Visitors again

So my brother and my folks came up this weekend.  Mom and Dad had been here before, of course, when I moved in, but in addition to being tired and disoriented and the weather being miserable we didn't see much.  This time we had a chance to actually go around and see things.

(Random aside: for some reason I can manage to get around without getting lost just fine when I'm alone, but as soon as Mom and Dad get here I go the wrong way, have no idea what street's which, and can't properly read a web page for some reason.  I have no idea why this is.)

Saturday we did the local rounds -- all stuff I've talked about on this blog before.  Dad was talking up Blue Fin, the Japanese restaurant we'd gone to when I moved up, and Joshua decide that was where he really wanted to go, so we ate there again, and I suspect we will continue to eat there, and often.  Joshua, Dad, and I all had the lunch sampler and it was amazing.    The plan had been to go to church, but I misread the website and we arrived as they were singing the last hymn, so we took the subway out to the Boston Commons and Public Gardens -- saw live swans this time, in addition to the swan boats!

We had a late dinner of Ohio Sweet Corn :)  Not exactly "Local first"; so sue me.

Yesterday we took a gamble and picked a park up at Cape Ann that looked promising according to its website.  This is what we got:

And this:

I can't even describe the place.  Beautiful, rugged granite cliffs and wild surf.  There were a lot of people, but it didn't matter, everyone left everyone else to enjoy themselves and the waves were so loud that you didn't hear a lot of chatter.

We stayed a long time.

The Yogurt Recipe

Not to turn this into another food blog, but since I was making it, and since I remember that some folks had asked me about the recipe, here it is.

Yogurt is one of the few things I can reliably make in my tiny kitchen (save Kombucha, and seriously, there's so much that can go wrong with that one that I'm not going to share the recipe, you're on your own there) and it's very simple.   There's only one real trick--you must be immaculately clean.  This is true of any fermented product (talk to a home-brewer some time), and yogurt's a little more tolerant, but pretend it isn't.  Learn the taste and smell of properly-made yogurt before you start -- yes, I'm recommending you go sniff some yogurt).

Before you start, go to the store and get some live-culture yogurt.  Traderspoint is my favorite by far, but there are many to choose from, including Dannon and Stonyfield.   Pick something you like, because your yogurt will pick up some flavor from what use.

What you need:
A quart canning jar
A food thermometer--ideally one that's never been used for meat
2 tbsp live culture yogurt
Just shy of a quart of milk (you need a little space in the jar)

Heat your milk to 180 degrees, stirring to make sure you don't have hotspots.   If the milk forms a skin (and it will), skim it off and discard.   Set the milk aside, covered, and let it cool to 118.  Add your yogurt, and stir gently with and up an down motion.  Cover again, and hold at temp for 6-12 hours.  Refrigerate.

A couple tips:

• Never rinse your thermometer in hot water; use cold initially.  You'll get a buildup of milkstone, which in addition to being kind of nasty can affect how things set up.
• Make sure all your utensils are free of any soap residue -- it kills the yogurt.
• Experiment with the cooling temp; it depends on your culture.  118 is what I've found is ideal for Traderspoint.
• I've found the best way to keep things at temp is to just set up a pot with water at about 130 degrees and set the jar of milk in there.  I have a very warm kitchen, though.  You might find that it's better to use hot water in a cooler so you can seal it.

Boston Commons

So if you've been wondering where I've been (and I doubt anyone was), I was home for a week.   Since this is about the city, I won't talk about the country, save to say that only this setter could have a vacation involving a poisonous snake and waiting out a violent storm in a pickup truck (not, thankfully, at the same time).

Anyhow, I came straight back and went to the EduWeb conference in... Boston.  We're cheap here at Harvard.  Luckily, lots of conferences come to us, so we kind of cheat.   It made it easy to return the rental car, at least.

To get to the wonderful Boston Plaza Hotel and Towers (another landmark worth seeing), I take the Red Line into Boston, then pick up the Green Line and hop over to the Arlington stop -- or so Google tells me.  While I did this the first morning, when I didn't have to be on the trains until 10:00, something told me not to listen to Google when it came to getting on the extremely weird and overloaded Green Line at 5:30 that afternoon.  So I decided to walk to Park Street station, which turns out to be about 15 minutes from the Arlington stop on foot, and right through the Public Gardens and Commons.

Two books familiar to most of us from our childhood take place at least partially in and around this area -- That'd be Make Way for Ducklings and Trumpet of the Swan.  Welp, below you get both ducks*, and, way in the background, the swan boats.

 

And just so you get a chance to see where I've been hanging out all week, the Imperial Ballroom at the hotel:

*Actually, after looking more closely, there are actually ducklings in that picture.  Totally missed them while I was walking by.

Seafood and Severe Storms

So I'd hoped to have this post up long before now, but between just catching up and the spectacular storms of this weekend, I kind of never got around to it.

First, the storms.  Boston got missed but the June 2012 Midwest derecho, but it squarely hit back home.  We discovered that having a setter in the city with full internet access was extremely useful.  I have spent the last 48 hours relaying information back home (in fact I JUST got off the phone again, to report severe weather moving into the county), whether it's news, additional weather alerts, or just the outage numbers.   If you haven't seen the reports, this is a spectacular mess.  We've have successively nastier storms in Ohio over the last 10 years, but everyone I've spoken to repeats the same refrain: I've never seen anything like this.  Speaking from the outside, where I get an excellent bird's-eye view, neither have I.

The last monster derecho in Ohio was in 1969 (though there was one in 1995 that I don't remember, so it must not have been so bad; I'm guessing it was dissipating by the time it got to central Ohio.)  Incidentally, so far as I can tell, the last major hurricane to affect the Boston area while it was still actually a hurricane was Donna in 1960.  Who wants to be Boston gets a cat 2+ hurricane while I'm here?


***

Anyway, the reason I was supposed to be posting this was that I had visitors last weekend.  My sister and brother-in-law came up and we ate eastern Massachusetts.  Or so it seems.

Saturday we went out to Cape Cod -- something I was really looking forward to, since it's pretty much out of reach for me unless I want to rent a car (you can get there by bus, but at some distance a bus becomes more trouble than it's worth).  The coast on Cape Cod is beautiful.  There's really no other way to say it.    What photos I got didn't do it justice.

In addition to just walking along the shore, we saw swimming seals, a working lighthouse (so New England) and three historic lighthouses (the Three Sisters).    Again, I say, I can't do them justice.  Come visit me and we'll go there and you can see it all yourself.

Since we were in the land of rich people we decided to eat well.  Stopped at the Bookstore and Restaurant and ate dinner looking over the bay.  Wow, the surf and turf.  I was in cow heaven.  And lobster... I'd never had lobster before.  And they actually cooked the damn asparagus correctly, the only time I've had edible asparagus that didn't come out of the back yard.   All this while sitting in a little town right on the edge of the water.  You feel like you're in a book.  And maybe you are.

Sunday morning we went for Dim Sum at the Winsor Dim Sum cafe -- a must for Dim Sum lovers.   This is a to-order place -- no carts -- but that means your food is fresh and hot.

Sunday afternoon at the Publick House on Beacon Street.  Beautiful area.  I was still so full of Dim Sum that I only ordered the cheese board, but it was awfully good.  That and a Kriek made for a good evening.

Sugar and Spice for dinner on Monday (I worked, so the guests took themselves to the aquarium) for Thai -- HOT Thai.  I'm glad I got something without any pepper symbols, or I'd have gone hungry that night.

The Kitchen Mouse has more on the food: http://the-kitchen-mouse.blogspot.com/2012/06/eating-cape-cod.html  She'll be picking up the eats for the rest of the weekend once she gets lights and internet again.

Urban beach

So this morning, despite being fairly well worn out, I headed out to find Revere Beach.

I'd done my reading and was ready for a dreadful beach.  What I got was something that I think you could say might require a developed taste.

Revere beach reminded me an awful lot of your typical farm pond, only on a huge scale.  This isn't Florida or California; the water's dark and full of seaweed.  I was there at low tide, so the whole place was a bit fishy until you got down to the tideline and the stranded seaweed was downwind.

That said, I really enjoyed myself.  Tangled in the seaweed were quite a few shells, mostly huge things, big clams and snails.  Then once in a while you'd come across some beached sea life, or a crab or something.  The water wasn't something I'd really want to dive into because of the silt, but it felt good on my feet.   Maybe it's because I like to go creeking and I'm more used to Ohio ponds and the Great Lakes than West Coast beaches, the water and profusion of flora and fauna didn't really bother me, but I can sure understand where some people would hate it.

The best part was just being able to listen to the ocean and feel the breeze off of it.   I don't know how often I'll go out there (and I suspect it's crowded despite the seaweed once the water warms up), but I do know that I want to go out there some time in the dead of winter because I've never seen the ocean in the winter time. 

And yeah, I came back with a sunburn again and a raw spot from my new flip flops.

Storm in the city

So we finally got weather here other than all day sunny or all day dreary.   It does thunderstorm here.

I've never liked storms.  They're loud and they're alarming and they can be really dangerous.  But I've experienced storms in the city before -- once a nasty one in downtown Pittsburgh that put on an amazing light show -- and I like them there.   The Pittsburgh storm was in a hotel, so you couldn't hear much, but here I've found out that the thunder has a much different tone to it.  It's got sharp edges, sounds like a load of metal falling down the stairs, not the rounded, rolling sound you get in the Midwest.

I had a doctor's appointment right at the end of the day today.  A large number of Harvard doctors are located in Harvard Square, in the large administrative building there.  The lower floor is given over to shops and has an inside arcade area.

Anyway, I came down from the appointment to an arcade packed with people and this:

If it's not immediately obvious what's going on there, that isn't water pouring down, it's water blasting up.  And no, I've no idea what's normally there or why it was doing that.  I assume there's a drain that couldn't handle the water.

This is all about three steps away from the subway, so I figured I'd take advantage of the fact that no one seemed inclined to go out and hopefully catch a train easily. 

Turns out that when it rains in the city, everyone packs into the subway -- outside the tolls, of course.   There's a weird sort of feeling -- Hawkeye describes war in an episode of M*A*S*H with "A war is like when it rains in New York and everybody crowds into doorways, ya know? And they all get chummy together. Perfect strangers. The only difference, of course, is in a war it's also raining on the other side of the street, and the people who are chummy over there are trying to kill the people who are over here who are chums."  It's interesting that I've got a better idea of what he means now  (sans trying to kill each other, obviously -- I was in a rainy city, not a war).  People stand watching the rain and chatting.   Some people fret over getting where they're going, but mostly they just all hang out.

I got on the subway and outran the storm, going under it up to Porter Square.  By the time I got there the storm was well out of that area and I was able to walk back to the apartment.   Things smelled surprisingly nice and there was a cold bite to the air.  I've noticed that when there were storms in the general area here -- the wind can get quite cold.

Shopping in the rain

So one thing they don't tell you when they say you can live in the big city with no car is that there's a asterisk.

The asterisk is: so long as you don't want to go anywhere when its pouring rain.*

I'd hoped to get out this morning before it starting pouring, but it moved in a little quicker than I'd expected.  I couldn't put it off after not being here at all last weekend (and after dropping my toothbrush in the toilet first thing when I got back and using my travel brush all week).   So I went out in the rain.

And got soaked. 

It wasn't too bad right off, really.  Those three years at Denison where I commuted and had to park at the bottom of the hill and walk were fairly wet.  I'm a little out of practice at being damp, though, not as tough as I used to be.   I got to the market and trust me, I wasted as much time as I could trying to dry out a little before even thinking about going back.

My clothes still aren't dry and they've been hanging in front of the fan all day. 



*OK, so you can go places, but you'll need a zipcar or a cab, both of which are expensive.