What are you doing on Saturday night? You’re going to drink high-quality beer (not PBR) at the Black Cat, that’s what. Why, you ask? Because DCFUD’s own contributors RJ3 and seeking_irony will be spinning records (or at least, scratching CDs) and, as loyal DCFUD readers, we know you’ve been hankering to drink and dance all week.
For more information, pop on over to bluestatedc.com.
OK, I can’t let everyone off the hook without a little discursive note on the etymology of the word “chai”. It’s Hindi for tea as some of you may know.
Here’s where it gets interesting: think about various languages you speak, and what the word for tea is in those languages. Chances are it’s either some variation on “tee” or “cha”. The theory goes that some languages picked up the Mandarin version (cha) and some picked up the Cantonese version (people will specifically mention “Amoy” which is now Xiamen in southern China). Apparently when the Portuguese got to Asia they picked up the thee version and people who later traded with the Dutch East India Comapny mainly picked up that form of the word. To lift wholesale from wikipedia:
“Languages that have Te derivatives include Armenian, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Latvian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Tamil, Singhalese, Spanish, Yiddish, and scientific Latin. Those that use Cha derivatives include Hindi, Nepali, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, Albanian, Czech, Russian, Slovene, Turkish, Tibetan, Arabic, Vietnamese, Korean, Thai, Greek, Romanian, Ukrainian, and Swahili.”
When we think about India, however, let’s not forget other contributions to English, including shampoo, khaki, and sandals.
So you
The latest step away from bricks and mortar commerce?
The latest $500 “lifestyle enhancement” Steve Jobs has suckered you into?
It’s how you pronounce the name of my little enamel lifesaver.
My Ibrik is the preferred method for making coffee everywhere from Albania to Uganda and Algeria to Afghanistan. Ya’ll are going to recognize the drink* it makes as “Turkish Coffee”, probably.
Normally on a weekday I’ll brew a pot of drip or nice little french-press and on the weekend I’ll bust out the nespresso or the hand tamped espresso machine. But I’ve been moving house for the last six weeks** and it’s meant that my many means of caffeination have been sequestered in paper and cardboard.
Now, I haven’t gone even 10 hours without coffee since I was 17. I set the coffee maker to go off before I get up and make drip coffee with extra espresso grounds. I’ll be damned if a little elbow grease is gonna be what stands between me and good teeth grinding, red-eyed, itchy-palmed case of the jitters***.
I have a two cup Ibrik, so if you’ve got a different size you can use those math skills your teachers promised would matter later in life and figure out how to adjust this.
So, since everyone posting seems so gosh-darn set on writing about food in Baltimore, Little Rock, and Rockville* (to name just a random sampling of recent posts), I guess a post about a shopping trip to the suburbs isn’t so out of place.
As background: I recently tried to go shopping at the awesome Indian Spice and Gifts on Pollard Street (halfway between the GMU metro stop and Ballston on the Orange Line for fellow metro-ers) but it was sadly closed for renovation. So to soothe my ruffled foodie-soul I took a quick hop, skip, and jump over to the Giant there (I will admit that there was a brief perusal of the Arlington Main Library along the way**). Keep in mind that I ordinarily shop at my local ghetto rip-off Safeway in the city. It turns out that there is produce in the world! I grabbed a quick bag and then rushed home to impart the realization that there really are better grocery alternatives within (albeit far away) Metro access.
I planned the next weekend feverishly. We would go to Harris Teeter at Pentagon City and drop off a camera with a friend who had left it at our New Years Party. I like killing multiple avians with one basaltic nodule.
We broke out the granny cart and got ourselves there with no problem. The aisles were wonderfully large, the produce divine. We picked up 10 habaneros for the jerk chicken I made this evening (good ole Irma S. doesn’t shy away from the spice despite her Germanness) with no trouble. There were multiple brands of organic peanutbutter to choose from! All was bliss.
We headed out the door, full cart in tow. We negotiated the “no pedestrian zone” with aplomb. We snagged the elevator to the metro-level of the mall just as a stroller-wielding young mother came out. We drove through the mall with the granny-cart and garnered not a couple of perplexed gazes. We took another elevator to the farecard-reader level. Then we took a new (urine-scented) elevator to the tracks. Then we took it back up, and switched to the elevator on the correct side of the tracks.
Here’s where tactics come into the story. As those of you who Metro on a regular basis know, there are very few chances in DC to determine your own route. Either the train goes there or it doesn’t, and there’s usually only one line that will do so. However, from Pentagon City to Eastern Market you can either take the Yellow Line to L’Enfant and transfer to the Blue Line, or just ride the Blue straight. The drawback to the former is obviously the transfer, but the latter is six stops longer. It’s generally much faster to take the transfer. So we did, cart in tow.
It turns out that to transfer at L’Enfant being good metro-citizens and not taking the cart on the escaltors takes not one, not two, but three elevators. This is not even mentioning the narrow hard-to-manuver paths which those wheel-challenged are channeled through. So we gave up two-thirds of the way through and attempted to drag the cart on the final escaltor. Bad move. But that’s another story, and happily no one is permanently injured.
Final thoughts: It was sobering to experience in any small way what transfering in Metro is like when you’re mobility challenged.
Grocery stores really are bigger in the ‘burbs.
Granny carts suck.
*Yes, I meant to use the serial comma there. Also known as the Oxford Comma (primarily in the UK, for obvious reasons) it is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Actually either way is fine in my book, but for heaven’s sake be consistent!
**As a DC resident you are entitled to library cards not only in the DC system, but also in Fairfax, Montgomery County, and Arlington. As a US citizen you are entitled to a card at the Library of Congress.
Making granola is surprisingly easy and satisfies the inner control freak in all of us because we get to use exactly the ingredients we want, to the exclusion of all others. An approximated “recipe” follows (more like a collection of suggested steps intended as a starting point for experimentation).
Orange-Sunflower-Flaxseed Granola
1. In a large saucepan, mix 2/3 cup honey, 1/4 cup canola oil, 1 tsp vanilla, 1/2 tsp orange extract (optional) and heat on low until the mixture is thin but not yet boiling.
2. Turn off the heat and stir in 1/4 c orange juice, 3/4 c sunflower seeds, 1/4 c flax seeds, and about 5 cups of rolled oats. Stir the mixture well so that all the dry ingredients are coated. If it looks too soggy (beyond moist), add more dry ingredients. You do not want to start with a soggy mixture because it will take forever to bake off the moisture.
3. Spread the mixture onto a baking dish so that it is no thicker than one inch. Bake at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes, stir, then continue to bake and stir thoroughly every 8-10 minutes or so until dry. This may take more than 45 minutes, depending on your oven.
4. Allow to cool before storing. It may clump a little bit but you can break it up.
Optional ingredients include other nuts (chopped into medium-sized pieces) and dried fruits like cranberries and raisins. Your finished product will be excellent for breakfast, or, if you’re just home from work and really tired, dinner.
There
In a city of transplants where 3-4 years is the average staying-period, even the most dedicated Hill Staffer hesitates to say
Rarely do good things exist in strip malls, even in the south. Whole Hog Cafe & Catering Co. proves that there are exceptions to every rule.
Nestled in a strip mall in Little Rock, Arkansas, Whole Hog is the brainchild of three award-winning BBQ chefs. It’s an old-school style BBQ restaurant, where hungry Arkansans (Arkansas-ites?) line up at a counter, place their order, and await their tray full of heavenly BBQ. The restaurant is apparently so popular that it now takes up three storefronts in the local mall. And they go through so much Iced Tea that there are two barrels of both sweet and unsweet sitting on the beverage counter at any given time.
RJ3 and I both went for the simple choice — the Whole “Hawg” Platter, a plate with pulled pork, beef brisket, 3 baby back ribs, beans, potato salad, coleslaw, and a dinner roll. With that combination, we couldn’t possibly go wrong. The pulled pork was, by far, the best I’ve ever tasted. The pork itself was extremely smooth, very flavorful (but not overpowering) and cooked so perfectly that it literally melted when it hit your mouth. The beef brisket, too, was exceptional – finely sliced and well spiced, it complemented the pork and went very well with the sweeter BBQ sauce. The ribs were good but not exceptional. In fact, rj3 and I decided that they didn’t beat the ribs from Lefty’s. Which just means that the perfect bbq meal found to date would be a combinaton of pulled pork from Whole Hog and a plate of ribs (and sides) from Lefty’s. If only they were in the same geographic region…
Whole Hog offered six different barbecue sauces – several standard sauces, mustard-based sauce, and vinegar-based sauce. I’ve never been a fan of the mustard sauce, but the sweeter sauce and the vinegar-based sauce were both excellent. In fact, the only less-than-perfect part of the meal were the sides, which were, well, underpowering. But, with meat that good, who wants to waste precious calories eating potatoes or slaw, anyway?
Whole Hog Cafe | 2516 Cantrell Road | Little Rock, Arkansas | 72202 | 501-664-6596 | www.wholehogcafe.com
For those of you who, like my mom, can’t remember dcfud.smorgasblog.com or are too lazy to type the whole thing, you can now reach our food-crazy blogging home at www.dcfud.com.
