Quest for Paczki - 2009 Edition

When I worked downtown, I learned about paczki from Jenny Lee Bakery in Market Square.

Paczki (the singular is paczek) are basically filled donuts. But they're special Polish Fat Tuesday donuts. The theory is that you have to make pastries to use up all your lard and sugar and stuff, because you don't use those during Lent.

Traditionally, paczki come in lemon, raspberry, sometimes custard, and - the best part - lekvar, which is prune paste. There's actually a great flavor interplay between the donut glaze and the mildly sweet prune paste. Also you can only eat one or two before you get full.

Last year Jenny Lee Bakery closed forever. I woke up this morning and heard New Orleans music on the radio and thought, damn, no paczki? (Well, even if Jenny Lee were open, it would have been too late to get any there by 9 a.m., but I would have gone before.)

So after an early appointment on the South Side I went on a quest for paczki.

First, I cruised part of E. Carson St., because I'd heard there once was a bakery there that made them. But even when I went there five years ago they weren't apparently open, and now it's gone completely.

I looped around and headed for Homestead.

Last year on a quest for donuts I'd heard of a place called A+B Donuts. It's on 8th Avenue in Homestead across from the Waterfront shopping mall - but you can't get there from the mall. When I went last year, the place was closed but promised it would re-open. So I drove by today. The cute little donut shop part is up for sale (which is unfortunate, I hear it's cool-looking inside), but the bakery side is open every day except Monday. No paczki, but I got some other awesome-looking donuts.


As I was pulling out from my illegal parking space in front of A+B, I noticed there was a Shop N' Save across the road. There is actually a whole little "locals" mall there on the other side of the tracks from Waterfront, with a Rite Aid, and a Big Lots, and a Shop N' Save. It's hard to find Shop N' Save in the East End, which is overrun with Giant Eagle, so I went in to have a look. Paczki! But no prune. I settled for a box of raspberry, but my quest continued to find the one true paczek.


Oh yeah, I got some wasabi peas there too.

Saturday night we'd come through Homestead on our way back from a strange theater (we had to go out to Century III land to see Coraline in 3D) and passed Nancy B Bakery (actually a sign saying that the closed road was open as far as the bakery) so I was thinking to stop by. I was not really expecting paczki, but they have "world renowned chocolate chip cookies" and how bad could that be? Unfortunately Nancy B's is always out of chocolate chip cookies unless you pre-order. I told the lady at the counter that I'd never had one, and she went looking in the back and brought me a "second" - free! It is yummy. They also have other good cookies too - those crescent-shaped nut cookies are pretty awesome. So I bought some cookies there.


Last stop: Giant Eagle. Giant Eagle tries to be all things to all people, and I'm people, so I thought it was worth a shot. Actually I'd found prune paczki there before, last year or the year before, but different stores get different baked goods, so I wasn't sure the Edgewood one would have them. It did, and even had a sign about what they are and how to pronounce them! But they were out of prune, so I didn't buy any. But here's a picture of the display anyway.


So, no lekvar, but I will manage a fair amount of lard and sugar today, and even eat some "official" paczki. Though they're not as good as Jenny Lee's.

Finally, Exercise for Geeks.

Star Wars Yoga.
http://youwillnotbelieve.typepad.com/ywnb_the_blog/star-wars-yoga/

I like TIE Fighter (advanced).

Okay, I just looked at the pictures.

Hometown Fail

Hometown Fail
Originally uploaded by erink

Saw this today on the Hot Metal bridge. (It was after 2 p.m. so I had plenty of time stopped on the bridge to take a photo.)

Maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking that if you really want cred with the locals, you probably should spell the name of your town right.

There is another possibility, but I find it very unlikely that this plastic license plate frame was produced between 1892 and 1911.

I left half the license number on because it's a happy coincidence that it almost spells "hick."

If Yellowtail Sushi Fought Katsuo Sushi, Who Would Win?

Came across this blog entry from a Japanese woman who got a fresh whole yellowtail from Hiketa fisheries. (The photo of Hiketa fish boxes is from this blog.)

It makes me hungry.

But when we were in Japan I was kind of disappointed in the yellowtail we got there. In the US, yellowtail sushi is always soft and buttery and delicately flavored. The yellowtail I had in Japan was often bland, and occasionally tough. Do we get better yellowtail here or was it just the wrong season?

Now, to be fair, we didn't always go to the best sushi places. Frequently it was just some restaurant we saw on the street. We did hit one really good place.

The best sushi fish I had in Japan was katsuo. Katsuo is cured and shaved into stinky flakes and used as a flavoring and soup base. (Apparently in English it's called skipjack, and the flakes are also called bonito but I don't know if that's Japanese or not.) I never had the fresh fish before, and it was awesome. A bit like tuna, but very savory and a little sweet. And good. It's dark red.

One thing that I thought was strange, in Japan it's not unusual to have tough bits in your fish. I came across many a tough membrane running through my nigiri fish, even in the good restaurant. Apparently that's not a dealbreaker. In the US that never happens. US sushi and sashimi is always soft and yields easily. (Ika, which is detailed below in the "stuff I don't like" section, is an exception.) Maybe because they think we're so easily grossed out by raw fish we just couldn't take it if it was difficult to eat.

I also made a point of trying things I didn't like in the US. See, I've never liked anago, saltwater eel, which shows up raw on nigiri sushi in a slimy sauce that resembles thickened formaldehyde. (Anago is very different from unagi, freshwater eel, which is served grilled and delicious even when done badly.) Then my beau had anago in Japan (in a very posh company cafeteria) and said it was pretty good. So I figured when I got to a good sushi place I had to order the stuff I avoid. The result:

• ika (squid)
  Much better than the US, but still kind of gross. Ika typically has a hard ridge along one side that makes it hard to eat, and the consistency is very gluey. The flavor is okay, not very big - but it's the texture that puts me off. In Japan it was less gluey and had a slightly better flavor.
  
  
• ama-ebi (sweet shrimp)
  Almost worth eating. These are tiny shrimp (like 1/2" long) that are marinated in a kind of sweet and sour sauce.
  
  
• toro (tuna belly)
  Now, I don't dislike toro, but I avoid it because it's considered "premium" and it's extra-expensive (the phrase "market price" gets used on menus), and I don't particularly like it. It's wasted on me. I like regular tuna for the meaty flavor, and toro has a fatty, buttery flavor that kind of turns me off. Usually it just tastes greasy. I'm certainly not against grease, but I think that greasy taste goes much better with pork flavor (bacon, pork chop) or a pot roast.
  
  So I had toro twice in Japan and once I thought it was actually better than the regular tuna. (I also had some tuna that was not that great, but it wasn't the same place where I liked the toro.) I think the one toro I liked was meatier than usual. Also, in Japan there are two kinds of toro, chu-toro and o-toro, with chu- ("middle") being less fatty and less premium than o-. (Sometimes I think o- should be translated as "super-good".) So I didn't even try the o-toro.

I did not manage to get anago. So that's for another trip.

I hear that katsuo turns up occasionally around here. I hope it comes near me!

Best Fake Sudafed

Target beats them all. 20 tablets of 12-hour (generic/Target brand) for under $5!

I used to swear by Rite Aid's fake sudafed. Or Eckerd when they existed. Same product, different house brand, about $6 if I remember right. But lately they've been having trouble getting them from their supplier and they're frequently out of stock. When you can only buy one pack per visit, availability is important.

Today I stopped by Walgreens. They just built one in my neighborhood - literally; they bought and demolished my friends' house to make room for their drive-through pharmacy. I'm not a big fan of the strobe light that flashes on the outside of their building all night, but otherwise it seems like an okay place. They had a decent stock of their house brand 12-hour, but it was $7.50! Also, instead of scanning my ID they had to type in some information, so it took a lot longer.

For the record, I tried the Sudafed brand 24-hour pills when they first came out. They just don't work. I don't know why, maybe it doesn't release the way it's supposed to. I haven't seen a generic 24-hour, maybe it doesn't work on them either.

But Target rules.

Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together

Though I still have guilt about failing to blog more Japan stories, I have an out. The new Top Gear episode that just aired Monday on BBC America features a race across Japan. Jeremy Clarkson drives a souped up Nissan while James May and Richard Hammond take trains from Hakui (Ishikawa Prefecture) to Nokogiri mountain (Chiba Prefecture), south east of Tokyo.

On the way, they have several standard tourist experiences.

• Yes, it is rude to talk on a cell phone on the train! A very strange concept for us. You also don't eat or drink on commuter trains or the subway (long-distance trains like the Shinkansen are different), though we saw several women doing makeup and other similar grooming tasks.
  
  
• The manhole covers are awesome.
  


• The trains stop precisely so that the doors are lined up with the lines on the platform. That's why people queue there to get into the train, but you can sort of stumble in after them if you weren't lined up.


• There's no point in working out how to ask a question in Japanese if you aren't going to understand the answer. Hammond and May find this out while trying to buy snacks from a pushcart on the train. (Incidentally, we are big fans of that Toppo that Hammond chose. It's like pretzel Pocky - tiny pretzel rods filled with chocolate - but a little softer and better.) Their electronic translator asks how much it costs and the snack cart woman tells them it's 250 yen - at which point they realize they have no clue what she said. They're still near Hakui at the time, which is fairly remote, but in areas that get a lot of tourists most merchants use pocket calculators to show prices. Also people tend to assume that caucasians don't speak Japanese, which is sometimes helpful.


• Clarkson joyfully crunches all manner of dried or fried sea life as snacks while driving. He eats little dried whole fish (we had some, mainly as bar snacks or garnish) and these tiny crabs (we didn't see these but they looked good). Hammond, on the other hand, has some issues with the food. There's a great line when he and May are in a convenience store trying to find snacks for the train:

  Hammond: But it's all fish. I don't like fish.
  May: Then you've come to the wrong country.

Since we didn't drive on our trip, we didn't get to experience a Japanese service station, though they did look impressive. It's great to see one in action in the video.

Here's a link to the episode description. There are also two videos from the segment that you can watch online.
http://www.topgear.com/us/the_show/more/season-11-ep-4-nissan-gt-r-vs-bullet-train/

Share and enjoy.

RoboOrange

RoboOrange
Originally uploaded by erink

My orange has a barcode.

That never happened before.

Life in Pennsylvania

You don't see this headline every day:

Police say buggy driver drunk in crash that killed horse

Apparently a 19-year old "man" was driving his horse and buggy, ran a stop sign, and hit a car. I feel bad for the horse, but it does seem like the driver deserved some penalty. And the horse probably could have been smarter about that, now that I think of it...though maybe it couldn't see the car. Or maybe the horse was drunk too. Now there's a picture.

Fractured French - Mise En Scene

Fractured French - Mise En Scene
Originally uploaded by mthaeg

Another find from the scary-good Dinosaurs And Robots blog. This is a great photoset of vintage cocktail napkins on Flickr.

I like the French ones.

Peri Peri

My new favorite song.



This is a keychain toy that mimics the sound and feeling of pulling the tab on a cardboard box or envelope.

The song has a lot of onomatopoeic words, which are particularly Japanese. For example, it rhymes "peri-peri," the name of the product (after the sound of opening a box tear strip) with "doki-doki" which is the canonical sound effect word for a pounding heart. In the Kansai airport on the way home I bought some cider soda that said "With KiraKira Sparkle" which was ironic because "kira-kira" is the canonical sound effect for sparkling (like light reflecting on water). Yes, they have a "sound effect" for something that's not a sound.

I found this video while Christmas shopping, but while in Japan I did buy the sibling product, Bandai Mugen Edamame, which is a rubbery soybean pod that you can pop the beans out of over and over again. You can find these wondrous things and many more at Strapya World, (http://www.strapya-world.com).

More and better Japan stories are in my brain for you, but I had to start on Christmas cleaning and such and I got distracted. That part might be getting under control now.

Not Japan, But Worthy of Note

We interrupt my vacation stories to bring you two relatively unrelated items of news.

Muslim Scientist Leaves US Over Security Clearance

How often do you get to invoke Cartman's catch phrase to describe a serious news story? Basically this guy, a physicist and a naturalized US citizen, suddenly lost his security clearance and his job because the acting deputy energy secretary decided he was a security risk. The evidence was never presented and he never had a chance to refute it. 

Here's the story:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08333/931314-82.stm

He has appeals pending, but he also has a new academic job in Egypt. Too bad "home" is probably actually Pittsburgh, where he's lived for 28 years (longer than he lived anywhere else).

Awesome Glass Sale Next Weekend

Riverside Design Group, which makes many awesome things, is having its annual warehouse sale. We went last year and bought many beautiful glass things (and some metal ones, I think). Some are seconds or discontinued, but lots of stuff is quite fine. The sale is a benefit for Persad Center, which is a counseling center specializing in queer issues (sexual orientation, gender expression, HIV disease). Some other artists are selling things too. The sale is at Riverside's studio in Lawrenceville. Details here: http://www.persadcenter.org/events3.htm

One hint, though; if you buy gifts at the sale you might want to re-wrap them if you don't want your mother wondering why the newspaper on her dishes is advertising mens' dating services. (Though she thought the photos were scenic.) (No, this was not my mother, who I think went to the sale too and would have known why.)

The Amazing Onigiri Wrapper Trick

Onigiri (rice balls) are a staple convenience food in Japan. You can find them in all the convenience stores and they're relatively cheap ($1 to $1.50, depending on the filling). When I told my beau that we could eat out of the convenience stores for lunch he was thinking microwave burritos, but these are much better. Most shops have a pretty good selection of noodle bowls and ready-to-eat food; a lot of stores have actual cooked food too (hot tofu balls and korroke and those cakes with bean inside) though it didn't look that great....

When you can't read a lot of Japanese it's sometimes a gamble as to what's inside the rice ball, but we did okay.

The trick about prepackaged onigiri is that you want the nori (seaweed wrapper) to stay crisp. If you wrap it around the rice it absorbs moisture and gets gummy after an hour or so. (Personally I don't mind it gummy, but crisp is the ideal.) So they wrap the nori in its own layer of plastic wrap. When I was in Japan in 1995, only some companies packed the nori separately, and if they did you had to wrap it up yourself. But now there's this great packaging innovation that wraps up the rice automatically when you open it.

Here's how it works:



P.S. Ebi = shrimp.

On Slurping

Udon Man
Originally uploaded by erink

Japanese slurp their noodles. On the trip we ate a lot of noodles (I think it's a stereotype that tourists eat nothing but udon, soba, and ramen - but they are good!) and I think I finally got the hang of it.

As a good American kid, I grew up eating spaghetti without slurping. At least in polite company. I also learned that if you did suck the spaghetti into your mouth the fun way, the end of the noodle whips around and spatters sauce on your shirt. So that fear of staining had also influenced my attempts to slurp in the past.

Turns out I was missing a key point. In Japan, all became clear. And here's why:

When Japanese serve things hot, they are really, really hot.

The tea is really, really hot; the soup is really, really hot; the bath is really, really hot.

You have to slurp the noodles to cool them down. Otherwise you'd be there for hours.

To cool the noodles, you have to slurp them with your mouth open. If you close your lips around them, your lips get burned.

This explains the sound, too. The sound is close to that aeration gurgle you use for wine tasting. It's a lot louder than that squeaky little slurp you'd get at the end of a spaghetti strand.

The other advantage of slurping with your mouth open is that the noodles don't spatter.

The disadvantage is that it's a little gross hanging your mouth over the bowl and shoveling stuff in, but if you control the amount of noodle you pick up you can pretty much get one mouthful in without a lot of back and forth. Though, in my experience, you will have to bite. Some noodles are very long.

So, that's my journeyman take on noodle slurping. I've probably got lots of things wrong still, so don't take this as the high authority on Japanese table manners.

I think more field work is necessary.

Following the Election from Afar

We were out of the country during the presidential election, and time-shifted enough that we couldn't easily get the results as they happened. When we left on vacation Obama was definitely leading, but his winning wasn't something you could feel really confident about.

On the other hand, I was a little annoyed that before I left, _two_ of my relatives sent me that funny customized video about how I didn't vote and cost the democrats the election - when I was, in fact, the only member of my family who had already voted! But it was amusing, at least the first time.

McCain Makeru

So we woke up on - was it Wednesday? - in Japan and got on the internet at our hotel to find out what had happened. Obama won. Yay. We looked a bit at the state-by-state reports and news coverage, but we didn't get the speeches or anything. I even forgot to get a newspaper that day (I hear they were hot commodities elsewhere).

And then we got dressed and got food and went out to tour Tokyo.

But later that day, we were in a Japanese government building to use the free observation towers. A man stopped us in the lobby and asked the stereotypical Japanese-to-foreigner question "where from?" (though he was a bit more sophisticated and I think he actually asked what country we were from). We said America*, and he said something about Obama's win. I told him we were happy about that. He seemed happy too.

At this point I'll say that he didn't look like a government worker - not only was he not wearing a black suit and white shirt, he wasn't wearing a suit at all, I think he had a khaki green canvas blazer. And he had a slightly wild beard. Perhaps an academic.

And then he told us this story. In Japanese, McCain gets transliterated as ma-ke-in. There's another word in Japanese, makeru, which means, as he delicately put it, "to not win." So ma-ke-in, ma-ke-ru was a popular slogan in his circle during the campaign.

We actually saw him again that day, on a subway platform at rush hour, but we were on the train and couldn't say hi.

* Actually I would normally answer "United States," since that's more precise (Canada and Mexico and all those southern countries are in America too) but you have to say "America" in Japan because that's the word they expect.

America is Weird

Back from 15 days vacation in Japan. One of the interesting things about foreign travel is how strange your home country looks when you get back. So before that fades completely, you get this post.

Americans are big. Really, really big. Fat, yes, but tall too.

And we're sloppy-looking. I was really struck by how few people tuck in their shirts here (hey, I never do myself). And we wear oversized shirts and sweatshirts, and unfashionably faded jeans. (Japan has a high population of thin men in black business suits and white shirts at all times, so they really bring the neatness factor up on average. The Japanese men in suits on the plane to San Francisco with us didn't take their jackets off the whole flight - though I saw that one of the younger ones had loosened his necktie. Slacker.)

We eat everywhere. And we eat really big sandwiches, with lots of meat on them. At the Chicago airport the beau and I ordered a "large" soda to share, and it was like a liter and a half of root beer in a giant plastic cup.

We have lots of different color hair. We have no cell phone charms. We drink really big coffees.

Welcome home.

Halloween Frights

This is the scariest thing I've seen all week:


I mean, I knew she was running and all, but somehow it didn't really hit me until I saw it on the absentee ballot. They're actually letting her do it. That's ... messed up.

Sweet!

Tokyo Game Show, October 2008. Whoah, he should turn around and roll up all those newspapers.

Photo by Lisa Katayama for Wired.com. More at Wired.com.

katamari.namco.com

Medieval Babes...Riiiight.

Just found this ad in an old newspaper I was throwing out (gotta make sure I've read Savage Love before I put it in the recycle bin).


To this, I can only say.... "Amateurs."
http://www.flickr.com/search/?s=int&w=all&q=sca+cleavage&m=text

Oobleck?

Apparently there's a commercial product that has similar qualities to oobleck, the classic geek toy made from a saturated cornstarch solution. (Or is it a suspension?)
Post-Gazette: Zoombang Protects Teen Athlete's Insulin Pump

The company says its product, "Zoombang" (wowie zowie), is a "viscoelastic, shear thickening" polymer. It even references its corn starch relative in the explanation.
Zoombang Protective Gear: What's Zoombang?

They make custom garments for athletes who need extra protection because of injuries or whatever. The Post-Gazette story was about a gadget they made for a youth football player who needed to protect his insulin pump. Apparently it's the viscoelastic part that makes it protective - standard oobleck is quite rigid under stress and wouldn't protect anything from impact.

Oobleck, I just learned by Googling, is named after some goo in a Dr. Seuss book. To make it, mix about one part water with 1.5 to 2 parts corn starch. It's said to be a "non-newtonian fluid" which means it has variable viscosity. Oobleck flows and behaves like a liquid under gentle pressure (it conforms to the shape of a cup and can be stirred slowly) but under more intense pressure it becomes rigid, like a solid. Quicksand is another example.

Oobleck also made an appearance on network TV recently. On Big Bang Theory, the guys had wrapped a stereo speaker in plastic wrap and set a puddle of oobleck on it. There are lots of videos of this on YouTube, but they use a steady tone instead of music like the TV show had. So turn your volume down.

There's lots more fun with non-newtonian fluids on YouTube (including a bunch of British science videos featuring Richard Hammond from Top Gear - who knew!), but this one is probably the best:

Unintentional Time Capsule Found in Lancashire, UK

Wow. Just, wow.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/7664661.stm

Apparently someone went to investigate an abandoned building and found a boarded-up corner shop with fixtures and some stock intact. There's at least one magazine from 1971, but the rest of the stuff could be from the 60s.

Here's another video where they poke at some of the stuff: news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7664369.stm

From my new favorite blog, Dinosaurs and Robots. Which is unfortunately flooding my tiny little Google Reader box with multiple posts a day and crowding out my friends' blogs....