Spotlight On: Columbus, Ohio

Nothing beats a pleasant surprise :)

     The first weekend in November my family and I went to visit my brother, Dan, in Columbus, Ohio, where he is a graduate student studying Urban Planning at Ohio State University.

    People, I do not know what I was expecting, but it most certainly wasn't a gorgeous, clean city with a vibrant arts community, a huge and amazing university with a kickass sports team, beautiful rivers, peaceful suburbs, interesting and diverse neighborhoods, just about every other cool thing you can think of. We had a wonderful weekend exploring, attending the Ohio vs. Indiana football game (Buckeyes won 34-20!!!!! O-HI-O!!!!), relaxing in the hotel, and EATING. No foolin', the food scene in Columbus is A.MAZE.ING. I can't say enough good things about it :)

    The foodie adventure started on Friday night when we hit up a Middle Eastern Restaurant called Lavash Cafe .

This my friends, was first rate short order Middle Eastern cooking. Yes, you read that correctly. You wouldn't think that a counter service- based restaurant could be this good, but it WAS. Their menu was extensive and everything was fresh. excellently seasoned and DELICIOUS. An added bonus was that the owner was a constant, pleasant presence in the dining room, stopping by each table several times to answer menu questions, deliver food to customers that weren't able to walk up to the counter, make jokes, check on the diner's experience, and just generally be entertaining and friendly. This gentleman clearly took pride in his food and his business, and his good mood was certainly infectious. We started with hummus and Kibbeh, which, for those unfamiliar, is ground meat with onions and pine nuts in a deep fried wheat shell served with yogurt sauce *YUM*, for entrees, there were gyro platters, Shawarma, and Mojadara (rice and lentils over a tomato, cucumer and herb salad), all served with saffron/almond rice, salad and pita bread. This place was a total win :) Props to the Lavash Cafe crew for running such a tight ship :)

  But the evening didn't end there :) After some shopping and a little downtime at my brother's apartment, we headed over to what might have been one of my favorite spots, the Grandview Ave. neighborhood for some ARTISANAL ICE CREAM  *swooooooooon!!!* We had the pleasure of going to Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams, (sorry, I couldn't the photo of this one to load) which, if you are unfamiliar, is a homegrown business that started in Jeni's home kitchen, and now has 11 locations across the state of Ohio. Jeni's only uses local milk from grass fed cows, and boy oh boy oh boy can you taste the difference that that makes :) In Jeni's own words, they only create ice cream flavors that, " we fall madly in love with, that we want to bathe in, and that make us see million year-old stars". I am so glad that there are other people in the world that feel the same way about ice cream that I do :) The Jeni's team is endlessly creative when it comes to ice cream flavors. Among the flavors we sampled that night were Goat Cheese with Figs and Cognac, Salty Caramel, Smoked Tea and Plum Pudding, Vanilla Cedarwood, and one called "The Milkiest Chocolate in the World" which most certainly lived up to it's name. I do not have the words to tell you how absolutely delicious this ice cream was, but I can tell you that Jeni's will DELIVER ICE CREAM VIA UPS ANYWHERE IN THE COUNTRY!!! I know this because my brother sent my mother some Jeni's ice cream for Mother's Day this year :) I wholeheartedly recommend this ice cream :) Jeni has also recently published a cookbook, and one day soon it will be MINE!!!

The next standout on our culinary tour was post-football game dinner on Saturday night at City BBQ

    Another Ohio standout, and one of the only BBQ joints I've ever found that might actually be in the same category of Syracuse's beloved Dinosaur BBQ. Again, this is counter service in it's highest form. You know the food's gonna be dang good if there's a (fast moving) line out the door. After ordering at the counter, and waiting a surprisingly short amount of time, we plunked down at a bare wooden table which was dressed only with a napkin container and a motley assortment of bbq sauces, we dug into our feast. Friends, this was my first encounter with a Carolina Pulled Pork Sandwich, and HIGH HOLY HELL am I a woman converted :) Allow me to explain. By and large, I strongly dislike coleslaw. I find it too squishy and too sweet to really be palatable in most cases. However, this coleslaw was cool and creamy and tangy, not the least bit sweet or mushy, and the interplay of the tangy, cool coleslaw against the rich, unctuous pulled pork was HEAVENLY :) I now have a standard order whenever I go out for BBQ :) Several of my table mates also got the Carolina Pork Sandwich, but the Brisket and the Pulled-Pork sans coleslaw were also excellent. I must also give props to the fresh-cut French Fries, which were the exact right kind of crispy, the mac and cheese, the spot-on cornbread, and THE DEEP FRIED PICKLES ( deep friend pickles were one of those foods that weirded me out at first, but one bite and I'll never look back, YUM-O!!!) A fun quirk about City BBQ? The walls are decorated with antique/quirky/interesting bbq and hot sauce bottles, and if you bring one in to add to their collection, you get free food, can't hate that :) I also want to give a nod to the fact that both their lemonade and iced tea were scratch made and freshly brewed with real lemons and real tea leaves and natural sugar and you could absolutely taste the difference :) We wanted to try the Peach Cobbler, but we were stuffed absolutely silly and dessert was not an option, so we'll save that one for the next trip :)

Before heading back to Syracuse on Sunday, we had brunch at another local institution in the Grandview neighborhood, Paul's Fifth Avenue  .
 

      This was another establishment that was packed to the gills (although being the day after an at-home game victory for Ohio State, I really shouldn't have been surprised). At first, I was a little put off, because there was absolutely NO ROOM for diners waiting for a table, so your choices were to hover over the already seated diners, or smush two or three deep against the wall. However, this is a design flaw and in no way the fault of the staff. They sat us as soon as they could and got to us as soon as they could. Having been in food service off and on for most of my adult life so far, I'm more than willing to cut them a little slack. Our server was in a refreshingly good mood, which is always welcome after a harried morning :) Paul's has been around for over 40 years, and if the rest of their meals are as good as their breakfasts are, I can understand why :) No one got anything especially elaborate, eggs over easy/sunny side up/scrambled, toast, a Greek Omelet, a Wisconsin Omelet, sausage patties and home fries,but everything was cooked to perfection, served hot, excellent portion sizes, and DELISH :) If I had one complaint about Paul's it would be that they really should expand their building, they absolutely have the client base to justify an expansion, but service and food-wise, everything was excellent :)

I loved Columbus, capital *L* Loved :) I had a wonderful time with my family and I was genuinely sorry to leave. I'm definitely going back as soon as possible :)

Love,
Lynn



     

Victory Pancakes (Oatmeal Pancakes with Blueberries and Honey)

Hello, My Loves,

  In the archives of this blog, I'm pretty sure we've already covered the concept of food emergencies. In essence, a food emergency, in my little world, is when you have an inexplicable need for a certain food, a close relative of the *craving*, or as my Mom would say, a *wooly* :) Last Monday night, I wanted pancakes. I NEEDED pancakes, I would not REST until I had PANCAAAAKES! I'm not sure why, because I had just had some pretty good ones a few days earlier when I went out for breakfast with Michael's family, but there it was. I was in the midst of a pancake emergency. Something had to be done. It was pretty late in the evening, too late to make pancakes right then, so I did some recipe research for the following morning. I've really been enjoying the inclusion of more whole grains and other healthful foods into my daily diet, so I decided to look at recipes for whole grain pancakes,with the added caveat that  they had to be made from ingredients that I already had in the house, because I was too lazy to make another trip to the grocery store. I didn't have any whole wheat flour in the house, but, I did have Oats. Wegman's brand Quick-Oats, to be exact. Oatmeal pancakes they would be :)

  Allow me a quick subject detour to explain something. Although I love pancakes, the creation of the perfect pancake has always eluded me. I make a dang good pancake batter, but I always seem to stumble when it comes to the actual *cook and flip* part. I inevitably flip them too early or too late, ending up with either burned, broken or undercooked pancakes. A few years back I attempted a batch of Ricotta Pancakes that were such a complete disaster that I was actually in tears over them. So, suffice it to say, up until recently, I was more than content to do the *mixy-mixy* part and let a kitchen helper do the *flippy-flippy* part. However, in the midst of a food emergency with no kitchen helper in sight, it was time to face my pancake-flipping fears :)

    So, Monday night was spent looking for whole grain pancake inspiration. The base recipe I eventually went with (though admittedly, I altered it a fair bit) came from a website called allrecipes(dot)com, here's the link. I used to use this site a great deal and I have no idea why it has recently fallen off my radar, I definitely need to go back to using it for recipe inspiration in the future. It's almost like a recipe-themed Facebook. People post recipes by category and then other people rate them and leave comments about trying the recipe and anything they did to adapt it, suggestions, etc. They also have nutrition info and a tool to scale recipes up or down, depending on how many people you're feeding :) It's a fun site, check it out :) So, I had a base recipe to work from, and all the ingredients I needed, I couldn't wait for breakfast the next morning :)

   Boy oh boy,either the Gods of Whole Grain Goodness were with me or I've magically gotten the hang of pancake flipping, because these turned out better than I could have hoped :) Pancake redemption was MINE!!! All kidding aside, they taste great, really, they do, and not in that apologetic *we're not bad for whole grain, don't complain,we're healthy* kind of way. They taste good in and of themselves. They don't need to measure up to regular pancakes, they stand on their own merits. Also, (and this is just my personal preference) I don't really like overly sweet pancakes, and sometimes pancakes that are made with just white flour, especially if they have fruit in them plus syrup on top, are too sweet for me. With these, the oat flour balances out the blueberries, making the pancakes just sweet enough.

  The batter is half oat flour and half all-purpose flour (but nutritionists say that anything made with at least 50% whole grain is considered whole grain, so we're good:). I'd be willing to bet you could probably coax the ratio to three parts oats to one part flour, and they'd probably be fine and you'd get even more oat goodness.  I also replaced the sugar with honey and used skim milk ( but really, that was just because I didn't have any buttermilk, you could use low fat buttermilk here too and they would be equally delicious). Since I was only making a test batch, I made a mini-version of this recipe that made about 5 medium-sized pancakes. Here is the recipe scaled for a more normal-sized batch. This should make about 10-ish pancakes, depending on how big you want the pancakes to be. Making and eating these put a smile on my face :)

Oatmeal Pancakes with Blueberries and Honey
(recipe inspiration taken from www.allrecipes.com, from member name *mom2hhh*)

- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 cup quick oats or 1 cup oat flour
- 2 tbsp. Honey
- 2 tsp. baking powder
- 1/2 tsp. baking soda
- 1 tsp. salt
- 1 1/2 cups skim milk or low-fat buttermilk
- 4 tablespoons vegetable oil
- 2 eggs
- 1-2 tsp. vanilla extract (optional)
- 1-2 cups blueberries, depending on how much fruit you like in your pancakes.

-If you are starting with Quick Oats and not Oat Flour (like I did). Put the oats in the food processor and pulse them a few times until they are coarsely to finely ground, but not all the way down to powder. *points down* 

  (All oat flour is is ground up oats, save yourself the price markup, buy a container of quick oats, grind them in the food processor and bingo, you have oat flour. Store them in an air tight container you're golden :)

- Transfer oats to mixing bowl and add all remaining ingredients. Mix all ingredients together. IMPORTANT!!! Do not over mix the batter, it will look a little lumpy and that's fine. I find that 10-12 stirs around the bowl with a large spoon is all you need, seriously. See Notes.

Note 1: If you want to take the time, you can put all the dry ingredients in one bowl, all the wet ingredients in another bowl and then add the wet to the dry. I confess, I did not do this, and everything turned out fine.

Note 2: If you want to save a step, you can put all the ingredients into the food processor and puree until smooth. It would save you time and there'd be one less mixing bowl to clean, I just like to mix things, so I did it by hand :) It's more satisfying to me :)

- Heat a lightly oiled or buttered griddle or frying pan over medium to medium-high heat (I alternated between butter-flavored PAM spray and butter, the butter won hands down, I'll take the few extra calories, and you could certainly use oil instead) . Pour or scoop the batter onto the griddle, I used a soup ladle, about one ladle-ful per pancake. When pancakes become dull (as in, no longer shiny) around the edges and little bubbles start to pop up in the middle, sprinkle the berries onto the pancake and you are ready to flip. (THAT's the trick I've been missing, matte around the edges and bubbles in the middle, I MUST remember this!!!) Another pancake-flip hint. If the pancake is too big to flip with one spatula, or the spatula is on the small or narrow side, use two spatulas. One in each hand. Slide the two spatulas horizontally under the pancake and then flip. I would I could have take a photo or video of this, but I could not, because I had a spatula in each hand 0_o

 - Cook until browned on both sides, serve hot with your favorite accoutrements. You can always sprinkle more berries over the top of the pancakes as well :) You can keep pancakes warm until you serve them by placing them on a plate in the oven. My oven was off, but you could turn it on to it's lowest setting if you like. I did make a few of these plain, without the blueberries, just to see what they tasted like, and they were totally fine, but the ones with blueberries won out, no contest.

 

LOOK at these babies!!! NOM NOM NOM!!! You know, with the Oatmeal, Blueberries and Honey, and the myriad health benefits all those foods have, I was almost going to call them *Superfood Pancakes* or *Superhero Pancakes*. However, this is, hands down, the best batch of pancakes I have ever made. In addition to being delicious and good for you, they enabled me to triumph over one of my oldest kitchen fears, that I would never learn to flip a pancake. So, Victory Pancakes they are, and ever shall be, in my book :) Breakfast as a self-esteem builder, I love it :)

Love,
Lynn