Tag: Buffalo

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A random observation

Back in July, we had in Buffalo a fairly long string of days that were cooler than usual, and as a rule it never really got sweltering during the summer. The general consensus seemed to be that the summer’s weather sucked, and one sentiment I heard a lot went along the lines of: “Gee, what a cold summer. Global warming my ass!”

Flash forward to now, when we’ve had a November that’s been warmer than any I or anyone else can remember. Temps have been consistently above 50 degrees, with frequent trips into the 60s, for several weeks now and according to the weather reports, this pattern is unlikely to change anytime in the next week. Where snow at some point in October is usually the norm here, it has yet to snow at all this year in Buffalo.

And yet I’ve not heard a single person say anything to the effect of this extended warm spell being a positive indicator of global warming. I find that interesting.

(Of course, short term local weather trends do not actually indicate anything one way or the other about global warming, but the general psychology is interesting here.)

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Fallen Heroes

For me, the greatest heroes in American public life are firefighters and EMTs. These are people whose job is simply to do whatever they need to do to save lives, no matter whose. They charge into terribly dangerous situations, often almost by reflex, in order to save people. There is no occupation which I consider more admirable — and there are a lot of admirable occupations out there.

Two Buffalo firefighters died this morning in a fire. The building was a deli in one of Buffalo’s poorest neighborhoods. The fire was in the middle of the night, and the two firefighters in question, Lt. Charles ‘Chip’ McCarthy and Firefighter Jonathan Croom, apparently had the floor collapse from under their feet. Reports are that they were looking for someone whom they thought was trapped in the building.

They died doing what firefighters do: being heroic and almost certainly not even questioning why they were doing it. I’ll bet that if you asked them, they’d have shrugged and said, It’s what firefighters do..

Bless their souls, forever.

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How to insult Alan Bedenko

Alan Bedenko is apparently amused at the low-quality of insults directed his way by the local libertarian whom he enjoys taunting, so it seems to me that what’s needed are better insults. Here are some trial-balloons for Alan’s perusal. Let’s see if these hit the mark!

:: Alan Bedenko wouldn’t know a good pizza if it bit him on the arse.

:: Alan Benenko is too provincial and needs to see more of the world than his subdivision in Clarence.

:: Alan Bedenko’s dream car is a Ford Pinto.

:: Alan Bedenko would know more if he’d quit drooling on the pin-ups of Sarah Palin and read a bit.

Anybody else?

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Tasting Buffalo

Yesterday the Family and I made our annual trek into downtown Buffalo for the Taste of Buffalo festival. For those not from ’round here, this is a two-day food festival at which dozens of restaurants and purveyors of food set up shop and offer small sample-sized portions of their menus. Or rather, it used to mainly involve sample sizes; nowadays, many of the participating venues are offering either full-size portions or something between “sample size” and “full size”. The result is that we came home much more full than we have in the past.

There’s something of a balancing act to Taste of Buffalo. On the one hand, you want to try new things because you can attend year after year and never eat everything. On the other hand, you have old favorite dishes that you want to have year after year. So it was that we had the same slices of white pizza that we’ve had the last three years, and the same Caribbean Jerk Chicken that we’ve had the last eight years, and the same Italian ice for the Daughter and the same Anderson’s ice cream for us that we’ve had for the last however-many years. But on the other side of the ledger, we had one joint’s fried calimari (The Wife and I love us some calimari), another joint’s ribs, and yet another joint’s roasted turkey legs. (Of course, the turkey legs may not count as we always have those at the Sterling Renaissance Faire, and as fun as they are, a turkey leg’s pretty much a turkey leg.) We also had the Chicken Wing Soup from Danny’s, which The Daughter continues to pronounce as not quite as good as my Chicken Wing Soup. Huzzah!

The other thing different this year was the weather. In years past, Taste of Buffalo has tended to land on the first really hot weekend of the summer, but for some reason, this summer is stubbornly cooler than usual. (Fine by me; I hate hot weather.) Yesterday, though, the weather started out downright cruddy, with storms barreling through Buffalo during the first couple hours of the festival. We went down an hour later than usual, and we still got rained on quite a bit, despite our umbrellas. The rain stopped after we’d been there about an hour, and then it was merely overcast for a while, and eventually that, too, cleared on out. The nice effect of the weather was that it kept the crowd size down. The Taste can be immensely crowded when the weather is good, so it ended up being a lot nicer to attend yesterday, once the poor weather had vanished. It certainly cut down on a lot of the dumb behavior of Taste attendees. I also didn’t notice any homeless people, who are usually haunting the peripheries of the Taste for begging purposes. Also, the last couple of years, one particular street corner has been the haunt of a fire-and-brimstone preacher dude, but I didn’t see him, either.

In other thoughts, when I was looking for someplace to refill the water bottles we’d brought with us, I ended up inside Buffalo City Hall for the first time. I was of two minds of what I saw of the interior of the building: it’s impressive enough, but it’s really dark and grim in there, isn’t it? Wow. The main interior has very high ceilings of stone and marble, with not a whole lot of light coming from the electric fixtures hanging from those ceilings. It was nice to see that big new building going up, though; they’re erecting a new Federal courthouse in downtown Buffalo. New construction in downtown always makes me happy, even if directly opposite the new building is the Statler Tower, which is to be auctioned in August after the last owner, some Brit who sailed into town with lots of promises of spreading money around, ended up leaving without spreading any of that money. Oh well, life goes on in Buffalo, doesn’t it?

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Winyum

WNYMedia.net has been around for a while, under several different incarnations. At first the site seemed to be a hub for Western New York area bloggers, but as it grew it became apparent that the powers-that-be over there envisioned something bigger than a mere blogging hub; they wanted to become an all-purpose online media entity, with varying styles of content over and above mere blogging. They’ve relaunched several times (the less said about the brown background, the better), and they’ve just relaunched again, with a much improved look and organization on the main page. They’ve also allied themselves with two other area media entities, alt-weekly paper Artvoice and a local radio station. This is the first incarnation of WNYM that really starts to look like what they’ve been working toward for a long time. Congrats to Mark Odien and company!

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Chicken Wing Soup

UPDATE 11-10-10: The most recent revision of this recipe is here. Check it out!


chicken wing soup VII, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Denizens of Buffalo’s Southtowns may have eaten at a popular restaurant near Ralph Wilson Stadium called Danny’s (there’s also a location out by the airport), which is a really nifty place to eat — they’ve got the typical local menu of sandwiches, burgers, fish fry, steaks, and the like. They also have a soup and salad bar that is extremely popular. Now, the salad bar itself isn’t anything spectacular — just comforting typical salad bar stuff, right down to the deep-fried rice noodles — but the soups are terrific, especially the Chicken Wing Soup, which is downright legendary in these parts. It’s literally like eating Buffalo-style chicken wings with a spoon. Uncanny.

Well, I figured that the stuff can’t be that hard to make, right? It’s not that complicated-tasting of a soup, so I decided to give it my best shot. I did a bit of Googling, and I found one recipe that looks quite good, but that recipe basically involves a milk-and-sour cream base, whereas I was pretty sure that the stuff at Danny’s uses a broth or stock of some kind, even though it does have a creamy texture. So I made it up myself, and here’s how I did it.

Ingredients:

1 lb chicken breast meat
6 tbs butter
6 tbs flour
Dash pepper
1 onion, diced
2 stalks celery, diced
4 cups chicken stock
1 cup milk
1 cup sour cream
Lots of Frank’s Red Hot Sauce (use to taste)

First, I cooked the chicken meat. I had some breast tenders that I cut into bite-sized chunks; then I seasoned these with salt and pepper and tossed them into my soup pot to cook in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Once the chicken was nicely browned, I transferred it to the crockpot, whereupon I doused the chicken with a liberal helping of the Frank’s Red Hot and let it sit while I made the liquid base for the soup.

OK, back to the soup pot. Step one: make a roux. I melted the six tablespoons of butter in the pot, and then added the flour and ground pepper a bit at a time, stirring constantly for a few minutes to make a blond roux. When the roux was the color of caramel, I threw in my diced onions and celery and sauteed those veggies until they were moderately browned and tender. This took about three or four minutes.

At this point, I added the chicken stock at once and turned up the heat, to slowly bring the stock to a boil. Once it was nice and hot (about ten minutes) I added the milk and sour cream, in order to create a nice creamy texture to the soup. Then I started dumping in liberal amounts of Frank’s Red Hot. This I suppose one does to taste, although one should be careful, since in my experience, spicy dishes tend to get spicier as they age in the fridge over a day or two. I got it nicely spicy, though, and then I poured the whole shebang into the crock pot over the chicken, gave all a stir, and then put the lid on. With the crock pot set on “Low”, I then walked away for three hours.

The pic above is what it looked like when I dished it up and added my garnish of garlic croutons. The taste? I loved it! Really good. I couldn’t be happier with this maiden effort, although I do have some notions for next time:

:: I think I’d prefer my chicken to have a more shredded texture, so I think next time I’ll roast a couple of whole chicken breasts and then shred the meat before tossing it into the pot. I only used the breast tenders because that’s what I had at hand. I suppose you could use any leftover chicken, huh? This might be a good way to use the leftover meat from a rotisserie bird.

:: I know I said to be careful with the hot sauce, but I don’t think I added enough. Next time, more is going into the pot. I might try using the bottle of Anchor Bar Wing Sauce I’ve had in my cupboard for a year, too.

:: I’m not sure if the soup was thick enough. I may make more roux next time for greater thickness.

:: And I can’t remember for the life of me if the soup at Danny’s has potato in it! Now I have to go eat there sometime and figure that out.

So there’s my initial formula for Chicken Wing Soup. It’s not exactly like Danny’s, but I think it’s a good starting point. Give it a try!

(I’ve posted photos of the soup-making process on Flickr, here.)

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Good morning, Mr. Phelps


Vigil 192ab, originally uploaded by ny_lucy.

Alan posted about the reception received the other day that greeted the representatives of the Westboro Baptist Church when they showed up to protest the services for the victims of the Continental Airlines plane crash. Nice to see that these nitwits got nowhere with their shenanigans, thanks to lots of local people who showed up to basically marginalize them and make them invisible. Kind of like the people in the photo above, which includes…my parents!

There they are, at far right. Mom’s in the red overcoat, and Dad’s beside her, with the ballcap, looking off down the street at something. Cool!

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A modest suggestion

Alan reports that the creeps of the Westboro Baptist Church — the creeps who like to show up at military funerals bearing placards that read things like “Thank God for 9-11-01”, because it’s all God’s punishment of the US for, I guess, not rounding up all of its gay citizens and stoning them to death en masse — are planning to bring their unique brand of protestery to the memorial services for the people killed in last week’s crash of Continental Flight 3107. Most people seem to think that ignoring them is the best approach, but I think it would be funny if about a dozen locals made up some placards of their own, in the identical style of the Westboro folks, with messages of a completely nonsensical nature printed on them, and then just walk up and start milling around right next to, or even right in the midst of, the Westboro folks. The placards could say things like “Beware the mind control pizza!” or “All bow down before BACON CAT!” or “My hovercraft is full of eels!”

I just think this kind of humorous approach might neuter these twits a bit, and maybe even get under their skin a bit. Of course, such an approach might detract from the solemnity of the event, but I think it would be a funny way to deal with these nitwits one of these days.

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Hey, WNED

On the off chance anyone from WNED, Buffalo’s classical music station, reads this: this sort of thing does not predispose me to giving money to WNED, something I had actually been considering doing. Now I think I’ll just buy a pizza instead, or maybe get that wireless router I’ve been considering.

John Landis always came on the radio when I was getting off work, and I enjoyed listening to his show. He was knowledgeable and always conveyed a great love of classical music. I can only assume that his termination had something to do with the fact that he’d been there for a long time and thus was probably making more money than some of the less-tenured hosts. If that is the case, I would hope that the WNED brass note that the “Let’s fire the ones who have been around the longest and therefore make the most money” strategy didn’t work out so well for Circuit City.

Anyway, best wishes to Mr. Landis, and hopes that he lands on his feet in these times when so many people are hoping to land on their feet.

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