And they even serve soup at the end

Making a carrot into a flute is much cooler than making one into a pipe. Not that I would know. If the above video doesn’t totally satisfy your vegetable music desires, check out this guy’s videos too.

Eating my way through not-quite-DC

The last time I was in DC I didn’t make it through my restaurant list, though I put a good dent in it. This time the first restaurant I hit was…McDonalds.

Ouch. (Really. I cut myself on a plastic knife trying to remove it from its protective plastic bag.)

Thing is, we weren’t quite in DC. We were in Crystal City, VA, pretty much just across the street from Reagan National Airport in one direction and McD’s in the other. Our presentation was in the first timeslot after lunch, and the in-hotel food options were all swarmed with fellow librarians. Eating something seemed like a better option than not eating at all, so there we were. Luckily, once we had a bit more time to explore we found some far more interesting food options just out of sight from the hotel.

One of the things I really wanted to try on this trip were pupusas. Conveniently, we found Sombrero, a “Salvatex and Peruvian” restaurant just up the street that served these tasty filled corn cakes along with fried plantains. I had one filled with cheese and loroco–a fresh, green, blandish herb I had never heard of before–and one filled with rebueltas–cheese and pork. They were quite tasty and I think they will make an appearance on our weekly menu sometime soon.

We also found some nearby Ethiopian food, cuisine a DC colleague once described to me as “the closest thing we have to our own regional food.” The restaurant we found, Harar Mesob, ended up being quite good.

Finally, I have to give a shout out to the quick lunch we grabbed from the French Meadow Bakery Cafe in the Minneapolis Airport. That’s right, the airport. Normally it’s hard to find tasty airport food, let alone stuff that you’d willingly select if you weren’t in an airport, but this place fit the bill. The menu includes organic, omnivorous, veggie, and vegan choices including fresh soups and salads, made-to-order sandwiches, and crazy looking baked goods. The next time I fly through Minneapolis I hope I have enough time to eat there again.

Food for thought: Free rice inspires free kibble

Even if you haven’t tried it yet, you’ve probably heard about FreeRice, the free, online vocabulary game that awards points in the form of grains of rice. To play, you choose the best synonyms for words like “farinaceous” or “filbert”. Every time you choose the right word, you earn 20 grains of rice and the next word is more difficult. If you miss, you don’t earn the rice for that question, but are given an easier word to try. The rice you win is paid for by the advertisers you see at the bottom of the screen as you play and is distributed through the UN World Food Program.

Unless you caught it on Central Oregon’s local news, however, you probably haven’t heard of FreeKibble. This site, started by a local 11-year-old, rewards your answer (right or wrong) to a daily trivia question about dogs with a donation of 10 pieces of kibble to the Humane Society of Central Oregon. The kibble is sponsored by local businesses, and it will be delivered to the Humane Society once a month.

Granted, winning donations through games is not the same as finding long-term solutions to any of the world’s hunger problems. If you’re going to waste time on the net though (no!) it’s probably more productive than browsing celebrity baby pictures.