I get why the chef at the small Des Moines restaurant Harbinger is a semifinalist for a James Beard award (Best Chef, Midwest). We just had a superb meal there to mark my 60th birthday. We’d been once before – during restaurant week when we ate small bites of small plates for a small price. This time, we got bigger bites of small plates for a not-as-small-but-still-reasonable price — and the food made even more of an impression, a good one. Almost all the “plates” had an Asian twist — Vietnamese, Thai or Japanese — and almost every one was something we’d never eaten before.
We had two appetizers — the first was “tapioca and pecorino fritters” –2-inch crispy-on-the-outside-moist-on-the-inside logs of yes, tapioca and tangy cheese in a spicy tomato sauce. Delicious. So were the Prince Edward Island mussels in a light but spicy Thai coconut milk sauce.
The small plates we tried (and enjoyed) were:
- A bowl with moist coconut rice, large pieces of Berkshire pork shank (“braised in Chinese aromatics” and roasted chili vinegar).
- Fresh spinach with sweet cipolla onions and strawberries somehow dried akin to raisins.
- Two small steamed buns — one with spicy sriracha chicken, the other with a grilled pork belly in a sweet Hoisin sauce.
I stopped at a 19th-century drug store. And in the town square, I admired the ceramic cowboy boots adorning the street lamps by the Fremont County Courthouse. 
In Red Oak, I admired Montgomery County’s elegant red court house.
I met another friend of 39 years, Jemima, who came all the way from her home in the northern town of Ludlow to meet up, for the first time in about four years. What a treat! She suggested an exhibit of work by Pierre Bonnard at the Tate Modern, one of my favorite London “it” spots. The exhibit itself turned out to be stunning (Go! Go!)
on Saturday night, Francine, Russ and I had highly unusual vegan and veggie Brazilian food at Oliveira in East Sheen. We are now back on Shalstone road where Russ is engrossed in a chess channel on YouTube that he swears by (Power Play Chess, should you be so inclined.)
Francine and I met 39 years ago when we were both working for Labour MPs in The House of Commons. Today we returned for a program marking International Women’s Day, featuring 25 people – most black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) women speaking in an elegant Commons meeting room on topics ranging from youth violence to sexual slavery to increasing minotity women participation in science, business and artificial intelligence. 
We drank tea and ate finger sandwiches, scones and macaroons afterwards at a reception in the House of Lords, overlooking the balcony and Thames on a rainy afternoon. Francine managed to get us back over to the House of Commons, through back hallways and we sweet-talked the nice guards into letting us join some other tourists inside the H of Commons chamber, which looked even smaller and more compact than I remembered. We walked through the glorious 12th century Westminster Hall, bits of it under repair. (Big Ben is completely shrouded in scaffolding.)
Continuing on our sentimental journey, we walked up Whitehall, past Downing Street and other imposing government buildings to Trafalgar Square and then Covent Garden, where I bought a rain hat (like my friend Una’s, which I borrowed in Dover) from Barbour (quintessential British) and tried on some shoes at one of three Allbirds stores in the world. Then we walked in the dark and drizzle through the crowds and past the shops in Covent Garden to embankment (Gordon’s wine bar, an old favorite, had an overflow crowd) and over the bridge to South Bank and the train from Waterloo back to Mortlake where we had Indian takeaway with Russ. Ahhh London….
We learned the hard way that you can’t pay cash to ride a bus, nor if you are American are you likely to be able to pay with your credit or debit card. (It’s missing some sort of chip that British cards have…and I don’t mean “the chip” of “chip and pin” which American credit cards now have.) We also learned that I can’t simply use my Oyster card twice on a bus to get a ride for myself and a friend (unlike in, say, NYC, where you can swipe your metro transit card twice or however many times needed to get your entire party through the turnstiles.)
We did finally make it to the sweet rustic cafe at Petersham Nurseries, where we learned (the hard way) that it doesn’t serve a proper English breakfast, as hoped, but we did have a nice flat white coffee and another scone with clotted cream and strawberry jam, surrounded by glorious flowers (hydrangea, camellia, daffodils) in bloom.
Emerging from the Thames Path onto Kew Green, we stumbled into the nearest pub, The Cricketers, which turned out to be a winner. We had big glasses of hard cider, my pate and bread sufficed and we all enjoyed an “Eton Mess,” whipped cream with strawberries, bits of meringue and shortbread.
