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Oct. 22nd, 2006 10:44 am
kansas city
I did have barbecue! And it was gooood. A lot smokier than I expected.
I bought Mark a cookbook published by the Kansas City Barbecue Society or something like that. Overall, the experience was a very weird (to me) and kind of interesting one. The conference attendees were all women who were older than me by at least ten years, and the majority of whom had kids who were school-age. I have never been asked so many times if I was married, or if I "had a family" of my own. I mentioned that I had a boyfriend, but no one really seemed interested in boyfriends.
I flew in on the Missouri side, and the actual site of the conference was on the Kansas side. There was actually quite a contrast between the two sides - we were told that the Missouri side hadn't experienced much growth in recent years, and that Kansas City on the Kansas side was actually doing really well economically. The houses we saw were huge, and people had a lot of room in their front yards, and I kept thinking how much Californians would be willing to pay for that kind of real estate. Once our shuttle driver took us past Russell Stover's house. Apparently he's really famous for his chocolates or something? I hadn't really heard of him before. We also passed by a lot of signs about Amendment 2, which was explained to us as a stem-cell research bill. The opponents of the bill have taken to calling it cloning. We were told that Kansas had a lot of research companies around who were pushing for the bill. I thought that was pretty interesting, since California went through that last year, and right now the stem cell research building is being built pretty close to my work site.
The first night we had dinner at McCormick & Schick's, a restaurant chain that's fairly popular in the MidWest, from what I gathered. It's a seafood and steak restaurant, and they get seafood shipped in twice a day, so it's considered "fresh". I think just about everyone ordered seafood. It was sort of disconcerting, because I'm starting to get used to the way food is being treated in California now - emphasis on local, seasonal ingredients. This restaurant just got stuff from all over the country - New England, Louisiana, Washington, etc. I suppose it's harder to do local and seasonal if you're a seafood restaurant that's not next to any large body of water. Anyway, I ordered the scallops since they're my favorite seafood. They were all right - a little bit overcooked, but better than I'd had them at most restaurants. The real winner, however, was the chocolate bag dessert, which was the restaurant's signature dessert. It was made up of a chocolate shaped bag, and on the inside were creme fraiche and lots of strawberries and other berries (that were definitely not in season). It was really good. I shared the dish with someone and totally could not finish it.
Overall, people were pretty friendly to us. On the last night there was some teenage girl and her brother giving out free hugs to people.
I bought Mark a cookbook published by the Kansas City Barbecue Society or something like that. Overall, the experience was a very weird (to me) and kind of interesting one. The conference attendees were all women who were older than me by at least ten years, and the majority of whom had kids who were school-age. I have never been asked so many times if I was married, or if I "had a family" of my own. I mentioned that I had a boyfriend, but no one really seemed interested in boyfriends.
I flew in on the Missouri side, and the actual site of the conference was on the Kansas side. There was actually quite a contrast between the two sides - we were told that the Missouri side hadn't experienced much growth in recent years, and that Kansas City on the Kansas side was actually doing really well economically. The houses we saw were huge, and people had a lot of room in their front yards, and I kept thinking how much Californians would be willing to pay for that kind of real estate. Once our shuttle driver took us past Russell Stover's house. Apparently he's really famous for his chocolates or something? I hadn't really heard of him before. We also passed by a lot of signs about Amendment 2, which was explained to us as a stem-cell research bill. The opponents of the bill have taken to calling it cloning. We were told that Kansas had a lot of research companies around who were pushing for the bill. I thought that was pretty interesting, since California went through that last year, and right now the stem cell research building is being built pretty close to my work site.
The first night we had dinner at McCormick & Schick's, a restaurant chain that's fairly popular in the MidWest, from what I gathered. It's a seafood and steak restaurant, and they get seafood shipped in twice a day, so it's considered "fresh". I think just about everyone ordered seafood. It was sort of disconcerting, because I'm starting to get used to the way food is being treated in California now - emphasis on local, seasonal ingredients. This restaurant just got stuff from all over the country - New England, Louisiana, Washington, etc. I suppose it's harder to do local and seasonal if you're a seafood restaurant that's not next to any large body of water. Anyway, I ordered the scallops since they're my favorite seafood. They were all right - a little bit overcooked, but better than I'd had them at most restaurants. The real winner, however, was the chocolate bag dessert, which was the restaurant's signature dessert. It was made up of a chocolate shaped bag, and on the inside were creme fraiche and lots of strawberries and other berries (that were definitely not in season). It was really good. I shared the dish with someone and totally could not finish it.
Overall, people were pretty friendly to us. On the last night there was some teenage girl and her brother giving out free hugs to people.