Tag Archives: Food and drink

PAD 2/22/2013 – Seconds!

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Describe the most satisfying meal you’ve ever eaten in glorious detail.

Without a doubt the most satisfying meal has to be the first time I assembled a Boeuf Bourguignon from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. There was a huge feeling of reward as I assembled all the ingredients, cooked them all independently and then assembled them. When the dish came out of the oven it was absolutely perfect. The scent of the wine and the beef were intoxicating and the flavor of the sauce was transcendent. The entire thing takes hours to make, but the reward was very much worth every moment, even worth going so far to not crowd the mushrooms and to individually hand-pat dry each chunk of beef before adding it to the cookpot. There were three distinct callouts to other recipes including braised pearl onions and butter-browned mushrooms that all had to have a hand in creating the final dish. There was a certain delight in preparing something as simple as egg noodles to serve as the substrate for this meal – the combination of the breathtaking complex paired with mindless simplicity really spoke to me. In later iterations of this meal I varied the substrate and discovered that I liked it more if the stew was resting in an island surrounded by mashed potatoes. Of course its a meal that isn’t meant to be eaten if you are on a diet – so you either have to live with the consequences or run around the block a couple times to burn off your caloric transgressions.

I’m glad I tackled it. I can’t do it without MAFC, but I know I can do it. Since it’s one the most complicated recipes out there there is a fair bit of pride in how well my first shot went. I’ve done it several more times and each time I think about sides that could compliment the dish. If I wanted to go over the top I could prepare a delightful Risotto while the stew cooks in the oven. That would be even more of a feat since I’d have pretty much every cooking tool in my house working all at once. It would be a gustatory tour de force but at that point you’d need an even stronger wine to pair with it and you’d need to also roast some asparagus on the side to serve as a counterpoint to the smooth richness of the Risotto and the delight of the Boeuf Bourguignon.

If I wanted to be really mean, I would pair the Boeuf Bourguignon with Grilled Cheese Sandwiches. That’s another contrasting pair that I love. The very high with the very low. It makes me laugh heartily.

Superbowl XLV

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Anyone who knows me knows full well that my attitude to organized sports is careless at best and massively abusive at worst. I take a lot of my cues from my personal hero, George Carlin, especially for his points that good sportsmanship and competition isn’t where it’s at, it’s loss of property, loss of limb, and loss of life where the real drive is. Anyways, since I care not a whit for the players, their teams, or the entire endeavor really it came down to the commercials. After all, the game is just a sweaty grunty window-dressing for the real game – that is, drawing the millions of people who watch to the advertisers. The ad men spend millions to put their very best spots on TV. So after a while, the game becomes a foolish excuse and people look for whats in-between, they look for the ads.

What did Superbowl XLV Ads have in common? Ultra-violence. We’re talking Clockwork Orange level of abuse and mistreatment. The Pepsi Ad where a woman throws a full can of soda at ANOTHER PERSONS HEAD, the Doritos Ad where one man licks the fingers of another, then tears the pants off yet another and fetishistically goes Japanese-businessman on them, all the way out to the extremis, which would be Bridgestone’s ad where a cube-drone attempts to head a Reply-All Email off at the pass by hurting a great number of people, Wow.

After watching the ads I was filled with a kind of cheerful violence, if I had watched ‘Taken’ right afterwards I would have likely been trembling with the urge to pull people’s heads off and scream at the corpses.

So, what do we learn from Superbowl XLV? That when we are at the market buying Pepsi we should have helmets. When we are buying Doritos we should have gloves and secure pants and a rape-whistle, and when dealing with Bridgestone perhaps a taser, a handgun, or an aluminum baseball bat. The central theme is “buy our products and something horrible will happen to you at random”. So… avoid Pepsi, Doritos, and Bridgestone.

Save yourselves. 🙂

State Burger Review

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Earlier today we did lunch at State Burger in Portage Michigan. We were already progressing down Westnedge Avenue doing other errands and while trying to figure out where to go to lunch we remembered seeing this place from our earlier stop at Kumo’s Hibachi Restaurant which is just around the corner of the same strip-mall building.

State Burger, which has a facebook page serves burgers, chicken, fish, and competently good Hot Dogs. The arrangement is a pretty standard burger joint and today they had three people manning the store. The order person, the cook, and someone we both pegged as the owner. Everyone was doing their job very well and our food took not-longer-than-we-expected time wise. This place has a really great thing going and we both agreed that their formula makes it damn near impossible to screw up, that food made with fresh real ingredients by people who are doing their best is a sure-fire way to succeed. Even if you botch everything and burn the food, it’s still quite good.

We were both pleased by the food, the service and you certainly can’t beat the price. Scott was so impressed that he thinks he could make it a regular lunch place when he’s free from Barnes & Nobles since it’s well within walking distance, about two hundred yards from his usual stop, the Pizza Hut. We both commented that skipping out on PIzza Hut for this place was probably the best idea when it comes to healthier food. Between the Pizza Hut and State Burger is Taco Bell. We were laughing at the recent misfortune that Taco Bell had been on the business end of, that people were questioning the notion that Taco Bells meat actually has any meat in it. For all that kerfuffle, it’s pretty much clear to us that you can skip both frankenfood destinations and find better food just a few yards away.

Erbelli’s Pizza

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Today for Comixlunch, Scott and I decided to go visit a new-for-us restaurant in Kalamazoo called Erbelli’s. We ran into Max at Fanfare Entertainment (our local comic book shop) and after we bought our comics we took a trip all the way across town to where Erbelli’s is. I already knew they had excellent Pizza due to a surprise lunch thrown for the staff by our local management at work so I expected this to be top-notch.

My expectations were generally met. The pizza that Erbelli’s makes is incredibly good and currently occupies my #1 choice for Pizza anywhere. Their restaurant is unusually organized and I believe it was due to an expansion they made after they “made a better mousetrap”. The “original” shop is very small, quite literally a foyer jammed against a large pizza kitchen. The expansion is a cutaway doorway between the original strip-mall space and its adjacent space. The dominating feature of the adjacent space is the bar, it’s immense! Nothing about Erbelli’s is confusing or difficult to manage. The restaurant has some wear-and-tear issues that come with any place that’s been open as long as they have been and really those didn’t detract from the experience, they were just a part of the ‘atmosphere’ of the place. We went for their lunch buffet, from 11am to 2pm, about $8 per person. Everything about the buffet experience is customer-driven, you get your own food, you tend your own plates, and you tend your own drinks. For what I spent and what I got, it was an absolute steal. Truly exceptional pizza with every part of the experience in my hands, the way I like it.

There was only one problem with Erbelli’s and it’s not really a showstopper, more of a hip-bump adjustment and that is, there isn’t any labeling present on the buffet layout. You don’t know what Pizza is laid out on the buffet and you pretty much have to look-and-see to figure out what is what. It’s something that is exceptionally easy to fix, just need some cardstock, an inkjet printer, and about half-an-hour and anyone could make little disposable tent-cards which would really polish off the entire experience.

When I say Erbelli’s has good pizza, it’s a massive understatement. It’s the best pizza I’ve had in my life and I prefer it more than any other Pizza anywhere (with a normal exception to NYC Pizza, but that’s nearly in a different category altogether!). I can’t recommend them enough, and to that end, here is their contact information and address. If you like pizza, you owe it to yourself to go and enjoy what they have to offer:

6214 Stadium Drive
Kalamazoo, MI
375-0408

-or-

8342 Portage Road
Portage, MI
327-0200

Kalamazoo Beer Exchange

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Last night, December 21st, 2010 we got together with our friends and headed to a new restaurant on Water Street in downtown Kalamazoo. This old building was District 211 first, a restaurant that served really odd food at really high prices, then it became Charlie Fosters, which was a smoky Chicago faux-mobster dive and that too failed. In its current incarnation it’s Kalamazoo Beer Exchange.

This new restaurant has a very nice interior and thanks to the statewide smoking ban actually is pleasant to enter. The wait staff really aren’t that interested in welcoming new diners to the restaurant, one may think that they are simply overworked, but we noticed them chatting and ignoring a build-up of new diners at the front door, so take that for what it’s worth. Once we were seated we got our menus, which were fine. This establishment serves bar-food and bistropub food, an odd high-brow/low-brow mix which is cute and innocuous. When you sit down the focus of the bar area is the market-ticker display, a giant flat panel television with the prices of every carried draft beer, and they have about 30 of them available. We asked for a menu of their beer provisions and they didn’t have a menu for their drafts. So you pretty much just had the brand and the name to go by. The gimmick is not readily apparent at first glance and it took a verification question to our waitress to figure out what it all meant. Draft beer prices are adjusted every 15 minutes by the popularity of the beer. So if Bud Light sells a LOT, the price goes up. If beers don’t sell well at all, the price drops. So each 15 minute cycle you could pay $4.25 for a 22-ounce glass of beer, or $3.25 a bit later. The gimmick is cute and does set them apart, but it eventually does lead to irritation as the popularity-feedback-loop means that value is pretty much out the window – a beer isn’t expensive because it’s good beer, a beer is expensive because townies make it one way or another. Case in point, Bud Light was 4.25 and Labatts was 3.25. Ohhh-kay.

As for the food, that was the biggest heartbreak for this place. The burger was top-notch, really well done. The soup was okay, I could have taken or left it either way, but the one thing that blew my mind and ruined the entire experience was the value-added french fries. That’s right, you have to pay an extra dollar to get fries instead of potato chips. So I was forewarned that the fries were overseasoned before and that perhaps they had corrected the problem. Well, obviously not. The dollar-more fries were HORRIBLE. Overseasoned was the weakest description possible for what was slung on a plate. The salt level was beyond anything that I had previously experienced. If I was responsible for perpetrating those french fries and charging money for it, I would be living in a constant fear of being lynched.

That being said, our first experience was a massively bad one. The gimmick is worth a chuckle at first but eventually gets very old very quickly. The food suffers from those unforgivable abominations they call French Fries, and the cost, $32 for 2 people is too high for what you get. We won’t ever return to this restaurant and it’s one of many downtown that we regard as never-agains. It ranks up there with Food Dance in over-expensive pretension trying to masquerade as anything but bottom-of-the-barrel dining. If the initial experience doesn’t drive you off, then either gastroenteritis or kidney failure will.

the Oatiest Oatmeal Cookies Recipe

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By popular demand, this is the best way to share this recipe with friends and family. Enjoy!

Oatiest Oatmeal Cookie
Recipe courtesy Alton Brown, 2010

Prep Time:15 minInactive Prep Time:–Cook Time:12 min
Level:
Easy
Serves:
3 dozen cookies
Ingredients
16 ounces old fashioned rolled oats
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon kosher salt
10 ounces unsalted butter, room temperature
6 ounces dark brown sugar
3 1/2 ounces granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
8 ounces raisins
Directions
Heat the oven to 375 degrees F. Spread oats in a single layer on half-sheet pans and bake until lightly toasted, about 20 minutes. Remove the oats from the oven and let cool for 2 to 3 minutes.

Grind 8 ounces of the toasted oats in a food processor for 3 minutes or until the consistency of whole-wheat flour. Add the baking powder, cinnamon and salt and pulse to combine.

Combine the butter, brown sugar and granulated sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer, and mix on medium speed until light in color, about 3 minutes. Stop once to scrape down the sides of the bowl. Reduce the mixer speed to the lowest speed, add the egg and vanilla and mix to combine. Stop to scrape down the sides of the bowl, if necessary.

With the mixer on the lowest speed, slowly add the oat mixture, the remaining 8 ounces of oats and the raisins until just combined. Stop once to scrape down the sides of the bowl. Scoop the dough with a 1-ounce ice cream scoop or disher onto parchment-lined half-sheet pans, leaving 2 inches between each mound. Bake the cookies for 12 minutes, rotating the pans after 6 minutes, until the cookies begin to brown around the edges. Remove the pans from the oven and let the cookies cool on the pans for 2 minutes. Transfer the cookies to a cooling rack to cool completely.

Printed from FoodNetwork.com on Fri Nov 19 2010© 2010 Television Food Network, G.P. All Rights Reserved

SmashBurger Kalamazoo – A Return

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Last Friday my friends Justin and Jeramiah asked to try SmashBurger Kalamazoo. For them it was the first time, for Scott and I it was our return. I promised that I would give SmashBurger Kalamazoo another shot around September 11th, 2010. I was a little late in getting back to the restaurant to give it another try. This was tounge-in-cheek because a beloved family member of mine sent my blog entry to the restaurant management company and they responded quickly, urging us to return and give SmashBurger Kalamazoo another shot.

Upon our return we dwelled for a brief few moments in the foyer to the entrance while our friends regarded the menu items. After we all made up our minds, we walked into the restaurant. The order process was acceptable, the person behind the counter was stumbling and trying to cope with our order but got it in successfully. In comparison to our previous visit there were some notable changes:

  • Fountain Service was at 100%
  • Restaurant was not absolutely packed.
  • Manager was not bounding like a billiard ball.
  • Servers were not wandering aimlessly asking everyone what they ordered, the numbering system is working.
  • The hamburgers were rested properly and did not fragment or run with juice.

That being said, quite an improvement. However there were some lingering problems and one I did not detect until this last visit. We were dining with my dear friend Jeramiah, who I trust completely when it comes to food preparation. He detected it before I did, and that is that the French Fries had a different taste to them. They were fried, but they carried an odd flat/dull taste along with them. Jeramiah told us that what we tasted was what happens when you deep fat fry french fries in shortening instead of a true plant oil, like Peanut. It wasn’t unpleasant, just different.

In the end we couldn’t detect any failures in SmashBurger itself on our visit, our only point of surprise was the price, again. For Scott and myself it came to $18.57. For Jeramiah and Justin it came to $21.52. I polled the table and posed the same question to them that I did the last time: Comparing SmashBurger Kalamazoo to Culvers Kalamazoo, which one would you choose and why? The answer was unanimously for Culvers, and the reasons were “better food” and “cheaper prices”. The prices for what we got were really remarkably upsetting, still.

Of course, for due diligence I must also state that Jeramiah became extremely ill the next day and had to miss work because he was very ill. The illness was most likely foodborne as it affected his digestion. I can’t pin anything on SmashBurger as none of the other of us got sick, but my trust in a restaurant is savaged when I or someone I know gets sick from eating at a place. Once bitten, never again.

That being said, we are done with SmashBurger Kalamazoo. We will never return to this restaurant and we won’t include it when we are thinking about places to go when we are hungry. The food is not very compelling for the price and the prices themselves are too high.

Entertainingly, the people who own and run SmashBurger Kalamazoo also run at least two other “Food Traps”, FireBowl Cafe and Wine Loft. While I haven’t been to FireBowl Cafe and wouldn’t comment on the quality or price, I did attend Wine Loft’s inaugural opening and I have not been back since. The food quality follows the design that we see in SmashBurger Kalamazoo, meh food for unacceptably high prices. Seeing that two out of the three properties this holding firm own are off-limits, it makes it a handy guide to figure out whatever else they own and avoid that out-of-hand. We can simply assume it’s not very good for too much money, and instead patronize other establishments that are better and worthy.

Eggs

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The recent news of the Salmonella-tainted Eggs is bouncing around the 24 hour news cycle. My mom told me about Davidson’s Pasteurized Eggs, they are still raw, but rendered completely safe to consume because they’ve been treated with heat, not enough to coagulate the yolks and set the whites but enough to kill any potential infections of Salmonella that might be lurking within the egg. I am of course wanting to explore the MAFC, and a good portion of that is mastering the Sauces section, for which under-temperature eggs are a fundamental component.

I discovered that I could pasteurize my own eggs by raising an amount of water to 150 degrees and holding eggs suspended in this water for 5 minutes. To overcome this annoying inconvenience I thought I would write to my local supermarket chain, Meijers. I suggested that they carry Davidson’s Pasteurized Eggs and basically got a rebuff throwaway message from a Meijers representative who claimed that none of the eggs that Meijers sells was involved in the recall. As it may be, Meijers, that your eggs weren’t recalled does not necessarily mean that they are safe. Pasteurized eggs are safe. I would pay more for eggs that I knew were safe so I could feel okay with exploring the Sauce section of the MAFC. I can’t really just target Meijers, as WalMart, D&W, and Hardings, all the markets in our area do not carry pasteurized eggs. This isn’t the first time that I’ve contacted Meijers, so far it’s the third request I’ve made over the years for products that would do very well in our area. I’ve decided that contacting Meijers is a fool’s errand.

I suppose that if enough young and elderly die of Salmonella poisoning then Michigan will legislate to force egg pasteurization and Meijers will turn a tidy 180 and then aggressively pursue and market it to their customers. What bothers me deep down is that expanding customers choice for truly safe foods isn’t on the radar for any of the local food marketers in our region. Then again, I’ve said time and time again that restaurants and food markets have no interest in public health or safety – filthy food from monstrous sources is perfectly fine as long as the balance sheet remains in the black. Because I don’t trust anything I buy from Meijers, D&W, Hardings or WalMart it is important to cook everything thoroughly, select against raw foods, and when there is no choice but to buy raw foods from these providers, make a weak bleach solution to sanitize what you bought because nobody is going to care for your health but you, yourself. I couldn’t imagine having a live-in elderly family member or an infant, that we don’t have more of a body-count from tainted and monstrously sourced foods is an absolute blessing.

Casa Bolero – Mexican Tapas

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Casa Bolero in Kalamazoo MI is a quaint cozy restaurant serving tapas style food. Having to wait for our tables was the only annoyance, but understandable.

The food is delivered on small plates and I had chicken falutas and chicken enchiladas. The flavors are clear and bright and presentation is top-notch. The price per plate ranges from 6 to 11 dollars. It is a very good value for the money for upscale downtown dining. I give it a 8/10.

The sharing of plates is a delight and this restaurant delivers. The staff is bright and conscientious and the interior is very pleasant.

The desserts, flan and key lime tort are toe-curlingly delightful.

There are only two issues I can see, the first is that the tortilla chips aren’t very good, but they are consistently bad which makes me think that they are meant to be this way and i’m off. The second problem was that one of the bench seats was besmirched by some stray BBQ sauce. It should have been bussed properly before we sat down. These are the only problems, and they aren’t anywhere important enough to truly complain over, so they only get a 2 point ding on their score.

SmashBurger – Kalamazoo, MI

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Today, on August 11th, 2010 a new burger joint called SmashBurger opened on West Main Road in Kalamazoo, MI. Scott, Craig, and I decided to try them out for dinner, along with a fair amount of the rest of Kalamazoo, they were very very busy.

I had a Classic SmashBurger, Scott put together one of his own featuring sauteed mushrooms and onions and Craig had a Michigan Olive Burger. For sides, Scott had the classic french fries, and I had deep-fried Dill pickles.

We walked into a clean and orderly restaurant with a very compact and on-first-glance well designed approach and order area, we ordered our food, the total for Scott and my meal came to just under $20. Craig’s came out to just about $10. After we ordered we were given a number flag that went with our order and wandered away. The first failure hit then, we weren’t given cups that went along with our order and had to ask for them, this isn’t anything out of the ordinary as we have to do that for a few restaurants in the area. Once we had our cups, that’s when we ran into our first problem. The fountain service is to the far left and it is not at all obvious where the lids are kept. I walked up to the fountain depot and already the Low Ice alarm light was blinking. I put my 16oz cup under the Coke Zero spigot and tried it, the Coke Zero sprayed horizontally and covered my hand with mix and a big carbonated squeal. Only when I looked much closer did I discover that there was an “Out Of Order” label that was printed using black ink on a clear plastic label and attached to a dark piece of plastic just under the Coke Zero display. I got slightly vexed and switched to Diet Coke instead, which was just as well. With my hands covered in Coke Zero mix and what amounted to fizzy club soda I walked back to the bathrooms. What I expected was a standard restaurant bathroom setup, Men/Women, big enough for multiple users at once. SmashBurger’s bathrooms were single use rooms and there was a line of 4 men doing the pee-pee dance, I didn’t need to wash my hands THAT badly. As I walked to the bathrooms I was amazed at how much space was wasted in the long hallways to the bathroom area, whoever designed the layout to that restaurant did them a disservice.

Once I returned to the table we waited for our meals to be walked out to us. It quickly struck us that nobody was really paying any attention to the number-flag system for the orders and they were wandering around asking people what they ordered and seeing if it matched what they were carrying. Scott and I got our food first, then after a few minutes Craig got his order. I immediately had a problem with what I saw in my order, The Burger I ordered was delivered open-faced and the patty/cheese combo was wedged underneath the tureen that held my side-dish. When I moved the tureen I saw that some of the cheese was stuck to it and came away from the burger. So right from the start my food was smushed up against the outside of another serving dish and I had to fight down a little bit of irritation, it didn’t *have* to be that way. On to the burger itself, it had it’s own problems. The SmashBurger Burger that I received was assembled hastily and the burger began to immediately fragment as I started to manipulate it on the serving dish it came on, trying to pick it up. As I started to eat I noticed not a dripping of meat juices but a veritable raining / deluge of juices running out. SmashBurger cheats. They sear and sling, the meat doesn’t have time to dry out since it’s delivered in a heartbeat right off the grill. As I ate, I had to lean very far forward so the gushing juices could land in the serving dish and not against my shirt or in my lap. As I ate, the meat slid to one side and the vegetation slid to the other side. This was because the burger was sent out of the kitchen open-faced. The meat didn’t have time to melt the cheese and help the vegetation stay in place. As I ate it was mostly the hamburger first, and then at the end a bread-covered salad. Once I was done speed-eating the burger (since it was gushing juices so very much) I reorganized my dishes and tried the fried pickles.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a salt hound. I love salt, I can’t get enough of salt and I always season everything to my liking and it’s always proper. Even I, as a salt hound, found the fried pickles to be shockingly salty. The taste was SSSAAALLLTTT pickle dill.

After I finished my meal and my drink I got to thinking about how everything was organized in this restaurant. There are no “Meals” or “Baskets”, everything is a-la-carte, you get a dollar discount on the sides if you order a sandwich, but that’s it. I started polling the table for opinions and Scott was very displeased and Craig was shrugging along with the rest of us. What we got wasn’t $20 worth of food, at most it was $12 worth of food. SmashBurger is in direct competition with Culvers, and from what we saw tonight SmashBurger will not be able to compete with Culvers. I posed a question to the table, “If you had a half-tank of gas, as we do now, and you were driving from downtown, would you stop here and have dinner or would you drive on another 5 minutes and go down 9th Street to the Culvers by the I-94 interchange?” Everyone was in agreement that Culvers would be the preferred destination by far.

Earlier today we stopped at Culvers for lunch and I had a vastly superior burger and fries, Scott got a burger and chili-cheese fries and the total was $15.03 for the entire meal, with fountain drinks. Culvers superiority coupled with it’s relative inexpensiveness in comparison with SmashBurger is really damning.

On our way out of the restaurant we were effectively trapped and prevented in our leaving by a SmashBurger employee who took it upon themselves to begin spraying the glass door with Windex and wiping it down. There is only one door, and there we stood for about 30 seconds while we waited for the SmashBurger employee to conclude their needless glass cleaning task. It stunned me, that they elect to have someone wiping down the glass doors during the massively busy dinner crowd, just getting in the way, preventing people from entering or leaving. Since this was the ONLY DOOR in or out I did feel a slight shine of irritation that I couldn’t exit until they were done doing a needless task.

The manager of the establishment was wandering around like a lost puppy bumping into customers and tables, during the mad dinner press he was bounding from table to table, getting in the way. He asked how everything was and Scott and Craig were fine, I was busy chewing. By the time I was done he had bounded off to another table. What I had to say wouldn’t have made him feel very good anyways, so I kept my peace.

SmashBurger enjoyed an insanely busy opening day, the honeymoon period in it’s prime. After our experience we decided that we would give SmashBurger one more shot, and we’ll do so on September 11th, 2010 – one calendar month from now. Scott mentioned “If they are still open by then…”

Then once we were in the car, I asked everyone for their ranking scale and the score they gave SmashBurger Kalamazoo. Scott gave them 2/5. Craig gave them 2.5/5. My score is 1/5.

One thing that struck me was, SmashBurger’s grand opening could have been far more successful if they had tried a soft open a week earlier with invited guests. “Please come to our new Restaurant and have a meal on us, critical feedback is greatly appreciated” and that would have caught the lid problem, the label problem, and most likely the salt problem.

I don’t see SmashBurger being very successful, I see the competition walking away with their money. There are so many other better places to eat lunch or dinner with similar themes. Culvers, Red Robin, and even Sonic are better than SmashBurger. I can agree with Scott, if they are around in a month, I’ll be surprised.