It is a cloudy, gusty Saturday night in the Hawkeye state. We are watching the movie No Reservations, and I am not very into it, so I thought I'd write a bit. It is Memorial Day weekend, but we are not doing anything too exciting, really. After work last night, we went to the zoo for a special members event. The Des Moines zoo is nice, but pretty small, and normally lacking elephants. Well, for two months they have "borrowed" some elephants, a mother and a baby. Last night was the special preview of the elephants. We saw the elephants, fed the animals in the petting zoo, and rode the train. It was a nice evening, and Asher was extremely excited about the lions.
Today was supposed to be sunny, but we woke up to thunder, rain and wind. We had been planning to go to the farmer's market (now known to us as the city market), and decided to go despite the ugly weather. I bought some pork ribs there last week from a farm that grows their own feed, and sells pork and chickens out of a minivan. Last Sunday, I BBQed the ribs, and they were absolutely phenomenal (if I do say so myself). I wanted to buy more from them this morning. When we got to the market, it was pretty cold, and the wind was howling between the buildings. Boxes, vegetables, and part of tents were blowing around the streets. The meat lady was even out of ribs! It was disappointing, but we got some good Dutch Letters and some bad breakfast burritos, and got out of there before everything blew away.
Let me tell you about Dutch letters. They may have them outside of Iowa, but probably not in Holland. They are HUGE in Iowa. Every public gathering has competing Dutch letter stands. A Dutch letter is an S-shaped tubular, flaky pastry with almond paste on the inside. They are delicious!
Sometime I'll talk a bit about some other interesting Iowa food specialties we have discovered. That would include Maid-Rites, Steak D'Burgo, pickle wraps, walking tacos, and tenderloins!
This afternoon, we did something we haven't done since moving to Iowa. We left Asher with a babysitter and went to a movie... a real movie in a theater and everything! We saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I'll spare the review (my fingers hurt from typing out the whole title), but it was a lot of fun to go to the movies.
After the movie, we decided to take advantage of the wind, and fly some kites in the park by our house. We had a great time!!
Asher flying his kite, with the towering north face of the Waukee sledding
hill in the background
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