3/5 -3/7/10 ECAASU weekend

This weekend my boyfriend and I made a trip down to UPenn for the ECAASU 2010 conference. The food at the conference was woefully disappointing. In our lunch break, we and some friends made our way to a korean restaurant. The portions were small and over-priced, although the owner was nice and gave us a few free dishes. My boyfriend ate most of my meal since I was hoping that maybe I'd have better luck with the green tea ice cream. Wrong. There was no green tea flavor, just an odd lemony-dish detergent sort of taste. We tried the fro-yo place next door, where once again we were disappointed. The milk chocolate flavor tasted like old cupboard, the birthday cake flavor tasted oddly of basil, and the berry-tart tasted of some Chinese fruit (the ones made into thin slices parents give to their kids in substitute of candy, or are often dried and rolled in salt) which I've never been fond of.

Unsatisfied, we decided to skip our second workshop to explore the city and hopped on a train towards the Reading Terminal Market. Upon entering, I fell in love. Because we were short on time, I didn't get to explore as much as I wanted to. We bought an espresso cupcake which was small and over-priced once again. It looked lovely, but upon biting into it, I discovered that the frosting was entirely unpleasant. I'm not too fond of buttercream frosting, but I had just bitten into mildly coffee flavored butter. My poor boyfriend ate the mouthful of butter on top while I ate the bottom of the cupcake. The cake part was delicious but there was so little of it and I had wanted really good frosting to go with it.

We saw chocolate hearts and lungs on our way out of the market which was fun for my boyfriend since he's studying to go into medicine.

It took us 5 minutes of being at the farewell reception to realize that once again the food would be disappointing. The lines for food were ridiculously long, and what little we did wait in line for was not very good. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how pasta with cream sauce, asparagus and bacon counted as Asian food unless you count Marco Polo bringing the concept of noodles back to Italy. I am a pescatarian who is slowly (and by slowly I mean progress is minute) making her way back to meat. The food at my boyfriend's college is absolutely dreadful and he was convinced that Philly cheesesteaks were vile, disgusting things (my boyfriend eats anything so if he won't eat something, you know it's that bad) until I made him try them at my college. Usually I'm not inspired to go back to meat at all, but since we drove 6 hours to go to this conference, we had to go try some cheesesteaks.

Instead of paying $20 per person to go to the after party, we hopped into a cab towards Geno's cheesesteaks. Since Geno's and Pat's are across the street from one another, we decided to try one of each. We had the American with 'wit' at Genos and the mushroom, pepper, American with 'wit' at Pat's. Finally, I was happy. I risked the comfort of my stomach to try these cheesesteaks and they were both good. We enjoyed the flavor and cut of the meat from Geno's as well as the peppers and hot sauce. We also liked the juiciness and the mushroom and peppers from Pat's. The only thing I would say is the the cheese was not prominent enough or melty enough in either. If we could create a perfect cheesesteak, it would have the flavoring and cut of meat from Geno's with the juiciness, mushrooms and peppers from Pat's with extra, gooey-melty American cheese on top. I think perhaps my boyfriend and I lean more towards Geno's for the hot peppers and hot sauce. We're both sucker's for spicy food and Geno's hot sauce added that kick that we both enjoy. All in all, going to the market and eating some cheesesteaks made the 12 hour trip (getting there and back) worth it.