Velvet Tango Room

I'm envious of cleveland foodie [blogspot.com], which is an entire weblog devoted to eating out (which might be my favorite thing to do in the whole world). What a great idea. And... any time you need something to weblog about, just pick a new restaurant and eat there.

Anyway, Heimlich and I recently went to the Velvet Tango Room [velvettangoroom.com] for the first time. It's situated in the abyss between the Ohio City and Tremont areas of Cleveland, which is why we hadn't noticed it earlier.

The exterior is stark, and features only a tiny sign to indicate that it even exists. In contrast, the interior is very warm and luxurious; the waitstaff are friendly and attentive; and the drinks are heavenly.

At $15/cocktail, the place is no bargain. But the drinks are incredibly smooth. My favorite was the Rangpur Gimlet (being a gin fan), which I could not stop drinking. One of the things that Heimlich had was a Caipirinha [wikipedia.org], which is a Brazilian drink. Many places in the US sell versions of Caipirinhas, but they substitute in more commonly found alcohols, giving the drink a different taste. The Velvet Tango Room is the first place we have found in the Cleveland area that actually uses the correct alcohol so that the taste is authentic.

VTR is easily my new favorite place to drink now. There is also a back room, which can be reserved for groups.

Spice Labeling

If you look for spices in our cupboards, this is what you will see:


We don't have one of those new-fangled spice racks, and I prefer to have them hidden away anyway. But the problem is that you can't really read the labeling on the sides of the containers. For one thing, all of the containers would have to be turned in the right direction. And for another thing, each container blocks the view of the label on the next container.

Heimlich finally got fed up with having to lift up each and every container (thus performing a linear O(n) search) to find the spice that she wanted, and she wrote the name of the spice on the lid with a magic marker. It is so much faster to find the one that we want now (I suppose that it is still O(n), but with a smaller constant?).

Why don't they label the lids from the factory? We can't be the only people having this problem.

Maybe this post should have been labeled, "Kitchens of the anally-retentive"...

Whole Grain White Bread

I'm always trying to tweak my diet to be a little healthier. The latest part of my diet that is under attack is the bread. I eat a massive amount of carbs, most of which consists of bread (but there is also a lot of rice in my diet). I probably eat around 1.5 loaves of bread per week.

Years ago, all of the bread that I ate was white bread. I grew up eating white bread, so it was really difficult to switch to anything whole grain. A few years ago, I switched to alternating between eating loaves of white and whole grain wheat. Now I'm trying to switch entirely to whole grain breads.

A friend recently told me about a new product out on the market: whole grain white bread [usatoday.com]. The idea is to have the nutrition of a whole grain bread, with the texture and taste of a white bread.

If you go out and try to buy this type of bread, you have to look out [cbsnews.com], because many companies try to fool you into thinking that a loaf is whole grain when only a small percentage of the ingredients are whole grain.

We are trying out a local brand right now (as many of the competitors, such as Wonder, haven't made them available in our area yet). So far, the loaves seem like they are a step in the right direction, but maybe they're not quite there yet. From the texture, you can still tell that it is a whole grain bread, but at least the taste isn't so harsh.

Food Pairings

Here's an interesting article that I read recently: Food pairings: Working for or against you? [cnn.com].

Heimlich and I are fairly health-conscious. We try to stay fit, eat a balanced diet, and get enough vitamins and minerals. For instance, we eat lots of spinach, thinking that it is a good source of iron. Apparently, this is too simplistic a strategy, according to the article:

"Although spinach has lots of iron, your body doesn't absorb it well when spinach is eaten alone. (Sorry, Popeye.) But with vitamin C by its side, this vegetable becomes a true standout."

"That's because vitamin C converts the iron in spinach into a form that is more available to the body..."

This kind of has me wondering what else is wrong with our food selections.

Anyway, there are plenty of other interesting tidbits about food in that article.

Oatmeal Butterscotch Cookies

A friend recently made cookies that he called "Oatmeal Scotties", which were a kind of oatmeal butterscotch cookies. They were awesome, so I tried to find a recipe.

One that I tried making was this one [allrecipes.com]. They were very good, although not quite what I was looking for. So, I don't know if I am going to stick with this one, or try another one.

If anyone does want to try that one, note that the dough will not roll into a ball, because it will stick to your hand. With normal cookies, I took a tip from my mother-in-law and roll the dough into a ball, so that it turns into a perfectly round cookie after it bakes. The dough from this recipe also expands by a surprisingly large amount while baking, so don't place them too close together on the cookie sheet. The other cookie recipes I have baked before have not expanded nearly as much.

My Pitiful Knowledge of Akron

Very shortly, I'll be coming up on my one year anniversary at work, which is in Akron. According to the entry for the city on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], Akron is the 82nd largest city in the US.

Somehow, I have managed to work there for almost an entire year, and about the only streets that I have any knowledge of whatsoever are the ones that I use to get from the highway to the building I work in. It's sad.


Also, after an entire year of working there, I have eaten at a grand total of four restaurants in that city. Those four restaurants are:

• El Rincon [citysearch.com] - fantastic Mexican food, maybe the best I've ever had...


• Bricco [briccoakron.com] - yuppie-type restaurant, with bordering-on-unacceptably-slow service, but excellent food.


• Crave [eatdrinkcrave.com] - this whole place SCREAMS yuppie.


• House of Hunan [thehouseofhunan.com] - decent enough food, with sushi about as good as can be expected of a city this size.

I think that the moral of this story is that I really need to get out more. I'll be interested in checking out (Pretenders lead singer) Chrissie Hynde's new restaurant: VegeTerranean [ohio.com].

Picture of Main Street in Akron, OH, courtesy of kevinq2000's Flickr photostream [flickr.com].

Community Supported Agriculture

On one of our visits to New York this year, a friend of ours started talking about the CSA (or Community Supported Agriculture [wikipedia.org]) she was participating in. Heimlich and I thought to ourselves, "You get what from the who?" It is times like those that make me feel as though I must be living under a rock.

Since then, without even looking, I have seen articles about CSAs showing up in the news sources that I read anyway. Apparently, you pay up front for that season's worth of vegetables, usually to a small local farm. And every week or so, you get a share of whatever has been harvested lately.


Of course, there is good news and bad news. The main piece of bad news in my head is that you don't get to choose what vegetables you get. You get a part of whatever is harvested. So, if they are harvesting radishes (yech!) or whatever, you're getting a basket-full of them.

On the other hand, there are tons of things that I don't know how to cook, because I haven't done enough experimentation. Sometimes I feel as though I am stuck in a rut, and am not trying to learn how to cook new things. Lately, all I have been cooking with are green peppers, onions, and tomatoes. But there must be plenty of other tasty things out there to try.

Picture of vegetables courtesy of bullish1974's Flickr photostream [flickr.com].

Winking Lizard

So, I used to go to the Winking Lizard (Tavern) all of the time. There were a few years in there when I used to go at least once a week. The food was decent, they had a huuuge selection of beer, and they nad all kinds of NHL games on their TVs that I couldn't get at home.

But I haven't been there in a few months. Until this past weekend, when I stopped in to grab a bite to eat. They apparently have changed their menu. Now, I was only at one Winking Lizard, so maybe the one I went to was an odd one, but in my experience, all of the restaurants in the chain use the same menu.

Half of the pages on the menu were ads. You opened the menu, and the entire left side of the page was a huge add, and the food was listed on the right. It was incredibly annoying to me.

There is no way that you are going to tell me that they needed to make more money to pay the bills. That's just ridiculous. How can any place that sells alcohol and has as many customers as they do have any problems making money? They're just being greedy now.

I have to think that eventually, we'll get to the point where our environment is so saturated with ads that they are no longer really effective, but I have a feeling that it'll be a long time before we get to that point.