a movie. I really don't think this story would translate well to film...

Hanover is over...

...but not before we go to the King Arthur Flour Bakery.


































San Diego boy enjoys the snow.




























The Hanover Inn.
Pretty, quaint, and serving travelers since 1780.
Most importantly, it's next to the theater.


A sign inside the Hopkins Center.

Hm.

Too much of a good thing.

Consumed within the last hour:

From the Dirt Cowboy Cafe: free coffee giveaway this afternoon (no idea what the occasion was), so I had a two-shot skim latte.

From Chocolate Now: free truffle samples and free hot chocolate, made with hot milk and actual pieces of melted chocolate.

From our hotel (Hanover Inn - serving visitors to Dartmouth for 225+ years!): free chocolate truffles from Chocolates of Vermont.

I am somewhat lactose intolerant.

Urp.

Hanover, Part II: The Return

We are, seriously, in the land of snacks. Hanover, NH is lousy with adorable restaurants and cafes that are all pretty darned amazing. And nice east coast pizza.

Murphy's, a pub with lots of dark wood, stained glass, and the world's second best BLT. (The best one was at the Hotel Playa in Mazatlan.)







Avocado! Red onion! Brown sugar bacon! Sweet potato fries! And did I mention the brown sugar bacon?

All right. So the BLT in Mazatlan didn't have candied bacon or sweet potato fries. But it was served on a perfect beach in a perfect resort hotel, so really, there's no competition.


Lou's Restaurant & Bakery. We have been here before.



I had the poached eggs on english muffins with tomato, bacon, and a chipotle cream sauce. With a side of baked beans, made from scratch, natch.

There's still some Pennsylvania left in me - I looove homemade baked beans.

Yumi & Stew each got a giant plate of corned beef hash.




This was great. I could eat this all day. And I don't really like corned beef, hash-ified or otherwise.












Yumi cleans her plate.



















Stew is defeated. Which worked out well for me, because I got to eat half of his breakfast.












Turns out to have been a good thing, since I had quite the workout during the concert later that day.

Tired now. G'nite...

Roadkill Snacks

The British. Purveyors of very strange snacks.
















These British crisps (chips to you) are from a candy shop in Keene.

Chili & Chocolate (gack), Crispy Duck & Hoisin (tasty), Roast Chicken (meh).

Other flavors (neither pictured nor tried - yet) were Fish & Chips, Builder's Breakfast (tomatoes, beans, & ham or some such), something Indian & onion, and Prawn Cocktail.































And, of course, CAJUN SQUIRREL. What.

That was awful.

I would rather have ketchup chips.

Keene, NH

Keene is the home of the lovely Elm City Brewing Company. We were in Keene for 3 days and went there 3 times.




Great brews! Onion rings the size of donuts! Salmon fillets smoked in-house!

And a roasted malt beer that tasted like mugicha and would be the perfect obon beer.

We went there with our Odaiko New England friends after the concert.





Lunch at Keene Fresh Salad Company.

Huge sandwiches! Soups and breads made from scratch!