Foodgeek Blog

Good morning, foodies.  Having the day off today, and still being up first thing in the morning, I decided to make myself a nice breakfast.

I recently discovered the secret to making the most delicious, knock-your-socks-off, amazing fried potatoes every time:  It’s onion and garlic, which I guess isn’t that surprising in the grand scheme of things, but anyway…  A couple of weeks ago I made breakfast for my brother, sister-in-law, and niece (who is, hands down, the smartest, most adorable child on the face of the earth) and decided (sort of on a whim) to sweat some onion and garlic in the pan before I cooked the potatoes.  The effect is striking.  It’s not just a matter of adding the flavor of onion and garlic to the flavor of the potato, they enhance the potato’s flavor as well.

This morning I added mushroom to the mix, and let me tell you, it was a good decision.  The other thing I’ve started doing is using a mixture of butter and vegetable oil in which to fry the potatoes.  Butter has a very low smoke point and burns easily, but by adding the vegetable oil (actually, I think we use corn oil) you raise the smoke point of the mixture.  This allows you to cook hotter, so that you get nice, crispy potatoes and also the flavor of delicious, delicious (non-burnt) butter.

In the photo they sort of blend in with the plate, but I also made myself a couple of over-easy eggs.  No magic here, except the aforementioned delicious, delicious butter.

Ok, here’s the thing: I have a somewhat frequent argument with a coworker about the proper cooking medium for eggs.  See, he’s something of a health buff, and he uses cooking spray.  When I tell him that I use real butter, he insists that I love it because it’s bad for me.  This is not the case.  To be fair, it’s not even entirely the (delicious, delicious) flavor.  It’s about depth.  If you’ve ever cooked eggs in cooking spray, you know what I’m talking about.  The white of the egg comes out paper thin, and lacking the fantastic texture of which eggs are ultimately capable.  If this is alright with you, then mazel tov, enjoy your cooking spray and absurdly thin eggs.

It’s not alright with me.  When you come right down to it, it doesn’t matter what fat you use, as long as you use a fair amount of it.  This is the part where I can hear Dave’s voice in the back of my head saying “See?!! Lot’s of fat!  You like it because it’s bad for you!”  No, Dave, that’s not why I like it.  There is a textural component here that you just don’t achieve with cooking spray.  I’m not talking about total immersion.  You could use butter, vegetable oil, peanut oil, it really doesn’t matter, but there has to be some depth to whatever you use.

On the subject of total immersion, though, you can achieve almost the same textural goodness (albeit lacking a bit of the flavor) if you poach the eggs.

Anyway, back to breakfast…  Top the thing off with some whole wheat toast (I admit I did use a buttery spread rather than real butter here) and a cup of coffee, and you end up with one very happy blogger.

Have a great day.

This place is amazing.

My girlfriend took me out to dinner on Sunday night, and we went to a restaurant near her apartment that I’ve always been curious about but that we hadn’t gotten around to trying.  The restaurant is called Stonegrill Dining, and the sign outside advertises an “unforgettable dining experience.”

Let me tell you, this place delivers. 

While we were looking at the menu, a guy came out and said “I want to make you an appetizer.  Do you like bacon or peppercorn?”  This caught me off-guard.  I’ve had servers ask if I wanted to order an appetizer, or if they could “put in an appetizer” for me, but I’ve never heard it phrased quite this way.

Anyway, my girlfriend is a vegetarian, so we ordered the peppercorn.  The man, (we put together that he was the guy in charge), whose name was Michael, brought out a potato gratin with a homemade peppercorn dressing on top.  At this point I would really like to be able to tell you something useful that actually gives information about how it tasted, but I can’t.  The dish was incomprehensibly good.  I have no words to describe it.

I ordered a New York strip steak, and my girlfriend ordered the Wahoo fish.  I didn’t notice it at the time, but the waitress didn’t ask me how I wanted my steak done.  After a while the waitress came out with our food, and before I looked over at her I heard her say “This is the moment you’ve been waiting for.”

That caught me off-guard, too.  To be fair it was a moment we’d been waiting for, but phrasing it that way seemed a little over-dramatic.  Then I looked at the food.

Our meals were on large, rectangular, three-sectioned plates.  On the left were mashed potatoes, on the right were vegetables, and in the middle was a large black stone.  My stone had a raw steak on it.

It was at that moment that I became sort of dimly aware that places like this existed and that I had heard of them before.  All that said, neither my girlfriend or I had any idea of what we were in for when we got to the restaurant.

The meat and veggies were raw, and the stone was hot.  (750 degrees.)  The waitress told us that the stone would give us 25 minutes of cooking time and 25 minutes of warming time.  We were also given a little dish of morel butter.  Everything was delicious.

We were told that we should save room for dessert, because they had a truffle pie that would “knock our socks off.”  While we were deciding on dessert, Michael reappeared with an impromptu palet cleanser that he’d decided to make for us.  It was a sliced nectarine with leche sauce drizzled over the top.  And the truffle pie was amazing.

Once dessert was finished, Michael asked us if we’d ever had muscato.  When we said no, he said he was going to “bring us a treat,” and he came back with a glass of the sweet, sparkling wine.  So incredibly good.

In short, Stonegrill Dining is awesome.  The food is amazing, and the service is excellent.  In addition to all that, it’s a very comfortable place to eat.  Both my girlfriend and I were in shorts and short-sleeved shirts because we had no idea that it was actually a pretty fancy place.  It would have been very easy for us to feel underdressed or uncomfortable in a place like that, but the atmosphere was so informal that both of us felt right at home.

Right now I’m sitting at one of my favorite Berea restaurants. Cornerstone Brewery is home to excellent sandwiches, burgers, fries, and delicious beers which are brewed in-house.

I’m having a new one called Wallace Wheat. Lots of flavor. It definitely rivals Holy Moses as my favorite wheat ale. I’m waiting on my Californian chicken sandwich. Roasted red peppers, alfalfa sprouts, avocado, and provolone.

I ended up at work longer than expected today and had a chance to grab breakfast from Currito. Not the first time I’ve had one of their bacon & eggs burritos, but it was the first time I’ve eaten one sitting down. Delicious. Add some roasted corn salsa and a strawberry banana smoothie and that’s one excellent breakfast.

As an added bit of news: I’m posting from my Droid Eris.

Oh man. Oh man oh man.

Delicious sandwich. They call it a Brewben, and it’s pastrami, hot pepper kraut, thousand island dressing, and Swiss cheese on rye. And it’s delicious.

Served with their freshly made potato chips. (Good and thick, the way I like my chips.)

Oh yeah, and they make their own root beer. Wonderful.

I’ll definitely be going back.

On Monday I’ll be boarding a bus to take Tri-C West’s production of Don’t Count Your Chickens Before They Cry Wolf to beautiful Montreal.

The itinerary contains the phrase “French restaurant” and the word “bistro” several times so I suspect there will be plenty of blog fodder north of the border.

I’ll be taking my camera with me as well as my laptop, so there should be plenty of pictures in the blog as well.

Hopefully the hotel has wi-fi.

I rather enjoy wine, but I know squat about it. I’m mostly a white Zinfandel guy, and I occasionally find other things I enjoy. I usually joke that I have all the discerning tastes of a six year old when it comes to wine.

Tonight I had a lovely dinner with my girlfriend and two of her friends, and for it I found a white Catawba from a local winery called Mon Ami.

Very inexpensive at around $7.00 a bottle, and doesn’t taste (to me, anyway) like a cheap wine. On the sweet end of the spectrum, and gives a nice warmth in the nose (I’m sure that has a piece of terminology associated with it, but like I said, I know jack about wine.)

Anyway, delicious!

We also had tortellini in tomato sauce and French bread. Fantastic meal.

I made breakfast this morning. I didn’t make bacon, but I couldn’t think of a pun involving the word “chorizo.”

Here’s the menu:

Eggs

Chorizo sausage

Hash browns*

Buttermilk biscuits*

Orange-banana-pineapple juice*

Coffee

*Ok, you caught me. Bob Evans brown & serve hash browns, buttermilk biscuits from a tube, and orange-banana-pineapple juice from frozen concentrate. It’s not that I don’t know how to make these things, but I was hungry darn it. Also, I have no buttermilk.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks (as you can imagine.) A musical for which I was playing percussion just closed last weekend, then Christmas, there hasn’t been much time for me to just stand around and relax lately. As the hash browns were experiencing a little Maillard mayhem, I was leaning against the counter and drinking coffee.  A wave of relaxation ran over me.

I’ve been kind of stressing out over other life-related stuff lately, too, and the sudden and unexpected calm was really nice. I guess sometimes you just have to chill the hell out before life can get calmer (as opposed to waiting until life gets calmer before you chill the hell out.)

Anyway, back to breakfast….

Delicious.  Over-easy eggs (or dippy eggs for younger readers.)  The hash browns were fantastic.  And I’ve found chorizo to be an excellent breakfast sausage.  Nice little kick to it.  The juice is excellent.  And the best manual drip coffee I’ve made in a while.

That’s all.  Have a great day.

(of coffee mugs.)

As you’ve no doubt gleaned from past blog entries, I’m a big fan of coffee. I love it. I love the way it smells, I love the way it tastes, I love the way it looks, and I love all things that have to do with coffee, as well. Percolators, carafes, presses, coffee cake, you name it.

This blog is about a coffee mug. For me it exists as a sort of Platonian Form of a coffee mug, because I have yet to find it.

This isn’t about me being a snob, or me being picky, this is about comfort. You see, there are few things more relaxing for me than sitting back with a cup of coffee. Is it such a crime that I have an ideal vessel from which I’d like to drink it?

It has to be an average sized mug, about four and a half to five inches tall, and about three and a half to four inches across. The handle must be large enough to accommodate all four fingers on my hand comfortably (none of that pinky squishing crap.) When holding the mug, my fingers must be parallel to the cup (perpendicular to the ground.)

That’s it. Seems simple enough, but you wouldn’t believe the trouble I’ve had finding it. Or how many cups I’ve found that fit all the criteria but one or two. I’ll find it someday.

I wanted to call it the “Fall Food Spectacular,” but that would kill the alliteration.
My favorite month began today.  Pumpkins, cider, really good apples, pumpkin spice lattes from Starbucks, hoodies, sweatpants, I freaking love fall.  I also work with a high school marching band, and I’m constantly irritated at football games when the temperature is like 80 degrees.  WTF?  It’s football season.  It’s supposed to be hoodie weather at the minimum.  (Or maximum, depending on how you look at it.)

Anyway, I digress…

On the to do list for this fall:  (We all know how well I do with to do lists…)

• Go to an apple orchard
• Spaghetti recipe (really this time)
• Concoct the perfect hot chocolate
• Pumpkin pie from scratch (Ok, this might be a little ambitious.)
• Apple pie

So yeah.  That’s the plan.  Stay tuned.