Too long

Heh. Only a couple of you get the reference in this post's title, but I'll keep it obscure. Simply said, it's been a while since I had a general information post, and I'm sure my loyal readership, all 5.38 of you, need some FOOD PORN!

And actually, check out the labels for this post: it has a little bit to please everyone! (food porn, travel, bikes, fundraising, onions, homebrewing)

It's been busy, but also pleasantly slow-ish (as much as I let myself take things easy, I have.) The fall protest travel season is on the near horizon, and I'm out of town every weekend in October, and at least three in November.

The travel starts with riding in the Wapiyapi Classic in Aspen next weekend, which I'm very excited about. (And which I'll throw out one last pitch for you to please consider donating, as I talked all about in this post.) I'll get invited to a pre-ride party hosted by Lance Armstrong and Anna Hansen if I'm one of the top 10 fundraisers, and currently, thanks mostly to the lovely and generous people who read this blog, I'm #8 9 (but by a thin margin.) Please consider donating: http://www.active.com/donate/wapiyapi2011, and type my name into the boxes at the top next to "Find a fundraiser to support".

Okay, okay, to make this worth your while, how about some images, including FOOD PORN, and ONIONS!

Due to popular reader demand, how 'bout some FOOD PORN, and ONIONS! Conveniently co-located with tofu, which almost deserves its own label on this blog, and featuring a visit by some freshly chopped sage leaves.

File this one under the "J is a genius" category. And not just at her chosen profession. So, our (apprimxtaley 8 or 9 year old) washing machine has increasingly been stopping mid-cycle. Basically, for no obvious reason, the lid got bent, and so the contact that tells the machine the lid is closed and it's okay to start spinning all the water out was regularly not engaging.

So I started feeling around in the works, and the craptastic plastic assembly literally started crumbling in my hands, out of sight. I pulled half a dozen pieces of plastic crap out, never again to be properly reassembled. I avoided dropping any of them in the washer full of water (clearly shown in the picture.) Oh, and I got lightly electrocuted.

Enter J's genius. And her small hands. She started feeling around, and determined it was basically a single crappy connection, and hypothesized (which fancyschmancy scientists do) that all we needed to do was pull it out, twist it together, tape it up, and stuff it back in.

I took this one level further easier, and proposed we just twist and tape it above the hole.


Which we did.

And it works a charm!


Non-sequitur #1: Grilling peaches, pineapple, and.... I can't really tell for sure.

Grilling peaches, pineapple, and pears!

No, those aren't vegan organic hand grenades. They're eggplants studded with rough-cut garlic and then baked, which infuses them in a truly extraordinary way to make baba ghanoush. Another shining example of "J is a genius."

Eating healthy. WOOT.

Drinking creatively, even if not, ummm, healthy. Friends and I did three all-grain batches yesterday, which was honeslty too ambituous, but I'd already smacked the yeast smack packs, so we'd have lost almost $8 if we didn't brew the third batch.

From left, that's a bourbon oaked imperial stout, then a spiced pumpkin strong-ish (7.7% ABV) ale, and a witbier.

I made an outstanding decision and didn't drive home after a long day of Rule #1.

Okay, need to ride to the library and drop off donations for Friends of the Library, then think about dinner. It'll definitely involve onions (I bought a ten pound bag today) and spinach (I bought 2 pounds of organic spinach.) Mission: cookbook shelf!

Another fundraising pitch

[apologies for cross-posting if you already received this via e-mail!]

Hello friends and family,

So, here's the thing: I really hate asking for money. Seriously.

And since I mostly don't do social media, it's hard to reach out semi-anonymously. (Though I'm going to blog this well... again.)

I'm going to ask anyway, and if you can give even $5 or $10 (or more!) that would be fantastic. And if not, and I know many of you don't have a lot of money to give, no problem at all.

I'd like you to consider donating to the Wapiyapi Classic, a 50 and 25 mile bike ride that J and I will both be riding later this month in Colorado. You can donate by going to this page and typing in my name at the top. My mom made a really extraordinary donation, so I have easily met my fundraising goal, but this is really a great cause that I'd like you to consider.

As you might recall, I rode last year's Courage Classic in memory of J's best friend from medical school, Gretchen Life. Gretchen and her husband died in a boating accident on Lake Ponchartrain shortly after Hurricane Katrina. I blogged about it, and that post explains a lot of the background of why this ride, and the Courage Classic, are so important to me. Please check it out.

The Courage Classic was an amazing experience: summiting Colorado mountains with Richard, Gretchen's dad. Patients from Children's Hospital waved us out at the start, and into the finish line. And gave great high-fives. Literally dozens of times throughout the weekend, I was struck by how important Gretchen's loves, children and pediatric medicine, were.

The Wapiyapi Classic is a little different, but very much in the same vein. 100% of the proceeds from the ride benefit Camp Wapiyapi:

Wapiyapi is a Colorado based nonprofit organization that offers a community of hope and support to families affected by childhood cancer. Wapiyapi hosts free summer camps and year-round family retreats to provide a respite for children with cancer and their families.

Gretchen volunteered at Camp Wapiyapi, and changed the lives of children living with cancer, and their families. J and I are doing this ride as a small part of trying to help carry on this beautiful mission.

Please consider donating. And if you have already, or even if you can't this time around but made it this far: THANK YOU!

I hope you are well, and happy, and excited, and challenged. If we haven't been in touch recently: please, let's change that!

Love,
d

Motorized ice chests: Part II

Turns out that motorized ice chests, previously given only cursory mention in this blog, can have a useful application:


Unfortunately, it can also have unfortunate consequences: a DUI ticket. And not just in Australia.

So think carefully about where and how you'll operate it before spending between $349 and $1,399 on a Cruzin Cooler.

Leaving New York, yeah...

Yep, evacuating. Seems like a good call. Delta gave one freebie change, and I booked direct to ATL, totally spacing that I could have gone to CT/VT to join J and out niece and nephew to camp and hike.

Detailed photos of the WALK IN to JFK coming soon!

MoMA

Much Madness. Ok, neat museum, it was free for me, but it's a horrific visitor experience. It's jam packed with people taking pictures of random shit, who have no ability or willingness to share space courteously and/intelligently.

At least I took a picture of something good.

Ok, so...

Tasters for a buck. Ok. But tasters for a buck that come in a tiny portion cup? Not ok. J Ryan's: you saddened me.

OK:

Syracuse has its charms. The Erie Canal Museum is actually excellent. Small, but well done.

And right across the street is  J Ryan's , and excellent beer bar with a lovely outdoor patio. Sure, the interstate looms overhead, but it's pretty cool to drink a beer on what literally used to be the Erie Canal.

All the better that that beer is a $4 cask Middle Ages Druid Fluid Barleywine. Say whaaaat? Better get my cheap beer in before I get to NYC tomorrow.

 Middle Ages Druid Fluid Barleywine 

vegan food porn, upstate New York style!

This is the Spicy Tofu Scramble at Strong Hearts Cafe, just down the street from my hotel in Syracuse. The scramble was good, not amazing, the toast came out dry (but fortunately they have a cruet of olive oil handy), and the coffee bordered on bad. I think it was instant: it had that consistency weirdness going on, and lots of semi-tasteless sludge at the bottom. But I'll absolutely return: $6 for a tofu scramble? Cheap, good enough, and I like to support 100% vegan restaurants.

Wow, Syracuse is... kinda boring. I'm actually struggling to fill up the one full day I have here. I think I'm going to go over to the Erie Canal Museum. Yeah. Like, for real.

Fortunately central New York has a pretty solid regional beer scene, so drinking is a real option.

I visited "The 'Cuse" a number of times in the late 90s and early 00s, since E2 went to school here, but we always had a little routine of places to go, and I never had to much think about how to pass a day. Sometime today I'll probably hit up an old favorite, Empire Brewing. Had a nice vegan sandwich last night at Sparky Town, which had RIDICULOUSLY nice people working there. Actually, on balance, the average central New Yorker resident seems to be quite nice.

Tomorrow is a court hearing (not appearance) in a SYR suburb, then flying to JFK.

Vegas airport, redux

Ok, the  Las Vegas airport still sucks, but I have to be fair and update a couple things. The shitty annoying airtrain is only necessary if you're going to D terminal. It's still stupid.

The food options throughout D still suck, but there are two known vegan options: the Baja Fresh Express, and for almost double the price for about half the food, the vegan wrap at Burke in the Box.

The beer is still wildly overpriced, but they do sell it in bigass mugs.

It's oddly slow in the airport tonight. Guess Thursdays when it's 103 aren't big.

Walking out of airports: Vegas edition, baby!

My feelings about the  Las Vegas airport are known, but no airport is too terrible to walk out of , right?

Well, there might be a better way here, but I just walked to the "Zero Level" (fancy code for ground level) of the parking deck, then across the employee parking lot, through a drainage ditch, over a low wall, across a busy road, over another low wall, across another busy road, and BAM: I was on Russell Road heading east toward Maryland Parkway (which, conveniently, is the road UNLV is on.)

The bulk of the walk was quite pleasant, in the high 90s with intense sun.

I'm thinking about other routes for my return walk this evening.

vegan food porn, grill style

So, here's the thing: in condos in the City of Atlanta, you can't have propane grills (or any other open flame) on your balcony. And when you live in a complex with a ton of other units, using the community grills, no matter how well they're cleaned, just isn't that attractive for vegan grilling.

So we finally buckled down, and bought a small electric grill, this Meco 9300.

Naturally I was excited with the manufacturer's capacity demonstration:


I nevertheless went a slightly different route for the inaugural grilling, with fresh Georgia crookneck squash, tofu steaks, and Georgia banana peppers.


Then some fresh Georgia grilled corn, and tempeh.

Toward the end, I threw on some green onions and marinated artichoke hearts, and we made toast to go with it. Yum!

Airplanes, Peru, food porn, avocados

Pretty excellent comic that's relatively new to me: The Oatmeal. Check this one out for How commercial airplanes should be laid out.

And alright, Apple Juice definitely didn't find me, so it's time for some... wait... FOOD PORN, PERU STYLE!

Here's the summary: I ate pretty well, went through probably 5000-7000 calories in an average riding day, got almost no protein except quinoa, ate a literal shitton of avocados (sometimes three in a meal, sometimes ten per day.)

Peruvian food is... bland. Almost everything you see below required salt and pepper, at a minimum, to be added.

This is the special breakfast I got served three or four mornings at our hotel in Cusco, while my fellow trip members ate scrambled eggs that looked like yellow and white dish scrubbies. Yes, I shared. No, I didn't eat the honey.

The folks who cooked for us on the trip went out of their way to make me special vegan food. Yay! This was a lunchtime salad. Sometimes lunch occurred at 10am.

Breakfast. I told you I ate a lot of avocado, right?

Pizza! We went to this place at the foot of Macchu Picchu twice, and, uhhhh, I got some avocado. I was particularly hungry at this meal: this was when we hiked up Macchu Picchu, and Huayna Picchu, and then A6 (I think he's A6) and I hiked back down on the road with about a million switchbacks, rather than do another set of endless stairs.

Bland food, but you do see a lot of beautiful salad presentations in Peru. This is at the same pizza place as in the previous shot.


Ummmmm, how about more avocado, and more salad?

Okay, how about more salad. And more avocado.

Need more avocado, and more salad?

Fine, sure: more avocado. Good thing I love avocado so damn much.

Most of the coffee in Peru is, in a word, dreadful. I drank a ton of instant, made ultra-strong just to make it drinkable. The brewed coffee in hotels and restaurants was usually thin, bitter, insipid crap.


I drank a decent amount of beer, too. This is Cusquena, the beer that had floating around under the seat in the van for a week, that we drank while driving back from our last day of biking. It was pretty bad. It did provide for one highly amusing (for some) moment: in my rush to toast, I foamed beer all over the trip leader, and A6. They were... not amused. But everyone else was.

Lots of quinoa. Usually bland, usually with bland, unseasoned tiny vegetables in it.

We went back to this place three times. No, it isn't that amazing, but the trip leader really liked it. And after an initial incident with mayonaise, they figured out how to serve me avocado vegan-style. We actually managed to empty their stock of avocados on at least one occasion.

This is a sandwich. Yep, really. This is at the Cusco airport restaurant, but it burned through through nine soles (about USD$3.25) and got some food in my stomach.

The lovely little hostel I stayed a couple nights at in Miraflores, Lima, The Gallery House, had a kitchen. So I ate some more avocado!

I mixed up the avocado with sauteed ONIONS! and asparagus.

WAAAAAAIT. You said you want a detail of ONIONS?!? You got it! Oh, and some garlic playing second fiddle.

It may not look super appetizing, but a terribly exciting find in the supermarket in Lima was dry protein chunks (essentially dehydrated seitan.) They were a little over USD$3, and got some much needed vegan protein into my diet.


On my last full day in Peru, I stayed at a basic but totally serviceable hotel near the airport called Hostal Victor, and took my own picnic dinner (and breakfast, and avocado sandwich for the flight the next day.)

Okay, enough food porn for now. Gotta get chugging on, uhhhhh.... other stuff.

More Peru food porn

This includes the juice from the  crazy orange juice machine I blogged about in the Lima airport. Looks pretty unlikely that Apple Jack is gonna find me, so I plan to put up more images soon from my mountain biking trip in Peru.

High Museum = lame

I really like museums. Most of you who have traveled with me know this. I particularly like free and cheap museums. Even museums that aren't free or cheap, I can love: I'm a huge fan of the Atlanta History Center, and rank it in my top five or ten favorite museums anywhere (this list include the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, LAMCA: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the British Museum.) I did a significant chunk of my law school studying at the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston.)

We've lived less than a mile from the High Museum, which bills itself as the "leading art museum in the southeastern United States", for over two years. We haven't gone, though, since it's stupidly expensive: $18 for adults. Finally, a halfoffdepot.com coupon and J getting in free through her work enticed us to spend a hot, muggy Saturday afternoon there.

The air conditioning was nice, but on balance, it was an incredible disappointment. Despite a truly stunning (if somewhat disorienting) physical space, it's totally overrated. The curation is ridiculous: it looks like someone went on a meth binge with an art history book in one hand and googled the word "modern" with the other. There was a photography "exhibit" I was excited to see that ended ended up consisting of one room, about 10x10, four photos, and an "interactive" display (where you can put different sizes of frames against a print to see if you would have framed it the same. Whee.) They tell me that John Marin was the most important American artist of his time. Huh? The guards occasionally have to literally yell at the stupid people who touch the art. Yes: yell. As in: "DON'T TOUCH! DON'T TOUCH! DON'T TOUCH!" Navigating through the three major wings and walkways is confusing even with the map. There is all sorts of "art" that is only "art" because the museum tells me it is.

And I'm not the only one who thinks the High Museum is on the wrong track.

It's a kinda long story as to why, but we ended up getting in entirely for free yesterday. I'm going to give away my remaining free entry voucher: it's that uninteresting to me to bother going back in the next two months. Oh, if you want to check it out yourself for free, that famous patron of fine art, Target, is sponsoring free admission on Thursdays in September.

MIA sucks

Yep, it's official: MIA is definitely my least favorite domestic airport (indeed, it ranks near the bottom of all airports.) Stairs, escalators, elevators, and ridiculously long walks plague this dump. I just wanted to check out dinner at a place next to D8, I'm flying out of E9. The walk, done rapidly just short of jogging, took 20 minutes, including a stint on the Airtrain.

Ultimately I didn't have time to risk ordering food and waiting for it. I hustled back (a slightly arduous journey since the ol' tum-tum is on a flight rebellion.) I got to my gate with five minutes to spare, to consider the way the BA 747 dwarfs the Aerolineas Stalinistas 738 I'm flying (can't really complain, though, since I'm in first class, on miles, which is making this whole journey vastly more pleasant.)

In case you're curious, though J and the newly re-coined W already know this: the only close competition for worst domestic airport is DFW (which you might know is also a major hub for Aerolineas Stalinistas. Coincidence? Unsolved mystery? Dear readers, you be the judge.

Oh, and, in case anyone is wondering why I'm prattling about this rather than the wild trip I'm returning from... I have a bet with a fellow trip participant that he can't find this blog by googling me. He has a week, so I'll post images and text soon-ish. Even writing this, of course, is sort of throwing him bone. You listening, Eh Jaay? Yep, this is me!

Crazy orange juice machine

res ipsa loquitor, no?

Peru food porn!

At a nice little hotel, Hostal Victor, http://www.hostels.com/hostels/lima/hostal-victor---airport-hostel/1070, 10 minutes from the airport. Got food, got books, got cheap red wine, got wifi, so all set to post up and get a good night's sleep before my 0430 (ugh) transfer to the airport.

"Premium" lounge at MIA

Citrogne, Grand Marnier, fresh fruit. Yep. Life is excellent.

Obligatory

beach picture, since I'm standing in the ocean. Life is outstanding. Holy shit, I have a great life.

Vegan Miami Beach!

I know, a little surprising, but true, and delicious. This was a raw vegan pasta-less eggplant lasagna at ThriveVegan.com. Delicious!

Miami Beach

Kinda, well, sucks. But I have 12 hours to kill before my flight to Lima (whee!) and MIA is genuinely one of my least favorite airports on earth, so... yeah. Had a decent stout at Abbey Brewing Co., which A and W (the Artist Formerly Known As J2. Or J3. Or something) may remember from our rough sleeping romp to Florida . (happy barfday, W!)

In Peru mountain biking and wandering through August 3, so posting will be sparse. Shocking, no?

WV,

Sorry, readers: it's been a wild few weeks. Got back from West Virginia Monday midnight, and fly out to Peru tomorrow morning for 8 days of mountain biking. Yes, yes: life is rough. Or not.

In a likely futile attempt to satiate my readership in the meantime, what's better than some FOOD PORN?

A full on salad and fixins before I left ATL.

Here is some high speed vegan stir frying love in the outdoor kitchen.

Here are some fresh pickles, and some of my very kind and capable sous chefs prepping for the dinner I made for around 12-14 people (wraps and fresh pickles.) An excellent new friend who, shall, sigh, be coined J5, provided a ton of fresh produce, including a case of cucumbers.

OK, it's not food porn, but it is about West Virginia: this is what your tub looks like when you clean your thermarest in it.

Taking:

Taking suicide food to a whole new offensive level.

Welcome to West Virginia.