Category Archives: Iowa

December 15, 2011 · 4:56 pm

Stellar defense of Iowa – check out Jane Burns’ retort to Stephen Bloom

As someone who grew up in suburban Detroit, I’m used to watching the place where I live be maligned. Not to mention as someone who later lived in Wichita, Kansas and,  most recently, in Des Moines, Iowa. I have also lived in Boston and New York so I am very familiar with the coastal view of the Midwest, as immortalized in the famous 1976 Saul Steinberg map of the world for The New Yorker.

So Stephen Bloom’s obnoxious stereotyping pf Iowa and Iowans, especially small town rural Iowa, in a recent Atlantic online piece didn’t strike me as anything new – especially since he wrote something similar (for the LA TIMES?) soon after he first arrived in Iowa City some twenty years ago.  But his latest attack has raised a stink here, especially as the Iowa presidential caucuses approach.  One of the best defenses of  Iowa/Des Moines comes from my old friend Jane Burns. see: http://sneezingthrough.blogspot.com/

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December 12, 2011 · 10:30 pm

Well I didn’t “sleep with Wright” but still…check out my travel story in the Star Tribune

HOT OFF THE PRESS/WEB:

Here’s a story I wrote that ran in the travel section of the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune last weekend. For the record,  I didn’t sleep with (Frank Lloyd) Wright (I’m not that kind of girl…or writer. And he is no longer with us…) but I did enjoy visiting the hotel.

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/travel/135314803.html#

In Iowa, sleeping with Wright

  • Article by: BETSY RUBINER , Special to the Star Tribune
  • Updated: December 10, 2011 – 9:21 AM

In Mason City, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Historic Park Inn gets a multimillion-dollar face-lift.

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December 11, 2011 · 4:38 pm

New italian food (and hotdogs?) old church in Northwest Iowa

La Chiesa in downtown Spencer, Iowa is a new Italian restaurant in an old Episcopal church, so you can eat pasta and pizza in a former sanctuary, complete with  stained glass windows, arched wood beams and a big cross.  So says Family Living, an Iowa Farm Bureau publication (that, full disclosure, my husband edits.) The fare is Italian country – more roasted pork with handmade fettucini and”Pork Belly and Apples Two Ways” than “That’s a spicy meatball.”  No hot dogs that I know of. (Just threw that in to test my theory that people are more inclined to read blog posts that mention hotdogs…)

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December 10, 2011 · 4:32 pm

Coming in from the cold at The Cheese Shop in Des Moines

The Cheese Shop is such a nice addition to my local neighborhood strip mall – The Shops of Roosevelt in Des Moines.  I finally visited yesterday after driving by it’s fogged-up glass windows for days, vaguely seeing people gathered at tables and around the cheese counter.  Struck me as a particularly warm place to come in from the cold – and so it is.

I sat at the wooden bar (salvaged from a local architectural salvage shop) by the cheese counter with a friend, sipping a small glass of amber-colored cider (the kind with alcohol) and nibbling on a plate of artisanal cheeses, including a delicious Vermont cheddar (although not the delicious Vermont cheddar we ate in Grafton, Vt. when we were there in September), hearty bread from La Mie (a few doors down in the center) and fancy olive oil.

Yes the cheese is pricey (some are $27 a pound) and next time I will try to sit at one of the three or four tables rather than the counter (better for carrying on a private conversation) but this place is a keeper.  I hope it continues to find customers and does well.

Good also to see The Shops  filling in after a period when several businesses left. Never good to have empty store fronts.  And there’s a fun mix at the moment that sort of reminds me of an old town square with the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. You can visit “The Cheese Shop,” “The Soap Shop” and “The Juice Company.” (Reminds me of  Tucson’s fondness for one-syllable, to-the-point shop names like “Sauce,” a pizza place, which is next to “Frost,” an ice cream shop.) Plus you can get baked goods/a meal (at La Mie), a haircut, upscale second-hand clothes,  one-of-a-kind handmade jewelry, not to mention do a little yoga and, if need be, get some body-cracking  from a chiropractor.

Fun Fact according to the DMRegister: One of the cheese shop owners is the son of the guy who opened the original Timbuktuu Coffee Shop in the same strip (where La Mie is now.)

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December 7, 2011 · 3:12 pm

Gourmet hot dogs – from Chicago to Des Moines

About a year ago, I found myself in a long line of people stretching down the block from a small brick building that is home to Chicago’s renowned (apparently) hot dog haven…Hot Doug’s (aka “the Encased Meats Emporium and Sausage Superstore.”)  After waiting about 20 minutes on a chilly afternoon and hearing that the wait might be over an hour longer, we left and went to a very good Cuban restaurant nearby.

I’m hoping the wait won’t be as long but the dogs will be as good at Capital Pub & Hot Dog Co., just south of the East Village in Des Moines. From the outside, the place looks like an old roadhouse that matches its gritty industrial neighborhood that is slowly slowly gentrifying.  The pub – located in a 19th century building  originally built for Irish immigrants working on the railroad, the Des Moines Register reports – is selling 100 percent beef dogs (also turkey and vegan dogs) in 13 guises. They’re thick (maybe like my favorite dogs – kosher hot dogs?) – and cooked to order (whatever that means with a hot dog – surely people don’t eat “medium rare dogs”).

One favorite is the Chicago Dog (natch), which sports yellow stuff (mustard, onion), diced tomato sweet relish, sport peppers, pickles and celery. The Mobayashi dog sounds way weird – tempura battered and fried, dressed with spicy mayo, cream cheese, cucumber and, of course, wasabi. I may have to go for the non-hot dog sandwich – the Southside Link, made from locally-made (Graziano’s) Italian sausage with giardiniera pepper relish (which I first ate at a street fair in Chicago, yum) and cheeses.

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October 27, 2011 · 11:42 pm

Pilgrimage to new FLWright hotspot in Mason City

Just back from a tour of the Historic Park Inn Hotel in Mason City, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Fantastic$18 million renovation of the 101 year old hotel and bank buildings (now a lovely hotel with 27 rooms.) And the FLWright aficionados have discovered the place – both tours offered today were full of people, some almost as knowledgeable as the docents giving the tours. Next time, I’ll have to book a room and stay for the night. Also found a good place to eat – new spot about two blocks west of the hotel call Chop with very affordable salads, sandwiches, egg dishes served in stylish room with FLWright overtones (same ochre colored, scallop patterned plaster walls etc.)/ Lovely day.

Did I mention this is the only hotel designed by FLW that remains? (I think there’s a hotel in Oklahoma that’s in a FLWright building but it wasn’t originally designed as a hotel. Must doublecheck that.)

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October 24, 2011 · 6:11 pm

One coffee with a raw egg please? At Susie’s Kitchen in Stanton Iowa!

I waited with baited breath the other day to hear which Iowa cafe the foodies Jane and Michael Stern (of roadfood.com fame) would recommend after hearing a plug for their segment on the NPR show The Splendid Table. And the winner is….Susie’s Kitchen in the southwestern Iowa town of Stanton, famous for all things Swedish including apparently Swedish coffee made with a raw egg. I went there years ago – and of course remember the distinctive water tower shaped like a Swedish coffee pot (there’s also a coffee or tea cup water tower now, I gather.)

Apparently this isn’t fancy-schmancy barrista coffee – this is  a more watery, lighter Iowa cafe coffee that townies spend hours drinking (sometimes using their own cup hung in the cafe), and the secret, we’re told, is that Suzy (0r whomever) mixes ground coffee with a raw egg and then boils it  “to clarify the brew”…  (see http://splendidtable.publicradio.org/listings/111015/ to hear the Sterns’ description.)

Doesn’t really make me want to jump in a car and drive two hours from DM to Stanton but Susie’s pie does, especially her Fruit of the Forest pie, described by the Sterns as: “a multi-fruit extravaganza of apple, rhubarb, strawberry, blueberry, and raspberry heaped into a golden, lard-rich crust that is light, flaky, and flavorful.”  Susie’s is at 404 Broad Ave (712) 829-2947

By the by, Stanton is also the home of the actress (Virginia Kraft) who played Mrs. Olson in ye old Folger’s coffee TV commercials. During my visit years ago in late April, I  found myself walking around the small town with a strolling group of men singing in Swedish and stopping at neighbors homes to drink…what else…coffee.  It’s the town’s Swedish tradition of welcoming May by singing “Skona Maj” or “Beautiful May.”
Here’s water tower photos!

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October 10, 2011 · 11:40 pm

now for a little self-promotion…hot off the press: The New York Times, 36 Hours: 150 Weekends

A New Yorker cartoon recently summed up the typical contents of a blog that it’s: 1/3 how to sew, knit, cook, whatever, 1/3 kvetching of one variety or another and 1/3 self-promotion. Or some such.

With this blog, I’ve tried not to do much of any of that. But hey, what’s wrong with a little self- promotion – especially when, sadly, I won’t earn anything else  from the re-publication of two of my stories for the NYTimes  in an upcoming 774- page coffee table travel book.

So be on the look out for  The New York Times, 36 hours: 150 weekends in the USA and Canada which should be available in November I’m told and includes my stories on Oak Park (Illinois) and on Iowa’s Coast (yes, coast – along the Mississippi).  They’ve been updated since they ran several years ago – but not entirely by me.

Here’s some promo material:

The 740-page book includes the Times’ top 150 travel destinations, from cities and towns to natural wonders across America. Practical recommendations for the over 600 restaurants and 450 hotels is inside with color-coded tabs and ribbons to bookmark favorite cities in each region. Nearly 1,000 photos, most of them from The New York Times archive made it in, making it small enough to throw in your suitcase but big enough to enjoy from your favorite reading chair. The new illustrations by Times illustrator Olimpia Zagnoli of Milan, Italy look fantastic, and includes easy-to-reference indexes and detailed city-by-city maps,.  This will be TASCHEN America’s top title of the year.
 

The New York Times, 36 Hours: 150 Weekends in the USA & Canada
Hardcover, 16.8 x 24 cm (6.6 x 9.4 in.), 744 pages
EUR 29.99 | USD 39.99 | GBP 24.99 | JPY 5900.00

The best of the USA & Canada: The highly acclaimed New York Times travel feature finally available in one updated volume

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October 4, 2011 · 10:37 pm

Daring to ride a bicycle on Iowa’s county roads – Chichaqua Trail east of Des Moines

You can get very spoiled riding bikes on Iowa’s trails – no cars to worry about except at infrequent intersections with usually pokey gravel roads. But yesterday – in part because one of our favorite trails, the (unpronounceable) 20-mile Chichaqua Valley Trail from Bondurant to Baxter, east of Des Moines,  is partially closed – we decided to try riding on a few county roads paralleling the trail.

It helped that the roads we were (S52 and F24)  were chosen by the Iowa Bike Coalition as good – and included as part of a recommended loop on their new biking map that I recently picked up for $2.50 at a bike shop in Des Moines.  On a gorgeous fall Sunday, the two-lane roads were mostly quiet – but every once in awhile a car or truck would come up from behind and scare the be-Jesus out of us. My husband was particularly worried about combines and grain trucks – since it’s harvest time.

The roads were very hilly – so a challenge to ride from that standpoint too – with visibility limited. When I could banish my fear of approaching cars, riding the country roads was fun – you get a really different feel for the countryside than on the trails where you are more insulated and your view more restricted. You’re riding in the middle of the corn field rather than on the edge of it, if that makes sense.

Anyway, by the time we got to the small town of Mingo on county roads we were very ready to return to the safety of a trail – and we gladly hopped on the Chichaqua Trail, riding  south to Valeria, where the trail was closed thru to Bondurant, due to damage caused by flooding last year.  We had the trail from Valeria to Baxter (via Mingo and Ira) almost to ourselves – about a 10 mile stretch – because, I’m guessing, 1)  people think the trail is completely closed and 2) the High Trestle Trail has become so popular that it’s siphoning off riders on the the Chichaqua Trail.

The weather was a balmy 75 degrees or so and the trees and light were in their autumnal glory – we rode through tunnels of trees changing color, our tires crunching on fallen leaves, the sun making shadows that dappled the path, gliding past fields of browning corn and golding soybeans, past the occasional combine harvesting away or tractor in the distance making hay bales. Iowa in its glory.

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August 17, 2011 · 10:49 pm

Collegebound road trip

We’re off to the University of Iowa tomorrow to move my daughter into the dorm and with any luck we’ll fit all her stuff in the car AND be able to see somewhat out of the rear view mirror…

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