Food – Page 12 – Travelcraft Journal

September 14, 2015

Pancake-Making Machine

I read this story a few months ago about a fight breaking out over a breakfast buffet waffle that ended with 30 people getting kicked out of the hotel.

While I wasn’t able to verify the story, the point is that things can get messy around those self-serve hotel waffle makers. And I don’t just mean the dripping batter.

So I thought the Holiday Inn Express had an interesting solution to promote breakfast buffet peace: a patented machine that makes pancakes in a minute. I got to try one out and see the super secret inner workings. It’s pretty neat. You push a button and the batter inside the machine gets squished out and heated through, and in 60 seconds a pancake pops out on to your plate.

A video posted by stephanieliebold (@stephanieliebold) on Sep 12, 2015 at 4:22pm PDT

While the pancake machines (aka “Stack Stations”) are already in most Holiday Inn Express Hotels, they wanted more people to try them out. So they sent a blue truck out with a handful of pancake machines and something not available in hotels – a special laser etcher that puts your photo on a pancake.

So that is how I ended up, not with pancake on my face but with my face on a pancake.

If you would also like your face on a pancake, here’s the schedule:

Tempe Marketplace (today’s the last day!) – Sept. 14, 1-6pm
San Diego – Sept. 17-19
Long Beach – Sept. 21-22
Los Angeles – Sept. 24-27
San Francisco – Oct. 2-3
Oakland – Oct. 5-6
Sacramento – Oct. 9-11

Also, rumor has it that if you signup for IHG rewards at the pancake truck, they give you 500 extra points and enter you in a drawing for more points and/or shwag. I get nothing from this, but I’m generally a fan of hotel rewards programs (I signed up for IHG’s awhile ago) and a bigger fan of free points, so I thought you’d want to know.

Finally, here are Tammy and Jordyn. They were so excited about their pancake selfie, I just had to get a photo of them with it.

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Not really a disclosure: While I occasionally work with IHG, I didn’t get any special compensation for this post. The selfie pancakes are free for everyone. I just thought it was fun and that you might want to give it a try.

August 29, 2015August 29, 2015

7 Things You Didn’t Expect to Find in Madison County, Indiana

There’s a view that the middle of the U.S. is nothing but farm fields.

Drive an hour or so northeast of the of the Indianapolis Airport, and you’ll find yourself in Madison County (not the one with the bridges). It has its share of agriculture, for sure, but there are also cultural and historical sites, and people passionate about things they make.

I bet you didn’t know you could find all this in Madison County, Indiana:

1. A performing arts theater that makes you feel like you’re sitting in a Spanish courtyard under a starry sky. The Paramount Theatre Centre is one of only a handful of remaining atmospheric theaters by architect John Eberson.

2. Large, 2000-year-old heaps of earth built up by mysterious ancient people(s) to align with heavenly bodies at Mounds State Park.

3. Free public wifi throughout downtown Anderson (the county seat), thanks to dozens of hotspots. (PDF map)

4. The House of Glass, a family-run artisan glass studio, which still crafts each piece by hand in the tradition of their French ancestors.

5. A gospel music recording studio that also serves insanely good house-made cakes, Pure & Simple Restaurant at Gaither Family Resources. (Phillip wants me to add that the pot roast skillet was also delicious. So was the chicken bacon mac and cheese.)

6. The first historic district to be added to the National Register of Historic Places – West Eighth Street Historic District. (Walking tour map)

7. The world’s largest ball of paint, a baseball that’s been coated in more than 24,000 layers of paint over the last 37 years and now weighs over 4,000 pounds.

Where to Stay

Our homebase while we explored Madison County was a suite at the conveniently-located Best Western Plus in Anderson, which included breakfast every morning and coffee all day. (Yeah!)

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A big thank you to Anderson Madison County Visitor and Convention Bureau! We were their guests at the Best Western Plus and at Pure & Simple Restaurant. But I wasn’t kidding about that cake.

August 24, 2015July 24, 2016

From Cheesesteak to Cheesecake: “Local” is Relative

“Really?! You want to eat one of those things?”

Until at that moment, I hadn’t thought wanting to get a Philly cheesesteak in Philly was such a crazy idea. But Phillip’s uncles, who we were visiting a few years back, seemed surprised and disgusted at the thought.

I guess when you have lived your whole life just outside of Philadelphia, you’re over the whole cheesesteak thing.

More recently, while in line at Star Wars Celebration Anaheim, we struck up a conversation with some guys from Germany, who had already been to their bucket-list restaurant for their SoCal trip. It wasn’t a beachside seafood spot, Downtown Disney diner, trendy vegan cafe, or even an L.A. taco truck.

It was the Cheesecake Factory.

To me, that’s part of a big ol’ chain I could eat at whenever (but haven’t for a long time). To them, it’s the hangout from The Big Bang Theory, and something you can’t experience where they’re from.

Local – and interesting – eating is relative.
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August 15, 2015May 23, 2023

A Mount Lemmon Trip

Mount Lemmon doesn’t have a website.

Which, I guess, makes sense, since it’s a mountain. Although that didn’t stop Mt. Rainier or even Camelback. Maybe the difference is that they’re both the main event in their respective parks. Mt. Lemmon, on the other hand, is just one impressive part of the impressive Santa Catalina Mountains and extensive Coronado National Forest.

It’s right outside Tucson, but, as much as Phillip and I like hanging out in that area, I’ve never been on Mt. Lemmon itself. Tucson is a 1.5 hour drive, and then it takes another hour to wind your way up the mountain, so it kind of requires its own designated trip.

Which is happening soon, because my dad thought we (he, Mom, Phillip and I) needed to take a day trip before Phillip goes back to grad school and ~~disappears for 9 months~~ / ~~can’t do anything fun~~ / gets much busier.

We decided to go to Mt. Lemmon since my mom hasn’t been there either. We’ll drive around, picnic, and maybe take a hike. But probably a short one, because the elevation at the top is about 9,000 feet. That is significantly higher than Denver. It’s actually closer to La Paz, Bolivia’s 11,000+ feet.

Side note: Thinking about this made me wonder about all the high-altitude places I’ve been and how they compare to each other. So I made a little, roughly-to-scale chart. Maybe I’ll do a better one later, where I actually write legibly and measure the lines. Maybe.

Side note to the side note: I’m thinking of titling my chart “Great Heights” or “Altitude is Everything” or “Elevations I Have Known and Loved” or maybe just “Places I’ve Been High.”

Really, the point is that I’m gonna be moving slow up there in the thinner air.

Driving from the Tucson desert to the pine-covered top of Mt. Lemmon takes you through climate zones equivalent to driving from Mexico to Canada.

Mt. Lemmon is one of the sky islands, a poetically-named category of mountains in the Southwest U.S. and Mexico that have dramatically different environments than the areas around them. They have remarkable biodiversity, including plants and animals you normally wouldn’t find in the region.

My favorite is the coatimundi, a mammal that’s native to Central America but also inhabits the sky islands. When we went to Chiricahua National Monument (also sky island territory) a few years back, I got kind of ~~obsessed~~ focused on trying to spot one in the wild. It hasn’t happened yet, but, during the trip, I’ll definitely be on the lookout.

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PS I’ll be posting info from my Craft Camp presentation soon.

July 16, 2015July 15, 2015

You can make pickles without canning!

One week our CSA box came with more cucumbers than we knew what to do with.

Someone suggested making pickles, but so far I’ve shied away from anything that involves actual canning. The combination of glass jars + boiling water + my klutziness sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

So I was really excited to learn you could make refrigerator pickles without the whole scary canning process. As the name would suggest, they need to remain chilled and not on a shelf.

I shared a few jars with family. They were as excited as if I’d done something really brilliant and difficult, when, in reality, it was much easier than conquering my fear of canning.

I’ll tell you how I did it, as long as everyone agrees to keep thinking (or at least acting like) I’m brilliant.

pickles-1

EatingWell’s post on “How to pickle anything” was the key. I decided to make sour/dill pickles, seasoned with various combinations of fresh oregano, green onions, garlic, dill, turmeric, and cumin seeds.

pickles-2

Following their guide, I sliced cucumbers, piled them in just-washed jars, added seasonings, and then made the brine to poured over the top.

The next day it was time for a taste test – and we had pickles! It was almost like magic. They were great on sandwiches and turkey burgers and even just piled on the plate as a side dish. Refrigerator pickles keep for about a month and the flavor gets stronger, so they were pretty intense by the end.

pickles-3

From there, you can experiment with seasonings and even use the same recipe with different vegetables.

Brilliant, right?