Brownie
I just found a Killer Brownie in my purse. I’d purchased it at least a month ago for Ben, then promptly forgot about it. It’s been in the “checkbook” pocket of my purse, which, I admit, has been feeling a little bulky as of late. (Killer Brownies are not called Killer Brownies because they are tiny.) Ben says he still wants the brownie, but I’m not sure about the shelf life of these things. I’m leaving the decision up to him.
Here are two other stories of Purse Food.
Mario Batali went to Cambados, Spain. So did we.
I learned exactly two words on the trip that Maya and I took in the summer of 2000: resaca and bodega. Symbiotic and entirely relevant to our journey, the words “hangover” and “winery” bring back vivid memories from the trip.
You may have noticed that IF-OH has been silent of late. That’s because I’ve been preparing for a new trip: Nicaragua and Costa Rica. I’ve developed a method for my travels that truly honors the “itinerant” part of Itinerant Foodies. This method heavily involves the use of Google Docs and wikitravel. Basically, I write a middle school report on the country I’m visiting. My many anxieties are somewhat quelled when I fight them with knowledge. So I research every possible thing there is to know about a place in hopes that a) I don’t miss something good while I’m there, b) I don’t get stuck someplace awful and c) I don’t die. Vacations with Jill are so fun!
Bethany (of Tanzania and Philippines fame) will be joining me on this new adventure, and I’m hoping that her complete understanding of “island time” will balance out my we-need-to-be-there-four-days-early-to-catch-the-bus mentality. We’ve been working for months on the trip, interviewing friends who have been before, scouring the backpacking message boards and trying to learn some last-minute Spanish. (Thanks to two years of Spanish in 1995 and 1996, the burden of language is on my shoulders for this trip. In the past, I’ve had the luxury of Bethany pre-learning the local dialect prior to my arrival. There will be a lot of grunting and pointing, I fear.)
This winter, I took a few minutes to interview Peggy Yerkes from Bono Pizza for a series of interviews that I’ve sort of been afraid to publish. Procrastination, ya know. For months afterwards, I’d go into the restaurant and Bill would chastise me, “Every time I go to Itinerant Foodies, I don’t see my wife.” Thus, I came to a crossroads: either post the piece or avoid the restaurant. The latter seemed too ridiculous an option, so I present the first of our interview series: Behind The Scenes.
There are several reasons I love going to Bono Pizza. Their wood-fired pizzas are the best in Columbus and the BYOB policy is quite nice. But more and more, I find that I want to go see Peggy. It’s no secret that Bill and Peggy Yerkes are the incredible team holding Grandview’s pizza-shop-within-a-convenience-store together. While Bill works the back of house (in a figurative sense; the place is too small to have much of a conventional restaurant feel), Peggy takes charge of the front of house customer service operations. Her duties go far beyond the typical chores of taking orders, seating guests and making change; Peggy will also lend out books, introduce any unique or strange customer to everyone in the ten-seater restaurant, and has been known to chase down young ladies in her parking lot to procure phone numbers for (startled) gentlemen regulars. Peggy is the unconventional matron of this unconventional restaurant; in short, she fits in perfectly.
