I'm so bleu.......

 Blue. It's a color, a feeling, and a cheese. I love blue cheese. Even though I know the blue is mold, and I was taught to avoid moldy food, I still love it. I was put off blue cheese a couple of months ago by a REALLY nasty dish at Manny's Uptown Kitchen (See previous post), but I saw something that made me want to reaquaint myself with the moldy creamy stuff.

 Never been much of a buttermilk fan, even in salad dressing or pies, but as I get older, I find my tastes changing more and more. As I was checking the ads for my weekly foray into grocery shopping, I saw this on sale.....


 So I bought it and brought it home. One taste, and I was in love all over again. The cheese is smooth, rich and creamy, no bitterness at all, and the taste, oh my yes, the taste was heavenly! Sale or not, this is a keeper in my fridge!

Tasiwoo Ho!

 I've always wanted to try buffalo. Being part Native, I spent a good portion of my youth reading about my ancestors and wishing that I too could live in a teepee, following the buffalo herds. As I've gotten older, the teepee part has diminshed, but wanting to try buffalo hasn't. After eyeing the package of ground buffalo in the sote for several years, I finally decided to take the plunge and buy it.

 The meat is a bit darker red than the standard ground moo, and there is a very low fat percentage. I shaped up some patties and cooked them in a skillet, since I had been craving a juicy, greasy flat griddle burger for a couple of weeks.

 After cooking, I put the medium rare burgers on some artisan buns with some lovely uncured bacon, queso blanco cheese, blue cheese, red onion, Buttercrunch lettuce and mayo.

 The taste of the burger was everything I had hoped for; juicy, not at all greasy with a full rich beef flavor, more like a good Porterhouse steak than hamburger. We both loved it, and while it's a little pricey to be feeding the kiddies or eating daily ($6.99/lb), it will be replacing steak as a fancy date night dinner. Altho, they DO have a buffalo steak now at HEB.............

Get your b****h ass back in the kitchen, and make me some pie!

As I'm cleaning out the fridge, I noticed a jar of mincemeat in the back. Mincemeat, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is a blend of chopped applesa and dried fruit, sugar and spices. Up until recent times, mincemeat actually contained meat, as a way to use up meat scraps that would otherwise spoil and go to waste. I had never had it, but was willing to try it when I saw it on the clearance rack at Randall's.
  Since we had opened the jar to taste it, I figured I'd better use it, or the chickens would be getting it. So I dug around in the freezer, found some pie shells (Pie crust is one of the few things I never can make worth a damn), filled one, slapped the other on top, and in the oven. And what came out was this:

Since mincemeat is traditionally served with hard sauce, I made some to go with it. Hard sauce is butter mixed with vanilla and powdered sugar, kind of a really sweet butter spread. Good tho!

If you like really sweet desserts, then I would recommend mince pie, sweet and tasty!

Those Wonderous Weiners!

While shopping at Sprouts a few weeks ago with my engineer, I was passing through the deli area when Benji spotted Sabrett's hot dogs in the cold case. He and another native New Yorker went on and on, telling me about the pushcarts, and how good the dogs were. So after several weeks of thinking about it, we decided to give them a try. I bought the hog dogs and the Sabrett's saurkraut yesterday, and we decided to give them a head-on taste test with Hebrew National, our currrent nitrite-laden favorite.

 I fixed one dog of each brand exactly the same, and tried the dogs naked first, to get the true flavor, then with the bun and condiments. The HN were good, not too salty. The Sabrett's have natural casing, and the 'snap' of biting into the dog was fab, reminding me more of a sausage than a weiner. Also not too salty, the Sabrett's had a glorious flavor, smooth and tasty. The Sabrett's kraut was good, altho being a fan of sweet and sour German kraut, I did find the seasoning odd, and even after rinsing the kraut it was still very salty.

 I have to say that yes, my NYC friends were correct, the Sabrett's hot dogs were, indeed, the best I've ever tasted, edging out the Hebrew Nationals by a hair. The Sabrett's had more flavor, and the casing snap sealed the deal. The kraut, however, I would pass on, not my cup of tea. If you can't get Sabrett's where you live, you can order them online. I give Sabrett's two thumbs up, a very good dog indeed!

Hello after a hiatus, and Manny's Uptown Kitchen

It's been way, way too long since I posted a food blog! I have a new career as a recording studio owner, and for a little while even had my own chef, but that's gone by the wayside, and I'm back to cooking myself, and actually enjoying it again. Once I get something yummy prepared, I will post it with pics.

 On another note, I have a new fav place; Manny's Uptown Kitchen. While it is a chain, the food was really, really good. The menu is a combo of baby haute cuisine and old Jewish deli favs like chopped liver, knishes and latkes. I highly reccommend the loaded potato cakes. Our first time a friend and I ordered them for an appetizer. The server brought a long rectangular plate with three perfectly brown potato cakes swimming in a sea of delish cheese sauce, sprinkled with chopped green onions, crisp bacon bits, and a dollop of sour cream on each one. Let me just say the next time, I'm getting that as my entree! The cakes were crisp and tasty on their own, and the cheese sauce was most excellent. Had I been at home, I would have licked the plate, it was so good!

 The beef and blue pasta bowl, however, not so good. I was expecting a blue cheese sauce similar to the potato cakes, and what I got was a watery drippy au jus with an overpowering bitter blue cheese taste. The beef was a slab of rare strip steak indifferently slapped on top, and I was not offered a steak knife, so had to cut it with my butter knife. The pasta itself was fresh and would have been good I think, if I could have tasted it through the horrible bitterness.

 The prices were about what you would expect, similar to Chili's or any other chain. Other things I tasted were good, so stay away from the beef and blue, and you'll probably be ok.