Category: local

celebration

July 4th weekend spawned a variety of commentary on what it means to be “patriotic” — some of it thoughtful, some of it less so. I’m not sure where I’d fall in the mix, but my weekend was celebratory, and further endeared to me this place I call home.

We kicked it off on Thursday with a wine and cheese tasting at nearby Blue Bistro. They’re holding these events from 6pm to 8pm every Thursday in July, but this one was especially tantalizing, paired as it was with the work-free Friday following it. It’s $20 a person for samples of three wines and three accompanying cheeses. This past Thursday included a champagne cheddar served with champagne, a something something served with a something white, and a “true” Stilton served with a something white and sweet. You can tell how seriously I take these things. Seriously, I’m all about the tasting, less about the remembering. We’ll call it, “living in the moment.” And the moment was enjoyable, largely due to the company. The event itself was, well, not so much of an event. I pictured something with a little more ceremony, but they just brought out three glasses and a plate for each person, told us about all six of the items, then left us alone. I guess I was expecting each cheese to come out separately, and in retrospect wonder if that would have made it feel more ceremonious. But whatever. The full menu was also available, and both the red pepper bisque and the polenta — which they were kind enough to serve on its own, no order of less-stellar-salmon required — were outstanding. Their polenta must be half butter, but mmmm is it good.

After we finished our cheese, we returned to the house to continue the “wine tasting”, by which I mean the “wine overindulgence”. This was the first time we’ve had non-family at the new house for any length of time, and if we’d planned it ahead of time things would have been cleaner and more organized, but I also probably would have had less fun.

Friday was all about recovery, doing the cleaning I should have done before guests came over on Thursday, and then heading downtown to see Brasilian-by-way-of-Pittsburgh singer Kenia at the Hilton. Fun music, but we were both zonked, so we headed home relatively early, just in time to hear the fireworks but, due to the opaque buildings lining Second Street, not see them.

Fireworks then became the plan for Saturday, with my family scheduled to come for dinner and a short walk down to the river. At the last minute, though, I checked the schedule again, and saw that Saturday called only for “mini-fireworks” down at Vine Street — about a mile away. So we walked, and as we walked it became clear that I had not been the only one who misunderstood what and where the fireworks for the evening would be. For a while it looked like maybe we were going have them all to ourselves, until a clarifying announcement was made over the loudspeaker, and the droves began walking south.

The mini-fireworks were to accompany the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra’s rendition of the 1812 Overture at the conclusion of their performance. We got there early enough to hear the preceding song or two as well, stayed for the very mini-fireworks display, and then walked back along the river amidst an ever-thinning crowd while the loudspeaker intoned, “RIVERFRONT PARK IS NOW CLOSED. PLEASE EXIT THE PARK.”

And so fireworks became the plan for Sunday, despite that day’s pairing with the work-laden Monday following it. By this point we were really zonked; so zonked, in fact, that we got it in our heads that it would be a good idea to go to Toys R Us and buy bicycles. Yes, bicycles from the toy store. Whatever. We got two Schwinns, apparently models that are so low-end they’re sold only at Toys R Us and Wal-Mart, and aren’t even listed on the Schwinn website. However, they are cute as hell and have two wheels each, and they helped us propel ourselves from here to the north end of Riverfront Park and back again. I’m looking forward to travelling south from here as well, now that the festival stuff has vacated and that section of the park is again open to bikes. Just not for a few more days, until my legs recover.

Luckily, we didn’t have to walk far to get to Sunday’s fireworks. Actually, we walked several blocks further than we had to, in pursuit of a Brasilian/Bluegrass band playing the festival. The plan was to drop in there, then head up to Suba, and then make our way back to the river. We got waylaid, though, by a sign outside the Civic Club of Harrisburg, right next to the stage where the B/B band was playing, indicating that they were serving dinner. Dinner! The woman at the gate suggested that many people like to eat, then hang around for the fireworks. The Civic Club has a lovely lovely building and lovely lovely yard, and is located between the north tip of City Island and the Harvey Taylor Bridge. We were convinced.

According to our server and the menu, the Civic Club is open as a “restaurant” during the three major Harrisburg festivals — ArtsFest, American Music Festival, and Kipona. Food is ably prepared by Karen’s Catering, and apparently service is performed by members of the Civic Club. I still haven’t figured out what the Civic Club does, except that they have a lovely lovely building used mostly for weddings and banquets.

And a yard with a perfect view of the fireworks.

city cats

So, we’re in midtown.

Our arrival coincided rather unfortunately with a spate of violence that I’m sure those of you who live in the area heard way too much about — but despite the coincidence, I swear, it wasn’t us. Anyway, the violence appears to have subsided, at least temporarily, following a number of arrests and the arrival of a fleet of shiny new police cars. Ah, Harrisburg.

Violence aside, I do have mixed feelings about the new locale. I love that we can walk downtown, or just up the street, for a fun evening. I love that we apparently know tons of people within a radius of just a few blocks. I don’t love that I worry about finding parking in a safe place if I get home after dark, and that our “yard” is a little concrete fenced-in strip comprising something like 10 square feet. I love the house itself, I just wish it came with two parking spaces and a beautiful-but-low-maintenance courtyard. I’ll keep dreaming.

In other news, I’ve been frantically cooking and consuming vegetables in a desperate effort to keep up with the weekly inundation. The highlight was probably zucchini & summer squash with garlic scape pesto. The low was probably today’s summer squash & beets scrambled eggs. I have a whole buncha beets I need to use up. I keep fantasizing about documenting the adventures, but, you know, I can’t even keep up with this blog, so that’s not very likely.

on bitterness

A piece of business first: I just deleted 5,500 comments that were being held in moderation. The vast majority were clearly offers of hardcore pics of various celebrities, but I didn’t read all of them, so if you left a comment that never appeared, I probably just deleted it. But that’s not the point of this post.

I’m excited that Pennsylvania’s primary is actually going to matter this year, but I haven’t yet made up my mind. In the early days of primary season, I was leaning strongly toward Hillary; now, though, I’m leaning more toward Barack. But that’s not the point of this post.

Obama’s getting a lot of flack for his comments about Pennsylvanians. To recap:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Clinton, as everyone knows, responded by saying that Obama is “out of touch”.

I disagree. I know that Obama’s comments don’t paint the most flattering view of Pennsylvanians, and it’s not representative of all Pennsylvanians, but I think they do display a pretty good understanding of the mentality around here. I also think it’s important to note that he made these comments in San Francisco, where people are pretty unlikely to have any understanding of Pennsylvania attitudes and politics. In that context, those comments sound like a defense of the pessimism, bigotry, small-mindedness, and, yes, bitterness, so pervasive in our small towns and even big cities, rather than a condemnation.

Most of Pennsylvania is alienated from what’s happening in California and New York and even D.C., and the issues that are relevant in those places are not always the issues that are relevant here. And it’s awfully hard to untangle and understand the web of reasons that life here is so different than it is in the places time hasn’t forgotten, so it becomes awfully easy to blame the lack of good jobs on globalization and immigrants. And when people in Washington start talking about “taking away my guns” or ensuring that I have healthcare when all I really want is a job, well, one can see how it might be baffling.

There is a divide in America — there are many divides in America — and denying the differences in perspectives is not likely to help bridge those divides. Pennsylvanians are, as Clinton said, resilient, but we do, for the most part, have a very different worldview than New Yorkers or — especially — San Franciscans. Neither perspective is more “right” than the other(s), but if the people in power occupy one world and the people in rural Pennsylvania occupy another, recognizing those differences can look like elitism. It’s not, at least not necessarily. It’s realism.

chlorawhat?

Search for “chloramine” on PennLive.com and the only hit returned is yesterday’s article about a woman protesting Pennsylvania American Water’s decision to start putting the chemical in our water.

This isn’t news.

What is news is PAW’s decision. I’ve done the same internet research as this woman protesting, and maybe more as I still have access to McDaniel’s journal subscriptions. Most of the sites are hysterical (not hysterically funny, just hysterical), but what seems to emerge time and time again is that there just isn’t a whole lot of information available about the risks of chloramine.

We know that chloramine creates fewer by-products than chlorine alone — but not what all the remaining by-products do to the human body. We do know that chloramine itself is one of the harmful substances produced when chlorine interacts with organic matter. The EPA doesn’t even pretend to know whether or not chloramine causes cancer. Scientists — not hysterical citizens — have linked chloramine to increased blood lead levels, and anemia.

It is, of course, the responsibility of each citizen to be as informed as she wants to be. We should not, especially these days, rely on the mainstream media to accurately report everything that might be important to us, nor should we necessarily take at face value everything they do report.

But come on, guys — if you thought a woman who did internet research was worth writing an article about, maybe you could break out your notebooks and go talk to the people who actually know something?

away from el sol

We’ve been eating at home more frequently now that we have a decent kitchen and I have a regular schedule, so tonight, when we decided to eat out (on a weeknight!) it was something of a big deal. I, having come home and immediately changed into pajamas, even put on pants for the occasion, so excited was I to try Harrisburg’s newest Mexican restaurant, El Sol.

I’m not sure I should have bothered.

El Sol is fairly attractive. It looks like what it’s trying to be — a slightly funky, slightly upscale, casual Mexican restaurant. Except that the chairs of the first table we were taken to were so uncomfortable that we asked to move the first time an employee approached us, many minutes after we’d decided what we wanted to eat. They were friendly about the request, and moved us to a table at the bar, the only one open with a different chair/table style. But then they apparently lost track of us again, until Fred asked the woman who had seated us if she was our waitress, and she said, “No.” “But I can be. Are you ready?” We were ready, had been ready, were nearly past ready. We gave her our orders.

The sopes were good, but not nearly as good as Herby’s. Herby’s has this thing that works in Mexican food and very few other cuisines, where it tastes like it came from a street vendor. El Sol’s sopes tasted, and I know this might not make any sense, like they were made for a restaurant, but not for actual eating.

The guacamole, on the other hand, was very good. The other salsas in the salsa sampler were mediocre, though fresh. The chips were fresh, too, but also not great. We spent a while trying to decide what their odd flavor was, then decided they must have been cooked in peanut oil. I don’t know this for a fact, but if you have a nut allergy, you may want to check into it before eating there.

Or just don’t eat there. My fish tacos, on first bite, were too hot — in terms of temperature — to taste any flavor. After letting them cool a bit, they were too hot — in terms of spice — to taste any flavor. The description on the menu states that the tacos are served “with a mild green sauce.” I love heat. I love hot peppers. My tolerance has declined since I left California (where it increased greatly), but I don’t tend to be a wuss, and I do tend to be able to differentiate flavor from heat. This heat killed the cilantro and onions it smothered, and only a faint hint of fish made its way through. To top it off, the “cabbage salad” that came with it was a small pile of iceberg lettuce. Iceberg lettuce on the side is very standard, but it ain’t cabbage salad. The sliced radishes were okay. I mean, they were radishes.

It probably won’t add anything to this rant to talk about Fred’s fajitas, but since they were the worst part, they must be mentioned. First, they weren’t grilled. I’m not sure how they were cooked — maybe pan-fried, maybe even some combination of searing and steaming, but they were *not* grilled. And second, they were covered in a tomato-based sauce. The sauce itself had some interesting flavor (this based on the one bite I took), but it didn’t quite work, and it certainly had nothing to do with any kind of fajitas I’ve ever had.

My verdict is that this would be an okay place to have drinks (the margaritas were passable, though not great) and maybe appetizers if you absolutely have to eat in that neighborhood, but given my experience with Bricco (did I blog about that?), I’d recommend just finding another locale. Like Steelton, where Herby’s serves much better Mexican food for much more reasonable prices. Their margaritas are pretty good, too.

ho wah holiday

Last night my best friend and I found ourselves sans our respective significant others. Though Tammy and I became friends in high school while we were both perpetually single, since then we’ve never been single at the same time, and as a result it’s been more difficult to find time for just the two of us. She got married this past fall to a guy named Neal who, among other things, brews his own beer. More importantly, Neal’s the kind of guy every girl hopes her best friend will marry. So it’s okay that when I see Tammy it’s usually in conjunction with Neal — but it was still great to get a chance to have a girls’ night out.

In high school, Tammy and I frequented the now-defunct Mandarin Restaurant on the Carlisle Pike. It was in the boat-shaped building that now houses a mediocre Mexican restaurant. This and Taco Bell were probably our favorite spots. Anyway, I guess we’ve left behind the days when Taco Bell constituted a nice dinner, because last night we tried a Chinese place neither of us had been, Ho Wah in Lemoyne. Those of you who’ve been there probably know that Ho Wah doesn’t really constitute a “nice dinner” either, but, as I gather everyone else in the area knows already, the food was very good. I’m not sure how it differs from other Chinese food, but I do know it was better. Or at least that I enjoyed it more. (As a side note, I should mention that most West Coasters don’t like East Coast Chinese food, claiming it to be inauthentic. It might be, but I prefer it to the supposedly authentic West Coast Chinese.) It would, however, probably be better for take-out than for dine-in, as the service was pretty poor: I never got my soup, the entrees took waaaay too long to come out, and we had to make eye contact with the server several times before she gave us an opportunity to ask for boxes.

Ultimately, though, we did make it out of there with our leftovers and headed down to New Cumberland to the West Shore Theatre to see The Holiday. Before you say, “You saw what?” let me remind you that this was a girls’ night out. It was the perfect girls’ night out movie — predictable and sweet. And co-starring Jude Law. That’s important.

But more interesting to me than Jude Law was the overtly self-referential nature of the movie. Part of the movie is set in LA, and one of the main characters produces movie trailers. So right off the bat you’ve got elements of a movie about movies. Not that unusual. But there was also a character, a retired screenwriter, who named elements of the movie — in movie-speak — as they were happening. And there was the scene where the movie — which, at least at the West Shore Theatre, began without previews — interrupted itself with the green screen that alerts the audience a preview is about to be shown. What I’m saying is that this movie, in most ways just a typical romantic comedy, made a point to frequently remind the audience that this was a movie. Add to this the basic premise that by watching enough movies and living someone else’s life for two weeks you can change your own life — well, I think this may have been the first mainstream overtly postmodern romantic comedy I’ve seen.

This is not to say that it was, in any way, an intellectual or even thought-provoking film. But it did have Jude Law. What else do you need?

adios santorum

So Santorum has lost, and by a huge margin. Whoo! I wonder which state he’ll live in now.

The thing is, although I was very excited about Santorum losing, I never did get excited about Bob Casey himself, as evidenced by my lack of discussion about it here.

Likewise, I would have been disgusted if Swann beat Rendell, not because I have any particular feelings about Rendell, but because Swann seemed like a joke.

Anyway, right now it’s looking like the Dems will take the House (107 to 88, as of 9:57 PM), but the Senate’s still a toss up. So I’m going to wait for the results for the polls about to close, then head off to bed.

Oh — I was just reminded of one other good thing — Kenneth Blackwell appears to have lost Ohio. Maybe 2008 will be less of a mess.

Thanks for voting, if you did. Even if you voted Republican. I can say that because it looks like it’s all going to work out.

miss me?

Miss hearing what I have to say?

Come out, this Saturday, to Sparky & Clark’s in York to hear me read at Poetry Brew:

Saturday, November 11th, 7:30pm

Sparky & Clark’s
284 West Market Street
York, PA 17401

I’m currently working on a collection of new poetry for my senior project at McDaniel, which means most of what I’ll be reading is brand new.

Even better than checking my blog for non-existent new posts!

bayou blues

About a week ago I stumbled upon the menu for Bayou, the new Cajun place in midtown. Unfortunately we didn’t make it there until today, two days after Sara Bozich wrote about it in her Thursday column. Sara seems to have had a great experience; mine was not as positive.

Before I get into that, though, I’d like to offer you the web-premiere of this tidbit of information: Bayou serves breakfast on Saturdays until 1pm. They don’t mention this on their own website, nor were the hours mentioned in Sara’s column. But now you know.

Wait wait, maybe I shouldn’t tell you that. Bayou tells callers that they serve breakfast until 1pm, and 1pm is what is posted on the door. However, today they stopped serving by about noon, because they’d run out of almost everything.

“We’ve never been this busy,” the two servers kept telling customers. “Usually on Saturdays we just have one person working, but today we had to call in reinforcements.” Sara’s opinion must be highly respected, as I think it should be.

When we arrived a little after 11 the restaurant was nearly full. Here’s a picture, taken by Fred and his phone:

Bayou, Harrisburg PA

We were able to get a table right away, though, and after just a few minutes we were even able to get a menu. Bayou’s breakfast menu is limited, but offers enough options that nearly everyone (barring those with unusual dietary restrictions, I suppose) should be able to find something to please them. As Sara mentions, Bayou serves beignets and caffe au lait, as well as an eggs/potatoes option, an assortment of coffee cakes, and a couple of other items. Today, though, they were out of beignets and coffee cake.

I ordered the Bayou Breakfast: two eggs, cajun home fries, and a cheese biscuit ($4) with sausage (another $4). We both ordered caffe au lait (apparently $4 for one, $5 for two — but I’m not clear on this). The caffe piece of the caffe au lait arrived in a small French press not yet pressed. A nice touch. The steamed milk wasn’t ready yet, though, and we waited several more minutes for it to arrive.

Many more minutes later, our breakfasts arrived. They looked good, although the waitress informed us that they were out of cheese biscuits and so we received an English muffin each instead. Additionally, there was no sausage in sight — instead we’d both been given bacon. I asked for sausage; the waitress apologized and said she’d bring some. Also, she said she’d bring silverware.

By the time we did get our silverware, the eggs were cold. The potatoes were also less-than-hot, but they were otherwise perfect. I can only imagine how good they would be if they were warm.

My sausage arrived after I’d finished eating, despite my attempts to eat slowly in anticipation. Kindly, the waitress offered to put it in a to-go box, and said she wasn’t going to charge us for it. It did, however, appear on the bill. Twice. She deducted one instance of it. We asked; she said something complicated that seemed to imply that we were somehow coming out ahead in this deal. While everything else about the experience was forgiveable, that’s just bad customer service and not a good way to get people to return.

But I will return. Maybe not for breakfast in the near future, but I’d like to go back for dinner because the food was good enough, and the menu interesting enough, that if the staff can get their act together, I think Bayou will be a fantastic addition to the Harrisburg dining scene. And eventually I will return for breakfast, because I’d rather go there than to Cracker Barrel and there are few good options for Saturday breakfast.

I will add this advice to any establishment: if you are written up in the paper, it is always better to over-staff and over-stock in the following days. If you lose a little money, it’s a shame, but that’s better than providing a mediocre dining experience, and far better than turning away customers because you’ve run out of food.

zephyr brings no breeze

Okay, Diego, here’s a post about a restaurant in Harrisburg you’ll never visit. At least, I wouldn’t recommend visiting.

The restaurant is The Zephyr Express, named for and designed to feel like the dining car of a passenger train. I know that because I read their website, not because I could tell from the inside. I guess now that I think about it I see what they were going for.

We visited Zephyr last night, after I followed a link from Dine Indie, a cool, new (to me) website listing independent restaurants. Zephyr’s menu looked interesting — especially the Ahi Tuna and the Herb Crusted Blackberry Chicken. The website didn’t ooze excellence, but it all looked intriguing.

And it was intriguing, and they were attempting some interesting things, but, unfortunately, as we left the restaurant I said, “Well, that was a Harrisburg-caliber restaurant,” and, fortunately, Harrisburg-caliber no longer cuts it around here.

The caprese was made from grocery store plum tomatoes that had been refrigerated. Maybe our fault for ordering caprese at the end of September. The Zephyr bread was good, not in a fine dining kind of way, but in a family-style greasy cheesy kind of way. They were out of the Capicola Stuffed Chicken, which was the first thing I ordered. The Ahi Tuna was pretty good, but the seven pepper crust was so intense I couldn’t actually taste the fish. The rice pilaf that came with it was overcooked to the point of being completely inedible. However, the asparagus was pretty good, even though asparagus is out of season. My dining partner had the day’s special, which was something along the lines of tequila chicken over fettucine. It was good, but not great, tasting a lot like you’d expect chicken with melted cheese on top to taste.

So what I’m saying is the meal wasn’t a complete failure, but it was nothing special. However, it was almost four times as expensive as the meal we had at Skewers a few days earlier.

Granted, we did make a meal of appetizers and soup at Skewers, but we still left stuffed, and the food was much much better. Their lentil soup, by the way, is maybe the perfect cold remedy. It’s basically a thick broth with just enough substance to be satisfying, and employs a nice spicy (but not too spicy!) kick at the end to help clear those sinuses. If you’ve got the head and chest congestion that’s been going around, go get some soup at Skewers. Even if it means driving up from Baltimore.