Category Archives: Food & Beverage

Зайо Байо Maize Flips

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Before the snow fell on Sunday, I picked up an empty bag in my yard. Random trash in the wind, but I was intrigued enough to take a look at it.

At first I thought it was a Russian snack food bag, but closer inspection revealed that it was imported from Bulgaria, where they use Cyrillic too. Зайо Байо (Zayo Bayo) is a “maize flip” product of Sani-Kons Todorovi of Pernik, Bulgaria.

Judging by the illustration, since the bag was empty, a “maize flip” seems to be a corn puff, in this case flavored with dill. Business.bg tells me that Sani-Kons Todorovi was founded in 1990 — among the first wave of private businesses, presumably — and has made snack food since then. No doubt snack foods were a neglected consumer item in the previous People’s Republic of Bulgaria.

Zayo Bayo is translated as “Hunny Bunny.” My idea is that he’s one of Bugs Bunny’s great-grandsons. Unable to find cartoon work in the United States, he’s trying to make a go of things in Bulgaria as a commercial mascot. He’s probably finding his roots as well. At least one line of Bugs’ ancestry, before the family moved to Brooklyn in the late 19th century, seems to trace from that part of Europe (citation needed).

Lilly at 21

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Good Thanksgiving to all. Back to posting on Sunday the 25th, probably.

Lilly has turned 21. To mark the occasion, recently we went to the same restaurant as last year at her request, and by chance sat at the very same table.

No pics of the food this year. A similar array of sushi. The place, called Sushi Para, does wonderful sushi. One difference this year was that Lilly ordered hot sake to go with the meal, expressing surprise that there was such a thing. Heated in winter, chilled in summer, I told her.

At home we had a cake made by Yuriko. A big chocolate torte actually. Rich chocolate with a dash of edible gold leaf and chestnuts.

Lilly had a good time with it.

At one point, before she blew the candles out, the 2 fell over still lit, releasing rivulets of wax onto the chocolate. Ann sneezed at about the same time.

Once the wax had hardened, however, it was easy to remove.

Big Lou’s Really Big Pizza

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The evening after the funeral all of the family members in town got together for dinner at a place in east San Antonio, way down on W. W. White Road, Big Lou’s Pizza. My nephew Sam had heard about it and took care of the logistics.

The logistics involved ordering a 42-inch pizza ahead of time. Here is everyone at the table posing with a 42-inch pizza.

I’d never seen a pizza that large with my own eyes. I’m certain that went for everyone else at the table. According to one source anyway, it’s the second-largest restaurant pizza in Texas: bested only by a larger one that Big Lou’s makes.

I’m glad to report that it was a good New York-style thin pie. For my part, I ate about a piece and a half. I don’t think anyone else at the table ate any more than that, so there was pizza enough for two boxes of leftovers.

Thursday Detritus

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The rains have cleared away, leaving cold air in their wake. This pattern will keep repeating in the coming months, getting successively colder until snow replaces rain and mere cold air is a polar vortex or some such. Bah. At least the trees are coloring up nicely.

An open question for YouTube: how, in the age of digital spying on consumers — so I hear — can YouTube offer me such wildly off-the-mark ads? Lately I’ve been getting a lot of anti-vapping ads, for instance. Aimed at teenagers. Not, I have to add, ahead of much content that that demographic might watch on YouTube. The chances of me taking up vapping are pretty close to zero, YouTube.

Some time ago I picked up a copy of The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (1993) for $1 at Half Price Books. Now I’m reading it. It’s a good read and there are some good lines in it. Here’s one that helps introduce a character:

For the devil had long ago taken a shine to Tert Card, filled him like a cream horn with itch and irritation.

One of the author’s idiosyncrasies is constructions like that, with “filled” instead of “filling.” But you get used to it, and it works. That’s a wonderful sentence that pretty much sets the tone for Tert Card. We’ve all met people like that.

From a press release over the transom the other day, a subject I have no professional interest in. I’m more interested in how the thing was written. I suspect the writer is a fairly fluent but nevertheless non-native speaker of English (all sic):

Businessmen hailing from UAE have an interest in making some investments in Armenia. The trade turnover in between the two countries has risen 10-folks from twenty-five million to about 250 million USD in the last five years as told by Zaki Nusseibeh, the Minister of the State after the sidelines of the ministerial conference of 17th Francophonie summit…

After Ruddigore on Saturday, Ann wanted ice cream. At about 10 in the evening in Evanston, Andy’s Frozen Custard seemed the only place still open serving something close to ice cream. She agreed that was close enough, so we went.
That image doesn’t have many people in it, but not long after we got there, the place was packed. Seems that selling frozen custard late on Saturday evenings near a major university is a pretty good business.

I’d never been to Andy’s before. Turns out there are about 60 of them, mostly scattered around the central U.S., though as far north as metro Chicago and as far south as central Florida. Andy’s makes a good frozen treat. Too good, in fact. I should have gotten a small triple chocolate instead of a medium.

Who did the score for Doctor Zhivago? I found myself wondering that yesterday. Maybe that’s something I should know, but I looked it up: Maurice Jarre.

That came to mind because I’d turned on the TV and DZ was playing. In fact, the very scene in which Yuri and Lara reunited. The Lara’s theme leitmotif was part of the action. I watched about 15 minutes of it.

“What’s this movie about?” Ann asked. I had to think. It’s been how long since I’ve seen it? In the summer of ’81 at the Texas Union Theatre, or in Japan in the early ’90s, when I saw so many movies on VHS? Either way, over 25 years ago.

“Well, let’s see. Doctor Zhivago, that’s him there, Omar Sharif. He’s a doctor of course, and he has a wife. He likes her well enough, but he really loves this other woman, who’s on screen now. I don’t remember who played her. Anyway, there’s a love triangle and they all get caught up in the Russian Revolution and are often in danger. Bolsheviks show up. Zhivago’s also a poet and sensitive fellow. He spends a lot of time looking off in the distance. And there’s a lot of scenery. Wide shots of the steppes of Russia. It’s an epic of a movie. Did I mention that it’s over three hours long? It’s an epic of epic proportions.”

Despite my flip description, I remember liking the movie whenever I saw it. Odd how details of most movies you see or books you read or music you hear or places you go tend to evaporate over the years, leaving a residue like the one I told to Ann.

Never have read Pasternak, so I don’t even have a residue of the book. Maybe I should, but life is short and Russian novels are long. The most recent one I read, a few years ago, was August 1914. Pretty soon into it, I gave up trying to keep track of all of the many characters.

Maurice Jarre, I learned, is the father of Jean-Michel Jarre, known to me for Oxygène. Back when people had record collections, there was always one kid on each floor of each dorm at your college who had unusual records, things no one else had ever heard of. I can’t remember the lad’s name, but he was on my hall freshman year, and that was one of the records he had.

Faces in the Grocery Aisle

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Besides helping Lilly move her stuff into her new apartment in Champaign, we also took her to a major grocery store. Management seemed eager for the population of UIUC students to swell, as it does every year at this time.
I got distracted among the product aisles. It’s hard not to. For instance, I wondered about the odd longevity of the Vlasic stork.
When the mascot was created (1974, according to Vlasic), the parody of Groucho Marx, including the pickle-as-cigar, would have been instantly recognizable to the audience. Nearly 45 years later? Not as much. I guess the Vlasic stork exists pretty much as its own thing now.

Why a stork? But better always to ask, why a duck?

Another familiar face, Chef Boy-Ar-Dee. But it’s a younger Boy-Ar-Dee (or Boiardi, to be pedantic).
What gives? Boy-Ar-Dee has been an avuncular fellow, a gray presence, since Chef Boiardi was still alive and unafraid to attach his name (phonetically) to such a product.

Maybe the young Boy-Ar-Dee is part of the “throwback recipe” theme, designed to evoke what — the golden age of canned pasta?

Moving along, I was happy to see this phrase.
The bee’s knees is a phase that needs a new life. As for the product, it’s distinction seems to be honey mixed in.

Finally, what’s a grocery store without an array of Spam? More varieties than I remember.

Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!

The Warrenville Garden, 1987

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About once a month during the warm months of 1987, and maybe a few times the year after that, I drove from Chicago to southwest suburban Warrenville — it seemed pretty far away — to visit a friend of mine who had just bought a house in that suburb. He lives in Texas these days, and I’ve since lost touch with him, except for a nominal link on Facebook.

He cultivated a large garden in his large back yard and I helped him out because it was a novelty and because he gave me some of the produce. There was a lot of produce.
“We aren’t gardening for food,” he once said. “We’re gardening for virtue.”

He was a conscientious gardener, and I took home so many vegetables and melons that I further took some to my office and gave them to anyone who wanted them. They were a hit. A woman in the office who’d grown up on a downstate farm complimented the squash in particular.

I’d forgotten that my friend had made pictures of the garden. Also that I had a few of them tucked away.

Corn, tomatoes, melons, carrots, peas, green beans, cucumbers, squash and much else I’ve probably forgotten.

Not a bad thing to do for part of a summer. But I also found I had no natural passion for gardening. Later attempts in my own back yards were indifferent and lackluster. One problem in particular, aside from hating to weed: when the plants I wanted to grow were just sprouting, I couldn’t always tell them apart from weeds.

The pictures of the plants on the seed packages were no use in making that determination, either. They always showed idealized, fully grown examples.

Stray Thursday Items

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Various things my computer has told me lately:

Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Sure, whatever you say.

Tremendous loud thunderstorm yesterday evening. Short but dramatic. The yard needed the water. Been a dryish August so far. But not too hot. I try to enjoy lunch on my deck daily, and sometimes breakfast, because soon the air will grow cold. All too soon.

Cicadas are in full voice during the day now. Crickets are on the night shift, singing their songs. Sounds just the same — to my human ears — as it did in 2015. But for all I know, the songs have morphed since then, and are as different to the insects as Middle English compared with Modern English.

Presidential sites are pretty thin on the ground up on the north shore of Lake Superior, but I did find one place during our recent trip that has the vaguest connection to a U.S. president. Its name: Buchanan.

Here it is.
That might look like undeveloped shore on Lake Superior, and it is, but not far from shore a plaque says: This town site, named after President Buchanan, was laid out in October 1856. From September 1857 until May 1859 the place, though little less than wilderness, was the seat of the U.S. land office for the northeastern district of Minnesota. After the removal of the land office, the settlement disappeared.

This sizable sculpture is on the campus of University of Minnesota Duluth, near that school’s planetarium. It’s called “Wild Ricing Moon.”“The sculpture… was designed by John David Mooney, a Chicago sculptor with an international reputation,” the university says. “The piece is 89 feet tall. The first half of this large-scale outdoor sculpture was erected in October 2005. The first installation, a large steel circle, 40 feet in diameter, represents the full, rice-harvesting moon of late summer.

“A ‘rice stalk’ section and bird was included in the pieces that arrived in June. Mooney described the sculpture as reflecting the North Shore of Lake Superior and natural features of the region.”

Here’s the pleasant open area behind the Allyndale Motel in Duluth.

One morning I ate a rudimentary breakfast there as the girls slept. One night I went there on the thin hope that the northern lights would be visible. No dice.

I spent a few minutes tooling around Eau Claire, Wis., on the Saturday morning on the way up to Minnesota. One thing I saw in passing was the impressive Sacred Heart-St. Patrick Parish church.
Unfortunately, the church was closed.

A little later that day we stopped at Leinenkugel Brewery in Chippewa Falls. The tourist-facing part of the operation is known as the Leinie Lodge®, which “is filled with historical photos, vintage brewing equipment and plenty of Leinie’s wearables and collectibles to take home,” notes the brewery web site. There’s also a bar. Guess what it serves.

Boy, the Leinie Lodge was crowded. That’s the result of years of clever advertising (autoplay) and what we get for going on a Saturday morning. But that wasn’t the irritating part, not really. Leinenkugel Brewery tours cost $10. Admission for a brewery tour?

I’ve been on brewery and vineyard and distillery tours all over the world, including a beer brewery in Denmark, a bourbon maker in Kentucky, a winery in Western Australia and a sake brewery in Japan, and that’s one thing I haven’t run across. Because, you know, the tour is marketing — building goodwill — introducing new customers to your product — not a damned revenue stream. For the birds, Leinenkugel, for the birds.

But I have to confess that Lilly wanted a Leinenkugel shirt, so I got her one. Her souvenir for the trip. I got a couple of postcards.

On the way back from Minnesota, as I’ve mentioned, we ate lunch in Madison, Wis., at the excellent Monty’s Blue Plate Diner.

Across the street from Monty’s is the Barrymore Theatre. I like its looks.

Various live acts play at the Barrymore. Looking at the upcoming list, I see that They Might Be Giants will be there in October after dates in the UK, Germany and Canada. Maybe I should see them again — it’s been almost 30 years now — but it’s a Tuesday show, so I don’t think I’ll make it.

One more thing. At a rest stop on I-94 near Black River Falls, Wis., there’s a state historical marker honoring, at some length, the passenger pigeon. Among other things, the marker says: “The largest nesting on record anywhere occurred in this area in 1871. The nesting ground covered 850 square miles with an estimated 136,000,000 pigeons.

“John Muir described the passenger pigeons in flight, ‘I have seen flocks streaming south in the fall so large that they were flowing from horizon to horizon in an almost continuous stream all day long.’ “

Wow. 136 million pigeons more or less in the same place? A marvel to behold, I’m sure. That and an amazing amount of noise and a monumental torrent of droppings.

Duluth & Environs ’18

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When I was very young, I had a U.S. map puzzle that I put together who knows how many times, fascinated by the individual shapes of the states. Some states more than others, including Minnesota, with its rough northern border, more-or-less straight-back western border, concave eastern border and pointy southeast and especially northeast corners.

The northeast corner still holds some fascination, and for more than just the shape. There’s the lure of the North Woods, and Lake Superior is always calling. Enough to inspire a short trip. On July 27, after I finished my Friday work, we hit the road for a five-night trip to Duluth and environs.

Since reaching Duluth means crossing northwest all the way through Wisconsin, a few points in that state were part of the trip as well, especially Eau Claire, where we spent the first night at a spartan but tolerable chain motel.

From Saturday afternoon until the morning of Wednesday, August 1, we stayed at the non-chain Allyndale Motel, a notch up from spartan. It’s in west Duluth, almost at the edge of town, but actually Duluth isn’t that large, so the location wasn’t bad.

I guessed that the Allyndate dated from the golden age of independent motel development, namely the 1950s. The details were right, except no bottle opener attached to a surface somewhere in the room. Just before we left, in a talk with the owner, I was able to confirm that vintage. The first rooms dated from 1952, he said, with later additions.

Before checking into the motel that first day, we spent a short while in downtown Duluth, walking along E. Superior St., which features shops and entertainment venues, including a legitimate theater, art house cinema and a casino. Rain, which had been holding back on the way into town, started to come down hard, so we ducked into the Duluth Coffee Company Cafe long enough to wait it out over various beverages.

That evening, we took in a show at the Marshall W. Alworth Planetarium, which is part of the University of Minnesota Duluth. The recorded show, narrated by Liam Neeson, was about black holes, and then an astrophysics grad student (I think) talked about the night sky. Many planetariums don’t bother with live narration anymore, so that was refreshing.

On Sunday we drove along much of the winding and often scenic Skyline Parkway in Duluth, stopping along the route to take in the sweeping view of the city, as well its twin city of Superior, Wis., and a large stretch of Lake Superior, from the Enger Tower in the aptly named Enger Park.

There happened to be a coffee and ice cream truck in the park, so Lilly had iced coffee and Ann had ice cream. The truck showed its regional pride in the form of a Minnesota flag.

The design needs work, like many Midwest state flags. Here’s an alternative.

Late that morning we saw Duluth’s Aerial Lift Bridge up close, along with other parts of Canal Park and lakeside spots. The lofty bridge — crossing the entrance to Lake Superior from St. Louis Bay — is the Eiffel Tower of Duluth, a stand-in for the city that appears in a lot of places, including a refrigerator magnet that we brought home. (But I refuse to use the i-word.)

In the afternoon, we headed northeast from town along U.S. 61, which follows the shore of Lake Superior. That region, I discovered, is known locally as the North Shore. We made it as far as Gooseberry Falls State Park.

On Monday, July 30, we headed north, mostly via U.S. 53, to Voyageurs National Park, which is hard by the Canadian border. The trip up and back from Duluth is a little far for a single day, but ultimately seemed worth the effort. Besides, something about the symmetry of visiting Voyageurs NP and Big Bend NP during the same year appealed to me.

As the girls slept late on the last day of July, I made my way to Superior, Wis., and visited the Richard I. Bong Veterans Historical Center, a small military museum. WWII is increasingly distant, and except in Wisconsin, the memory of air ace Bong’s deeds has faded. But he had his moment.

The main event of July 31, our last day in town, was the Great Lakes Aquarium, which is in downtown Duluth, on St. Louis Bay not far from the Aerial Lift Bridge and Canal Park. The aquarium’s distinction is that it focuses on freshwater creatures.

Late that afternoon, I struck out again on my own to see one more place: Forest Hill Cemetery, which is in the hills northeast of the University of Minnesota Duluth. My kind of site, not the girls’.

On August 1, we got up early and drove home, stopping only to eat lunch in Madison. I wanted to take Lilly to Ella’s Deli, since she wasn’t with us last year when we went. But it’s closed.

Too bad. Wonder what happened to all the oddball stuff Ella’s had. Instead we found Monty’s Blue Plate Diner. Not as much whimsy on the walls as Ella’s, but the food was good.

The Daley Plaza Food Truck Array

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On Friday, the court gave us a generous hour and a half for lunch, so I had time to look around the collection of food trucks in downtown Chicago’s Daley Plaza, some of them ‘neath the Chicago Picasso.

The array of trucks was broad. Maybe 15 in all, though I didn’t count.

The one I eventually picked. Had a grilled cheese sandwich a cut above most diners, say, but still a little expensive, I thought.

Jury duty was over late in the afternoon.

It was as if the trucks had never been there.

Thursday Crumbs

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Not long ago I had a pork cutlet at a Korean restaurant, done in the katsudon style I’ve encountered in Japanese restaurants and at home. This particular cutlet was remarkably large. So much so that I was inspired to take a picture.

Large, but thin, so it wasn’t overfilling. Overall, quite good.

At an Asian grocery store the other day — Asian grocery stores are endlessly interesting — I saw this on offer.

I have to say I’m intrigued. People believe outdoor markets ought to be part of any visit to non-OECD cities, for that all-important authenticity and to see the locals, but if you really want authenticity, grocery stores are the place to go in any country. Ye shall know them by their grocery stores.

More debris from the Saturday grilling and gabfest.

The caps to the bottles I posted the other day, arranged in the same order.

I had a shandy over the weekend and later, during a moment when I had much else to do, naturally decided to look up the word, the story of which I didn’t know. I know more now, after reading this.

Shandy, a shortening of shandygaff, origin obscure. Now that’s a fine word. If I were a brewer, I’d use it for my shandies. Radler is a good word to know too.

Had a curry doughnut today. I don’t eat that many of them, but when I do I enjoy them.

“In Japanese bakeries of virtually every stripe, you can buy a thing called a curry doughnut,” I wrote once upon a time. “What a discovery that was. No part of it is sweet. Browned by frying on the outside, it’s soft on the inside, and a spicy brown curry resides at its core. An enormous amount of fat, I’m sure, and heartburn later on, but boy they’re good going down.

“My favorite spot for curry doughnuts used to be the Cascade Bakery, near the main promenade of Hanshin Station, Umeda, in the heart of Osaka. Even now, I can get one in Arlington Heights, Illinois, if I’m so inclined. I know at least two Japanese bakeries in that town that sell them. But it’s been a while.”

I’ve been to only two Afghan restaurants that I remember. One was in New York City in 2005. The other was ca. 1987 in Chicago: The Helmand.

Writing in 2005, I said: “I can remember visiting an Afghan restaurant only once before, about 20 years ago, a place on the North Side of Chicago near Belmont Blvd., long gone now. Much later I learned that it was owned by relatives of Mohammed [sic] Karzai. I vaguely remember it being exotically good.”

I have a matchbook from the place even now. Can you get matchbooks at restaurants any more? My experience is you can’t. In New York in March I experienced a brief and very minor moment of excitement when I picked up what I though was a small matchbox advertising a restaurant. Matches! Turned out to contain toothpicks.

Whatever happened to Hamid Karzai? Having managed to survive the Afghan presidency, no small thing, he seems to be living in comfortable semi-retirement after his career in peculation.