My first surprise of the morning was not being rousted out of bed till 8 AM! I'd thought for sure that we'd be hitting the road before dawn in order to be down in Ithaca and the state parks in that area while the light was still good for photos. I'm sure my husband was up in plenty of time for us to do so. However, what I haven't mentioned before in this blog is that since Monday afternoon, he's had his nose buried in the new Harry Potter book in every spare moment. I'm guessing he chose to read instead of drive!
Breakfast this morning was a glass of chocolate milk (sorry, no picture because I'd put the camera in the car last night so I didn't have to think about it this morning.) We were on the road by about 8:30, and we made the
Geneva Bike Center our first stop. That way, we didn't have to haul a mangled wheel everywhere we went, and we freed up space in the back of the car with other goodies. We got to Geneva about 20 minutes before the shop (and everything else in town) opened at 10. After talking for half an hour about stuff concerned entirely with cycling and not at all with food, we headed to Ithaca. It turned out to be a pleasant hour's drive, through farmland covering the ridge separating Seneca and Cayuga Lakes. We saw many signs for wineries, but bypassed them all this trip.
Ithaca is a much bigger and more affluent town than Oswego. We took the opportunity to run a bunch of errands, therefore saving ourselves a separate trip to Syracuse. We went to the Barnes and Noble store and purchased a CD/book set on how to speak Dutch. (There's a good reason for this, but I'll save it for another post, probably the one in which I answer rjwong's very good question.) We also looked for wheeled backpacks in the EMS store, but all the wheeled cases they had lacked backpack straps, and all their backpacks lacked wheels. (There's a good reason for this errand also, closely related to learning at least a little Dutch.) We got some maps at the AAA office. And finally, we fought through the traffic to the farmer's market.
The Ithaca farmer's market is much more formal than the Oswego market. They have a pavilion in which all the vendors set up. However, the market itself was disappointing to us, and not as good as we remembered from our previous visit four years ago. Although there are probably twice as many vendors overall, I think there were no more farmers than what we usually get in Oswego, and many more people selling crafts, clothing, cooked food like samosas and soup, and baked goods. I was surprised to see vendors selling meat, since we don't get any of that at our market. And the farmers' produce was twice as expensive than our local market. I'm not sure if that's because everything was some form of organic, or if the fees to vend are that much more.
Despite our disappointment, I'm very glad we went to the market. I hadn't expected to see anything really unique, but I once again got a pleasant surprise. The one thing we bought was cheese from the
Northland Sheep Dairy in Marathon, NY. They had four of their cheeses available, and we bought wedges of their Folie Bergère and Bleue Bergère. (The two cheeses in the photograph are Pepperino and Tomme Bergère, which we didn't buy.) We were particularly interested by the blue, because in Ft. Collins we'd gotten a wedge of Bingham Hill's Sheepish Blue. The Bleue Bergere is a very different sort of cheese; about the only thing the two have in common is that they're both sheep's milk blue cheeses. We'll be doing a head-to-head tasting at some point, although I'm not sure it will happen before the end of this blog.
As we walked past the stalls selling curry and noodles and soups, we realized that it was well past noon and we were both pretty hungry. So for our first real meal of the day, we headed up the hill to Cornell University. My husband was driving, and I'm grateful for that because Ithaca is a city of hills and we got our current car less than a year ago. My husband's been driving stick shifts since he learned to drive, but I hadn't had any experience with a clutch until we got this car! I'm sure that if we lived in Ithaca, we would have never considered anything but an automatic...and I'd probably have fewer gray hairs.
On the way out, we passed a small pond loaded with lily pods in bloom. We also found some good-sized tadpoles in the pond, not too far from having legs.
Why up the hill? We had the best lunch known to humans, as far as I'm concerned, straight from the Dairy Bar at Cornell:
My cone's the one in the foreground: a single scoop of Bavarian Raspberry Fudge (Bavarian crème flavored ice cream with raspberry swirl and chunky fudge pieces). My husband splurged on a double scoop of Espresso Chunky Chip, the closest he's come in eons to Ben & Jerry's Coffee Coffee Buzz Buzz Buzz, which is (sadly) no longer available, either on its own or mixed with White Russian and sold as To Russia With Buzz. We topped off our lunch with some bits of sharp cheddar from the dairy store, which was both flavorful and moist. Temporarily satiated, we took advantage of the big city atmosphere and headed down the hill for some more shopping.
Our target this time: Wegman's. We figured that Ithaca would be cosmopolitan enough that we'd find good stuff there. We were right! We got a good laugh from the various signs painted on the front windows. Our favorite was the one advertising the "Vegetarian Bar." After all, if you sell salad at a salad bar, what do you sell at a vegetarian bar? I've always heard that carnivores are no good to eat!
The first thing we saw, just inside the entryway, were some melons, ready to eat and packed for convenience:
The rest of the produce was quite spectacular as well, both because it was all stacked beautifully and because they have items that we just don't see elsewhere:
This was the Asian produce section. The eggplants on the right are Japanese eggplants. Two items to the left are the Chinese eggplants. Separating the two are lotus roots. Finishing out the top row are galangal root, long beans, lemongrass, daikon, yu choi sum, ong choi, and fresh water chestnuts (which I'd gotten in Ohio and decided tasted just like jicama but with a lot more work, although it's a moot point in Oswego because we don't see either there). We didn't get any of the goodies in this picture, but we did find a nice hunk of ginger root, several serrano peppers that we're hoping have more heat than the wimpy jalapeños we see, and a nice-looking jicama. We also got a bag of limes, since they looked nicer and were less expensive than the limes at our local stores.
From the produce, we moved on to our second-favorite section of any Wegman's store to browse: the cheeses. This is the case with the Spanish and Mexican cheeses.
There were five other cases of cheeses, including a case with nothing but varieties of blue cheese. And that doesn't even include the case of cheeses which they'll cut to order, or the "ordinary" supermarket bricks of cheese! We found a small wedge of Maytag Blue, which we'll add to our tasting of American blues. We didn't get any, but we did see that they have Piave available in the cut-to-order case. This is a cheese that PennMac introduced us to, when we walked up one day many years ago and said, "What else do you have that's interesting?" Piave is a cow's milk cheese, on the firm side but still soft enough to melt nicely, definitely sharp. We've actually been known to use it in place of Parmigiano Reggiano, with pretty good results. We prefer to purchase our Piave half a wheel at a time, because it seems to store reasonably well if you follow Dear Heart's instructions to wrap it first in waxed paper and then in aluminum foil, and because PennMac charges $5 less per pound than Wegman's does. Zingerman's in Ann Arbor also carries Piave, but they are more expensive than even Wegman's. When we lived in Ohio, we looked everywhere for Piave but didn't find any. We finally got exasperated enough to ask at West Point Market, the best cheese counter in Akron, and they more or less told us that this cheese was not permitted to be sold in the state of Ohio, for reasons they were unable to elucidate. At that point I'd already given up on finding someone to cut my hair, and went back to the wonderful man who kept me neatly shorn all the way through high school and before, so I was making the trip to Pittsburgh every couple of months anyway. From here, though, it's about a 6.5 hour drive, a little too long to be practical. We were back to visit last November, and have a little left from that trip's wedge. We're thinking it's time to restock our supply. Fortunately, my husband has a cousin who lives in Pittsburgh!
We also found the butter case (not to be confused with the Butterkäse in the cheese section):
The rest of the walk through Wegman's was also a lot of fun for us, because the store had a diversity of food that we just don't see in Oswego. (More than four brands of salsa! HOT salsa on the shelf!) Just before heading to the cashier, we had to check out the beverage selection, looking for still more unusual stuff we don't see in Oswego. And lo and behold, they had a display of Wolaver's organic ales. Ordinarily the word "organic" doesn't excite us too much. (As chemists, we both have a huge problem with people who claim their food is "chemical-free"!) But in this case, the brand rang a bell with my husband. He's an avid homebrewer, a certified beer judge, and a member of AHA. An issue of their magazine
Zymurgy from earlier this year had used a Wolaver's beer as a "calibration" beer (they have experts judge it, so you can judge it and see how closely you match the experts) and he'd sent me off to a meeting in San Diego last March in hopes of me having better luck finding it than he had. He couldn't remember
which Wolaver's beer it was, though, so we got a six-pack each of the IPA, pale ale, and brown. (The first thing he did when we got home was go to his archive and look up which one. The brown is the one in the article, but the others certainly won't go to waste.)
Confession time: I don't like beer. I'm probably the only chemist on the face of the earth who doesn't like beer. In fact, until last summer when we were in Belgium, I'd never ordered a beer for myself. I've finally figured out that the part of beer I really don't like is the hops. The alcohol taste isn't my favorite, either; most of the time, my taste buds run more to Coke. Malt is fine, though!
We'd brought a cooler and ice with us. We usually keep a soft-sided collapsible cooler in the car at all times, in case we find something interesting or just if it's a hot day and we want to get ice cream home as a solid, not a liquid. (My parents in western Colorado don't even have to bring their own ice, though: the nearest big supermarket from them is a 45-minute drive, and because so many people drive at least that long to do their shopping, the stores will actually pack your perishables in a bag with a bit of dry ice!) The beer and cheese went into the cooler for the duration, and we headed towards our last stop.
My husband had discovered
Baker's Acres nursery on our first trip to Ithaca four years ago. They're actually in Lansing, NY, several miles north of Ithaca on our way home. On that trip, we'd brought a bay laurel tree, a rosemary bush, and three different colors of raspberry plants home to Ohio. We killed the bay laurel tree that first winter, but the rosemary did quite well until we moved it to New York and it didn't like something here. The raspberries were bearing lots of delicious fruit but we left them behind, and I still miss them horribly! I hadn't been there when my husband and my friend Marty went there the first time, since my other friend Linda (who's now married to Marty) and I were busy with the important task of painting our toenails. (Linda's a biologist. We scientists tend not to paint our fingernails, since the solvents we use will just take the polish right off. Toenails, however, are safely out of the line of fire.) This was my first sight:
rows upon rows of plants, each carefully labeled
so you'd know whether to buy it in the first place, and what to do with it once you got it home. And that's just the perennials! There was another section of trees and shrubs, as well as a greenhouse of annuals and another of herbs. We walked through everything else, but the herbs were the most interesting. Each herb also had its own label.
In this case, "tender perennial" means that it's technically a perennial, but in these northern climates, if you want it to survive you need to bring it in as a houseplant for the winter.
They not only had lots of different herbs, but most herbs came in different varieties. We saw tarragon and sage (the pineapple sage smells really pineappley, but my next door neighbor has enough sage in her garden for at least FOUR households so we didn't get any),
and mints galore (this one's catmint; a little catnip is visible on the left side of the picture)
as well as more varieties of rosemary than we could count, in both big and small bushes.
We left with a good-sized rosemary bush, a spike of lavender, and a tiny bay tree. No catnip, though: one of our boys is exquisitely sensitive to the stuff, and gets stoned from the slightest amount. We also learned in Ohio that catnip is best confined to a pot, or it takes over the garden and causes the cat to cry when you're still 50 yards from the house, and climb up your leg when you come in from picking tomatoes.
I got to drive home, because my husband was busy with the last few pages of his book and because there weren't any big horrible hills to cause me and the clutch distress. We got home and half an hour later headed to Anne's to discuss minimal-budget kitchen options. (But that's for another thread, and we think she's got a workable short-term solution.) We got home at 8:30, and were both too hungry to think about doing anything other than leftovers. My husband ate two of the leftover curry beef patties. I ate the third as well as the leftover pasta from yesterday. It all looked really inglamorous, especially since we took it all down to the family room and watched the Tivoed footage from this morning's Tour time trial stage. And that's why I didn't get back upstairs to write this as soon as I wanted. (Is that the modern version of "the dog ate my homework"?)
We've now eaten all the leftovers in the house. That means I'll need to cook tomorrow. If I get out for sour cream, I think I'll try a sour cherry soup because I've never had anything of the sort and the idea intrigues me greatly. I also have some pesto still, so if I get up early enough I may make some pizza dough to grill later. Yum!
Good night,
MelissaH
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) My husband's been there for a few hours already. I'll probably go for a swim at noon, and then go back to work for the rest of the afternoon. The market opens at 5:30 this afternoon, and we typically arrive downtown shortly after that.
