Showing off my skills

Here's Will just showing off a few of the things he can do while eating lunch.

The Cuisine of Eastern Pennsylvania

This is an old post from our trip out to Eastern PA in February. I wrote up this post about the foods we encountered there, but just forgot to post it. So here goes...

A couple weekends ago we traveled to Womelsdorf, Pennsylvania for a family reunion on Beth's mom's side. You can read more about the weekend here. While there, we got to sample many of the unique foods of eastern Pennsylvania. It's a great example of some of the many regional varieties of food in America. Much of this food springs from the strong German heritage of the area. So we present to you some of the highlights...


1. Pickled Beat Eggs - these are eggs soaked with beets and sugar. Often found jarred. Some varieties are more salty. Grammie's are sweeter.


2. Tomato Pie - essentially a cold pizza with no cheese or toppings. Quite good.


3. Now, a pasta salad like this isn't necessarily native to Eastern PA, but these salads by Cousin Verl are really, really good. This shell pasta salad is supposedly Pop-Pop's favorite, and I can see why.


4. Shoo-Fly Pie - a pie with a bottom layer made with molasses. And we're told this is a wet-bottomed version.


5. And the piece de resistance: Scrapple - this is a meat dish made from the scraps (hence the name) of meat left over at the butcher, mixed with corn meal and fried. It's crispy on the outside, mealy on the inside, and really not that bad tasting. But I think knowing what it's made of doesn't help.

The only thing we didn't get a picture of was the Lebanon Baloney, which is a dense, smoky, spicy sausage named after Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. It reminds me of the summer sausage my family gets from Miesfeld's in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

Oh, Ethiopian food, how we love you!

Probably our favorite restaurant in the world is a tiny hole-in-the-wall Ethiopian restaurant in Grand Rapids called Little Africa. It's owned and run by a gentleman by the name of Lou. He's soft-spoken and extremely friendly.

We first experienced Little Africa just before we graduated from college eight years ago, and we've returned just about every time we visited Grand Rapids. The place is seriously amazing. We've never had food anything like it, even at other Ethiopian restaurants.

First, there's the hot tea (pictured at the top). We swear, there's something in this tea, aside from the indecipherable assortment of spices. We think it's laced with crack. It's that addictive. Lou makes it himself, and he won't tell you what's in it.

Ethiopian food is colorful and extremely flavorful. Lou makes exclusively vegetarian fare, but some Ethiopian restaurants use meat, too. His food incorporates peas, potatoes, lentils, chick peas, carrots, grape leaves, tomatoes, and various grains. The food is eaten without utensils; instead, you scoop it up with injera, a dense, pancake-like bread made from teff flour. It's fermented in a similar manner to sourdough. The owner of the Blue Nile, an Ethiopian restaurant in Columbus, once told us that it's common for people to feed each other over a meal like this, because people who feed each other will never betray each other.


The best part about our most recent trip to Little Africa was introducing Will to Ethiopian food! For the most part, he liked what he tasted, although he clearly had his doubts at first.

But he soon dug in. The only thing he didn't like was something mildly spicy (we barely noticed the spice). But he seemed pretty ticked with it - his face got a bit red and he stood up in his high chair and squealed, but we gave him some water and he was just fine. And he kept going back for more food. We gave him a taste of the tea, too, and that seemed to be his favorite part.

Next step, teaching him about Indian food!

Best Beer in the World

Over Easter my brother Mike and I finally indulged ourselves in a ritual we had been saving for a special occasion: drinking the best beer in the world.

I present to you two bottles of the Trappist Westvleteren 12. According to our favorite source on beer, BeerAdvocate.com, this beer is the best in the world. It's a Belgian Quadrupel brewed by Trappist monks at the Abbey of Saint Sixtus of Westvleteren. They make only three beers at the Abbey; the bottles come unlabeled, with different colored caps.

You can only buy the beer directly from the monks at the brewery, by reservation, by the case. A case retails about 36 Euro. When you purchase the beer at the brewery, you agree not to resell the beer. So the fact that I found our bottles - significantly marked up (don't ask how much) - at a store in Columbus means that someone broke their promise to the monks.

Mike and I took advantage of that broken promise to drink our bottles of it last weekend. We poured them into large goblets and slowly sipped them while we discussed them and jotted down notes.

Was it the best beer in the world? Hard to tell. Was it really, really good? Most certainly. Not the best I've ever had, but it was smooth and creamy, very well carbonated (even though the beer was probably 3-4 years old), and tasted/smelled fruity and sweet and bready. I may never have this beer again - it's too expensive to buy regularly, and I'm not planning to visit western Belgium any time soon - but it was fun to drink it with Mike. It's incredibly tasty, and I like the fact that I can say I've had one of the best beers in the world.

Here's some video of the tasting!

Lego cake!

These pics are a long time in coming, but we made this cake for Nick's 30th birthday on February 26th. We threw him a surprise party at the Wild Goose Creative space complete with Guitar Hero World Tour and tons of pizza.

We had to use a little model of legos to make sure it all fit together right. I baked the cake a few days before and it took us a few hours to put it together, but I think it turned out pretty good!

Ice cream!

We stopped by our Dairy Queen tonight (conveniently/dangerously one block away from our house) for some ice cream cones, and we decided to give Will a taste of it. He reacted much more enthusiastically than he did to peas and carrots.