Author Archives: Greta

Barbecue Part 2

Jenkin’s Barbecue
Jacksonville, FL
Served only a mustard sauce, with the philosophy of, “If you don’t like it, then leave.” I did like it, very much. We had a giant rack of ribs, completely drowning in the sauce. The meat was cooked well, but I can’t really give an assessment of their rub, because the sauce was a little overpowering. P1060638

Big G’s Barbecue and Catering
Allendale, GA
For a restaurant with barbecue in the name, it was remarkably hard to find any barbecue on their menu. Eventually we located the section, but it only had chopped (pulled) or sliced pork sandwiches. We both got pulled, which came on a hamburger bun, and slathered with mustard sauce.
Honestly, I don’t think mustard is good with pulled pork. It’s better with something with a bit more solid, like ribs or brisket. A smoother, tomato-based sauce or vinegar should be used on pulled pork.
That being said, it was pretty good. But it being out in the middle of rural Georgia means we’ll never go to it again, and it isn’t worth driving hundreds of miles out of your way to reach.

Slap ya Mamma’s Barbecue
Biloxi, MS
Locally famous, for a good reason. Just the smell walking up to it was tantalizing enough to make my mouth water. Like the restaurants above, they only had one sauce, but this was tomato-based. A bit bland in comparison to mustard, but it went great with the pulled pork, and the fried okra.
The ribs didn’t even really need the sauce. They were delightfully smoky, and made up for being slightly less succulent than Barbeque Exchange’s by having more meat on them. P1060837

Hushpuppies

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Despite never having tried or even heard of hushpuppies before this trip, I think I have come to know them quite well. They’re usually served as a side to something else (it can be anything in the South, from fried chicken to fish tacos), but I think they deserve their own post.

Wayside Takeout and Catering and Ole Virginia Fried Chicken
Charlottesville, VA
The first hushpuppies I ever tasted, and probably the worst, although I didn’t know that at the time. I thought they were good, but had to ask if they were traditionally eaten with ketchup, as they were a little bland. Also on the small side, only about an inch in diameter.

Clyde Cooper’s BBQ
Raleigh, NC
Unlike with the previous puppies, I could actually taste that they were made of cornmeal. They were also bigger, but not larger spheres. They were stangely extruded, in (I hate to say it) a form any three-year-old would immediately recognize. This made the surface to volume ratio a bit greater, which I think was good, despite the obvious flaws in the design.

Leon’s Fine Poultry and Oysters
Charleston, SC
Returned to round, but these were larger, about two inches in diameter instead of one. Definitely corny, though less so than Clyde Cooper’s. They also had peppers baked inside them, adding a dash of color and spice to an otherwise monochrome and occasionally bland food.
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Big G’s Barbecue and Catering
Allendale, GA
These had an interesting texture. Instead of having a thin crispy shell coating a mostly mealy inside, it was a bit more permeated. The two-inch spheres seemed more like small cornmeal balls wearing an almost crystalline coat of fried fat. It was full of little air pockets, making them much flakier than any other hushpuppies I’ve tried. P1060686

I think I’ve covered all the different variations upon hushpuppies, but if I find something new, it will definitely be added.

Treylor Park

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Treylor Park in Savannah, GA has actually accomplished the spectacular feat of replacing Velvet Taco in Chicago as the best food I have eaten on this trip, and second only to Fish Sauce in Portland as my favorite restaurant. Like VT, it puts a spin on classic foods, like wings or once again, tacos. Everything on the menu sounded so good that we intentionally ordered too much, so we could bring it back to our own trailer park for dinner. This place broke out of the bar food box so spectacularly that it deserved fireworks.

The first thing we tried was pigs in a blanket made with artisanal sausages and dipped in mustard sauce. The biscuit blanket was crispy on the outside, and soft around the meat, which was intensely flavored and delicious. The mustard was the best part in my opinion.

Pigs in a Blanket

My second favorite dish was the chicken pancake tacos. Lightly fried chicken, slathered with pepper sauce and strawberry salsa, and wrapped in a soft but stable pancake. Sweet was countered with spice, and soft by crunch, all together in the perfectly balanced food.

The sloppy joe was more normal, but even that was made with venison instead of beef. I was honestly expecting bleu cheese or something on top, but it only contained normal cheddar. But, the fried onions it came with were actually placed inside the bun, adding crunch to slop in continuation of the theme of balance.

Sloppy Joe

The PB&J chicken wings may have been the most delicious thing I have ever had the pure joy of eating. I know it sounds odd, but it came highly recommended on yelp, and being the strangest thing on a menu of weirdness I felt that it was my duty to try it. I did not regret this decision. Chicken cooked to perfection, coated in a sticky but smooth peanut butter sauce, with peach jam to dip it in. The peanut sauce was so good on its own, that I almost forgot the jelly, which would have been a travesty. The sauce was already pretty sweet, but the extra kick from the jelly pushed it into the realm of gods. I think ambrosia might actually be peanut and jelly sauce.

We literally stayed in Savannah for another day, just so we could come here again. We ordered the wings and the pancake tacos again, and they were just as fabulous as before.

Having seen the nachos last time, we decided we needed some. Instead of chips, they were made with waffle fries. I think this would have been better if they burnt them a little, adding a bit of extra crunch. Softer worked with the pancake tacos because the fried chicken supplied the crunch, but with nothing doing that job here, it felt a little soggy. They also were drizzled with a vinegar sauce. This made them a little too bitter for my taste, especially at the bottom where it pooled.

I got the Chupacabra, which I didn’t know was a burrito until it arrived. With something named after a goat-sucking cryptid, I probably should have guessed that this was a bit spicy. I didn’t particularly like it at first, and having already filled up on chicken, I ended up taking most of it back to the trailer. I discovered that it’s much better the next day, with the spices having cooled a little and leaving taste buds for the other flavors.

Chupacabra

If you’re ever within a hundred miles of Savannah, COME HERE. Come once, and then be so wowed that you have to come back again and again and again. Seriously, I cannot stress this enough. Don’t fall into quaint little tourist trap restaurants like River House where you’ll pay too much for inferiority, go across the street to Treylor Park.

Homosassa Springs

Hot Dog Blog: Part Two

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We have now eaten more hot dogs, so it is time for part two!

Sabrett’s
Anywhere in New York
For perhaps the most famous hot dog ever, there isn’t a lot to say. Cheap and readily available, it’s good if you’re hungry and don’t want to spend time looking for something else. Actually fairly decent. P1050182

Jack’s Cosmic Dogs
Mt. Pleasant, SC
With names like the Blue Atomic dog or the Galactic dog, you’d expect them to be odd, and you’d be right.
My hot dog was a fairly normal chili dog, with onions and spicy mustard. I must say, the mustard was a little overwhelming, so the chili taste was less noticeable. Like many places that claim to specialize in hot dogs, the dog itself isn’t something to rave about, but this one was better than most. Also like most places, their cheese is simply over-processed cheese sauce, which we got on the Blue Galactic dog.
But what was amazing was the blue cheese coleslaw. I wish I could embed a little packet of it in this post, because I find myself lacking the words to accurately describe it. Definitely slaw, and definitely containing cheese, but beyond that there was something intangible. So if you’re ever in the Charleston area, I highly recommend going to try it. P1060195

Ben’s Chili Bowl
Washington, DC
This restaurant is also going to get a full post to itself, so look forward to that. But since I had a chili dog, it also belongs here.
The dog itself wasn’t all that impressive, just a normal dog. However, the chili it was topped with was amazing, which I will go into more detail in the full post. P1050511

Barbeque

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We have entered the South. Well, we entered the South several months ago, but I’ve been lazy, and the the barbecue blogs (there will be several) have just now begun!

Barbecue Exchange
Gordonsville, Virginia
Great note to start the barbecue blog on. The whole place was filled and surrounded with happy pigs, including Miss Piggy, and a light-up Christmas tinsel pig. It was run by the former head-chef at some fancy country club.
Everything was amazing, but I especially loved the ribs. Crispy and flavorful on the outside, and beneath that so juicy that the meat was literally falling off the bone. The meal came with an array of sauces, from vinegar, to soooiet, to Hog Fire. I had my first piece of pork belly, which I learned is basically giant bacon.
High on my top ten best barbeque list, utterly fantastic in every way.

Sausage, Pork Belly, Brisket

Ribs

Clyde Cooper’s Barbecue
Raleigh, NC
Opened in 1938, and just having moved to a new building downtown, Cooper’s is a classic in Carolina Tidewater barbecue. Tidewater consists of meat with a vinegar sauce, for all you uneducated carnivores out there. Honestly, it isn’t one of my favorite types, too bitter. But the meat was all well cooked, with the ribs especially being crispy on the outside, but with their insides left tender and succulent.
I encountered pork skins for the first time, and at first, had no idea what they were or what to think of them. They were nicely crispy, and I was a little surprised to learn they were skins, which I was expecting to be more leathery.

Melvin’s Barbecue
Outside of Charleston, SC
For this place, I honetly have more to say about the restruant than the food. The pulled pork sandwich was good, but nothing to write home about. The order of onion rings we got consisted of one giant, fluffy ring of dough with a bit of a vegetable in it, but that wasn’t as odd as the place itself. Melvin’s was more of an upscale dining establishment than most BBQ, with carefully chosen decor and no happy pigs. The kind of place suburbanites would be comfortable going to. It was also a Christian establishment, with the ten commandments printed on the styrofoam water cups. Seriously. It was weird.

Remember to stay tuned for the next thrilling instalment of The Barbeque Blog!

Luray Caverns, Luray Virginia

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Throughout the tour of Luray Caverns, Dad and I could not stop making references to Moria. Although there was no mithril to be found, and it was considerably better lit, we did come across a hoard of goblins, aka a teenage school group. But in all seriousness, the caverns looked more like something out of a Doctor Seuss book than something written by Tolkien. Huge calcite spires between shades of red and white towered above us, and reached up from crevices below. The tallest was over forty feet, which is impressive considering that they only grow an inch every century.

There was a particular white spire named Pluto’s ghost. I wish we had gone earlier, so I could have gotten a picture of it before New Horizons. The tour guide explained that it got its name because the people who discovered the caverns kept seeing it, getting closer, and thought it was a ghost, but I think it should be a memorial to Pluto not being classified as a planet anymore.

Pluto’s Ghost

What was eerily like Moria was the pool. It was perfectly still, and so reflected a perfect mirror of the stalactites above. It looked like jaws, and I kept expecting to hear “gollum, gollum,” coming from its far side.

Mirrormere

Near the end of the tour, we were taken to the world’s largest natural instrument, the Great Stalacpipe Organ. Someone had created a organ out of the stalactites, hooking them up to mallets that would hit the right one at the right time to play a song. The idea was cooler than the music it played, which was too high-pitched and complicated, and not actually that good. It would have been better if they had just made it play Blitzkrieg Bop, and they would only have had to find three stalactites.

The Great Stalactite Organ

All in all, a completely different experience than the lava tubes of Craters of the Moon. Perhaps cooler looking and bigger, but there was no clambering involved, and you weren’t allowed to touch anything. There is plenty to see, but not much to do beyond taking the tour and taking pictures.

The ‘Dishtowel’ formation

Smithsonian Natural History Museum

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Beware of tigers

If you enter from the National Mall side of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, the first thing you see is a mounted bull African Elephant. It is the largest taxidermied specimen in the world, of the largest land animal. On your left continues the Great Mammal Hall. In its entrance, a Bengal Tiger is posed to pounce on you, and a giraffe waves his tongue in greeting through a window. Though the entrance is not laid out in any order I can find beyond looking cool, it quickly segues into being arranged by continent or environment. The region about Australia, being the only continent to house all three subclasses of mammals, explains the differences between placental mammals, marsupials, and monotremes. I’m a big fan of being allowed to poke stuff, so I liked in the polar area where they had a chilled squirrel statue that you could touch, and feel how cold an animal’s body might get during hibernation.

Giraffe in the window

For protection against being pet by small children, porcupines have developed spines

Carnivora

Echidna, one of only two remaining monotremes

Echidna, one of only two remaining species of monotremes

Highly Skilled Indoor Predator

And boasting a giant squid over ten meters in length and a multitude of whale skeletons hung overhead in the two story space, the Ocean Hall of the Smithsonian Natural History museum is an impressive sight. In its section about prehistoric marine animals, it had a Dunkleosteus skull, and the jaw of a shark that basically had a hacksaw as a tongue. I’d say between a quarter and a third of the exhibit was about how humans are destroying the ocean, and how pretty soon it’s just going to be inhabited by massive swarms of jellyfish, which is kind of my worst nightmare.

Ocean Hall

Human history, even ancient stuff, has never been a great interest of mine, but the Hall of Human Origins presented the information (and I know I sound like a textbook critic here) in a clear and compelling fashion. The hall had recently been re-done, and incorporated videos and technology efficiently. They even had a booth where you could have your picture taken, and then modify it to see what you might look like as another species of hominid. Much more detailed than what you might learn in school, instead of just talking about Neanderthals and Australopithecus Afarensis, the direct ancestor to us, Homo Sapien Sapiens, it had models and statues of others, like the hobbit-sized people of Polynesia.
The third floor, usually home to the dinosaur exhibit, was closed for renovation, but they had a smaller Dino hall set up near the mummies. It only contained a few full skeletons, and was obviously aimed towards young kids, but for a temporary exhibit it was rather well put-together. Like at the Carnegie, they had a fossil lab with large windows, so visitors could look in at how fossils are prepared for exhibits.
The Geologic exhibit held the world-famous Hope Diamond. Not being the kind of girl who’s interested in jewelry, I liked the crystal ball better. A large sphere of clear polished Quartz, when you looked into it, it showed the room and everything in it upside down, like a spoon does when you hold it the right distance from your face. Even cooler than this though, was the large piece of naturally magnetic rock. Not behind a glass case (yes!), it was covered in paper clips that you could experiment with sticking to it.

Magnetic Rock

Stibinite

But surprisingly, my favorite exhibit didn’t contain any taxidermy. The temporary show, Nature’s Greatest Photography, was simply a gallery filled with large prints of the winning photos from the Windland Smith Rice International Contest. One of my favorites in it was a picture of two Bush Rabbits playing, where they are touching noses, with one flying high in the air. To me it seems like a cartoon, where the pretty girl finally kisses the awkward boy, and he’s so surprised and happy he literally jumps. The exhibit actually prompted me to buy a catalogue of its photos in the gift shop.
Unlike the American Museum of Natural History in New York, it’s free. It also will let you in by yourself if you’re under 16, which is why you won’t see a blog post about that museum. I didn’t go into the insect exhibit, but I’ve been told that you should go see the butterflies, if you’re ever in DC.

Falafel in DC

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The first time I ever heard about Falafel was in a Batman movie, and I had no idea what it was. Then I ate a bad, horribly dry falafel burger in the cafeteria of the Art Institute of Chicago. Imagine my surprise when I finally tried good, fresh cooked falafel from Two Apple Food Truck on the way to the Mall in Washington, DC. Its logo depicted two cubic apples, which was odd, but also beside the point.

Fresh grilled balls of chickpea that broke apart when you bit them were surrounded by tzatziki, shredded lettuce, and tomatoes, and wrapped in flatbread. The crunchiness of the lettuce and falafel shell balanced nicely with the smooth tzatziki and the chewy wrapping. I ended up with quite a bit of it on my hands, as the whole thing had a tendency to deconstruct as I ate it, because the tinfoil it was wrapped in was not big enough to go all the way around the sandwich.

P1050769

As the falafel in Batman had been off a food cart, it feels appropriate that my first good falafel was too. I wish I could have eaten more than one sandwich from it, but the next day it had moved on. Sadly, that is the nature of food carts.