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Saturday, May 19th, 2012
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8:01 am - Pulled pork, May 11
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Last Friday, we had some friends over to play Arkham Horror. It will come as no surprise to y'all that I treated this as an opportunity to fire up the smoker. This time, I decided to try pulled pork.
I used Meathead's recipe from amazingribs.com, because his recipe for brisket had come out well. Since we were hosting on Friday evening, I planned to cook the pork overnight instead and refrigerate it instead of serving it fresh from the smoker. Meathead's recipe led me to expect about eight hours for my four-pound pork butts, and I wanted ten hours, so I set the smoker to 210° instead of 225° to make it take a bit longer.
I smoked with a mixture of apple and cherry wood. (I meant to use hickory, but I couldn't find my hickory chips.) I started at 10pm and added some chips every half hour until midnight.
At 8 the next morning, the temperature was about 175°, significantly less than the 190° I was aiming for. I turned up the smoker for 225° and let it go; it took another two hours to reach 190°. (I didn't use the Texas Crutch this time, because I was trying to make it take longer.)
This is what it looked like when I opened the smoker: 
I pulled it apart with a couple of forks. This picture shows off the mixture of dark, crusty exterior and pale moist inner flesh. The Lexicon of Real American Food calls these “Mr. Brown and Miss White.” 
In the afternoon, we heated the pork up in a slow cooker, made a big pan of macaroni and cheese, and served dinner.
The results were phenomenal. Though I hate to say it, the pulled pork came out better than last month's brisket. The meat was rich and succulent with a smooth smoke flavor. We will definitely have to make this again.
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| Sunday, May 13th, 2012
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11:57 pm - New Orleans Trip, Mar-23-2012: Annabelle's House
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Friday morning, we sampled the waffle at the B&B, because Lori had read a recommendation praising the waffle. That was an error; the waffle was completely ordinary, and New Orleans has many excellent breakfast possibilities. (Apparently it is prohibited by local law for a B&B in New Orleans to serve a full breakfast, to preserve opportunities for the restaurants.)
But this did provide a natural opportunity to get a tour or the B&B, and that was well worth it, because I think the B&B comes as close as we've experienced to providing lodging with a Roadfood spirit. What I look for in Roadfood is good food with a distinctive local character, and Annabelle's House thoroughly provided both of those.
The equivalent of good food for a hotel is comfortable quarters and good service. Our room was very nice, with antique furniture and a beautiful silk ceiling, but the service was really outstanding in ways that really matter to us. Two strong examples:
• When we were leaving on Thursday, rain was pouring down, and the proprietor loaned us an umbrella.
• When Lori needed Diet Coke to sate her caffeine addiction, the B&B provided it to us for free, and even said that we could keep the plastic Mardi Gras cup it was served in. This probably cost them less than a dollar, and it's quite likely that they made up for it with the room rate—but it felt very special to us because we are so used to feeling nickel and dimed at every turn in a hotel.
The other side of Roadfood-ness is distinctive character, and Annabelle's House had that in spades. It was built as a mansion in the 1800s, and Cary the manager regaled us with stories about the original owners (all four of the family's daughters went to college, which was very unusual for women at that time), the process by which the mansion was moved from St. Charles Street to its current location, and the current owners. According to Cary, he current owners separated soon after their marriage, but they are so rich and their finances are so entangled together that they will never get divorced. But they're both rich, and they're both fond of collecting things.
This cabinet holds his collection of Napoleonic-era porcelain. This room also holds urns that contain her mother's ashes and the ashes of two of her dogs.
They are both very active with Carnival in New Orleans, with different krewes. The husband is in Krewe of Hermes, but the wife is a member of Krewe of Muses. We were fascinated by the collection of framed Carnival ball invitations and other regalia.
I believe the collection of trophies was his:
The wife had had a hobby of collecting porcelain dogs and a hobby of collecting shaving brushes. But then she combined the two. So the cabinet in the entry hallway contains a large collection of shaving brushes with porcelain handles depicting dogs. Cary said that some of the individual pieces in the collection were worth tens of thousands of dollars.
One last photo to support my claim of distinctive local character: Cary is in Krewe of Barkus (a krewe for dog owners), and he greeted us on Sunday morning in his Carnival costume:
And with all this charm, the prices were lower than any prices we could find in the French Quarter. We would definitely return to Annabelle's House any time that we wanted to be in New Orleans with a car.
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| Wednesday, May 9th, 2012
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10:32 pm - New Orleans Trip, Mar-22-2012: Creole Creamery
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| Sunday, May 6th, 2012
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9:44 pm - New Orleans Trip, Mar-22-2012: Bozo's
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We returned from the plantation and made phone contact with Mike. We had been planning to go to Commander's Palace, and he was game for that, even though he hadn't brought a jacket. But when we met him at Commander's Palace, he said that they were promising a long delay for a table. That tipped the balance for us, and we suggested Bozo's instead. The host at Bozo's also claimed a wait of over an hour, but when we glanced at the empty tables, he made it clear that he was joking.
Mike ordered the raw oysters eagerly, and offered to share them with us. Lori is firmly anti-oyster, but I gave them a try. I haven't had raw oysters often (I think this was my fourth time), and I certainly couldn't call myself an oyster enthusiast, but these were really tasty, with a big slurp able flavor. I would gladly eat these again, and since Mike shared very generously, I ate several from the platters he ordered.
I saw crawfish on the specials board. I've only tried crawfish at the 2010 Roadfood festival, and I was not a big fan then. But the price was only five or six bucks, and I figured that would be a small enough portion that I could share that with Mike and Lori as a modest appetizer. I was wrong. I was served a whole mess o' crawfish. But wow, they were tasty; they converted me to loving catfish.
Lori frowns upon both crawfish and seafood, so wasn't attracted by either of our appetizers. So we ordered another appetizer, the Mediterranean stuffed artichoke. This was a mega-stuffed artichoke, crammed full of bread, feta cheese, and olives.
Mike ordered a bowl of gumbo. In all our time with him in New Orleans, I don't think I ever saw him pass up a gumbo opportunity.
I would have expected that we would have ordered something, but I have nothing recorded in my notes or photos. I suspect that we were sufficiently full from our appetizers that entrees were superfluous. We did get a cup of the shrimp stew, after a conversation with the waitress in which we failed to understand her attempts to explain the difference between the shrimp stew and the gumbo. My belief is that the shrimp stew includes shrimp and the trinity and is served over rice, but differs from a gumbo in that it does not include roux or filé powder. But that's just a guess; to the waitress, the distinction was too obvious to be explained.
We did order dessert, because the specials board mentioned a caribbean meringue. This was claimed not to be a pie by the waitress, but it looked like a meringue pie to us—but not a particularly tasty one, unfortunately. The filling was a custard filling with flavors of cherry and pineapple. Apparently I don't have a picture.
Despite the imperfect communication with the waitress, we liked her a lot; she was funny and talkative, and we had a good time talking with her.
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| Wednesday, April 18th, 2012
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10:58 pm - New Orleans Trip, Thursday Mar-23-2011: Oak Alley Plantation
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We had gotten a rental car for this year's trip, and we wanted to get value out of it. So we were focused on doing our touristing outside the French Quarter as much as possible. And the rain had stopped while we were in the Camellia Grill. So we went off to a plantation tour, and without much basis for choice beyond a few brochures, we went to Oak Alley Plantation.
 
Oak Alley is named for the two long rows of three-hundred-year-old live oaks stretching from the river past the house. They predate the house by over a hundred years, but there is no record of the person who planted them besides the oaks. It makes me wonder, really—planting them would be no little project, so I would assume that the man who planted them intended to make a home and a livelihood there. What happened such that there's no record of him even in an old deed book?
We started with a forgettable lunch at the restaurant on the grounds. Gumbo for me, roast beef po'boy for Lori.
 
I've had trouble finding what to say about the mansion, so I've turned to Lori. She writes:
The mansion was the opposite of our lunch -- memorably beautiful! The tour was honestly fairly standard, and our guide was competent but uninspiring. However, the views of the "Oak Alley" from the veranda were stunning. The interior of the mansion was pretty, much of the furniture is period but not original to the house. I think the beautiful grounds with their stunning live oak trees are the reason why it has played host to several movie crews over the years. Most notably to me, it was Louis' mansion in "Interview with the Vampire." For me, it was easy to imagine a belle on the veranda anxiously awaiting her swain galloping down the avenue of live oaks on horseback.
This contraption was operated by a slave standing in a corner to shoo away flies. One was very aware of the differences in class and the fact that the whole plantation lifestyle was built on the back of slave labor. (Including some very skilled slaves—they said that the cook had been trained in France. I'm curious about how that worked.)
Another view of the oaks from the veranda. Swain on horseback not included.
At the end of the tour, we bought a mint julep from the organization for the volunteers at the plantation. It was very different from our previous mint julep experience with the mint juleps benefitting the Tennessee Williams Festival. (I would not have characterized myself as the type of person who has opinions between charity mint juleps, but apparently I am.) The Tennessee Williams Festival mint julep tasted primarily of strong bourbon, softened only slightly by mint and sugar. This julep was extremely smooth, so smooth that it was easy to overlook how potent it was. Sipping this made it very easy to imagine genteel Southern belles languidly fanning themselves on the veranda as bluecoats overran their plantation.
As we were leaving, we stopped to ask one of the groundskeepers what he was doing. (Answer: he was pumping out one of the lawns for a craft festival that weekend.) This turned into a surprisingly fascinating conversation. He told us about the cycle of flowers on the site, and he told us that he was rebuilding the slave quarters for the plantation—by hand. He had already put two hundred hours of work into the slave quarters, and they currently had only a chimney and the beginnings of the floor.
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| Sunday, April 15th, 2012
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10:07 pm - New Orleans Trip, Thursday Mar-23-2011: Camellia Grill
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We were very late to leave on Thursday morning. We woke up late, because we'd both been sleep-deprived in the days before our trip. (Our room did a fabulous job of keeping out the light; we discovered later that the curtains were lined with aluminum foil.) And when we woke, rain was pelting down, and the clatter of the rain made it seem extra cozy inside. So we didn't leave for Camellia Grill until very late in the morning.
 
I have racked my brain trying to remember why I asked the waiter about the muffuletta on the menu. I had mostly resolved to have the red beans and rice, which I'd found delightful before. And I wouldn't have called myself a muffuletta fan; I had had the muffuletta at Central Grocery (where the muffuletta originated) in 2011, and I considered it good but not great. But some faint memory of Chris Ayers saying that he had heard someone speaking well of Camellia Grill's muffuletta triggered a stray neuron, and I asked the waiter about it. And he said that it was a great muffuletta, and then I felt awkward about the thought of choosing something else after such a glowing recommendation. So I ordered the muffuletta—and I'm very glad that I did.
Though the Central Grocery's muffuletta was just a good sandwich, the Camellia Grill's muffuletta was one of the greatest sandwiches I've ever had. There were differences from the original muffuletta; this used corned beef instead of the Italian meats, and used a bread that's not the traditional Sicilian muffuletta bread. The most significant difference, though: this was served hot. This did make it a sprawling, messy sandwich that had to be cantilevered with a fork to bring it to mouth, but the taste was sublime. The grilling made all the flavors blossom, especially the garlicky olive salad, so that the effect was like a brass band playing in my mouth. My mouth is watering now just at the memory.
The waiter said that the city's best muffuletta is found at Nor-Joe Imports. I did not get a chance to test this claim.
Lori ordered the pancakes, because she's found them perfect on three previous visits. Unfortunately, this visit's pancakes were only very good.
On this visit, the Camellia Grill had a whole lot of banter and sass flying back and forth among the staff, which was really fun to listen to while we ate.
One last picture of note: this iconic camellia is made from a few of the hundreds of Post-It notes that were posted on the walls imploring them to return after Hurricane Katrina.
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10:07 pm - New Orleans Trip, Wednesday, Mar-22-2011
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Third time's the charm: unlike the previous two years, we managed to arrive in New Orleans on the day we'd planned to arrive. But the trip was unpleasant enough that we wondered if we'd made the right choice.
We were offered the chance to get bumped, but we declined, because we have had trouble using airline travel vouchers in the past and we wanted to get to New Orleans on time for once.
The flight to Chicago was unremarkable. We tried to get dinner at Frontera Tortas. Unfortunately, I overestimated how long we had before we boarded our next flight, and we had to carry our food onto the plane. We did not enjoy the tortas at all, and we found the tortilla chips much too salty - but that may have been affected by the fact that we were eating the tortas after they'd been cooling for forty minutes, in the dreadful ambience of a cramped plane seat where the person in front of me had leaned back so far that I could have used his hair as a napkin. However, the agua frescas that we had before boarding were wonderful; Lori had the mango lime flavor, and I had the cactus pear. Mine was really quite tart, which I really enjoy.
The flight from Chicago to New Orleans was very bumpy and turbulent because of thunderstorms passing through Louisiana. I'm not normally prone to airsickness, but I was feeling quite uncomfortable.
The woman at the car rental agency made me feel that we had plunged deeply into Southern hospitality; her familiarities went from "honey" up to "sweetheart". She offered us a complimentary upgrade to a minivan. I considered the challenges of driving through the narrow streets of the French Quarter and declined the offer—which threw her off track. Finally comprehension dawned: "you're offering me a minivan because you have no mid-sized cars in stock." Once I understood that, I accepted the minivan cheerfully.
We found the bed and breakfast without difficulty, and I managed to parallel park the minivan, even though I had not routinely driven a car that large in a decade. The proprietor had stayed up late for us.
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| Monday, April 9th, 2012
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9:33 pm - Easter Dinner
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I didn't mean to smoke the Easter ham.
I know that this sounds implausible, because lately I've been inclined to smoke everything except popsicles.And I did entertain hopes of smoking the ham. But Lori talked me out of it, because we'd never tried it before and didn't want to risk screwing it up for a big dinner. So we planned a ham with an apricot-ginger glaze that we had made before.
But it was a rather large ham, and the according to the recipe, to get it done on time, we would have to start it during or before church services. And Lori feared having the oven on while we were out of the house. We thought about starting the ham warming in the slow-cooker, but it was too large to fit. So I suggested that we could start it warming in the smoker, because that would be outside and assuage Lori's worries about fire risk.
And well, if we're putting the ham in the smoker, I might as well add some wood chips for some smoky flavor.
And after church, we thought we might need the oven for heating up casseroles, so we left the ham in the smoker, put the salmon in with it, and added some more hickory chips.
It ended up quite nice, very moist with a noticeable smoke flavor on the edges. It had a very dark shiny crust like that of the black ham from Mother's in New Orleans.
It should be noted that I bought far too much ham. Lori had read a recommendation of a pound per person for a semi-boneless ham. We had twelve people dining, and I padded a bit to provide some leftovers, so I bought a fifteen-pound ham. We ate about a third of the ham for dinner, I filled four quart-size ziploc bags with leftovers to send home with folks, and we have a large container full of leftover ham for ourselves, plus a big ham bone with a lot of meat left on it. (The ham bone seems destined for bean soup. I'm considering running it through the smoker again before putting it in the soup.)
Details for my records: smoked the ham for about 8 hours at 200º-175° (I turned it down because I didn't want to have it too fast). I used about three handfuls of dry hickory chips over the course of the smoking.
I smoked some salmon for about 2.5 hours with the ham. This time, i used two tablespoons of canning salt, two tablespoons of brown sugar, and five grinds of lemon pepper - but though I halved the recipe from last time, I seemed to have more rub per unit salmon. I also let it brine longer, let it dry longer (it had significantly more of a pellicle) and cooked it longer than last time. The net result: it was much firmer and chewier; where a spreader worked nicely for flaking the salmon last time, I think it wanted a knife with an edge this time.
The rest of our dinner:
For an appetizer, we made gougeres, because they are fairly easy if made properly. I had smoked the Gruyere the day before, but the Gruyere was so strongly flavored that the smoke wasn't very noticeable.
Aaron Joyce brought two flavors of deviled eggs:
Heather and Paul brought a very tasty carrot soup.
To accompany the ham, we had fruit salad made by us; broccoli casserole, potato casserole, and asparagus-pea stir-fry made by Bobbie; and macaroni and cheese, made by Charlotte and Juliana.
For dessert, we had brownies made by Paul, cheesecake made by Charlotte and Juliana, and a bunny cake made by Lori to celebrate Heather's birthday.
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| Saturday, April 7th, 2012
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10:53 pm - Smoked Cheese, Second Try
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There are lessons in life that every man must learn for himself, and apparently one of mine is "There are reasons why no one smokes Havarti."
Cold-smoked some Havarti, some Gruyere, and two pans of flour. Set smoker to 100°, ran it for three hours, with a handful of dry cherry chips at the beginning and a handful of soaked cherry chips at the midpoint.
I did put in some ice at the beginning and wrapped some aluminum foil as a heat shield for the cheese. The Havarti melted anyway. (It still tastes pretty good, but I'd want to put it in a cheese ball or something.) The Gruyere did not melt, although it did soften noticeably.
I think I lost a lot of smoke when I opened the doors; neither of the cheeses was all that smoky, and the flour was much less smoky than the last batch I smoked, I may smoke it again at some point, though not with tomorrow's salmon.
This is a picture of the Gruyere:
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| Sunday, April 1st, 2012
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5:50 pm - Smoked Salmon, Mar-31-2011
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My first attempt at smoking salmon came out very well, so it's worth trying to record what I did. I tend to be very precise in my cooking. I rather like following recipes. But it seems that smoking is much more imprecise than most cooking. The first recipe I got (from Tom McClure, a Facebook friend) involved Johnny's Seasoning, which I'd never heard of knew I didn't have at home.
So I consulted the smoking book I got at Christmas. It says this about smoking time: "Smoke at 170º until flaky." I wanted something a bit more precise. So I looked at several other recipes, which only magnified my confusion. All the recipes I saw used a mixture of salt and brown sugar as the basis for a rub, with a bit of extra seasoning. But the ratios varied from 3:1 salt:sugar to 1:4 salt:sugar.
Cooking temperatures varied from 170º to 225º, and target temperatures varied from 125º to 145º. So I was going to end up winging it. Here's what I did:
I had two skin-on filets of about a half pound each. I decided to go for a rub of equal amounts of salt and brown sugar, with four tablespoons of each. Then I discovered that we didn't have salt in the house. (And buying more wasn't an option, because this was after midnight and I needed to let the salmon brine overnight.) I got three tablespoons of salt out of our table shaker, and then made up the other tablespoon with celery salt. I then added a few shakes of garlic powder and ten grinds of lemon pepper.
This was about the right amount of rub; I applied it quite thickly to all sides of the salmon, and didn't have a huge amount left over. My planned smoking schedule got thrown off by errands that I had to run. The salmon ended up brining in the refrigerator for about twelve hours. The next step was to rinse it off, pat it dry, and let it dry in a cool dry place until it formed a tacky skin called a pellicle. (This was the step that worried me most about the general "wing it" nature of the recipes; if the brining step was too far off, this could be an opportunity for bacteria growth. I'd like to find a resource that explained what is necessary for safety, so I can be sure I'm within the safe zone.) I let it dry for an hour and a half, at which time it had just started to form a pellicle. I put the salmon filets on aluminum foil and trimmed the foil to match the salmon skin, because one of the recipes I'd read had recommended doing so. I then inserted a meat thermometer and started to smoke it with a smoker temperature of 200º and a handful of hickory chips. I let that run for 20 minutes while I did other chores. When I checked on it after 20 minutes, the smoker was reporting a temperature of 225º, and the salmon's temperature had climbed from 57º to 89ª. I turned the smoker temperature down to 180º and opened the vents. I then went off on my errands, and didn't manage to return until the salmon had been in the smoker for 2 hours. By that time, the smoker reported an internal temperature for the salmon of 161º, well above the target temperature of 145º I was aiming for. I thought the salmon would be overcooked. But I was planning to serve the salmon in five hours, so I didn't have time for another try. So I put the salmon in resealable bags in the refrigerator and planned on saying "Sorry, it's my first time". The salmon turned out very nicely, though, with lots of flavor of both salmon and smoke. It was also very moist and tender, more so than any commercially smoked salmon I can recall. (I've had salmon smoked by friends that was as moist and tender, though.) Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.
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| Sunday, March 18th, 2012
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9:16 pm
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The smoked chocolate chip cookies came out well, with a nice smoky flavor. Unfortunately, some of the cookies got a bit scorched in the oven. The smoked chicken thighs got overcooked. I was following a recipe for chicken breasts that said 225° for 4-6 hours; when I checked them after three hours, they were overdone and dry. I chopped them up into Alfredo sauce with some peas and served them over pasta, and it was a pretty good combination–but there's definitely lots of room for improvement. Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.
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| Saturday, March 17th, 2012
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10:51 pm - Smoked Cheese
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My verdict: the first attempt to use the smoker was a qualified success.
What I meant to do (there's foreshadowing in those five words): I was following a recipe for cold-smoking cheese by using a heat shield and an ice tray to keep the cheese cool, setting the smoker at its highest heat setting for twenty minutes, then letting it cool for an hour with no added heat, then repeating the cycle of twenty minutes of hot wood, an hour cool.
What I actually did: when it was time to add wood chips and turn the heat up for the second twenty-minute phase, I discovered that I'd set the timer for the first high-heat phase to twenty hours, not twenty minutes. Ooops. So that's more of a hot smoke than a cold smoke, and there are good reasons not to hot-smoke cheese. But I couldn't undo the mistake, so I added more chips, ran it at hot for another twenty minutes (double-checking the timer, this time) and then let it run cool for an hour.
After an hour, I opened it up to see what had happened. The cheese had melted completely. (This is the reason not to hot-smoke cheeses.) But I had set a disposable pie plate underneath the cheese, just in case it tended to melt. The white cheddar cheese had settled into the pan and solidified into a mottled orange-and-brown puddle.
I had no idea whether this would be tasty or not, but I felt sure it would be safe after being at 275° F for an hour and forty minutes. So I carved off a bite-sized bit with a spoon and tried it.
It was delicious. The smoking had mellowed out a fairly sharp cheddar cheese and given it a rich smoky character. It had even solidified into a layer flat enough to be right thickness to top a cracker. The texture was perhaps a bit off, but overall it was very tasty indeed.
So, a success, but a qualified success. I hope not to hot-smoke cheese by accident again, but I might do it on purpose.
Details that aren't relevant to the story but which I might care about in the future: the cheese was a New York sharp cheddar. I used one cup of hickory chips (soaked for an hour) each time I loaded the smoker.
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| Thursday, March 8th, 2012
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11:10 am - Escalation
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Our St. Patrick's Day Party is coming up; it's actually on March 17 this year. (We'd love for you to come. Contact me if you want details.)
In a normal year, we would be trying to get the house decluttered. In the penultimate week before the party, we'd be splitting the time between working on the house and making sure we're on top of Lori's grading.
This year...
We're getting some new cabinets for the living room, because our old Ivar* furniture from IKEA doesn't match the new couch.
The cabinet maker contacted us on February 28 to say "Your cabinets are done, when would you like them installed?" I was excited about the prospect of showing friends our new cabinets, so I asked for March 12.
Preparing for the cabinets involved removing the baseboards and the Ivar cabinets. I thought that it would take only ten boxes to hold all our books. Staples had a buy-two-get-one-free-sale on banker boxes, so I took advantage of that sale expecting that we'd find extra boxes useful sometime. It took thirty-five boxes to hold all the books and games from those cabinets.
And Lori reminded me that we'd wanted to get the living room repainted while we were between cabinets. We weren't at all sure that we'd be able to get a painter on short notice, but we decided to give it a shot.
And Lori's father suggested that while we were between cabinets, that would be a good time to get the floors refinished. I managed to find a refinisher who could work on short notice.
But we wouldn't refinish the living room without refinishing the dining room... there'd be a visible mismatch, and the dining room floor is in worse shape than the living room floor. And the hallway would also need to be done to avoid a visible mismatch.
So we spent Tuesday evening and Wednesday afternoon packing stuff into boxes (another twenty boxes or so up to the attic), and Wednesday evening Les, Dave, and Paul came over to help me move furniture out of those three rooms.
So: it's a week and a half before the party. All the furniture from half the rooms on the first floor is crammed into the other half. I suppose this gives us a bit of partial credit towards cleaning up the house, because the three rooms with no furniture can be considered extremely neat. But it's counterbalanced by the chaos of the other rooms. We are consoling ourselves that our guests are familiar with the chaos of home improvements. As long as we manage to move the furniture back before the party, I think that we'll do okay.
It's raining now. I wonder if I can reach the coat closet for my hat and jacket without touching the just-refinished floor. If not, I'll have to resort to plan B: get wet.
* Sign that I live in an Apple world: I first typed 'iVar'.
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| Tuesday, February 28th, 2012
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10:38 pm - Nashville Glee Club Trip, February 2012
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Friday, February 17
I've been rereading some of my trip reports, and I found myself really noticing that my trip reports are strongly dependent on my state at the time. It's as if my trip reports are a picture taken through a window, and they show my own reflection as much as they show what's past the window. This was something of a worrisome thought for this trip, because we definitely started the weekend off badly.
To begin with, we were both sick; I'd gotten a cold in the week before, and Lori's had a low-grade sickness since Thanksgiving that had gotten bad enough that she wasn't sure whether she'd be able to go to Nashville at all.
But then matters got worse once we got to the airport. We got to the airport with plenty of time, even enough time to get barbecue on the way. But although we were at our gate with plenty of time, our plane was not. Our itinerary was to fly from Pittsburgh at 6:24, arrive in Newark at 8:05, and depart Newark at 8:39. But at 6:24, there was no plane at the gate. The plane didn't arrive until 6:37, and no gate crew arrived until 6:45; we were extremely doubtful about our ability to make the connection. We tried to get the gate clerk to put us on a 7:05 flight through Charlotte that could connect to Nashville, but the gate clerk pondered the situation until after 7:05, at which point it became irrelevant. We didn't want to spend the night in Newark, but it seemed pretty clear that our only chance of getting to Nashville without buying a whole new ticket was to go to Newark and hope that our connecting flight was delayed as well.
We managed to make the connection through a combination of luck and mercy. At 8:55, the wheels hit the tarmac in Newark and we were told that we could use our cell phones. I checked the flight to Nashville: it was delayed until 9:10, and the departing gate was A27A, right next to our arriving gate A28. So we had a chance... but we still had to get to the gate, and we had to retrieve the bags we'd had to gate-check. So Lori dashed to the gate as soon as the door was opened to implore them to wait for us, while I retrieved our bags. As I grabbed our bags, someone called down the jetway, "Who's going to Nashville?" I called out a response and hustled out, and a gate clerk met me with my boarding pass; I was the last one to board the plane. We barely made our connection - but that's a lot better than almost making it.
But our travel troubles weren't over. We got the rental car without trouble and got to the Best Western at 12:15am. The desk clerk took our name and our reservation number and frowned. He then told us that our card had been declined when they had tried to run it, they had tried to call us once but received no answer (probably because we were in the air), and they had no more rooms available. We do understand why the card was declined; we'd had to change card numbers after our card was used for some unauthorized purchases. But that doesn't change the essential point: it was after midnight and we did not have a hotel room after all.
We did have an internet connection through our iPads, but travel sites won't let you book a hotel room for the evening of February 17 once it's after the midnight beginning February 18. But we handled this better than we did when we'd encountered this problem in LA: we found a likely-looking hotel online, then telephoned the hotel to ask whether they had rooms available. They did. I started driving while Lori finished making the reservation. By 1am, we were lodged in the Hilton Garden Inn, at a price lower than the Best Western's.
Even though everything had worked out, I was feeling very grouchy about the snafus. I concluded that waking up in time to drive an hour and meet people for breakfast at 7:30 would make me too grouchy to enjoy anything, and even a 9:30 stop was chancy. I posted an apology and we went to bed, hoping that my grouchiness wouldn't sour the whole trip.
Saturday, February 18
We got off to a late start with no hopes of intercepting folks at Knockum Hill. That gave us hope of making a stop on our own at Pancake Pantry, where'd we'd had a splendid breakfast in 2004. The line was very long, so Lori went shopping while I waited in line.
After she'd exhausted the possibilities of the nearby shops, I followed ChiTownDiner's recommendation for Provence, the French Bakery across the street. We split the slice of apricot-pecan ring (good, but a touch dry) and saved the handmade chocolate-covered marshmallow for later.
 
Lori was phoning somebody when I noticed someone enter the line carrying a rose and I heard something about "free". I walked down to investigate that and saw that I A Village Of Flowers had buckets of roses and tulips with a sign saying "free flowers!" I brought Lori back a rose, which really delighted her even though it was slightly bedraggled. It was a particular surprise, because I wouldn't have bought her flowers when we had no way to keep them for any length of time.
We finally managed to enter the Pancake Pantry, and got to skip several larger groups because we were a couple.
One of the particular reasons that I like the Pancake Pantry is that I feel I know something special about enjoying it as a Roadfooder that isn't obvious from the menu or the Roadfood.com reviews. Here's my secret: they do half orders. (Generous half orders that are about 70% of what I want from a pancake order, but half the price of normal orders.) So we each ordered two half orders.
My pecan pancakes (served with pecan maple syrup) were splendid, with a lovely rich, nutty flavor.
The Santa Fe Cornmeal Pancakes (including cheddar, bacon, and green chiles) were not so wonderful. I felt that despite the nice savory ingredients, the whole was somehow less than the sum of its parts.
Lori's peach pancakes were a big winner with lots of peach compote and whipped cream.
She was even more pleased with her sugar and spice pancakes, which were nicely cinnamon-flavored and served with cinnamon cream.
We also shared some rugged country ham, because I get country ham whenever I can.
We had to make a detour to an Apple store in a super-crowded mall to correct for bad packing on my part. This ate up an unfortunate amount of our Nashville time—but this was the only time we encountered traffic jams in Nashville. We managed to make phone contact with Mayor Al and buffetbuster, but neither of them were out and about, so we were still on our own until evening.
One of my major goals for our Nashville visit was to sample the Nashville specialty of hot chicken (a dish which legend claims was created as an act of revenge). Lori was apprehensive, because she can't handle food of any noticeable heat. I convinced her that a trip like this was the perfect time to try it out, because even if there was nothing for her to eat, she was at no risk of starving between the Pancake Pantry and the Loveless Cafe. So we went to Prince's Hot Chicken.
  
We saw a long line in Prince's and thought that it was a wait to order. We were wrong; ordering was unimpeded, but there was a long wait for our chicken. We were number 74, but they were calling out numbers in the mid-thirties—I thought for a moment that they were taking orders from two different pads. In the late fifties, a table opened up for us. Since there were four chairs at the table, we invited another couple to sit with us. That ended up being a great choice; we had a great conversation with Jamie and Toon. They have both sampled other hot chicken places such as Bolton's and 400 Degrees, and felt certain that Prince's was the best—this was clearly a biased sample, but it was still nice to hear. We asked what they recommended we see in Nashville, and we were tickled by their answer: "honky-tonks and hot chicken, that's about it."
Number 74 was finally called, and we received a bag of chicken. (The major choice to make was the level of heat: mild, medium, hot, or extra hot. I like heat, but it's possible to exceed my heat tolerance, so I decided to play it safe with medium heat.) Merely opening up the package got red-orange cayenne-flecked grease on my fingertips.
The heat was intense, even at the medium level. I had to start very carefully, because it was very hot in temperature as well as spice—but even so, I was weeping from the heat in short order, and was trying to be very careful to keep from wiping my eyes. It was a very rugged flavor; I sometimes try to describe food in terms of music, and it might have been fitting geographically for hot chicken to have a country twang—but this was a flavor full of snarling guitars and growling bass. I liked it a lot, but I think I made the right decision by not getting hot or extra hot.
We found that by nibbling at the driest corner of the piece of white bread farthest from the chicken, Lori could get a taste of the flavor without quite getting overwhelmed by the heat.
From there, we went down to our first gathering with other people of the weekend at the Loveless Cafe. The Loveless Cafe is one of the famous Roadfood joints, but the one time we had visited before, I had felt that it was a little too conscious of its fame. But I didn't feel that at all on this visit, perhaps because I was enjoying our group's conversation too much.
The Loveless takes great pride in their biscuits, and they certainly are good, but just a tad denser than my own biscuit ideal.
With a group that large, a large family-style dinner was an excellent choice. For some reason, my photos came out really poorly, but the food was much better than the pictures. I think that my favorites were the greens, the country ham, and the hash brown casserole.
  
 
Crowd photo:
Buffetbuster receiving the prize he shared with wanderingjew for the best trip reports of 2011. (I'd have gotten pictures of Dale, too, but he was at the other end of the long table.)
 
CajunKing ordered a selection of desserts to share with the crowd: from top to bottom, blackberry cobbler, banana pudding, chocolate pie, and not in this picture, key lime pie. My favorite was the excellent banana pudding. I am a big fan of cobbler, even moreso than pie, but I am enormously picky about cobbler, and I wanted this color to have a thicker filling.
Pogophiles shared with me another new gastronomic experience: he had a mason jar of moonshine in his trunk. I'm not very familiar with liquor; I don't feel that I would be able to reliably distinguish it from vodka. There was a touch of a slightly brash note in the aftertaste—or perhaps I'm looking for things so strongly that I'm seeing things that aren't really there.
Sunday, February 19
Sunday morning's weather began with precipitation that precisely straddled the line between snow and rain. I took Lori to church and packed us up with the slapdash approach justified by knowing that we had no need to keep any clothes clean.
Our first stop was Ellendale's for a brunch buffet. The group was much less raucous than they had been at the Loveless the previous night, but a fair bit of that was that we got a room all to ourselves. The food was good, but it's hard to get good photos from a buffet. The most distinctive item was a macaroni salad that turned out to be very spicy.
From there, we joined the crew sampling restaurant after restaurant, because I would have felt that I was missing something if we didn't do some of that on this trip. Our first destination: Sands Soul Food. Sands Soul Food was once named Silver Sands (according to the evidence of http://www.roadfood.com/Restaurant/Overview/4578/silver-sands , which includes pictures that convince me). I don't know whether there was a change in management and ownership to match the change in name.
It is still a short cafeteria line:
 
We ordered the smothered pork chop, fried cabbage, mac and cheese, and the hot water cornbread. Of these, I think the clear winner was the fried cabbage; nothing else was good enough to finish when I was trying to conserve appetite.
Next stop: Cupcake Collection, in a neighborhood that showed signs of having been up and down the socioeconomic ladder.
  
Six of us shared six cupcakes, and we hardly finished any of them. From back to front: sweet potato (tasted a lot like carrot cake), caramel, red velvet, wedding cake, strawberry, and marble. I liked the strawberry a lot, because it had a very clear strawberry flavor. Lori's favorite was the wedding cake.
Ron's BBQ and Fish was chosen as our last stop because of it's proximity to the airport. The couplet on their sign deserves special attention:
"The food that brings your feet on high…
and make your mouth say my, my, my!"
My smoked chicken was dry and unpleasant, but the green beans were spectacular, with rich, silky, soulful flavor. This served as evidence that that I wasn't finding only the tastes that I was expecting to find, because I really don't believe that I was expecting to find one of the best foods of the trip as a side item at the last stop we made.
In the Memphis airport, we stopped for barbecue at John Neely's Interstate Barbecue. I liked the barbecue spaghetti, but the ribs disappointed me; they were soft and flavorless under the sauce, as if they had been boiled. I would avoid them in the future.
  
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| Sunday, February 5th, 2012
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11:37 pm - Kielbasa
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Tonight's kielbasa for the Super Bowl gathering got many compliments, so it's worth recording what I did.
4 pounds Silver Star kielbasa
2-pound package fresh sauerkraut
1 teaspoon Lesley Elizabeth hickory garlic seasoning
Liquid Smoke
1 medium-quality beer
Cut the kielbasa into four-inch segments. Cut each segment in half lengthwise. (We didn't cut all of the segments in half, but the halved ones were easier to eat.)
Layer the sauerkraut and the kielbasa in alternating layers in a slow cooker, with three layers of sauerkraut and two of kielbasa. Sprinkle the hickory garlic seasoning in the middle layer. Sprinkle four dashes of liquid smoke over the top layer.
Cover the slow cooker and cook on High for two hours.
Open the slow cooker and pour a bottle of beer over everything. (I used Samuel Adams Winter Lager, because it was what we had around. I'd use whatever medium-quality beer was handy.) Cover and cook on high for 2-3 hours. Serve in buns.
We served this with pierogies sautéed in butter and onions, and the combination made me feel very much a Pittsburgher.
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| Thursday, January 19th, 2012
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1:19 pm - Ham
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We have finally discarded the last of the Christmas ham. Lori's mother froze it for us after Christmas, and through January, we've enjoyed it in sandwiches, soup, and quiche. But we didn't manage to finish all the ham before we got suspicious of its safety. Our ham tradition has evolved progressively over the years, and I wouldn't have expected to end up where we did. We started with ham for Christmas dinner because Lori's father has been making smoked turkey for many years. It's an involved process, involving three days of marinating and ingredients that usually require a special trip to the Strip—but the turkey is always phenomenal. So we started making ham in order to avoid direct comparison to the turkey. Our first few years, we just baked a ham from Giant Eagle. Then we started experimenting with glazes. We tried a soy-cider glaze one year that came out very nicely, and then the next year we used an apricot-ginger glaze that came out even better. In 2009, we experimented in another direction: Lori happened to go down to the Strip in late fall, and she signed up for the ham from Parma Sausage. We had the ingredients for the apricot-ginger glaze, but when we opened he package and smelled the ham, we both agreed that the glaze would only detract from it. So this is the process we've followed for the past few years:
1. Buy the ham from Parma Sausage. (This requires preregistration.)
2. Remove the plastic wrap.
3. Heat until warmed through.
The ham is wonderful. It has a bold meaty savor that far outstrips any ham we have ever bought from Giant Eagle, without the fierce saltiness of country ham. (I tried to talk Lori into letting us serve a country ham, but she feared it would be too fierce for her family.) I don't know of any tweaks we could make to improve it. But I had somehow expected that our perfect ham would involve more involvement from us. Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.
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| Thursday, January 5th, 2012
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6:19 pm - Poached Pear Tart
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 Jennifer Sommer asked for the recipe for this tart after seeing it on Facebook, so I am providing it here. The recipe is from Pies and Tarts in the Williams Sonoma Kitchen Library; the italicized annotations are my own.
FOR THE PEARS:
2 cups (16 fl oz/500 ml) dry red wine (I used a Malbec for a box we bought for our holiday party)
3/4 cup (6 oz/185 g) sugar
1 cinnamon stick, about 2 inches (5 cm)
3 whole cloves (we didn't have any whole cloves, so I used a generous shake of some Penzey's mulling spice)
5 firm but ripe pears (We had been given some Royal Riviera pears from Harry and David as a Christmas gift, and they were already getting notably soft. So I wanted to to make the pear tart to use the pears before we left for a week. But by the time I made the tart, they were getting very soft.)
rich tart pastry for a 9-inch (23-cm) tart shell (I'm not going to give the full recipe here, but it's a tart pastry with a lot of butter and a little sugar; it's much easier to press this into the pan than to roll it out.)
1/2 cup (4 fl oz/125 ml) apricot glaze, warm (the cookbook gives two recipes for apricot glaze; one involves heating apricot jam and forcing it through a sieve to remove the solids; the other involves whomping the heck out of the jam in a food processor. I took the food processor option, because I was concerned about time.)
1/3 cup (3 fl oz/80 ml) heavy (double) cream
2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon nonfat dry milk (milk powder) (I wasn't willing to buy a box of dry milk for just one teaspoon, so I left it out. It might have stabilized the whipped cream, but it was fine without.)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (essence) or 2 tablespoons pear brandy (I used the double-strength vanilla extract, but unlike Lori's usual practice, I didn't double the amount)
To cook the pears, combine the red wine, sugar, cinnamon stick and cloves in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil. (I used a broad sauté pan.) Reduce the heat and simmer, partially covered, for 5 minutes. Peel, halve and core the pears. (This was tricky because the pears were so soft. I ended up breaking up one pear half while peeling it.) Place them in the simmering liquid, adding a little water if necessary to cover them completely with liquid. Poach gently until tender when pierced with a knife, about 15 minutes. (I had to rotate them once or twice, because when I put them in flat side down, the tops of the round sides weren't getting well-covered by the poaching liquid, and weren't getting as colorful.) Remove from the heat and let the pears cool in the liquid for at least 2 hours, or for up to several days in the refrigerator. (I didn't have refrigerator space, so I left them in the poaching liquid for about 3 hours. Even so, I saw variations in color in my pears that I didn't see in the cookbook's picture.)
Preheat an oven to 425° (225°C). Press the pastry into a 9-inch (23-cm) tart pan. Bake the crust fully, until browned and crisp. Cool completely before filling. (I had a bit more pastry than I felt I really needed. In retrospect, it might have been better to have reserved some for decorations as shown in the book. I had a very scary moment while I was baking the crust: when I removed the aluminum foil I was using to shape the crust, a fair hunk of pastry came with it. I smooshed it back into the crust as best I could and consoled myself that whipped cream covers a world of errors.)
Remove the pears from the poaching liquid and pat them dry. (This was far more delicate a process than that sentence implies, because the pears had started very tender and gotten even more tender from the poaching. I set several paper towels on a large plate and carefully transferred the pears to that plate with a pair of plastic forks. Then I put more paper towels on top of the pears and delicately pressed them down to soak up as much moisture as possible.) Brush a thin coating of the warm apricot glaze over the bottom of the cooled tart shell. In a bowl combine the cream, sugar, and dry milk and beat until stiff. Flavor with the vanilla or pear brandy. (I have no idea what is different between "flavor with vanilla" and "add the vanilla before beating the cream"; I did the latter.) Spread the whipped cream in an even layer in the tart shell. Arrange the pear halves on the cream, cut side down and small end toward the center. (This was a very delicate job, because I didn't want to smoosh the pears or the whipped cream. The two plastic forks were almost the right tool for the job; I wish the forks had been a bit larger.) Place 1 or 2 halves in the middle of the tart to cover the center. Carefully brush the pear halves with the remaining apricot glaze and serve as soon as possible. (We put it in the refrigerator for two hours or more before serving.)
When I read the recipe thoroughly before making it, I thought it would be hard to slice without pressing the pears into the whipped cream. But the pears were so tender that the knife glided right through them without any resistance. They had the mouthfeel of applesauce.
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| Saturday, December 17th, 2011
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4:03 pm - Graves visit
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My aunt and uncle visited us November 30-December 5. We might not have chosen those dates, but we'd be happy to see them whenever they came.
Our tourist schedule for them:
Wednesday:
Picked them up at the airport in the evening.
Took them to the Duquesne Incline and showed them the view from Mt. Washington. (We took the self-guided tour of the engine room, and found it very interesting.)
Thursday:
I had to go to work, so I took them with me to Oakland to let them explore the Carnegie Museum. Lori's parents came at lunch and took them out to Max's Allegheny Tavern.
For dinner, we took them to Josza's Corner.
After dinner, we took them through the Hartwood Celebration of Lights.
Friday:
I took the day off work. I meant to go to museums with them, but it didn't quite work out.
First, we went down to the History Center. I intended to do a little shopping and join them, but my shopping took more time than I planned.
For lunch, I satisfied the obligation to take every Pittsburgh visitor to Primanti's.
From there, I took them to the Frick Museum; while they toured the Frick, I drove out to Pierogies Plus to get a variety of pierogies and dumpling haluski for dinner.
Saturday:
In the afternoon, we went to the Bayernhof Museum, which I'd never been to before. It was an entertaining combination of antique music machines and rich-1970s mansion.
For dinner, we ate fine burgers at Tessaro's.
We then returned home and started putting up Christmas decorations.
Sunday:
For brunch, we ate pancakes with a maple syrup sampler we had brought back from Vermont, with country ham we'd brought from North Carolina.
After brunch, we went down to the Tower of Learning to see the nationality rooms. Without intending to, we arrived during the Holiday Open House, so in addition to the Nationality rooms, we saw ethnic dancing and vendors and lots of crowds.
For dinner, we had a family pot roast dinner with Lori's family.
Monday:
Drove them out to the airport in the morning and bade them farewell.
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| Friday, December 16th, 2011
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12:06 am - Thanksgiving in Myrtle Beach
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I have not been LJing as much as I'd like. Herewith a quick summary of our Thanksgiving.
Lori has a large extended family, and this year, they decided to have a family reunion in Myrtle Beach, with off-season rates for lodging.
Wednesday:
We flinched at flying, because of the cost and because of the madness of flying on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. (And Lori caviled at asking her new boss for time off then, so we would be leaving after she got out at noon on Wednesday.) So we drove down. But we had to finish packing before we could leave, so we got off around 2pm.
It was a long drive, so we sacrificed Roadfooding for places we could easily reach from the interstate. In Fayetteville, West Virginia, we stopped at Tudor's Biscuit World (my country ham biscuit was really pretty tasty). In the restaurant, we asked about a picture of an old billboard, and ended up with a long discussion with the fire chief of Fayetteville about the creepy story of how five of the Sodder's children disappeared in the Christmas eve fire. (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5067563 has a reasonable summary and a picture of the billboard; other websites added more lurid and potentially dubious details.)
We stopped again near midnight at a Waffle House, where Lori had an undistinguished hamburger and I enjoyed the "all the way" hash browns. I found a bit of a second wind and managed to finish the drive to Myrtle Beach, arriving around 2:30 am.
We had a very nice suite; it had a room for each of the three couples, a reasonably complete kitchen, and a balcony looking out onto the beach.
Thursday:
Brunch at the Spring House, late enough that we had to plead for them to serve us breakfast food instead of the Thanksgiving menu. I think I had biscuits and gravy.
Took a walk on the beach. Of the beaches I've experienced firsthand (not all that many), this is one that conforms most to my mental image of beaches, with broad flat sand instead of big rocks.
Thanksgiving dinner was a buffet at Magnolia's, the restaurant associated with the hotel. By my judgment, about 20% of the items on the menu were good, and the rest fair. This is probably about what you can expect from a buffet.
We didn't manage to play for the family miniature golf championship at Lost Mine Miniature Golf until the evening. I shot a 51, six strokes above the winning score.
Friday:
Les, Paul, and I went off to Wilmington, NC to tour the USS North Carolina Memorial. It's pretty impressive - it was essentially an industrial plant that could float and fire 16-inch shells 20 miles.
Dinner at Magnolia's again, because we could get the upstairs room again for karaoke and a crowd.
Saturday:
We joined a bunch of cousins for Wonderworks, which is more or less a for-profit science museum with even more of an emphasis on flash and glitz over building scientific appreciation. Coolest bits: the hurricane simulator, the ropes course (which gave me some alarming moments), and the family laser tag game.
One last big dinner at Bonefish Grill, a chain where I seemed least satisfied among all the family.
Played miniature golf with Lori and Paul at Mount Atlanticus miniature golf. It was a fun course, but I was disappointed not to encounter any moving hazards in either miniature golf game.
Sunday:
Started the drive back with breakfast at the Spring House. I had creamed chipped beef on toast (S.O.S.) for the first time, and enjoyed it.
Stopped at a roadside stand because they advertised boiled peanuts, a Southern specialty that I'd never tried. They tasted very leguminous, like very firm black-eyed peas.
Because we'd prioritized family over Roadfood for so many meals, I really wanted to find some Roadfood barbecue in North Carolina on our way back home. But I didn't call ahead, and so I got travelin-manned at Wink's King of Barbecue. Sunday in North Carolina is a bad time for barbecue—all these devout god-fearing pitmasters are very inconvenient for a barbecue-seeking sinner like me. We finally ended up at Hill's Lexington Barbecue, where the pork was pretty good but the chicken was so old and dry that Lori had to send it back.
Lori started to get sick on the way home, so I did about ten hours of the driving. It wasn't as bad as the late drive down, but I was eager to stop driving by the time we got home.
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| Thursday, October 27th, 2011
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4:18 pm - West Coast Roadtrip, Jul-22-2011
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We had time for one breakfast stop before we caught our plane: that classic of mimetic architecture, Randy's Donuts.
We shared a ham bun and an assortment of donuts. The ham bun was very good, with a soft, tender croissant enclosure.
I remember little about Lori's chocolate-coated donuts.
The plain glazed donut, though, was really splendid, far beyond my expectations. It was light and airy, but sturdy in a way that, say, Krispy Kreme donuts are not. After some debate, we decided that the best way to describe the texture was to say that it was the texture of a marshmallow. There's a wide range of variations in donuts that I do not notice, but this was really extraordinary.
I presume that every other tourist to Randy's takes this picture demonstrating the mimicry, but I can't always be novel:
We had one incident of note on the flight back: At our stop in Charlotte, we were told that if we were continuing on to Pittsburgh, we could leave our carryon luggage aboard the plane. So we left our things in our seats and had a nice dinner at a restaurant next to the gate. We returned from the dinner twenty minutes before takeoff, only to discover that USAirways had changed its mind–the flight to Pittsburgh was now leaving from another terminal. The airline staff had at least retrieved our things for us, but we still had to dash across the airport and get to the gate only after everyone else had boarded. There was probably some legitimate reason for the switch, but it still left me feeling mad at USAirways.
And so concludes my travelogue. I'd like to make one request: if you've enjoyed these trip reports, would you leave a comment here saying so? Many of my friends have told me that they like my reports, but I don't get a lot of comments on them. For the most part, I'm fine with that; I understand that most of my posts don't call for much comment, and I know that my posts are appreciated more than I see. But I am feeling a vainglorious yearning to see more of folks' enjoying my posts, so please indulge me.
(Also, if you're posting anonymously because you don't have a LiveJournal account, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know who you are in your comment.)
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