Soft Serve the Size of Your Head
Spring. It’s here. The snow tires are off the car. My yard has had its first mow. Tulip Fest is behind us. For that matter, so is the chill of winter. Sure, I may have seen someone at Tulip Fest on Saturday rocking a pair of gloves, but I blame it on the rain.
If you define spring based on the time our seasonal soft serve stands open for the season, it’s been here for over a month. During that unseasonably warm heat wave, I took Little Miss Fussy to Jumpin’ Jacks in Scotia. But we were just there for dinner. No soft serve for us.
Actually, I’m trying to teach my kids that soft serve isn’t ice cream. It’s an ice-cream-like product that can can easily be mistaken for the real thing, much like Country Time can be mistaken for lemonade.
Here’s one way to tell the difference. Real ice cream comes in servings that might approximate the size of your first. Soft serve comes in servings more like the size of your head. Or if you ask Jack from Two Buttons Deep, a small cone should be the size of his fairly large hand.
Apparently, according to Jack, it also shouldn’t melt.
Still, the appeal of soft serve isn’t lost on me, I recognize it’s part of our local culture. So let’s hear from someone who isn’t quite so jaded. Our new friend Emily L. submitted another guest post all about her love of local soft serve. But once she’s done, I’ll share one parting thought on the matter.
In Your Room
Well, The Bangles week concludes with what is probably the most inappropriate song to ring in Mother’s Day weekend ever. Let’s try to forget that it’s all about hanky panky, and focus on the thing that really matters: breakfast.
Sure, there are some families who go out for Mother’s Day Brunch. I’m not entirely sure what to make of those people. It’s like going out for Valentine’s Day Dinner, but with your entire family. Actually, Mother’s Day Brunch might be worse, because they are generally all-you-can-eat buffets.
Ugh. My stomach starts to ache just thinking it.
I’ve been to some pretty opulent Mother’s Day Brunches in my time. The one at the Fountainbleu Hotel in Miami really made an impression on me as a young kid. Just rooms and rooms of food. Now, I find it more than a little bit sickening.
But for those who do not go out to brunch, Mother’s Day can mean breakfast in bed. Because apparently someone at some point thought that getting to eat in your room was a special kind of treat.
Hazy Shade of Winter
It wouldn’t be wrong to call Hazy Shade of Winter a Simon & Garfunkel song. I mean, Paul Simon wrote it, and the duo sung it first. But The Bangles took it further on the charts, and it was one of the band’s biggest hits.
The FLB is celebrating The Bangles this week, because why not.
This little tune metaphorically covers the passing from fall to winter. For me, winter is all about cooking beans. And now that the weather is heating up, the idea of simmering steaming pots of beans in the kitchen is unthinkable.
Where is this going? Well on Friday, I’m off to another potluck. And while I’ve seen ramps and fiddleheads in local markets, early spring in the Capital Region really means one thing to me. That’s clearing out the last of the winter storage crops.
My plan is to do it in a springy way, that also involves beans. Any guesses?
The 10/10 Pizza
Let’s talk about love.
When you’re in love, do you see something for what it is—warts and all—and love it anyway? Or if you truly love something, do you deny its imperfections?
Because nothing is perfect.
Nobody is perfect.
And thankfully, something does not need to be perfect in order to be loved.
This applies both to human beings and to pizza.
Bye Bye Big Beer
There is a lot about the Capital Region food scene I hope never changes.
This past week, I took my daughter to Jumpin’ Jack’s in Scotia. That’s a magical place. On a warm spring night that felt like summer there were about 80 people ahead of us in line. She got the joy of hearing the orders converted into the lingo short order cooks call out to their brigade. And we watched the flames lick the grill to cook a seemingly endless stream of burgers.
But even places like Jumpin’ Jack’s can change in positive ways. For example, I have no idea when they put a veggie burger on the menu, but it’s delicious. One of my Yelp friends swears by their veggie burger with cheese, cooked onions, slaw, and red relish. And I have to say, after finally trying it this week, it’s now my favorite sandwich there.
Little Miss Fussy got the clam roll, and it is one of the better ones we’ve found locally.
Another classic Capital Region place out of time is Ralph’s Tavern. In an attempt to get more people to experience the joys of one of my favorite takes on Mozz & Melba, I hosted Yelp Office Hours there on Monday night. Since it’s a place that resists change, small changes are very very noticeable.
This one has to do with beer, and it’s not just interesting, it’s important.
Albany is as Walkable as Troy
In many ways Albany has been lagging behind Troy over the past decade. I could speculate on some of the reasons, but that won’t move the conversation forward. The good news is that Albany is finally catching up!
There are all kinds of exciting things happening within the city limits. The word on the street was that last weekend’s Half Moon Market in the Washington Park Lake House was off the hook!
It’s great to see a hunger for this kind of thing in Albany proper. To me, it proves that having a significant weekend farmers market would be welcome with open arms and would be a draw for residents. Of course, there are small farmers markets scattered around the city. But Troy, Schenectady, and Saratoga Springs all have large markets that have left Albany in the dust.
No matter. Good things are happening in Downtown Albany, including a weekly walking food tour which starts tomorrow.
Health-Full
Last night I missed out on the chance to have a fancy post theater dessert at Wellington’s.
Thanks to Yelp’s promotional involvement with Proctors and theREP, I attended one of the few remaining performances of Blithe Spirit. It’s an almost eighty-year-old British play that has been performed all over the world, and it’s still quite funny.
But at the end of two and a half hours, I was tired. It was my fault. I’ve been staying up far too late this week. Getting more sleep has been on my to do list for years.
Even though I wasn’t particularly hungry for dessert, that’s never stopped me before. Just Monday, towards the end of Yelp Office Hours, I wasn’t particularly hungry for lemon pepper wings. But when Steve N. thought it would be a good idea to order some for the table, I went with it like a champ.
Going out for dessert after a play is a real treat, and yesterday I had an additional reason to celebrate. In addition to being the blog’s birthday, it was also the date of my annual physical exam. I was on pins and needles about the results of my blood work, because I had been less careful with my eating than I was in the past.
Let me tell you how it worked out, and what I realized about how I eat.
What I Don’t Know About Flavored Coffee
Nine years ago today, I gave birth to this beast. Now it holds over 2,500 posts. It has hundreds of followers, thousands of readers, and I can’t even count the number of words. Wait. WordPress has some kind of tool for that.
Okay. I’ve posted 2,139,978 words. All on food and drink, or at least for the most part.
Thank you! It’s been a wild ride. And I have every reason to believe it will continue to be so. Although I’m still actively encouraging other voices. Perhaps you remember Emily L. from last week.
Well, she had such a fun time writing, I’ve got some more words from her to share. Last time, Emily lit up this corner of the internet with a find that was hiding within plain sight. Today, she strikes a contrary opinion to one that I’ve held for many many years.
You see, Emily loves flavored coffee.
I think it might be healthy, maybe even a little bit therapeutic, to air some dissenting views on these pages. Because as Emily demonstrates, there are people who both read this blog and enjoy flavored coffee. Don’t they deserve to know where to get the good stuff? Certainly, I’m of no help in that department. I know nothing about the stuff, except for the fact I don’t care for it.
But Emily’s tale goes beyond that. Let me turn it over to her, and you can read it for yourself.
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