Crazy flavours extend to alcohol

A friend of our had a big housewarming party tonight. She's a well-paid full professor so her parties always have a well-stocked bar. But tonight, I noticed a couple of bottles that I'd never seen before:
Whipped cream vodka


"Cotton candy" (i.e. fairy floss) vodka

In America, you can get anything!

When I first arrived in America, I really liked to go shopping. I'd spend a lot of time browsing the supermarket and even Target seeing what was available. These Poms feel the same way:


While the novelty has worn off for me now, there are still occasions when I'm amazed that a certain product exists, and Cindy will exclaim, "You can get an-y-thing in America!" This happens mainly around Xmas.

Satellite TV is not as glamorous as it sounds

We've had some intermittent problems with the TV lately. Apparently it was the heat -- it's been in the mid-30s all week. A serviceman came today and found that one of the switches had melted.

It's fixed now but there's still nothing good on.

Bacon Ice-Cream

I had dinner tonight with some friends at a well-known local brasserie. One thing they have on the menu is a diabolical sounding seitan tenderloin, so I thought that if Cameron ever visited, I'd take him there.

But one other thing they have on the menu is bacon ice-cream! That's a chocolate-coated rasher on the left!


It had little chunks of real bacon through it, as you see in the photo and the rest of the ice-cream tasted of bacon too. It was as nauseating as it sounds.

Bilingualism

Tonight at the play I saw someone whom I was supposed to know but didn't recognise. I knew him from French Table (he came a few times a couple of years ago, I remembered his name when he told me) and he thought it was funny that we had never spoken in English before. In fact, I had failed to recognise him last week when he was at the meeting with Kim Beazley. That was the first time he had heard me speak English and so tonight he said to me, "I didn't know you had an accent in English."
"I don't. You do!" I replied.
"Well, I didn't know that you were Australian until then," he corrected himself.

Let Newton Be!

I went to see a play tonight. My department and a few others sponsored a showing of "Let Newton Be!", about the life of Isaac Newton. It was a very small production, just three actors and not many props, but they made excellent use of what they had. The actors represent three stages of Newton's life but they also change into other characters occasionally, like Leibniz. The most impressive thing is how they managed to keep it under an hour and a half and include so much material without dumbing it down.

Interesting Chip Flavours

What can't be flavoured like bacon?

I think this speaks for itself:

I'll just add that the picture on the box looks like that because Americans usually eat streaky bacon (rarely "Canadian" back bacon and never middle rashers).

Family Reunion

Today Mum, Dad and Erin arrived. Their hotel, the Outrigger on the Beach, is just on the other side of the market from us, only a few hundred metres away. We went there just a little before they arrived so that we could greet them with leis. They were tired but Erin was surprisingly perky, thanks to her travelling drugs, and insisted that we eat lunch at The Cheesecake Factory. I had a Hawaiian pizza and we all struggled to share a piece of Kahlúa cheesecake. (I didn't really need dessert but you can't go to The Cheesecake Factory and not order cheesecake!)

Cindy and I spent the afternoon showing them around the market and getting them oriented. Then we went out to dinner at The Hard Rock Café. Erin and Cindy ordered drinks that came with free hurricane glasses (they actually give you clean ones) and we had vouchers for a free gift, which just turned out to be a lanyard and pin but we received two.

Waikiki Beach

Today we shopped. We explored the market in front of our hotel and got some cheap souvenirs then caught a "trolley" (shaped like an old wooden tram but with bus wheels) over to the Ala Moana shopping centre. That was like most other American malls but have a couple of interesting shops like Hilo Hattie and As Seen on TV!
This evening we went down to the beach bar at the Hilton for a drink with my friend Matt who was coïncidentally in Waikiki for a chemistry conference and his wife. After a nice Hurricane we went to a tropical hamburger restaurant where all the waitresses were dressed in grass skirts.

Hawaii

Yesterday I went in to uni and marked a big stack of my students' final essays along with the professor and the other assistant instructors. I got home a little after lunch time and Cindy and I went to get the hire car that we planned to take to the airport the next morning. I had made the reservation a few weeks before and the car was ready for us (the guy started telling us aboutthe seat warmers) but when it came time to pay we discovered that Hertz does a full credit check on anyone paying with a debit card. After we ran around and got our social security numbers, it turned out that they would not let us hire the car at all. Our flight would leave too early for the Bloomington-Airport shuttle so we had to ask our friend Charly to take us. He's an early riser but it was still very kind of him to come pick us up at 3.30 am and drive an hour each way. The crazy part was that in the queue for security Cindy saw someone from her lab who had driven himself up - if only we had known!

We flew with US Airways because their flights to Hawaii go through Phoenix, Arizona and we didn't want a repeat of the Xmas before last when we spent a night in Chicago and our bags were lost. Because both legs of the trip were domestic, we didn't get any food, we had to buy it at the airport. That's not good for a 6-7 h flight to Hawaii because the food gets cold. US Airways was even worse than United in some ways, like trying to charge us $5 for headphones to watch the movie. But the trip itself was pretty uneventfull.

We got to the hotel around dinner time and went straight out for a cheap meal in a Chinese-Hawaiian takeaway.
I was feeling dizzy from exhaustion by that time because it was well after midnight in Indiana and I had had only a couple of hours sleep the night before and a couple more on the plane. But Cindy insisted that we couldn't go to sleep at 7 pm localtime so we wandered around a little touristy market for a bit before retiring for the night.

The hotel is quite nice, even the cheapest of Waikiki is pretty luxurious for us - I think it's the nicest hotel I've ever paid for.

Christmas Fare

I know I've mentioned pumpkin pie ice-cream before but an update is required: I've discovered that a luxury ice-cream brand here is making pumpkin ice-cream with cheesecake chunks in it!

I was going to take a photo of the fridge full of different egg-nogs, including Jack Daniels and pumpkin, but the shelves were a bit bare. Still, you'll be relieved to know that there's not one, but two varieties of egg-nog ice-cream (the slow-churned one is low fat):

That sounds like it could be good for Xmas in Hawaii!

Thanksgiving 2010

Today's Thanksgiving. This year I'm not cooking a turkey (Cindy's out of town) and didn't get invited anywhere. But my friend Larry heard that Bloomington's best pizzeria was hosting a free Thanksgiving lunch, so we went.

Believe it or not, they were serving turkey pizza: mashed potato, turkey slices and stuffing, with gravy and cranberry sauce on the side! We thought we were arriving early but the place was already packed, so we had to sit in the waiting area and eat off our laps but I was grateful for a free meal.

The Turducken of Cakes

So you all remember what a turducken is? Well this, my friends, is the cake equivalent.

You take a pumpkin pie, place it in a cake tin, pour chocolate cake batter on top and bake it into a cake. Then you bake an apple pie into a vanilla cake. The two layers are stuck together and iced all over with American-style butter-cream frosting. Voilà:


Apparently they're actually selling this in Philadelphia, from a café in Reading Terminal Market. I left town too soon!

Concert

Tonight Cindy and I drove up to Indianapolis to see a show. The headline act was Billy Bragg. He's getting a bit long in the tooth but still knows how to play a mean guitar. It was a great performance, he changed a couple of lyrics just to make the better-known songs more interesting.

When I was buying the tickets I was surprised to see that the warm-up act was Australian Darren Hanlon. He's completely unknown here, which might explain the supporting role.
I've liked his music for a while so it was nice that I actually got to have a chat with him and bought a CD, which he signed.

Oh, what's that? Yes, we went to IHOP on the way.

Automotive Decoration

This car is parked outside my building. I wonder what the occasion is.

Ice Cream Flavors

The latest in our ongoing series of crazy American food:

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!)'