palace of winds

Oh lordy am I in love with Baton Rouge already.

Friday (Saturday morning, really) I dragged my butt to bed sometime after one. I think it was more like 1:30, but after I passed the one a.m. mark my brain refused to process anything later, for my own protection. I was going to get up at eight for showering and breakfasting and finishing up packing, but I woke shortly after six, and though looking at the clock my first thought was that I’d just go back to sleep, after lying there a minute I realized that even if I was mentally fuzzy I was Wide F’ing Awake and there would be no more rest that morning. So I got up and put in my longest Firm video and exercised my groggy little butt off (and was well-rewarded — I knocked down twenty or thirty more calories than I usually do!).

The first leg of the flight was pretty uneventful. I continued my streak of airplane magicness and was next to an empty middle seat, which was nice because I’d packed a *huge* lunch and I needed the extra tray table to shuffle all my containers. I was craving something big and green and I wanted to use up the last of the stuff in my fridge, so I packed a big container of spinach and romaine with green onion, a big thing of matchsticked carrots, and the last of the feta cheese, and whipped up a bit more of the creamy lime dressing that was so good earlier last week; rounded all that out with some mixed veg (just from a freezer bag, thawing overnight), a peanut butter and banana sandwich, and an orange. Which all turned out to be WAY too much food, but I love eating well on airplanes because you get so many jealous stares from people who just didn’t think to pack anything and who are now regretting it, munching on their overpriced and oversalted tube of ‘trail mix’. Personally I think eating that volume of nuts and seeds and other super calorie-dense bits is totlaly fine for people who are hiking all day and is total insanity for people who are vegging out practically immobile on an airplane all day.

Aaand I’m so rambling because it’s early. And I’m thirsty but Steph’s door is too loud for me to be able to creep to the kitchen to get a glass of water without waking her up, and I’m really trying not to wake her before eight today.

Ahem. I had a brief stopover in Memphis. The airport smelled like barbeque and fried meat — the former of which was pretty pleasant, because I love the deep spicy scent of barbeque sauce, and the latter of which was much less appetizing. I’d braced myself to come into the land of all fried meat all the time, though.

The second plane was smaller (two two-seat rows instead of two three), and I was next to a chatty environmentalist, and we spent a pleasant hour talking about food and the global carbon market and the Mississippi and trends in carmaking and gas prices. (And, weirdly enough, I ran into him again yesterday while we were getting groceries at Whole Foods. Small world here in Baton Rouge.)

After the requisite (controlled!) squeaking and hugging and rejoicing with Steph in the airport and grabbing my bag we headed out to her car, and I got a little tour of BR as we meandered back to her apartment. It has this lovely small-town feeling while still being quite a large place — large enough to support much more than just a Walmart, say, and to not feel back-water the way Kirksville does. Back at her apartment I got the tour, and we wound up on the back balcony, where I just sat for a while and marvelled at how green and summery everything looks, and all the wonderful sunshine.

We had grand ambitions to plan our menus and go grocery shopping, but halfway through the planning phase we decided Hello Sushi sounded a lot better at the moment, and dropped everything and went over there. It was cute (if freezing) inside, and the menu was adorable, and just the whole atmosphere, but disappointingly at heart it seemed to be much more of a chain than a restaurant, a distinction that’s only just coming really clear for me. (I mean, I’ve always known it unconsciously; I’m just really starting to think about it a lot more now — something I started as my eating habits changed and which has just gotten about a thousand times more important now that I’m a vegetarian). We wanted the sushi chefs to make us some vegetarian rolls, and we wanted to leave it up to him on the thought that: he’s the sushi chef, so he’s going to know way better than us what’s going to taste great. In my mind, a good restaurant response (a good chef’s response, that is) would be enthusiastic, excited at the opportunity to be a little creative. The chain response (and I think the sort of people who work in chains must be food preparers, like a Target check-out person versus someone in a specialty shop who’s intimately connected with and knowledgeable about the product) is what we got; that is, the waiter stared at us like we were crazy and said no, and that if we wanted to request something specific we certainly could, and that they had lots of vegetarians who did. To my thinking, then, the chefs must know what the local vegetarians favor, and maybe we could try that, but it was really no dice, and we were forced to invent our own.

So we got the veggie roll on the menu (cucumber, avocado, and…something else, I don’t remember what), a roll with apple and cucumber and cream cheese, and a spicy asparagus roll. I found the set veg roll to be okay but nothing spectacular. The asparagus roll ended up just being asparagus with a little dollop of something spicy on top, and while I like spicy it was kind of a one-note song, the roll ending up as just a vehicle for whatever the paste/sauce was — and while it had a nice play as far as spicy goes, going through a whole slow range of flavor, I wasn’t able to taste the asparagus at all. Our apple-cuce-cream cheese invention, though? With a tiny bit of wasabi on it for spice and a dip in the soy sauce for salt, it was amazing. Clear crunch from the cucumber, slightly grainier crunch from the apple and its own brand of acid-sweet, and pure heavy creamy sweet from the cream cheese, along with that spice-salt edge — that was the one that had us both Mmm and slit-eyed in pleasure.

We followed up with a cheesecake roll (as you’d expect, wrapped in pastry) with chocolate and caramel sauce. Nice and sweet but again about what you’d expect.

And wow, I actually meant to make this an entry about yesterday, which I haven’t even gotten to at all yet, but it’s already past eight and my tummy’s rumbling and we have to get moving so we can get to work on our sandwiches for this afternoon’s tea party! :D