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sniffnoyThere's a lot. I'm not going to fit this all in one entry so I've split it up by subject. This is where I'm going to talk about food, and things touching on food. Not something I normally talk about very much, but, I don't know, I have a lot.
This entry may be mostly pretty boring except maybe for the bit with the bagels and the sevens. Oh well. I'll get to the more interesting stuff next time. Hopefully that doesn't take too long.
So anyway this past week -- from the Thursday before last till this past Wednesday -- Heidi was here in Ann Arbor! Mostly visiting me but of course she also made a point to see Charlotte and Tanzer. She was supposed to arrive Wednesday but then a bus got canceled.
Now what I didn't realize when we planned this earlier was that this weekend was when the NASCO people were here. And we at Truth House had agreed to host 35 of them (because we wanted to outdo Nakamura House, apparently). This led to a bit of confusion -- having to explain that yes, Heidi is just someone who is visiting me, she's not from NASCO, she can eat our food, etc. (While we provide the NASCO people a place to sleep, we can't let them eat our food, because, well, there's so many of them; the house couldn't support it.)
Speaking of food -- fortunately most days it turned out that there was something for Heidi to eat at dinner. Heidi is vegan, recall, and while the house always has something vegetarian prepared, vegan is another matter. Of course at some of the other co-ops they do that -- certainly at the vegetarian ones -- but here we don't bother. So, we got lucky there. Well, OK, not entirely luck. Hannah and Justine knew about this and decided to accomodate Heidi the night they were cooking, so, thanks to them! In any case it wasn't going to be a big problem anyway seeing as we had plenty of food around ("You guys have four fridges?!") and Heidi had brought some of her own anyway, just in case. (It consisted largely of Clif bars.)
Well, she had meant to, anyway. In fact she had accidentally left it behind. So on Friday morning she went wandering in search of someplace to buy food. Luckily she started out heading to the south and eventually came across Whole Foods. Then she tried to find the math building to meet me but instead she got lost and literally wandered around for hours, largely to the north around the medical center area. She didn't know the name of the math building so she just asked people where the math building was, and they didn't know. Finally she thought to ask where the main quad was, and once she made it there, things became a bit easier. So yeah, oops. We didn't coordinate that very well.
She would return to the area-to-the-south-where-Whole-Foods-and-Trader-Joe's-are to get more food later in her stay; whether that means we didn't have enough food she could eat, she failed to find it, or she just preferred to get her own, I don't know. (I should probably remark at this point that she was pretty surprised at how friendly everyone was in Truth House, Marc in particular.) But the plan of "get some to keep for the whole week" didn't go too well -- she ended up eating her 7 Clif bars on the same day.
This became something of a theme. Some days later she went and got 8 ice cream sandwiches[0], ate 6 of them on the way back, gave one to me, and eight the remaining one. So she ate 7 ice cream sandwiches. And then on Tuesday...
Well, OK, this is a substory in itself. Which I thought I had told some components of earlier, but I'm not finding here. So let's start from the beginning. Right, so, Heidi is from Missouri, and when she was at PROMYS and was told how hard it is to get a decent bagel outside the New York area, she didn't believe it. We do too get good bagels in Missouri, she insisted; and when I visited her down in Rolla the other year, she intended to prove it. She showed me... Einstein Brothers. Yeah. And then some other crappy bagel place on campus.
Of course, I'm in Ann Arbor at the moment; not like I can do better, right? Well, actually -- there's a place around here called Barry Bagels that does in fact make decent bagels. It's pretty far away; I only know of it because there used to be some people in Truth House that worked there, and they would bring back leftover bagels. I was pretty surprised at the time, that these actually seemed to be decent bagels, all the way out here in Michigan, but I never actually bothered to go there before. But with Heidi here, well, I had to show her what a real bagel consisted of.
And... she couldn't tell the difference. Well, so, that was disappointing. But hey, she likes bagels regardless, and she ate five of them. And then realized -- hold on, I have to eat two more, so I'll have eaten 7 bagels.
The next day, some hours after she left Ann Arbor, she texted me from Chicago, saying -- I've eaten 4 burritos; should I eat 3 more?
OK, last thing. Heidi and Hunter and I went to Seva, a nearby vegetarian restaurant, on Saturday. (She had thought of making some chili with what was around, but, eh.) I got a tempeh burger. I'd never heard of this tempeh stuff before. The burger was really good. The next day Heidi went and picked up some pre-cooked tempeh, and, it was really bland. So, guess it's not the material, then. Which I guess should be obvious. Heidi told me -- OK, I'm pretty fuzzy on the details here and am going from memory, but I recall that she told me -- that she and Kiley once one a cooking contest by making bean burgers because most people make bean burgers terribly and none of the judges had had a good one before. That seems a little incredible so I suspect I'm misremembering something. Though her bean burgers are good, I can attest to that from when I stayed with her down in Rolla.
Also: One thing that has always confused me is that vegetarians seem to eat, well, so many vegetables. Because vegetables, well, aren't exactly food as I see it[3]. I mean, sure, it's in the name, but not in the definition. But Heidi is vegetarian -- vegan, even -- and seems to eat more of things seem like I might actually want to eat them. This is encouraging should I want to try going vegetarian. I'd have to ask her about this in more detail, obviously...
Yeah, this entry may have been pretty boring except for the bit with the bagels and the sevens.
-Harry
[0]Well, vegan "ice cream sandwiches"; don't ask me just what they might have consisted of.
[3]I can expand on what I mean by that if people really want.
This entry may be mostly pretty boring except maybe for the bit with the bagels and the sevens. Oh well. I'll get to the more interesting stuff next time. Hopefully that doesn't take too long.
So anyway this past week -- from the Thursday before last till this past Wednesday -- Heidi was here in Ann Arbor! Mostly visiting me but of course she also made a point to see Charlotte and Tanzer. She was supposed to arrive Wednesday but then a bus got canceled.
Now what I didn't realize when we planned this earlier was that this weekend was when the NASCO people were here. And we at Truth House had agreed to host 35 of them (because we wanted to outdo Nakamura House, apparently). This led to a bit of confusion -- having to explain that yes, Heidi is just someone who is visiting me, she's not from NASCO, she can eat our food, etc. (While we provide the NASCO people a place to sleep, we can't let them eat our food, because, well, there's so many of them; the house couldn't support it.)
Speaking of food -- fortunately most days it turned out that there was something for Heidi to eat at dinner. Heidi is vegan, recall, and while the house always has something vegetarian prepared, vegan is another matter. Of course at some of the other co-ops they do that -- certainly at the vegetarian ones -- but here we don't bother. So, we got lucky there. Well, OK, not entirely luck. Hannah and Justine knew about this and decided to accomodate Heidi the night they were cooking, so, thanks to them! In any case it wasn't going to be a big problem anyway seeing as we had plenty of food around ("You guys have four fridges?!") and Heidi had brought some of her own anyway, just in case. (It consisted largely of Clif bars.)
Well, she had meant to, anyway. In fact she had accidentally left it behind. So on Friday morning she went wandering in search of someplace to buy food. Luckily she started out heading to the south and eventually came across Whole Foods. Then she tried to find the math building to meet me but instead she got lost and literally wandered around for hours, largely to the north around the medical center area. She didn't know the name of the math building so she just asked people where the math building was, and they didn't know. Finally she thought to ask where the main quad was, and once she made it there, things became a bit easier. So yeah, oops. We didn't coordinate that very well.
She would return to the area-to-the-south-where-Whole-Foods-and-Trader-Joe's-are to get more food later in her stay; whether that means we didn't have enough food she could eat, she failed to find it, or she just preferred to get her own, I don't know. (I should probably remark at this point that she was pretty surprised at how friendly everyone was in Truth House, Marc in particular.) But the plan of "get some to keep for the whole week" didn't go too well -- she ended up eating her 7 Clif bars on the same day.
This became something of a theme. Some days later she went and got 8 ice cream sandwiches[0], ate 6 of them on the way back, gave one to me, and eight the remaining one. So she ate 7 ice cream sandwiches. And then on Tuesday...
Well, OK, this is a substory in itself. Which I thought I had told some components of earlier, but I'm not finding here. So let's start from the beginning. Right, so, Heidi is from Missouri, and when she was at PROMYS and was told how hard it is to get a decent bagel outside the New York area, she didn't believe it. We do too get good bagels in Missouri, she insisted; and when I visited her down in Rolla the other year, she intended to prove it. She showed me... Einstein Brothers. Yeah. And then some other crappy bagel place on campus.
Of course, I'm in Ann Arbor at the moment; not like I can do better, right? Well, actually -- there's a place around here called Barry Bagels that does in fact make decent bagels. It's pretty far away; I only know of it because there used to be some people in Truth House that worked there, and they would bring back leftover bagels. I was pretty surprised at the time, that these actually seemed to be decent bagels, all the way out here in Michigan, but I never actually bothered to go there before. But with Heidi here, well, I had to show her what a real bagel consisted of.
And... she couldn't tell the difference. Well, so, that was disappointing. But hey, she likes bagels regardless, and she ate five of them. And then realized -- hold on, I have to eat two more, so I'll have eaten 7 bagels.
The next day, some hours after she left Ann Arbor, she texted me from Chicago, saying -- I've eaten 4 burritos; should I eat 3 more?
OK, last thing. Heidi and Hunter and I went to Seva, a nearby vegetarian restaurant, on Saturday. (She had thought of making some chili with what was around, but, eh.) I got a tempeh burger. I'd never heard of this tempeh stuff before. The burger was really good. The next day Heidi went and picked up some pre-cooked tempeh, and, it was really bland. So, guess it's not the material, then. Which I guess should be obvious. Heidi told me -- OK, I'm pretty fuzzy on the details here and am going from memory, but I recall that she told me -- that she and Kiley once one a cooking contest by making bean burgers because most people make bean burgers terribly and none of the judges had had a good one before. That seems a little incredible so I suspect I'm misremembering something. Though her bean burgers are good, I can attest to that from when I stayed with her down in Rolla.
Also: One thing that has always confused me is that vegetarians seem to eat, well, so many vegetables. Because vegetables, well, aren't exactly food as I see it[3]. I mean, sure, it's in the name, but not in the definition. But Heidi is vegetarian -- vegan, even -- and seems to eat more of things seem like I might actually want to eat them. This is encouraging should I want to try going vegetarian. I'd have to ask her about this in more detail, obviously...
Yeah, this entry may have been pretty boring except for the bit with the bagels and the sevens.
-Harry
[0]Well, vegan "ice cream sandwiches"; don't ask me just what they might have consisted of.
[3]I can expand on what I mean by that if people really want.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-13 03:05 pm (UTC)I expected this to be about more interesting food, despite your warning! I still like hearing about what is going on in people's lives, though.