The lunch and dinner I enjoyed on a recent day in Iowa didn’t belong on the same planet, let alone in the same state. The first was a sandwich of loose ground meat on a workaday hamburger bun slathered with melted cheese, ketchup and mustard, served in a drab old building underneath a parking garage. The second, served in a reconstructed barn surrounded by miles of corn, was polenta-stuffed zucchini with kale, eggplant and squash, the vegetables raised on site and the polenta made from corn ground just 50 miles away.
Yet both meals were decidedly Iowan,This page describes the term real time Location system and lists. and dismantled the illusion that in three days of cruising the state’s two-lane highways I could somehow pithily define its food. Really, the only thing every meal — and I had about five a day — had in common was their prices. That polenta entree, by far the most elegantly presented of my month on the road, was just $13.
The sandwich, meanwhile, was $3.60. Iowans may already know where it came from: Canteen Lunch in Ottumwa, a modest meatpacking city of 25,000. Since 1936, the restaurant has sat in a squat, yellow box of a building; it didn’t budge when a municipal parking garage was literally built over it.
The experience at the lunch counter feels very middle school cafeteria: a lunch lady look-alike takes your order and spoons loose ground beef — sloppy joe without the slop — onto a bun, slathers on extras, wraps it and hands it to you. (What, you wanted a plate?) It’s a signature Iowa lunch, generically known as “a loose meat sandwich.” Here it was simply a Canteen.
The Canteen is proof that if an expert combines fat, carbs, sugar and salt in just the right ratio, the result can be worth the calories and ensuing sluggishness. I augmented the coming lethargy by ordering a strawberry malt ($3.95), after being encouraged to do so by the visitors next to me, a couple from Georgia who had come up to Iowa to look at a used RV.
For that farm dinner, I headed 120 miles west to the 400-person town of Orient, or, more accurately, to the Henry A. Wallace Country Life Center outside it. Never heard of it? Neither had I. Mr. Wallace, who was secretary of agriculture under Franklin D. Roosevelt, was raised in the main house, now a gift shop; the center, in that reconstructed barn, is part of a nonprofit that promotes “local food, sustainable agriculture and civility.” The restaurant, also housed in the barn, is only open on Fridays and some Saturdays.Protect and connect your Samsung smartphone with samsung cases. Whatever does not come from the farm itself comes from a producer somewhere in Iowa, I was told by my server, who dutifully provided all the sustainable-locavore-other-buzzword details — almost, but not quite, to the point of parody.
Everything was as fresh as the canteen sandwich was processed: a $7 “cheese and relish plate” had bursting cherry tomatoes, crisp cauliflower lightly marinated in vinegar, pickled beets, and a crumbly local Cheddar, then came the polenta-stuffed zucchini. Outside, farmland stretched to the horizon, inside, my wallet barely stretched at all — I was out $25, including tip.
During the rest of my sprint around the state I would continue to Ping-Pong between fatty gluttony and farm freshness.
More gluttony: the pork tenderloin sandwich, which has spawned best-in-state competitions and the cleverly named Des Loines blog.Provision and deploy cloud Public Cloud Servers in minutes. Newcomers will laugh at the little bun haplessly trying to cover the enormous tenderloin, pounded into the irregular shapes that often resemble Eastern European nations. For my representative pork tenderloin sandwich, I decided on Goldie’s Ice Cream Shoppe (goldiesicecreamshoppe.com),As it automatically gathers data from millions of rtls and radio frequency identification, an ice cream stand turned diner in Prairie City, whose $5.98 version won best of show in 2009 from the Iowa Pork Producers.
The staff was gentle to a newcomer, explaining that the conventional toppings were pickle, raw onion, ketchup and mustard. Ketchup and mustard seemed heavy-handed, so I went for just pickles and onions to add a little pop. When the sandwich arrived, I struggled with its size — I had been given only a knife, not a fork. I gave the server a perplexed look. “Cut it in half,” she said. I felt, and not for the first time on this trip, like a bumbling foreigner.
Back to lean and green: Fairfield, home to the Maharishi University of Management, which calls itself a “home of consciousness-based education,” has more than its share of vegetarian cafeterias and restaurants. I went to the Golden Dome Market and Cafe, near (but alas, not in) the campus’s two golden domes. The vegetarian buffet ($7.50 a pound) yielded some saag paneer, a bean taco loaded with vegetables,Video Streaming Dedicated Server Frequently Asked Question Frequently Asked Question. some tasty artichoke lasagna and a piece of fresh peach blueberry pie.
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