Donut Corral

I stopped into a small cafe near our neighborhood this morning called the Donut Corral. It is not exactly what you might think. They do sell donuts, but they also make killer breakfast burritos and other things, too – like ready-made dinners you can take home and heat up in your oven later that night. They often have homemade Chicken Pot Pies and Chicken or Cheese Enchiladas. This morning I stopped in to get a Chorizo and Egg breakfast burrito and they had available for their daily take-home dinner special, the Enchiladas. So I got some cheese enchiladas to try out for dinner for tonight.

Here is the strange part. The store is owned and run by Mennonites. I would see these nice ladies in there with their simple pastel dresses and their hair in buns with those little net covers. Finally one day, I asked them if they were Mormons (they look kind of like those women from that compound in Texas that got raided by the FBI a few years back). They exclaimed “Heavens no! We aren’t Mormons, we are Mennonites.” They run the small cafe to raise money for their missionaries over in Africa. I feel good about spending money in this place. I feel like it is going to a good cause. I like to think of these sweet Mennonite ladies feeding starving kids in Africa.

Here is the really strange part. These women make some of the best Mexican food around and they aren’t even Mexicans. Well, I did see one Mexican woman in there this morning, but that is a first one. The food is fresh, made right when you order it, and it is spicy and flavorful. I had to wait this morning while they made my enchiladas. They charged $9.95 for a whole tray of homemade cheese enchiladas smothered in fresh chili sauce and real cheese. It was the same $9.95 price for a family-sized homemade Chicken Pot Pie, as well. I haven’t tried that yet, but I think I will. The enchiladas turned out to be quite good, actually. In fact, I may give up cooking all together and just buy our dinner in there every morning!! Homemade by Mennonite women! (‘Just kidding.)

This got me thinking about dinners and remembering the kinds of things my Mom used to make for dinner back in the late 1940s when I was a little girl. I am probably just remembering the dishes a 3-year old would think were really good, because when I think about those meals at this age, and in these health-conscious times, I am pretty much horrified. One of my favorites was something my Mom called “Wiener Schnitzel.” She basically sautéed some onion in some bacon fat, added a couple cans of Hunts tomato sauce, and then added a package of chopped up hot dogs. This was heated together until the hot dog pieces puffed up, then served over noodles. Now, my Mom was from pure German stock – my grandparents often spoke German around their house – so I KNOW my mother knew what REAL German Wiener Schnitzel was. She must have just been selling us ‘little kid’ food and calling it by a fancy foreign name.

Another dish I remember didn’t really have a name other that “Noodles in Brown Gravy.” This was browned hamburger with a can of Franco-American Beef Gravy mixed in it and it was also served over noodles. You can maybe already tell that we really liked noodles as kids. I LOVED it when we had that. I find myself trying to remember if I ever saw my parents eating this food, or if it was just served to us kids? Sadly, they are both dead now, or I would surely ask them.

My mom also made a dish she called Beef Stew. I would watch her brown some stew meat, add a can of Hunts whole tomatoes, and a potato cut into 1-inch chunks. This would cook together until the meat and potatoes were mostly tender. It was served to us in a soup bowl. Sometimes she would put a can of peas in it at the end, but my sister and I would just pick those out and drop them on the floor under the table.

As many of you that are of older remember, Spam was a hot item in the 1940s and 50s. Many delicious dishes were made with this product and when the World War II soldiers came back home from the war, they demanded it. They were used to eating it in the service. It was often sliced up and fried and served with almost anything. My spouse remembers his mother and grandmother making something called Candied Spam. The Spam was sliced up and cooked in a caramelized brown sugar sauce. The Candied Spam my family made was with the Spam left whole – right out of the can – with some cloves stuck in it like a fancy Easter ham, and a can of crushed pineapple dumped over the top. It was baked in the oven and was served with candied sweet potatoes and canned spinach or asparagus. People used to be far more into “candied” food back then than we are today. And by the way, our grandparents all lived actively into their mid-nineties eating stuff like this and none of them were overweight nor had diabetes, either. Go figure.

But my all-time most favorite dinner was a concoction that was something we just called Spam Casserole. Here is the recipe:

Macaroni, Spam & Cheese

2 cups uncooked elbow macaroni
1 can Cream of Celery soup
1 cup milk
1/4 lb. processed American cheese (Velveeta works best)
1 med. – lg. onion – chopped
1 large green Bell pepper – chopped
1/4 tsp. black pepper
1 can Spam – cut into 1/2-inch cubes

Pre-heat your oven to 325 degrees. Lightly grease a 2 quart casserole dish.

Cook macaroni until semi-tender and drain. Combine soup, milk, onion, green pepper, and black pepper in a large sauce pan. Heat it slowly over very low heat, being careful not to scorch it, until it is not quite boiling. Add chunked up cheese and stir until it melts into sauce. Add Spam cubes and macaroni and stir gently until well-blended without breaking up macaroni pieces. Pour into a 2 quart lightly-greased casserole dish. Sprinkle a little extra grated cheese on the top. Bake at 325 for about 25-30 minutes until bubbly and cheese on top starts to brown.

I used to make this for our boys – all 6 of them – when they were growing up. It was a favorite and was requested often. When they were all teenagers at the same time, I had to double or triple the recipe. They’d come in after football or track practice and microwave up a couple pounds of it for a snack – IF there was any left over from dinner the night before. It is amazingly simple with few ingredients, but it is absolutely delicious. If you are feeling sinfully willing to eat something that today is classified as “unhealthy,” then make this your guilty pleasure some night. Serve it with a huge green salad and some Artisan bread and a good Cabernet. You’ll be fine. It won’t kill you – right away. Hahahaha.

I also remember when my mom would go grocery shopping and would bring home what passed for butter in those days. It was a margarine substance that came in a clear, 1-pound bag with a small dot of orange food coloring in it. I used to love to be the one who got to sit and massage the orange spot – distributing the color throughout the bag of margarine until it turned an even yellowish color and looked just like butter. This was long before we found out that this trans-fat loaded butter-substitute was deadly. It was touted as a more ‘healthful’ alternative to real butter, which had been demonized by the corn industry who now made the margarine. The corn lobby was far more powerful than the dairy industry in those days, besides it was a lot cheaper than real butter which appealed to thrifty post-war housewives who were used to stretching the food dollars.

Oh, after my enchiladas and breakfast burrito were ready, I hesitated for a second, then stopped and bought a cinnamon sugar donut on my way out – just to further contribute to the starving African children, mind you.

Art and Desert Plumbing

I came back to our home in the Arizona desert early this year. Art classes at Arizona Western College beckoned me back the middle of August. I usually stay in Oregon until the end of September, giving the Sonoran Desert time to begin cooling down. Arriving this year to 119 degree days caused me to question my sanity. What I endure for art’s sake!

This term, I am enrolled in Advanced Ceramics and I’m back at working in clay. Other years I have done Painting – oils, acrylics, pastels, and watercolor. There are so many things I want to make in clay and the ceramics studio at the college allows me free rein to pursue my ideas. How I love it! The guidance and counsel of a master potter (Angel Luna) is such a plus for our small college. We have an incredible art department here and I like to take advantage of Painting (William Blomquist) and Ceramics with professors who are not only extremely gifted, but excellent teachers, besides.

My regular posts have been interrupted by traveling and returning to a major plumbing disaster in our guest house next to our main house. ALL the plumbing in the house needed replacing due to breaks everywhere causing flooding inside the house and underneath it when we turned the water back on after our summer away. The desert heat, corrosive desert water, and bone-dry air leach the life out of pipes, fittings and valves, causing major failures every few years. Water heaters and water softeners that have a 10 year lifespan, often last only 5 years here in the desert – if you are lucky.

Fortunately, we have learned to turn all the water off to the houses when we are gone for the summer to avoid having the plumbing fail and run thousands of dollars worth of water into the sandy ground. This happened to one of our snowbird neighbors a few years back. They came home to a plumbing repair and a $4000.00 water bill when a pipe under their house burst and the water soaked into the sandy ground for several months. The water company allowed them to pay it out over several years, but they were still responsible for the full bill.

A further word about our plumbing. The plumbers are back AGAIN today. They needed to order parts last week to replace the ‘guts’ of the toilet tank – seals, float, water lines, flusher thingy, etc. The one plumber they keep sending out here is a giant of a black man named Mike – he looks just like “Refrigerator Perry” from the Chicago bears back in the eighties. Last week, he showed up at the house, peered underneath it with a flashlight and exclaimed, “Yeah, I see where it’s leaking but I can’t fit underneath your house to fix it.” So, he has to call a small Mexican colleague (Alex) to come over who will fit under the house. He passes him tools and pipes and calking and sealer so Alex can make the actual repairs. He keeps up a running stream of conversation about all manner of plumbing subjects and past plumbing horror stories. I don’t ask why I am paying 2 plumbers – one as a storyteller and cheerleader and the guy under the house who is actually replacing the pipes and fixing stuff, etc.

Mike “the Refrigerator” is a great fan of the Calvin Klein men’s fragrance “Eternity.” You might wonder how I know this fact. Well, I can find him by the odor wafting off of him anywhere on our property. I swear I can smell when he is coming down the street in his red plumbing truck. I found him purely by smell the other day over at Home Depot. I KNEW he was close by and I wandered around the store, and sure enough, there was Mike over by plumbing parts! I could smell that he was somewhere close by and I was in the Garden Center section! I suppose it is better than smelling like over-ripe septic tanks, but plumbers that smell like Eternity make me nervous.

So Mike comes back to finish fixing the toilet in the guest house today and declares “Well, did you know this toilet is leaking?”

Huh?? “That’s why you are here, Mike, cuz the toilet is leaking and that’s why you are replacing all the parts and seals in it!”

I have been trying to hold my breath in order to not breathe in a fatal dose of Eternity. Too late. I am sure I will die choking from COPD from breathing his cologne.

“Just make it not leak, Mike, and let me know when you are done. And, don’t forget to calk around the tub. You guys didn’t do that last week and it is still leaking all over the floor when the shower is turned on.”

“Oh, wait a minute. Tub calking wasn’t part of the original price. I’ll have to call the boss.”

“WHAT? Mike, the original reason we called you to come out here is because when the shower was on, water ran all over the floor! Its true, you found many other leaking pipes and you fixed those, but you never calked the tub which was causing the flooding problem in the first place, which still exists.”

The “boss” insists tub calking wasn’t in the price. The fight has gone out of me. I have a migraine from hell and breathing Eternity isn’t helping a bit. The bottom line is they extracted another $40.00 from me for calking the tub which they insist wasn’t in the original price. $2500.00 we’ve paid them to re-plumb the entire guest house, and they can’t run a bead of calk around a small tub??? Plumbers!!

Fortunately, it is nearly time for me to go to my art class where I will lose this headache and thoroughly enjoy making cool things out of clay for the rest of the afternoon.

Letters from Eco-Utopia

Dear Ones, mid-June 2012

We are back at our home in Portland, Oregon for the summer again this year. We are looking forward to hanging out in the cool Northwest, instead of the broiling Yuma, Arizona desert. We will spend a few months enjoying the mid-seventies instead of the 115 degree summer temperatures in Yuma. We have been here about a month now and the temperatures in Portland have hovered in the mid-fifties – and it has rained almost every day – all day. Oh well, the 4^th of July will be here soon – a date when Mother Nature magically remembers to crank the global warming switch over to ‘summer.’

Being in Portland gets us back in touch with what’s happening in the world’s perfect example for a sustainable future. There are more bicycle lanes, bike racks, and bioswales here than you can shake a stick at. They seem to be sprouting like mushrooms in the rain forest climate of Oregon. We can also do all our food shopping in locally-owned, organic food markets, and buy lots of ‘locally-sourced,’ gluten-free foods. You just have to be sure you always have a supply of reusable shopping bags with you, as plastic bags are outlawed in Portland, and paper is only grudgingly offered if you are so stupid as to forget your reusable ones. However, no more do you have to suffer a crisis of conscience in the markets by being asked to choose between paper or plastic. Your correct answer should simply be “Neither, I have my own, thank you.”

Recycling has been elevated to a higher form here with the new and improved trash and recycling program provided by the City of Portland. You now MUST sort your trash into compost, recyclables, yard waste, and common old trash that doesn’t fit into one of those categories. Trash sorting is a heuristic, or an algorithm, taught early-on in the Portland school system to ensure the entire crop of future citizens knows exactly what piece of trash or garbage goes in which bin. (I think the word ‘algorithm’ must have been invented by Al Gore, since it even contains a good bit of his name.) The trash pick-up schedules all changed earlier this year with weekly pick-up of ‘common trash’ now only picked up every 2 weeks, but compost, recycling, and yard waste bins are picked up weekly. Hefty price increases were enacted along with this new reduced and more complex service. Houses and businesses now sport a panoply of brightly-colored plastic bins out front, eco-badges of the modern urban landscaping.

Almost immediately, an unforeseen problem cropped up in that there is trash that doesn’t fit in the new, mandatory, categories. Example – disposable diapers and dog poop. It is illegal to put a dirty disposable diaper in your compost or yard waste bin, but do you really want to keep them around for 2 full weeks before the common trash is picked up again? You can’t ‘recycle’ them, either. They aren’t ‘yard waste’ so that bin is off-limits, too. And what about dog poop? You most certainly can’t put that in the compost bin, and oddly enough, it isn’t considered ‘yard waste.’ Nor can you recycle it, so that leaves the once-every-two-weeks trash bin along with the used, pungently ripening, disposable diapers. Oh, boy. Neither can you just flush dog poop down your household toilet because the water treatment people insist that dog poop contains microbes that upset the whole system. Desperate parents found themselves surreptitiously slipping their dirty diapers into their compost bins that get picked up once a week. The compost managers screamed bloody murder over having to fish dirty diapers out of the incoming compost. Its been repeatably shown that using cloth diapers rather than disposable ones, is far more destructive to the overall environment than using disposables, so that is not an option to green-conscious parents. So now people are encouraged to keep an eye on their neighbors and report people who are slipping forbidden items into their compost bins. A hefty civil fine results if these culprits are caught doing such a despicable thing, and their trash-Nazi neighbors can smile smugly behind their blinds for doing their part in saving the environment.

The other issue I have with Portland trash is that they have removed most of trash cans from public spaces. Parks, for instance. We went for a long, rambling hike through Portland’s renown Forest Park a couple of weeks ago. We had our dog with us. We chose a trail that followed a creek uphill for several miles. At the beginning of the trail was a dog poo bag dispenser full of dog poo clean-up bags and a sign telling people that they must clean up after their dogs. Perfectly reasonable, and it is something we always do with our dog. So we walked a short ways and our little darling pooed. We cleaned it up with a bag, and guess what? There were NO trash cans to dispose of the poo-filled bag! I even walked back down to the trail head at the parking lot – NO trash cans there either! There was a sign advising that people should pack out all their own trash. Really?? Dog poop??? So we continued hiking the trail carrying a bag of dog poop the entire way!! This seemed like a monumentally stupid idea and we saw other people just ‘looking the other way’ when their dogs pooped wherever, because there was no place to dispose of it if you picked it up. We were passed, coming and going, by many people trail running with their dogs, and NOT ONE of them was running along carrying a bag of dog %#$^!.

At a fancy pet shop in the tourist area of Cannon Beach, I purchased a complex plastic device for attaching your twisted up bags of dog poop to your dog’s leash. I paid $13.00 for this thing. This way, you don’t have to carry a smelly bag of dog poo on your nice walk. Well, after you have attached a couple of bags of poo to this pricey device, it looks like your dog’s leash has a pair of plastic testicles dangling from it. I walk along laughing like a complete fool looking at this thing.

Here is a photo of a Portland trash can on a major downtown Portland street. This one happens to be at a block completely lined on all 4 sides with food carts. (more about these food carts later)

A solar-powered trash can! Only in Portland! Anyway, enough about Portland trash.

Love, Joanie

 

Dear Ones, late-June 2012

We are enjoying being in a big city that still has a circulating print newspaper that actually still has home delivery. Nearing the age of 70, we grew up in an era where your newspaper was delivered to your front porch every day. We watched our parents, grandparents, and neighbors all get their daily papers. We have always loved pushing the ‘on’ button on our coffee maker, and then trundling out to the front porch to collect our morning paper to read while we have our coffee. We find out what is happening in the world and our local community. We find out all kinds of little things that we would never know about without the daily. Reading the paper is a very different kind of experience when done on a computer. Reading it on the computer is just not as ritualistic, comforting, or satisfying for us.

Something I saw in the Oregonian one morning while savoring my local, organic, artisan coffee (St. John’s French Roast) was an announcement for the opening of a new Vegan Strip Club. Who would have thunk it??? It is called Casa Diablo and it would be their second branch to open in the metro area.. Nearby residents slowed the approval process of this establishment by the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, by expressing concerns about ‘public safety.’ Besides puzzling over the whole link between Vegans and strippers and what kinds of exhibitionist things they might be doing with vegetables, I was seriously wondering why no true Vegan Portlander was speaking up for the vegetables? If our government considers corporations ‘persons’ then why not vegetables, too? Abusing them (or whatever) for entertainment purposes seems like something a true Vegan would be morally opposed to.

Love to you all, Joanie

 

Dear Ones, mid-July 2012

We had the great fortune of getting tickets to see Ringo Starr when he played at a venue near us. Our son, David, and daughter-in-law, Nathalie, went along with us. Ringo is now 72 years old but he put on a great concert with the help of some old and new people in his band. He performed some of the old Beatles favorites like Yellow Submarine, Octopuses Garden, and Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey. We’ve had so much fun playing those old Beatles songs in the Wii Rockband with our kids and grand kids over the past 3 years. He also did a lot of old songs from other famous bands – specifically a lot of classic Santana.

One of the most entertaining parts of this concert was watching other people in the crowd of fans. There were many people our age who totally grooved on the Beatles 50 years ago, and were enthralled to see one of the real Beatles live, albeit an aged one. There was one particular elderly couple down a ways in front of us that caught our attention. After a song or two of the Santana, they stood up and began dancing very animatedly like teens with floor seats at a Usher concert. Then off came the man’s shirt and he was boogie-ing all over the lawn, shaking his old man boobs and his belly flab. He had very distinct tan lines from wearing a wife-beater undershirt – probably from mowing the lawn on his riding lawnmower. He was clearly carried away with either the music or too much of the micro-brew or wine, or both. Perhaps you can see him in this photo? The guy with the male-pattern baldness down by the white fence? His wife has on the pink floral shirt which she, thankfully, kept on.

Nathalie and David ran into a friend of theirs who’s a Portland business owner who makes video productions. They were able to score some VIP bracelets from him to get us into the VIP tent where there was an abundance of food and free drinks, but long lines at the VIP bar. By now, I am wearing a collection of bracelets. One to get into the concert, one showing me as a handicapped person entitled to sit in the handicap section near the stage (which I declined to do), one to show that I am old enough to drink, and now another one to get me into the fancy-schmancy VIP tent.

The other thing that Nathalie and I really enjoyed watching at the concert was an American Sign Language lady who was signing all the songs that the band was singing. She was just fantastic, signing and acting out song lyrics and she was incredibly expressive. If you were deaf, you’d still be able to tell what the words to the songs were and the rhythm of them from just watching her. Apparently, signers also take acting lessons to be even more expressive in their signing. I think I would have fun learning some of it. I learned some Signing for Babies when the grand kids were babies, but believe me, this is not the same thing as non-verbally asking for more Cheerios..

Love, Joanie

 

Dear Ones, mid-July 2012

Oregon is known as a super dog-friendly state. Portland has always prided itself on being the most dog-friendly of cities. Well, now they have been deposed by Bend, Oregon, according to Dog Fancy Magazine. Bend has won that title for the regional Northwest U.S. Area with Bozeman, Montana, Annapolis, Maryland, Seattle, Washington, and Alexandria, Virginia coming in as runners-up. Portland isn’t on this list.

We had the opportunity to spend a couple of days at Cannon Beach on the Oregon coast. We selected a dog-friendly resort so we could take our beloved West Highland Terrier, Yuki, with us. She positively adores going to the beach! She even has her own sunglasses and a swimsuit. We chose to stay at the Surfsand Resort, which is right on the Pacific Ocean just off the scenic Haystack Rock. When we arrived to check in at the lobby, we were greeted with this sign.

OMG!! How cool is this?? The desk people gave Yuki an organic dog treat and when we got to our room overlooking the beach, there was a bone-shaped wicker basket waiting there for Yuki with a doggie place mat, bowls for her food and water, more organic dog treats, a nice dog blanket, and her very own beach and spa towels! Double OMG!! They have poop bags on the deck stairs down to beach, a dog drinking fountain, and a special dog shower with warm water for washing off your dog after it spends the day romping in the surf and sand with you. AND, they actually had a trash can to dispose of your cleaned up dog poop! The human amenities are pretty dern nice, too, but Surfsand takes first place in our dog-friendly book and Yuki loves it there. It has become our new favorite place and we recommend it to everyone we know. ‘Just call us more crazy empty-nesters with a child-substitute dog.

Love, Joanie

 

Dear Ones, mid-July 2012

Portland has much to recommend it and we LOVE living in this community. However, an area that I feel they get a failing grade is in providing adequate handicap parking. Sadly, I have a permanent handicap permit due to a severely deteriorated ankle joint from an old sports injury which makes walking long distances extremely painful, if not sometimes, impossible. When I have good days, I never park in handicap spaces, even though I am entitled to do so. I always try to leave the handicap spaces free for people that I consider far more handicapped than myself. I have driven around and around in areas of Portland that I wanted to visit, and I can rarely find handicap spaces. Sometimes, I will find one way off on a back street somewhere, and it will, of course, already be taken. Besides, it is so far from the place I need to go to, that it would be pointless to even use it. There have been times when I have given up on my errand altogether and gone back home because I couldn’t park.

I have a theory about the reason for Portland’s deficiency in providing parking for the disabled. Portland is full of very hip, health-conscious, exercise-obsessed, younger-generation urbanites. This is the demographic preferred and catered to – human Spotted Owls, so to speak. There are bike lanes and bike racks everywhere and people are highly encouraged to use ‘alternative transportation.’ (Ironically, under Oregon Motor Vehicle law, motorized wheelchairs may use bike lanes. Hahaha!) The more primitive the mode of transportation the better, with walking, running and biking (not the Harley kind of biking) being supreme. Next in line in acceptability is to use the mass transit system.

Having a physical disability of any nature is a shameful and pitiful condition to a Portlander. The attitude seems to be that having a disability is somehow the fault of the disabled person – if only they had (insert here) eaten the proper foods, exercised regularly, hired a personal trainer, belonged to a gym, did more Yoga, Tai Chi, kick boxing, jogging, weight training, skiing, rock climbing, played more soccer, ran more marathons, visited their acupuncturists more faithfully, yada, yada, yada, then they wouldn’t be disabled and wouldn’t need handicap spaces. Portlanders don’t want to be walking, biking, or jogging down the street and be confronted by those bright blue spaces or signs with wheelchair icons reminding them that bad things happen to people. No one wants to have to see the homeless sleeping on the sidewalks, or handicap people struggling along. It makes them feel bad and question their own sense of invulnerability and control. Obviously if handicapped people had done all of the ‘right’ things when they were younger, like they themselves do, then they wouldn’t now be handicapped, would they??? Leave the abundant handicap spaces for the suburban Walmart parking lots, not the streets of Portland.

Never mind if some of the handicapped people became handicapped from doing any of the above listed activities. In my case, my ankle is totally wrecked from heedlessly hurtling down an icy slope on skies and crashing in a broken heap when I was 24 years old. Now in my old age, I am paying the price for that injury. I should qualify for a handicapped permit that identifies me as someone injured doing an extreme sport – say a little wheelchair figure with skies and poles. I should actually get some kind of Portland points for that! The athletic bravado of my past reckless endeavors should count for something! Like being a wounded Veteran?

Love, Joanie

Dear Ones, late-July 2012

Over the past few days, I have had the opportunity to explore some of Portland’s famous food carts. There is a two-block ‘pod’ of food carts lining all four sides of those blocks in downtown Portland. They open about 11 AM and serve food until their food is gone around 2 PM. Around noon, all of the many surrounding downtown office buildings and businesses spill out their employees into this collection of food carts where it is possible to sample foods from about every cuisine and region of the world. They look just like any street-food carts you would see in countries all over the world. They are wildly painted and look like strange gypsy wagons. The food they serve is exquisite and inexpensive. People eat their lunches standing up at the cart counters, or along the sidewalks, or take it back to their offices. The sheer number of choices are overwhelming. My son, Dan and I found ourselves walking around the blocks of carts – way more than 100 of them – and I finding myself paralyzed by having to choose one for lunch. We finally picked a Greek one with authentic gyros sandwiches – made from slices carved from a big slab of sizzling lamb, sliced red onions, Tzatziki sauce, fresh tomatoes and lettuce, folded into a hot handmade pita right off the grill. Dan ordered a Super Gyro that must have weighed 2 pounds. Total cost for both of us $10.00

Around the corner from the Greek cart was one we want to try on another day. It has a hilarious name!

Some of the choices on the menu include Escargot and Foie Gras wraps, Fish Heads, Squidfana, Prawn Baguette, Piri-Piri Chicken, and a Hot Dog. Where are you going to find things like that in Kansas?

So much to explore in this city!! The more we find, the more we want to keep discovering.

Love to you all, Joanie