Whipped Cream Difficulties

Well, not really “gone”. I hadn’t been back to Ohio for nine years, and it amazed me somewhat both how much and how little has changed.

For example, there’s an entire grocery chain that I don’t remember from my last trip…that takes the Discover card and cash. No Visa/AmEx/MasterCard/Diner’s Club, not even debt cards with a PIN, just cash and Discover. Who came up with this idea?

On the other hand, the tractor tire store that was a landmark on the way to Grandma’s place is still there, after 40 something years. And Grandma’s place still feels remote from everything, even though there’s major strip centers at the end of her road, and even though much of the land was sold off over the past few years (and now has houses sitting on it).

And the old NASA hanger is still visible from the airport. That was another landmark for us kids. (My dad worked there, back when it was still the Lewis Research Center, before it was renamed “NASA John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field“. Which is a mouthful. Not that I’m bitter or anything over the renaming; by gosh, if anyone deserved to have a NASA facility named after him, it was John Glenn.)

This is shaping up to be a long post, and sort of “stream of consciousness”, so I’m going to put the rest of it behind a jump. Before I do, here’s Grandma’s obituary, just for the record.

A funeral is not a vacation or a party. It is not your business to turn out a funeral.

However, if you’re going to be spending six days away from home, you might as well take advantage of the opportunities you have.

Our dining choices repeated quite a bit, but that was mostly a matter of time and convenience. We had two dinners at the Winking Lizard in Macedonia: Winking Lizard is a local chain noted for an extensive beer list, free popcorn, lizards, and what might be called “elevated pub grub”. If you have a chance to eat at one of the Winking Lizards, I highly recommend it.

(The one thing I didn’t get to do that I wanted to do was to visit one of the Lizardville stores, the Winking Lizard’s retail outlets. We actually drove over to one, but when we got there it was 2:30 PM and they don’t open until 4 PM. So, with regret, we drove onwards.)

Our big meal of the trip was at Lola, Michael Symon’s restaurant in downtown Cleveland. I went on a binge a couple of months ago, reading Ruhlman’s books: Ruhlman has written some about Symon and Lola, so when I knew we had to go to Cleveland, dinner at Lola was on my “to do” list.

How was it? Awesome.

Lola isn’t cheap, but that pork chop was huge. My mother got the braised pork shank, which looked like one of those giant turkey legs you find at the rodeo or RenFaire, but bigger. Both the pork chop and the shank were excellent; I’m usually not that much of a pork chop person, but Lola’s was one of the best I’ve ever had. I suspect it was brined before cooking, as it was really moist and tender. The pork belly and bone marrow were pretty amazing, too, especially the array of “various accompaniments” that came with the latter. I believe those included sea salt, pickled onion, butter…and I’m blanking on the others.

(I am currently restricted from purchasing cookbooks, but I was tempted to make an exception for the Lola one. Even though I’ve found the vast majority of restaurant cookbooks contain recipes that you won’t have the time or inclination to do in a home kitchen. I think of purchasing those cookbooks as a way of showing your support for the chef, and not as a way to let you recreate Lola at home.)

One other thing I liked about Lola: they are among the restaurants that have gone to having the wine list on an iPad or other tablet type device. I think this is pretty cool by itself. But Lola gives you the option of having the label from your wine emailed to you…

…so you don’t have to lug the bottle home and soak it off, or ask the wine steward to do it for you.

(I’ve had an idea for an iPhone/Android app percolating in my head for a while now, but I don’t yet have the skills to write it, so I’ll throw it out there for everyone else to use. Basically, this would be your typical wine journal app: details about the wine, tasting notes, location where you tried it, etc. But it would support taking photos of the wine label to add to your database, and would try to do either OCR on the wine label or scan the label’s QR code in order to fill in the vineyard, vintage, and other information, as well as allowing you to add the label photo to your database. It’d also allow social sharing of your entry, and I’d do cloud storage so your database is backed up and available from any supported device. If you write this app and release it under a Creative Commons or GNU public license, you have my blessing. If you write it and release it commercially, I want to be cut in for a percentage. Have your people email me.)

If you’re in Cleveland, I recommend Lola and Great Lakes Brewing Company, where we had another excellent dinner. I’m partial to the bratwurst and pierogi myself. What can I say: I like bratwurst. (And lizards. Let us not forget the lizards.)

(Should I add a “sausages” subcategory under “Food”?)

You may also remember Great Lakes from the Sumerian beer project. At this point, the Sumerian beer is still a work in progress and they aren’t giving tastings. Yet. I was able to get a Great Lakes sampler with my dinner, though: the sampler contained pours of all the beers currently on tap at Great Lakes.

Yes, there were eleven beers in the sampler. I’m a big fan of the Edmund Fitzgerald and Eliot Ness. (One of our first actions on arriving in Ohio was a trip to the grocery store, where I bought a sixer of the Fitzgerald to stash in our motel fridge.) The Dortmunder Gold and Commodore Perry were also quite pleasing; oddly enough, I also enjoyed the Lake Erie Monster, even though I’m not usually a big fan of heavily hopped beers. (The sampler did not include the Wright Pils, which I think may just have gone off tap. But I did get to try that at the airport, and found it also to be a pleasant beer. Indeed, I don’t think Great Lakes makes any bad beers, though tastes vary; the ones I like may be unpalatable to you.)

We also had two breakfasts at the Bob Evans near our motel, which really wasn’t bad: think of it as a better version of Denny’s. We had another two at a place called Luna’s, which was recommended to us by relatives who live nearby, and which I liked quite a bit. The Dolphin Family Restaurant is also a very good breakfast spot: I think I liked it just a tiny bit more than Luna’s. (Contrary to the name, there are no dolphin dishes on the menu. But they have crepes.)

(Two things that seem to me to be more common in Ohio than Austin: crepes, and independent ice cream/custard places. As my mother pointed out, the second one probably has a lot to do with the lack of penetration by Dairy Queen into the Ohio area. And unlike DQ, it seems that many of these places are only open during the summer.)

For complicated logistical reasons, we ate lunch twice at the West Side Market Cafe, which gets a big thumbs-up from me. The Korean pulled pork BBQ sandwich, grilled cheese with wild mushrooms, and sweet potato tots all meet with my enthusiastic approval.

If you’ve got some time to spare, I recommend eating at the cafe and then browsing the historic West Side Market. (I don’t recommend doing it the other way, or you’ll probably come home with enough food to feed an army for a week.) Unfortunately, I saw a lot of great stuff in the market that I couldn’t do anything with: what’s the point of buying a pork chop stuffed with mozzarella and chorizo if you have no place to cook it and can’t lug it back with you on the plane? There are, however, plenty of stalls in the market that offer takeaway prepared foods: if you don’t want to eat in the cafe, you can grab a bowl of Japanese noodles or some steamed buns or a cupcake or some crepes and coffee or (long list edited out).

We did manage to visit some used bookstores, too. The Book Shelf in Northfield was there last time I visited, and I was happy to see that it has survived. It is very much like the old Book Exchange on Manchaca, but there’s nothing wrong with that: the owner was very nice to us, and I picked up a few things…

Zubal Books, we discovered the hard way, really isn’t well set up for browsing. My mother spent some time talking to a gentleman (who I believe may have been Mr. Zubal himself) and he told us that they did “99.9%” of their business over the Internet these days. However, he was nice enough to let us browse the one section they had open, and once we got past some initial awkwardness, we were treated with great kindness and courtesy. And I picked up a few things…

Mac’s Backs-Books on Coventry is a more conventional bookstore that seems to cater to the university crowd. It is the kind of place that I remember from old Austin, the few times I came up in high school, before high rents along the Drag drove away all the neat funky old stores. And, once again, everyone was really nice to us (the guy who was checking me out even made approving noises when he found I was buying a Ross Thomas paperback), and I picked up a few more things…

(Also, Tommy’s Restaurant, which is right next door and connects to Mac’s Backs, looks like a swell place to eat. We didn’t have any food there, just coffee for my mother and a diet root beer for me, but the counter girls were awfully nice…)

(I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that I didn’t even know there was a “Little Italy” in Cleveland until we drove through it on the way to Mac’s. That’s another place I’d like to go back and explore, even if it is only a couple of blocks.)

The only gun shop I went to was interesting, but they struck me as a little high on stuff. They were asking $600 for an early S&W Model 36, which might have been reasonable except the finish was badly worn; I’d call it a 50% gun at best, and can’t see giving $600 for it. (On the other hand, they also had a S&W Model 57 Mountain Gun for $899. I already have a 4″ Model 57, and need another gun in .41 Magnum like I need another hole in the head. But it looks like $899 is not unreasonable for that variant.)

The past few days, I’ve been having another “Answers to Soldier” moment. I mean, I could move to the Cleveland area and buy Grandma’s old house and eat at Great Lakes and Lola and hang out with people and date girls who work at Great Lakes or the ice cream places. The house payment wouldn’t be bad at all, and I’d actually have a fairly large plot of land to work with. Of course, I’d have to move all my stuff 1,400 miles. And then I’d have to find a job in the Cleveland area (and I don’t know what IT job opportunities are like in Ohio). And while it may not hit 102 in Cleveland, I’d have to shovel snow and drive on it in the winter. And then there are other factors which I won’t discuss here; some personal, some just too long to go into.

Perhaps I should wrap this up. I still have some photos to edit and post, and I’ll be doing that over the next couple of days.

Before I go, my thanks to everyone mentioned above, the various relatives who kept us entertained and fed while we were in Cleveland (and who I won’t name here to protect their privacy), and the ladies of the Remsen Christian Church who set up and cleaned up after the funeral lunch.

No thanks to The Airline Formerly Known As Continental, who screwed us over on the checked bag fees, gave us 49 minutes to make a connection in Houston, which involved taking the train from terminal C to terminal B, then walking several miles to “gate B84”, then walking another mile down a maze of twisty little passages all alike to the ass end of Intercontinental, gate B84Q, where our flight actually departed from. Or would have, if there hadn’t been an “anomaly” with the plane that required us to get off, walk the mile back down the maze to “gate 84”, mill around for 20 minutes, and then walk another mile to get on a different plane after the guy at our original gate had already taken our boarding passes.

Continental always used to say “We know you have a choice in air travel, and we thank you for choosing Continental.” We’re getting to the point now where I’m afraid soon we won’t have a choice, and our only option will be “Airline”.

But we’re not there yet. And next time I have a choice in air travel, I’m flying Southwest.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 15th, 2013 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Admin, Android, Apple, Books, Clippings, Food, Geek, Guns, Lizards, Mixology, Obits, Photography, Planes, Reptiles, Thanks, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.