Blown by the California Zephyr

Okay, so I'm going to talk about the latest trip I took across the country using the magic of the railroads. Yes, we still have them in America. And yes, you can go transcontinental the whole way. As long time readers (all three of you) of this blog know, I previously took Amtrak trains to Seattle and Los Angeles in two separate trips. This time, I am going to recount my experience differently. The engine will not be moving forward in time. No, the engineer has gone crazy folks! We're going in reverse, backing up all the way to Emeryville, California! Which means starting with my time on the Lake Shore Limited. It dropped me off in Penn Station, after passing through Albany and Chicago. Before then, I had lunch all aboard.

Vegetarian Kofta with Basmati Rice and Curried Cauliflower

I ate it here in this dining car

My Roomette came with in-built toilet and fold-out sink. It was like being an astronaut in low, low orbit

Working on the train

Even though we left late (9:30 PM), they were kind enough in the dining car
to give us cheese, crackers, and in my case, champagne

Unlimited taste on the Lake Shore Limited!!!

I took he train the whole way, from Chicago to New York City. Here you can see the view I had from the Willis Tower. Yes, the very top of the Willis Tower. No better view of Chicago, no sir. But how did I get there? By riding another train, the California Zephyr! It was my means of conveyance across the Mighty Mississippi River. No more fording with oxen for me.

Now since the trip on the Zephyr was about twice as long as the Lake Shore Limited, I got to enjoy more meals aboard. Here is an omelet I ate during my last morning on the train. It had sundried tomatoes on it, a la 1997. It came with a flaky croissant and some pretty good roast potatoes. They had a kind of creamy consistency to them.

We stopped in Denver the previous evening. The Zephyr stood still for about an hour. During that time, I took in Union Station, the State Capitol, a game at Coors Field, and the Denver International Airport.

Or maybe just Union Station

We pulled in there after dinner. That night I had the blueberry strudel cheesecake, the steak, and the shrimp tempura appetizer. A complimentary glass of white wine was involved. During this time the train had to go backwards into the station. 

High above the mile-high city

First time being awake for the Rockies!

The secret of Coors

Boot-shaped rock

The Zephyr took me over several ranges of the Rocky Mountains, past various rivers and creeks, through dry basins, and along canyons. There were tall trees, precarious boulders, and rapids that were, um, rapid. All of which I could observe during an afternoon in the observation car.

The breakfast quesadilla. Also came with a croissant and potatoes. A NAFTA meal.

After my first night on the train, I woke up to see Utah towering over me. It was a welcome sight following an evening spent swaying back and forth in Club Amtrak.

But I could sleep with a full stomach at least. There was rice, and beans, and salmon that was oddly covered in a lobster sauce. A glass of wine too and a salad with bits of brie to compliment it all.

A little taste of the Zephyr

Another taste

Speaking of taste, Donner Lake, California

Though my conditions were cramped, I had my privacy, courtesy of curtains. They remained drawn most of the time I was on board. This fabric covered up my window, my door, and the window in my door. Good sturdy Velcro kept it in place. Not that I was completely shut out from the world. When I sensed I was near something worthwhile to look at, I ripped the curtains away from their holdings and looked out my window. 

I saw where all the air fresheners come from

Lunch options were limited. Pictured: hamburger

I was on the second floor

The golden west of California

San Pedro Bay, one of the few views that didn't involve going by a refinery

1980s problems require 1980s solutions

No WiFi

We set off from Emeryville, California in the morning. Unfortunately we were delayed by an hour and a half. I got to the station by flying from LaGuardia to San Francisco. No pictures of that trip survive because I dropped my phone from the plane. Since it landed on the western side of the Continental Divide, I caught it bobbing up and down in the bay. Here is me waiting to board the train. A hulking behemoth that managed to swallow me whole like Jonah. Didn't give me too much trouble until we hit Nebraska of all places. Then the thing buckled and shook like a sandworm, as if it was angry at being forced to enter the Cornhusker State. 

Art?

The Great British Candy Bar Review

Time for something sweeter in place of all the sourness in the news. Last Christmas, I got an assortment of British chocolates as a present. For the most part, I had never had these particular candy bars before. Now, some of you reading may be thinking to yourselves, “Christmas? You mean it took you until September to finish these chocolates? You have that much willpower? Didn’t they go bad?”  Let me start by saying, yes it took me that long. Yes, I do have that willpower. No, they didn’t go bad. 

Okay, I should confess, it wasn’t all willpower. I had these candies in my desk at work when quarantine hit and only just now was able to access them once again. There were only two bars left, but that was all that stood between me and finishing this review. Before we begin, I need to say that British chocolate is better than the standard American fare from things like Hershey’s and Mars. We may be better at putting things in chocolate, yet when it comes to plain bars, Cadbury has them beat. Maybe someplace is able to bring these two skills together to create the best of all possible candy bars, perhaps Canada.

Now onto the confectionary!

Curly Wurly

First up we have the Curly Wurly, which may or may not have been named in honor of the 1977 Song Blinded by the Light. This candy bar looks like barbed wire Willy Wonka would use to keep the Oompa Loompas in his factory. It consists of three strands of chocolate-coated caramel that wind together in a sort of double helix pattern. It’s quite possible this is what the genome of the cacao bean resembles. 

Eating it is not exactly pleasurable. It is a delicate piece of candy and breaks easily in the packaging. The caramel-based nature of the confection also leads it to stick to one’s teeth, not ideal either. I tried it with coffee to see if that would change the experience, and it did. The heat of the drink dissolved the chocolate nearly instantly, leaving behind the caramel, so that it could stick to my teeth more easily. 

I give it a 5 out of 10, if I unknowingly got this on Halloween, I would eat it, if I couldn’t trade it. To quote Blinded by the Light, when eating a Curly Wurly, it feels like “the calliope crashed to the ground.”

Flake

Despite being a British candy, this bar was obviously named in honor of former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, who seemed formidable in his opposition to Trump, but over time ended up crumbling, breaking down, and leaving a mess everywhere. Or maybe it’s named after the structure of the bar. It is nothing but chocolate, yet there’s a twist! No, not an actual twist like with a Curly Wurly. The Flake is filled with tiny perforations, like coral. 

So that makes it a light treat in a sense, though I’m sure the calorie, fat, and sugar counts are the same as any other standard chocolate bar, at least from Britain. I didn’t experiment to see if it sinks or floats like a pumice stone. For sure, it must pass that test. The chocolate itself is incredibly sweet, maybe the sweetest of all the candy bars I had in the assortment. Then again, it might just be because the chocolate taste is more concentrated instead of being spread out. 

The candy is a bit dry, and difficult to savor because the bar does in fact flake. So, the name works to describe the candy as both a noun and a verb. I thought it has a nice-looking wrapper. Trying the bar with coffee failed to improve the experience. Unfortunately, despite the collective holes in it, one cannot use a Flake as a chocolate flavored straw. Everything melts before the drink can reach your lips. I could try next time with an iced coffee, I suppose. Dunking it does make for an easy, instant mocha.  Six out of ten, because it didn’t stick to my teeth.

Double Decker

This is the double filling bar. It’s probably meant to evoke those red two-level buses you read about in children’s book set in London. The two flavors that Cadbury uses? The top is nougat, and the bottom is…well, it’s crunchy. I’m guessing some kind of puffed grain. Rice would be my guess. It’s strange not to have the nougat on the bottom, so one thing this candy bar does is give nougat its time to shine. It tasted okay, I like nougat, I like puffed ambiguous grains, and I like Cadbury’s chocolate.  

It doesn’t go well with coffee, which is crucial for me. It has a weird mouthfeel as well. The solid, chewy nougat and the pop of the grains didn’t sit well in my mouth. The way the bar is composed in a cross-section resembles the way some roads are laid out, with asphalt on top of a mixture of ground up rocks. This could be a further homage to the fabled red buses of London. After all, what do they drive on? Roads, or as the British spell it, Rhodes. 

nougat top and crispy bottom" is what it says on my Tinder profile

Overall, not a favorite of mine. Five out of ten, only good for strange cravings for nougat. The combination doesn’t make much sense to me. It combines two ingredients that go into other candies all the time, but almost never share the same chocolatey blanket.  The Double Decker is ambitious, I’ll give it that. But ultimately it embodies a poor synthesis, an example of Adorno’s “negative dialectic.”

Crunchie

British candy bars have such utilitarian names, don’t they? The legacy of Jeremy Bentham lives on it them, and not just as a stuffed corpse in a university hall.  On the other hand, it is far more golden than its name would imply. You see, The Crunchie bar is on a higher plane than the Krackel. Instead of mere rice pieces, the Crunchie has golden honeycomb encased in milk chocolate. It may make the same sound as its American cousin, but it is on a higher alchemical level. 

“Get that Friday feeling with Crunchie” is what the advertising says. I’m not sure how many people celebrate the weekend with honeycomb, golden or not. In the UK things might be different. Honey on everything while hitting the public house with the mates I suppose. The inside was light in the middle and it melted in my mouth. On one level it was reminiscent of a Butterfinger, or astronaut ice cream, (now I want a candy bar made out of that childhood treat).

It is fragile, though it has more structural integrity than a Flake. When added to coffee, the bar dissolves easily. However, it doesn’t quite go with the drink. Being honey-based, it would probably be better to dip into tea. I wouldn’t know though, I’m not a tea man. My American taste buds can’t stand that weak stuff. We got rid of those leaves and brought on the beans during the revolution. Back to the Crunchie, I give it an eight out of ten. If I got it for Halloween, I would probably save it for later.

STARBAR

I wasn’t sure if it’s meant to be in all caps, or that’s just a stylized rendering for the wrapper. When contracts for the candy are finalized do they say Starbar, or STARBAR? The world of chocolate is filled with many a mystery that is not Wonka related. The wrapper promises the eater a chewy cosmos of peanut and caramel. Maybe this is supposed to be a reference to the Milky Way without borrowing the name of that American candy?

Structurally, the STARbar (let’s compromise on capitalization) is flat on the bottom and round on the top, with the filling packed inside. It’s built less like the celestial cosmos and more like something subterranean: the London Underground. It is chewy and it evaporates in your mouth with you eat it. Unlike your standard American candy bar, it needed more of the advertised peanuts. Clearly Britain needed its own version of George Washington Carver. It gets a six out of 10 from me. I’d trade it on Halloween for a Snickers.

Wispa

By the time I got around to eating this bar (I didn’t eat them all in one sitting, have some faith in me) I realized that British chocolate bars seem to advertise their prices prominently. I don’t know why that is. This one costs 55 pence, in Freedom terms, that’s 70 cents. Don’t read this post and fly to the UK with seven dimes in your pocket, hoping to get one of these babies though. With Brexit, that number may change. Remember how that thing is still going on?

The Wispa is an aerated Cadbury milk chocolate bar. Unlike a Flake, it has more of a dense, lattice-like structure. The Chocolate isn’t folded or bunched up together, but seemingly punctured. It’s light, which is to be expected. Imagine putting holes in something and making it heavier. When you let a piece of it sit in your mouth, the holes speed up its dissolving. Occasionally they tickle the tongue. 

A Wispa seems shorter than a Flake bar, and it’s way less messy. They don’t just break up in your hands. When exposed to coffee, the Wispa is a real delight. The bubble feeling that the hole creates is much more pronounced. Once you get a hang of it, you can swish the coffee around in your mouth to feel the liquid go through the holes. I suppose you can use lots of other things this way to enjoy your Wispa. Milk, for instance, or whiskey. I give it an eight out of ten, a little plain in taste, but amusing in texture.

Twirl

Onto our next candy bar. It is twirling towards freedom perhaps, but is it twirling towards taste? I want to believe so and give this Twirl a whirl for what the wrapper promises will be an intense Cadbury milk chocolate hit. This confection comes with company. Open up the wrapper and you will find two sticks to enjoy. I guess it gets its name from the way the chocolate is structured. It is bunched up and folded around in a way that’s like a Flake. The major difference is the folds are more circular, and covered with another layer of chocolate.

The chocolate was certainly fine. I was expecting another ingredient to be part of the bars. You know, a real twirl of caramel, nougat, or peanut butter. When mixed with coffee, it creates a nice taste behind in the mug. It’s superior to a Flake in that regard. Looking at the two bars though, it’s hard not to compare a Twirl with the American Twix. Which one comes out on top? I have to side with the U.S. of A on this one. To be fair, it does manage to do more with its chocolate than a Twix and doesn’t cheat with cookie and caramel, the steroids of the candy world. 

Compared to my Platonic idea of a candy bar, Twirl gets a seven out of ten.

Cadbury Dairy Milk Caramel

First things first, this is not to be confused with a Caramello, which was my favorite candy bar as a kid. The Dairy Milk Caramel (DMC) is a different candy of candy. It even has its own mascot, the Caramel Bunny. Apparently, it was voted the third sexiest cartoon character of all time in a 2009 poll. It was only beaten out by Jessica Rabbit and Betty Boop. Make of that what you will about the sexual proclivities of the average British male. Of course, it should be noted that the poll was conducted by Cadbury.   

The bar in question here is made of bumpy pieces fused together. Each one is filled with caramel. Unlike a Caramello, each piece is completely segmented off from the others, like the famous compartment system under the Titanic. Does that make this candy bar unsinkable? The caramel does not come out when you break off the pieces. I’ll admit they look a little like pills, or un, suppositories. As for the chocolate itself, I found it a bit dry compared to what’s in a Wispa, for instance. I guess the caramel is supposed to counteract that, like gravy on mashed potatoes. 

When I tried the candy bar with coffee, it dissolved quickly, leaving a mass of chewy caramel behind. That could be fun for some. Overall, I’d give it eight out of ten.  

Picnic

We’re coming up to the last two of the bars I tried. I ate them last week, after going back to the office where I was storing this candy. Quarantine interrupted my survey, but in a return to normalcy, I was able to resume it. America is opening up and back for business, baby! Nothing tasted off, like it had passed an expiration date. This is something to keep in mind when stocking up for disasters. Forget beans, just buy candy. 

Anyway, time to shake it up with picnic, as the wrapper says. This candy bar comes in a very colorful wrapper. It is not a picnic to look at, more of a circus to be honest. It describes itself as a crunchy chew and fruity feast, all covered in Cadbury milk chocolate. Taken out of its wrapper, it looks like a Baby Ruth candy bar. That means don’t have a picnic in the pool, if you catch my drift. 

 It's a light candy bar. It has a crispy texture due to what seem to be rice puffs. It also doesn’t have too much fruit, which it good. According to the wrapper it contains “dried grapes.” They tasted like raisins. I don’t know if it’s a legal thing or a British thing to say dried grapes instead of that. I could see myself eating one after the other and not realizing how much candy I’ve had until it’s too late. 

I like the way it tastes just plain. With coffee the fruit ends up becoming separated from the rest of the bar and it lingers around. So you end up with a mouth full of “dried grapes” wondering why the British just don’t say “raisin.” Let me be clear, I’m not attacking the general taste of fruit here. It’s just the fruit in this candy bar, which is good in small doses. After all, we are talking about something put inside a chocolate dessert. It doesn’t need to be the ripest and juiciest thing in the world.

I give this one a nine out of ten. To be eaten right after Trick or Treating, or maybe during if you want to feel like having a “picnic” while dressed as a witch, vampire, or insurance salesman. 

Dairy Milk:

Finally, the end of the sampler and variety pack. The classic Cadbury candy bar. The name has always thrown me off. Why the need to emphasize the milk as “dairy?” Is it supposed to imply freshness? Like, straight from the dairy and into the vat (or river) of chocolate? It makes me wonder if the milk is real. Did these crafty Cadbury types actually add “malk” to adulterate these bars instead?

A Dairy Milk is a solid bar of milk chocolate. It is made of pieces that can be broken off. They are smooth, without jagged edges. The taste is velvety and there’s no bad aftertaste as with a Hershey’s bar of milk chocolate. No embedded ingredients are necessary. I suppose one could break off a piece, savor it, and return to the others at a much alter date. I did not do that, but it could be done. With coffee, a Dairy Milk slowly dissolves, making a mocha in your mouth. 

A good solid bar (in more ways than one). Let’s give this one a nine out of ten and bring our confectionary adventure to an end. 

The Future Is Nice

I got a thing, you got a thing, everybody's got a thing...but not everybody's got a thing in Quail Bell. Enjoy a piece of hybrid absurdity that mixes the real and the unreal, the ethereal of the promise and the mundane of the product.

Owl's Brew Radler is Rad

I'm more of a coffee man than a tea man, but I'm more of a beer man than a coffee man, so when you mix beer and tea together, I'll give it a try. Frankly I've never had the combination before. Yes, I've had vodka and tea, and unidentified malt beverage and tea, but never true, brewed beer and tea. Thanks to the Owl's Brew company, I get to expand my taste horizons this way.

Up for review are two products from this fine business: That's My Jam and The Blondie. They both combine beer and tea to create different flavors, finely balancing bubbly and bitter, sweet and tangy. You might think the use of the Penny Farthing is an homage to the Prisoner. You may be right. But there's solid history behind it, because these kinds of beer, tea, and lemonade drinks were developed for thirsty bicyclists on the go. On the back of the can it reads "Do us a solid and fill in the blank: I drink @theowlsbrew when I____________." Well I guess based on my experience I can say that I drink the Owl's Brew when I watch David Lynch's Mullholland Drive. Owl's Brew Radler didn't exactly clear anything up but that's not a knock against it. Perhaps I should've drank Mezcal instead.

That's My Jam is better on first taste and if you're looking for just one can to drink at a time, I would recommend it over The Blondie. It's a sweet, fruity concoction, perfect for the warm spring days I'm sure we'll be having any day now. It combines Darjeeling and fruit peel, a little heavier than a pure cider.

The Blondie is the drink for those long Sunday afternoons trying to get through an inane conversation at a party. That's My Jam is too sweet to go down six times in a row. The Blondie though, is for any long-haul drinking you might have (but please drink responsibly etc.) It tastes more like a traditional shandy, less like a cider. It combines black tea and citrus juices. Which ones? It's a mystery! Perhaps the red finger lime, or even more exotic, an etrog. Hey, a drinker can dream, right?

The relatively lower alcohol content and the mix of flavors in these beers also means they can be used for cocktail purposes. The Owl's Brew also sells cocktail mixes, but these radlers work just fine. I tried them both with vodka, that universal solvent for unlocking the good and bad time out of everything. I found that the Blondie works better than the Jam. the Blondie covers the vodka and smooths it out.  The Jam gets frothy upon contact and it's pretty sweet after a while. Now sweet might, in fact, "be your jam." it certainly is my girlfriend's. She liked That's My Jam over The Blondie. Then again maybe its because she's The Brunette.

Both of these drinks are fine and if you're a tea enthusiast, I would recommend them both. The only thing I didn't like was the plastic used to hold the six packs together. To be fair, I got these drinks straight from the source. In the store it might be different. The plastic is hard to describe. It's orange and thick, almost like tiny Frisbees settling over each can. My girlfriend had trouble pulling the cans out because of it. The plastic is hard and it's loud when you try to snap a drink loose. If you're trying to hide your drinking from someone, I wouldn't recommend these beers. Or you can just wait until they leave and untangle the cans all at once.

Finds and Observations 6/24 to 6/26

I hope by making it small enough, it isn't obscene.

Room in Rome is a terrible fucking movie. Literally. I looked it up on Wikipedia and surprise, surprise, a movie about Lesbians that fails to stimulate, educate, or even titillate was made by a man. Not only that, the same man, wrote, produced, directed, and EDITED the film. So there was no one reining him in. He was probably the caterer too. It wasn't even filmed in Rome!

I found a few interesting things in the city yesterday. The first was a twenty year old syllabus for a film studies class at NYU. I came across it at a Goodwill. It was tucked inside of a tome on film criticism. It is interesting to read because it shows how just a few years ago everything was different for students. There was no internet, no DVDs, and no expectation of using a computer and printer. In one assignment, the professor, Joy Gould Boyum, tells the students to keep the carbons because they won't get their essay back until the end of the semester. Carbons! I could also tell the syllabus was originally typewritten then xeroxed. The smudges on the letters give it away. Since the class was in 1996, I imagine she got twenty papers on Pulp Fiction for the final.

Oh, so much progress we've made since then! On the other hand we still have a Clinton running for president.

I also found a ticket for Eastern Airlines tucked inside of a book the library was selling for a dollar. The book looked like a Dave Barry knockoff, a lament by one of the early baby-boomers about how Elvis was great and the Beatles ruined everything in a frothy over the top style that hides a serious bitter core. Anyway, the ticket was at least 25 years old since the airline went out of business in 1991. What I found fascinating was the lack of personal information on the ticket. There was no name, nothing. Anybody could've used it to board a plane.

Ah, the innocence that was pre-9/11 America. I'm starting to sound like the author...

And finally, the final find. A kid's book by Eugene Ionesco.