Text 21502, 127 rader
Skriven 2007-10-18 21:40:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: Long Trail to Dave's 309
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Back down rte 7 to Rutland and rte 4 (quite scenic, but it
was interesting in a bad way to see that most of the inns
and restaurants along it are closed and for sale) and across
to Long Trail, where we tasted

Blackbeary [sic] wheat - pleasant if you like that sort of
soda-poppy thing, which I don't except under certain rare
circumstances;

Hefeweizen - smelly and nasty; neither of us cared for
this, and in fact it was the only one that Carol didn't
like; turns out it goes okay with popcorn (provided),
whose butyric acid masks the off-tastes of the beer;

Harvest brown - a low-hop pleasant but uncomplicated
beverage;

the regular ale - an old friend, easily quaffable, but
not so characterful as the Otter Creek Copper;

Doublebag - very brown, very bitter, like the ale, but,
as one can guess, twice as rich and twice as bitter;

and a moderately bitter IPA, which Carol liked enough
to get a whole Vermont pint of.

There's an Imperial Porter that isn't available for
tasting but available for drinking, so I had one -
rich and smooth, very coffee molasses, just what you
would expect except for a zing of sour at the finish.

We had our lunch here - my burger rare topped with Cabot
aged Cheddar was quite good; for $1.50 extra I substituted
onion rings for fries; these were hugely abundant and
very tasty but a little on the greasy side. Carol had the
Angus cheesesteak, shaved tough greasy meat with the same
Cabot cheese. For the same $1.50 she substituted a cup of
Cheddar beer soup. She asked the waitress if she could
substitute a bowl for an additional dollar (the differential
between cup and bowl on the regular menu), and the waitress
said no, but she would just give her a bowl and say it was a
cup. Deal. Actually, not such a great deal, because the soup
was so rich and salty that in order to finish it, Carol had
to sacrifice much of the crusty hoagie roll (healthier and
better) that her sandwich had come on.

The main purpose, other than the scenery, of Carol's trip
was a visit to the King Arthur factory store, another half
hour up, just north of White River.

I thought it was nasty, one step either up or down from an
outlet mall, and I don't know why people make these silly
pilgrimages anyhow.

It's an octagonal or so building that holds quantities of
most of the things available on the Website, with silly
names like Pompanoosuc Porridge, and with bread machines
cranking out reconstituted bread machine mixes and stuff.
I tried the popover, pretty average, and the potato bread,
below average. Didn't bother with the Vermont sourdough
or any of the other breads. I'm not really that much of
a starch guy.

We got out pretty quickly, with only a small handful of
things for Carol and another small handful of things for
her friends, which is good, as we'd whiled away extra at
Long Trail. So we hot-footed it down 91 to Connecticut
instead of doing the leisurely rte 5 thing as we'd planned.

Got to Clean Dave's at dinnertime. Maryanne wasn't around,
though, having had to work late to get the payroll out or
something. So we noshed on appetizers, the first three on
this list made by Dave, the others synthesized in a factory:

Clam cakes, a southern New England tradition, escape me,
probably because even if they are good ones, as these were,
with a sizable population of clam bits, they are still
essentially just hush puppies. I had one and part of another
and sent the rest of it down to Zim to fulfill its God-given
purpose.

Dave made a good thin clam chowder (whitish, as all real
clam chowders are) to go with - a traditional pairing.

He'd smoked some Russian-style bacon, with the rib bones
still attached, taking a cue from some of the delicious
charcuterie at the Russian deli in West Springfield. Good
job - I'd have thought this had come from there, except
that it wasn't quite as salty as the authentic stuff.

We had found blue razz Fizzies at the Vermont Country Store:
a pack of 8 tablets for $4. Highway robbery, and the resulting
chokerage tastes like slightly berrylike Alka-Seltzer. I tried
doctoring mine with Midori, which if anything made it worse.

I just had to try the Dakin garlic sticks and maple garlic
sticks; these were grossly overfatted and quite limp. The
garlic stick was your ordinary sausage, only you had to scrape
a fair percentage off the roof of your mouth; the maple kind
was similar but heavily mapled, the resulting flavor so strong
you'd swear it was artificial if you didn't know otherwise.

Luckily Maryanne came back so we could have real dinner.

Which was t-bone steak. Mine was a beautiful blue rare;
Maryanne's, though cooked at least five minutes more than
mine, was not done enough for her, so back it went. Lynnie
made a vegetable stir-fry with hoisin for her dinner, and
Carol made do with more clam cakes and chowder. Dave,
professing lack of hunger, just had bites of things.

He'd helped his b-i-l out of a computer crisis, and Nick,
in gratitude, had presented him with one of his favorite
wines, the Geyser Peak Block Collection Kuimelis Vineyard 97
Cabernet (Alexander Valley). I was honored to be able to
partake of this. Inauspicious beginning, with a crumbly rotten
cork and a sour scent emanating from the bottle. On pouring,
the structure of the wine showed, with still good legs and a
thick almost black appearance. On the palate, harsh and acid
with some burned raisin. After sitting out a while, though,
it tamed down nicely, and we sipped a still gutsy rather
astringent typical Cab, with plum and cassis (the raisiny
aspect taking a back seat), some stems and a touch of green,
and notes of tobacco, chocolate, and mint. Turned out well.
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