Fancy Frozen Fruity Flavours

Last night on my way home I stopped at a gelateria that's apparently very famous around Philly. Knowing it was expensive I chose the two most obscure flavours on offer -- blueberry and thyme, and rockmelon and absinthe. Both combinations were surprisingly good. The blueberry and thyme got a bit gritty by the end of the scoop, what with the berry seeds and dried thyme leaves, so I might not order it again. But I'd think about infusing a little next time I make blueberry crêpes. I think the other combination might be more easy to accomplish. All it would take is a blender, chunks of rockmelon, crushed ice or sorbet and a dash of pastis (which I already have a bottle of).

Update - 31st July
The champagne and mango is not bad. There's plenty of real mango in it but I think they were not completely ripe when they made the batch I got.
It's not a weird flavour but their hazelnut is fantastic, the best I've had in many years.

West Philly

Philadelphia has a bad reputation in America; the crime in some parts of town is seen as a symptom of the city's age, it's a city past its prime. That does seem to be true of the part of town where I'm staying, too far west to benefit from the gentrification happening around the universities.

Still, vestiges of earlier investment in the area remain. The main high school is in a very nice crenellated castle, there's a big domed insurance building on the other side of the tracks and down the road there's a nice old sandstone church.

Coffee

Apparently I haven't discussed American attitudes to coffee before. You probably already know that Americans in general drink a lot more coffee than tea (except at the CHF, where I was surprised to find a lot of tea drinkers). The problem is, drinking more of it doesn't mean they're any better at making coffee. For one thing, they over-roast it; so if you try to brew it strong it's too bitter and the only way to make it less bitter is for it to come out watery.

They're so obsessed with drip filter coffee that they're yet to embrace espresso. I don't mean in homes, I mean restaurants and even cafés serve filter coffee and only fancier places also have espresso coffee, which they charge more for. They've even started combining frothed milk with drip coffee, which is what you get if you ask for a café au lait (only by using the Italian name, caffè latte, do you get espresso and steamed milk). So strange that two foreign terms would get you the same thing in different parts of Europe but get you different things here.

Here's the weirdest thing: the rarity of espresso coffee makes some Americans think that it's not a type of coffee. A couple of times before I've heard them say things like, "espresso or coffee" and when I call them out on it they always say, "Oh, I meant normal coffee!" which doesn't change the fact that espresso is clearly a type of coffee.
Today Cindy told me that when she went to Dunkin' Donuts there was a poster that had two options that looked identical: iced coffee or iced latte. When she asked what the difference was, she was told, 'The iced coffee is made with coffee; the iced latte is made with espresso and milk, so there is no coffee in the iced latte'! Her response being, 'Instead of my daily dose of caffeine from the Coffea arabica coffee beans I'm going to get my daily dose of espresseine from espresso beans, growing on the espresso tree, Espressoa arabica (someone needs to tell Wikipedia to create a new page for this new species!)'

Bastille Day

Yesterday I went to the Philadelphia French conversation club, like most Saturdays, but this time we heard that there would be Bastille Day celebrations at an historic prison, so we headed over there afterwards.

The star was Marie-Antoinette, who was up on the ramparts yelling abuse at the sans culottes below. The scripted exchange was extremely hammy, consisting mainly of topical banter but when Marie-Antoinette said her famous line, they all started throwing free cakes into the crowd (a brand I had not seen before, which is apparently only available in the Philadelphia area). They had an impressively large guillotine set up in the street, which made short work of a watermelon.


It's a bit ironic that this sort of thing doesn't happen in France. They don't even call it Bastille Day, it's La Fête Nationale or simply le quatorze juillet. They don't do anything historical, instead they have military parades through Paris including tanks and fly-overs. It's funny that the 4th July parade we saw in Washington last weekend had only one or two military bands with only about a dozen armed soldiers. I guess the American armed forces are a bit too busy overseas whereas the French have nothing better to do.

Sandwiches

Americans have a reputation for preferring to eat with their hands, whether it be hamburgers or pizza etc. This is quite true but people in other countries probably don't realise just how far this goes. 

Americans consider hamburgers a type of sandwich (where I would reserve that word for something between slices of bread, 'Do you want a sandwich or a roll?') and it's sandwiches more generally that they worship. They prefer to eat with they're hands so they put all manner of nice things on rolls and pretend it's haute cuisine. It took a few years of living here to realise just how pervasive this phenomenon is - it's not just cheap lunch shops that sell fancy sandwiches, it's family restaurants (like Applebees and, my favourite, TGI Friday's) and even semi-fancy restaurants with nice décor. The other night when we were at an Italian restaurant Cindy was disappointed to see a kid at the next table eating his pizza with his hands, she thought it was too nice a place for that sort of behaviour. Then I pointed out that she had ordered a hamburger and I a fancy sandwich.

I don't know if it has more to do with the tough economic times of the last couple of years or just a willingness to consider sandwiches civilised but there's also a neglect of real food. I read an article a little while ago about a group of people who go around New York reviewing the hamburgers (this might be it). The thing is, if you're going to appoint yourself a connoisseur of beef, at least compare steaks!

Having spent some time in Philly, I've come to see their famous cheesesteak as a decent compromise. It's made with shaved or finely sliced steak (and they don't have döner kebabs here) and I've found that if you go somewhere decent (without a long queue of tourists), then a provolone cheesesteak with "sweet peppers" can be very nice.

Washington

For the Independence Day long weekend Cindy and I met up in Washington. I caught a dirt-cheap coach ($17.50 return) and Cindy flew. We stayed in a motel at the end of the metro line in Huntington, just south of Alexandria, Virginia.

Saturday we walked until our feet were sore, seeing all the monuments, memorials and museums. I got to see a couple that I hadn't seen the first time, like the Jefferson and FDR memorials. It was stinking hot but there were plenty of bubblers for us to refill our bottles with tepid water. I have a new appreciation for the Smithsonian Institution now; all their museums are free and air-conditioned, they provide a great place to cool down and sit, where there happens to be some art to look at while you're relaxing.

Sunday we watched the big parade. Before it started a couple of cyclists rode down the cleared street dressed in bright pink and waving signs saying "Peace is patriotic", declaring that they were part of the parade; the police soon moved them along. There were a few military groups marching but mainly brass bands. It was a bit strange to hear them playing God Save the Queen and The British Grenadiers but this wasn't an inappropriate gesture, those tunes have been given American lyrics, which everyone else was humming.
The assortment of random characters was a bit second rate (Paddington Bear, Madeline, Strawberry Shortcake all as balloons), a real Lone Ranger made it a little more American. What made it all worthwhile was that I got to see a real DeLorean!
We tried to stay out of the heat that afternoon while we waited for the fireworks. There were a lot of people but there was plenty of space on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial so we got a decent view without being too crowded.


Monday we spent the day looking around the old quarter of Alexandria, Virginia. It's a nice old port town on the Potomac with lots of little shops, a few good restaurants and two ice-creameries.