Visiting and fressing in Pennsylvania
US1023 BOS PHL 0630 0756 734 4A
was 1811 0830 1001 E90 12F The kiosk offered me the earlier flight at no cost. Hey, why not. Give me 3 hours to enjoy the beauties of PHL and do FT at the RCC. Flight was fine and fast. Courteous though uninvolved FA service. Comparison of the RCC versus the USAC (F terminal, comparable in size). staff: UA: courteous if a little gruff; helpful US: courteous if a little diffident; helpful Ever so slight edge to US amenities: UA: furniture semi-comfy; a bit outdated US: furniture semi-comfy; a bit outdated A wash restrooms: UA: fairly clean, small, inadequately ventilated US: clean, small, nicely appointed, airy Edge: US coffee: UA: Bunn-O-Matic regular and decaf, espresso machine, good selection of teas and herbal teas US: Flavia system, a couple teas Edge: UA breakfast snacks: UA: pre-staled Sara Lee cake; yogurt, raisins, fruit US: amazingly underbaked blueberry muffins; yogurt, fruit A wash lunch snacks: UA: cheese, crackers, crudites, chips and salsa, potato chips, raisins, Sun Chips US: cheese, crackers, crunchy salty junk, potato chips Edge: UA, slightly bar: UA: decent selection, amusing bartender who can make fancy drinks US: okay selection, bartender hardly forthcoming entertainment: UA: TV with unchangeable inane programming US: TV with unchangeable inane programming A wash Internet: UA: free wireless US: costly wireless (apparently soon to change) Edge: UA (apparently soon to equalize) business amenities: UA: telephones in TV room only; copier; spartan cubicles with bad temperature control US: telephones, some of which work; copier, shredder, fax; spacious well lit cubicles Edge: US On the whole, all the fighting about the superiority of one okay club over the other is kind of silly. US4118 PHL IPT 1051 1144 DH8 2A was 4F Unfortunately, this process changed my seat from the exit shady side window to the noisiest sunny side window, and I didn't notice. Ah, well, I carry earplugs and eyeshades with me, and my legs aren't super super long. Which reminds me, though. My buddies were watching Dancing with the Stars last night, and I demonstrated my high kicking prowess ... which would have been fine, except I forgot, in my eagerness to impress a young lady, that I can't kick my left leg as high any more. Threw the damned left butt out, and it was pretty unpleasant sitting in the Dash 8 seat. More Benadryl made it easy to snooze through the flight, though. My friends were there to pick me up and drag me to Ichiban, a sushi parlor run by an assortment of Chinese and Indonesians. I went against sanity and went for raw fish, which actually was pretty fresh and pretty well prepared. The sashimi lunch consisted of three slices each of escolar, sea bass of some kind, yellowfin tuna, and salmon. All were good examples, and only the tuna had a whiff of less-than- freshness. Rice was average, more American than Japanese. For some reason the escolar didn't have the embarrassing Olestra-like effects that it usually does. The lunch came with an average miso soup with lots of seaweed and an average iceberg salad with an average miso-based dressing. Billy, being immunosuppressed, looked enviously at the raw fish; he, Annie, and Merinda all had the shrimp tempura. I tried this: the shrimp were fine, though the batter was too thick; vegetables were mostly normal but had a couple odd additions, including large taro, which someone pawned off on me as eggplant. I also ordered an agedashi dofu appetizer for the table, but everyone else steered away from it; it was of a decent standard. Sapporo beer was a good accompaniment to all. |
I saw the title and thought you had eaten at one of those Lancaster County monster buffets, always a real fress-out. Didn't expect sushi! But your description of the meal is as vivid as usual.
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Localish beers:
Yuengling Light - not bad, low hops, clean tasting, good for quenchment but not doing all that much for the taste buds Yuengling Light Lager - not surprisingly, similar, but a bit more cereally Straub - somewhere between a real beer and an American one, with a bit of tartness and character; I enjoyed this local product; a bit of a surprise Iron City - a big surprise, as it has the reputation for being cheap bellywash a la Blatz, Haffenreffer, Schaefer, and so on: turned out to be a decent mainstream brew, not very characterful, but not Old Frothingslosh either. Unlocalish beers: On our trip to Corning, see below, we found Tiger, Singha, and Sapporo at Wegmans. Annie, who has fond memories of Asia trips with Billy, bought them out. At least Billy can close his eyes and think of Chiangmai. Also, for some unknown reason, she bought a case of Molson Light in anticipation of a friend who drank cheap light beer (despite the fact that we had cases of the two light Yuenglings). I had one - surprisingly well hopped, nice, clean, refreshing. I'd do it again. = Breakfast - with Robbie and Merinda Annie had bought some fake Chinese sausage - essentially Italian links with sugar and red food coloring. It tasted like what you'd think. I had one, Robbie had one, but after we made funny faces, the rest went begging, especially as there was an abundance of thick-cut smoked bacon from Ted's to go with our eggs scrambled with pepper jack. Lunch - I wasn't going to have any, but Merinda gave me the fattier half of her 20+-oz ribeye, leftover from some previous meat coma session. I also had a couple teriyaki wings, cold, from yet another oinkfest. Dinner - turkey and gravy sausage stuffing mashed potatoes fiddleheads in butter I made the first two dishes, Annie the others. It was a good turkey; I roasted it upside-down, so the back skin got all crispy and nice; then I took the breast skin and rendered it on the stove to get fat for the gravy. So as well as a platter of turkey we had a platter of crunchies. I ODed. The mashed had lots of butter. The fiddleheads as well. Our friend Holly, who likes green things, brought a lettuce salad with broccoli bits and other oddities; I tasted it out of politeness. It was fine but a bit healthy for me. |
Next day, time to say goodbye to Merinda. She was flying out
of ELM, so we had lunch at Market Street Brewing Company in Corning. Surprisingly good burgers, which were cooked as requested (mine bloody rare), with excellent sweet potato fries or the signature MSBC fries, which are sort of thick- cut potato chips but with some soft bits. The beers on offer: a red (like Killian's); a lager (like Bud); a blackberry lager, which Merinda and I both thought tasted like butter pecan; a fairly hoppy but a bit too malty IPA; dark ale (sort of partway between a nut brown and a stout); Hefeweizen (I hate this kind of beer); and a decent brown ale that was sort of English, sort of eh. After the sampler I had a glass of IPA. Dropped Merinda off at the rather modern (they've fixed up all the local airports, except for IPT) Elmira-Corning facility, which boasts a surprising number of flights, Corning being the third largest tourist city in New York. Then back to Williamsport via the Friendly Market, a Mennonite-run store that features beef from the Circle K Ranch, supposedly Wagyu x Belgian Blue. It comes frozen solid, so we came back with a bunch of beef bricks. For dinner, Robbie made a superb risotto Milanese, and I fairly expertly grilled some veal chops. Mushrooms in sour cream and asparagus in brown butter completed the artery- stopping meal, which Billy said was the best meal ever. = Saturday, Robbie came by bright and early to drag me to the local farmers' market, where I had an eye-opener of a Misty Mountain Farms burger - good beefy Angus meat, done from frozen. I asked for a rare one, which came sort of medium. It tasted pretty good, nothing special. I should have cooked it myself. We chatted with the locals, bought a few things, and then back to Annie and Billy's for breakfast. Breakfast. Ted's sausage, which is tasty but somewhat underseasoned to my taste and very, very lean, which I don't like. But it seems to be the regional style - even the supermarket sausages are lean. Mountain View Farms is an Amish concern. I got excellent sticky buns and rich, cheesy soured-cream butter there for not too much money. Eggs, too, laid fresh this morning, with bright yellow yolks and a lovely flavor. Also a pecan pie, which amid all the other bounty got shunted aside, so I never tasted it. Bea's Sweet Treats offered chocolate sticky buns, which I thought an unhappy compromise, being neither chocolaty nor sticky enough, and a gooey black bottom cupcake made with cream cheese (also not chocolaty enough). = Lunch for me was beer, including a couple Kiuchi Hitachino Nest products, which are enjoying some vogue, why I don't understand. A white ale was a citrusy Belgian-style brew, which I don't favor even when made by Texans or Belgians. Real Ginger Brew tasted similar, but with strong ginger notes and weak urine notes. = A fried dinner. Annie had pulled out a 2.5 lb box of cleaned squid from the freezer. She lamented that neither she nor Robbie had been able to make decent fried squid; I allowed as I hadn't succeeded in years, either, having forgot the technique years before my brain had been sucked out of the top of my head. We decided to try three ways, stopping when we found success. Method I: cornstarch only; method II: cornstarch and then tempura batter; method III; beaten egg whites and then Panko. After a slight contretemps, in which the Presto Fry Baby refused to come up to temperature, triumph was had using a regular fry pan on the stove and the cornstarch method. Yield: crisp tentacles and crisp-tender rings in a fragile white flaky coating. Delicious. I held out a pound of squid for the next day, as I thought 13 oz of fried calamari a person a bit much. I also made two-side pan-fried garlic noodles. Some leftover sweet tater fries from MSBC, refried at a nice 350F, completed the picture. Annie said that this was the best meal she'd ever had, and I pointed out that it was one of the few meals where she had not been bugged about eating her vegetables (of which, not counting the sweet fries, there was none). |
Breakfast: lamb 'n' eggs - fried marrowbone chops and
some more of those Amish eggs over easy. No lunch. Dinner. Mike and his wife Jill came over with cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches and salmon stuffed eggs. We gorged on these, after which I made kofta kebab, squid satay, and sauteed fiddleheads. That was for appetizers. Beaver Run Farms hot sausage was nice (though lean and not all that hot, truth be told); a Cattle Hill Farms burger, grain fed Angus, cooked really rare was superb, but as it had been cooked by loving hands, there was unfair comparison to the Misty Mountain burger, than which this was a zillion times better. Lamb chops in Moroccan seasoning (from Sur la Table) were an effort to salvage a tray of chops forgotten in the freezer and only found when the squid came out. They were fine. I made German potato salad to go with, as I don't care for mayonnaisey things, and bacon is always a good thing. Also grilled onions and peppers for those who wished to pollute their burgers and sausages with vegetables. Limoncello for dessert. = Next day. Leftovers (abundant) for breakfast and lunch. Dinner. This was the day for the American Wagyu x Belgian Blue ribeyes, which we had left as hard frozen bricks a couple days ago. They now reappeared, thick and gorgeous 20 ozers. Robbie had been invited, but he forgot. Annie was all beefed out, so there were 4 giant steaks for 2 people. Annie got Italian sweet sausages for herself from Wegmans: while the steaks were a-cookin' I had two. They were pretty good but way too lean. The steaks were pretty interesting. Mine, rare rare, was not spectacular; I'd say on the order of a good supermarket piece of meat, maybe a bit more character. Billy's, medium rare, was a revelation: full of bloody good beef flavor, almost livery in its intensity, exceptionally tender (in the normal way, not in the Wagyu way - there was not that much marbling in these steaks). One was put away for Billy's midnight snack; the other packed up for me to take to Boston (once there, I cut it up for stir-fry, and it fed three quite adequately). Along with this: more asparagus and a version of pommes Macaire using leftover potatoes from the turkey day and an impossible amount of butter, so they sort of exploded in the pan. Tasted good, though. = Annie had said that there are six airports that I could fly into and out of, depending on prices, availability, and schedules: IPT, ELM, AVP, SCE, MDT, and ABE in a pinch. There was good availability at MDT, so I flew out of there. Not a good choice: it's actually quite far, largely on US 15, which can get royally clogged up by a slow truck or a cop car or a tourist. We allowed two hours, and it took all of that and more. The airport itself is okay, sleek and modern with its 8 or so gates, and free Wi-Fi in the terminal. There's also a Susquehanna Club, which is open to all fliers on DL, UA, US, AA, or CO who are bottom level elite or higher. Plus it's honor system - you fill out a form on your first visit (there was nobody at the desk when I went in there), and they put you in the database, and all you do next time is just sign in. I filled out the form and put it on the desk; got a cup of coffee and did my e-mail (my flight was delayed), and when I left, there was still nobody there, so I took the form back and tossed it, as I'm not likely to go there again soon. US4596 MDT PHL 1237 1323 DH8 4A was DH3 11A The flight left close to half an hour late; after 16 minutes in the air (according to flightaware.com) there was a good fighting chance for making the Boston connection (three days a week there's a nonstop; the rest of the time you connect in Philly); but then we took 43 minutes from landing to gate - during which I snoozed, waking up a couple times as the plane started up only to straggle on a few feet; by the time we got in, I was refreshed enough to be able to kind of sprint to the next gate. US 717 PHL BOS 1515 1633 E90 12F was 767 PHL BOS 1415 1533 I ran to B4 - I was the first of at least 3 runners for this particular connection. They'd closed the doors maybe a couple minutes before, but the plane was just sitting there and sitting there. We just stood there and stood there. Irritating. Why this had to be the one flight of the day that wasn't affected by flow control I don't know. Be that as it may, the next flight was fine - I sat next to a woman who had missed that same flight and was dumped from F on the 1415 to the exit row on this one. We commiserated. This flight took off and landed a bit late as well, not enough to mess up my plans. It was otherwise fine. When I got back to a scale, I read the bad news: I had gained a whopping 3 lb, or more or less what I might have gained on a weekend bender. -33- |
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