The rooster made me do it...

This adventure led me to a BRC Gastropub here in Houston located on Shepherd Drive.  A gastropub is a restaurant that serves higher end beer and food and BRC definitely lives up to that definition.  You may be asking what exactly BRC means take a look at their giant statue outside of the restaurant and soak it up.

Now that we have got that out of our system I will issue a disclaimer that I did not exactly go full force into the menu here, just a light sampling of the beer and an appetizer, but after getting my toes wet here it is just a matter of time before I am back to dive in.  Check out the menu for yourself and it is not too hard to see why I will be back.

For the beer tonight I drank up one of my all time favorite beers, Moose Drool. This rich beer is brewed by Big Sky Brewery out of Missoula, Montana.   It is full of flavor, a malty beer, loaded with chocolate and caramel giving it a smooth drink that goes down way too easily at times.

My second beer of the night was another sampling from No Label in Katy, Texas.  This time it was El Hefe Hefeweizen, a sweet beer perfect for the warm summer nights here in Houston.  While I am not a big fan of hefeweizen myself, this one was good and easy to drink.  No Label has quickly become one of my favorite breweries that I keep an eye out for whenever I am at a bar with a wide selection of taps to choose from.

Then came the appetizer, with a wide list to choose from we tossed it back and forth for some time before the waitress informed us of one of the house specials, mac and cheese.   You will find this item under the sides portion of the menu, but as you can see there is no description of the flavor. This is because they rotate it day to day, featuring a new flavor on different days of the week.  This night’s special was buffalo chicken and bleu cheese, a combo too good to say no to.  The chicken was their “Dixie fried chicken” and it was quite frankly amazing and the bleu cheese was perfectly balanced, not too over powering, but all in all a delicious dish.

Basically, it is only a matter of time before I return here for dinner (Monday nights are $7 burger and fry nights) or brunch (their chicken fried steak sounds killer) so stay tuned for a future write up.

A second tour through Vietnam

I should be a politician with my awesome skills of keeping promises, maybe the mayor of food.  So back in one of my first posts I wrote about the bomb diggity sandwich found at Vietnamese joints, and now I am returning to titillate your senses with my other favorite meal bún.

I tried to make an honest effort of going to a different restaurant than the one that I visited in that previous post, if nothing else to get away from the stellar background music, but it was not in the cards.  I left work and headed north up Fry Road to visit Phở 88 located just north of Morton Road, but evidently they are closed on Mondays so I was dejected and forced to scramble.  Alas, I ended up back at Phở Mai on Westgreen at I-10. 

I did however spice it up this time and roll with a completely new dish that had nothing in common with the sandwich minus a healthy portion of pork.

First, a little background information on bún thịt nướng giò, from hence forth it shall be known as #65 since that is what it is on the menu and I am a lazy writer so deal with it.  The name is basically a description of what is in the dish, bún being the term for the vermicelli rice noodles, thịt referring to the pork, nướng means it comes with fish sauce, and giò means it has an egg roll.  Now that does not include all of the other fresh veggies piled in the bowl but you will just have to wait until later to see those.

As I mentioned before fish sauce is one of the greatest condiments ever invented, this fermented sauce derived from fish kicks everything up a notch or two.  It is basically a salty sauce similar to Worcestershire sauce that isn’t quite so pungent.

The other rock star condiment that I had to use on this dish (as well as most other dishes when it is an option) was the famous Sriracha or as I commonly hear it referred to, “the rooster sauce”.  This chili hot sauce is awesome, and it belongs on most Asian dishes, if not many other cuisines that can use a kick in the pants.

The bowl that shows up is quite frankly gigantic, and as you can see filled to the brim.  The flavor components on the surface are obvious, chopped pork, egg roll, along with piles of green onions, peanuts, carrots, and a sprig of cilantro.  Basically, this bowl is a colorful party begging you to shovel it into your mouth.  The Vietnamese egg roll is a different creature than the Chinese egg rolls that many of you are used to, it has a meat mix with some pork and prawns, along with your usual leafy veggie filling, but the twist in it is mushrooms, giving it a much darker filling than you usually find in other cuisines.  For those of you who hate mushrooms do not wince and vomit on me, it is not an overpowering flavor and just blends nicely with the rest of the mix.

Upon receiving the bowl one of my first tasks is to get my mix on, doing this brings up the veggies hiding on the bottom of the bowl, and mixes the rest in the fish sauce that has settled in on the bottom.  Doing this mix causes the lettuce and sprouts at the bottom to get more evenly spread out throughout the dish.

This dish is a large serving, but you don’t lose a single piece of flavor to size, and at under $7 it is a good price for a full on flavor bên (according to Google translate that means party but I am too lazy to research more beyond that).

Enjoy.

The most wonderful time of the year...

Growing up next door to New Mexico I fell in love with the delicious Hatch chile pepper.  These meaty peppers go great on anything and everything, from a burger; to a great add in for things like gravy, or heck even on their own.  Every year, late August and early September, you can usually find a roaster (think of a giant hand crank bingo machine or raffle tumbler full of chiles over flames) outside of one of your grocery stores cranking out some charred chiles for your pleasure.  Unfortunately, I left the lands of the desert and decided this year when chile season rolled around I was going to try my hand at roasting them.  Yes, these are the same peppers that are dried and bundled together for those decorations (that some use for cooking) that you often find around the Southwest.

To start out my adventure in roasting I ventured down to Central Market here in Houston, since I saw a flyer promoting their version of the Hatch Chile Festival.  I am sure it has nothing on the real deal, but considering I am currently over 800 miles away from the epicenter of the Hatch chile universe (Hatch, NM go figure) I figured it was the best I could do.

They certainly didn’t disappoint, they had crates full of these green beauties in varying temperatures, and even a few roasters outside (I picked up a bag of roasted ones just in case my experiment failed, didn’t want to be left out).  For those of you who may not be the biggest fans of heat, or like me and you don’t read signs once you get overwhelmed by sheer awesomeness and mobs of people, you are in luck because the chiles come in varying heats ranging from mild to hot. 

So I get the chiles home and decide to start the roasting, now the issue I found was that an infrared grill does not necessarily cook chiles quite the same was as an open fire grill so it definitely took longer than expected but the end result was still awesome.

The chiles start to blacken with the skin swelling up and popping, this is important for a step you will see later.  The smells were amazing, a nice fire roasted spicy smell just filling the air and making me drool all over myself (not really but you get the idea).

The chiles get a nice blackened look to them, and the skin was visibly loose I decided they were good and pulled them off the grill.

Once you remove the chiles from the grill, throw them into a zip lock back (may want to double bag it because they can melt through), this allows for the chiles to essentially steam themselves while you wait a few minutes.

Once they are cooler (this is important since you will be handling these) take them out of the zip lock back and begin to run them under some cool water and break the skin.  If it is roasted right, the skin will basically peel off in sheets (another side note here, if you went with hot wear gloves, these are peppers and they will burn your eyeballs when you forget about it taking out contacts later… speaking from experience), once the tough waxy skin is off you are left with the delicious tender meat that kind of resembles a slug but I am sure it tastes better (not speaking from experience on that one).

So here you have a bag of mushy peppers now and you might be asking yourself “What the heck do I do with these things?” The simplest answer I found is “Whatever the hell you want!”  One my favorite meals is to take a tortilla, lay a chile in it, and put some cheese on it and toss it in the microwave, simple and flavorful and quite frankly awesome.

I also made a dish that visually looked disgusting so you get no pictures, but I took a chicken breast seasoned with some fajita seasoning and cooked it up, tossed in a few chopped up chiles and let them all marry together.  In the end you get a bowl full of chopped up garbage that tastes like a party in your mouth…  And let’s be honest, who doesn’t love a party in your mouth?

Farmer's Market Fun

So tonight is going to be more of a photo sampling rather than a food write up.  Made a journey to the Urban Harvest Farmer's Market on a scorching August day, enjoy.

Pears... Don't know what kind these are exactly but the only thing we were told about them is they do the opposite of normal pears, rather than turning green when they ripen, they turn yellow.  Yes, they are delicious.

Spoiled goats... how could you not love it?  Goats are great.

I have never seen so many eggplants in my life as I saw at this market... I guess it must be eggplant season since these are all organic but they are over my head in terms of seasons.

No idea what these even are, but they had some good color to them.

Picked up some good Texas olive oil, a nice stout flavor much stronger than the olive oil I was used to, but a nice change up.

Then came the real star of the farmer's market, especially considering the 1,000,000 degree temperatures that were melting us as we walked around.  I love the Eatsie Boys food and this is their new addition to the family, an ice cream truck.

If you can see the menu here it is a fun gourmet assortment of flavors that made choosing hard to do.

In the end the decision was Arnold Palmer sorbet and to be honest it was delicious.  An Arnold Palmer is a famous golfer, or in this case a mix of iced tea and lemonade, and in sorbet form it was tart and smooth and perfect in this ridiculous Houston summer heat.

If it looks like a taco, and smells like a fish...

I am sure that I have said this before, but one of my favorite things about living in Texas is the abundance of Mexican food.  There is just something magical about chips and salsa and the wide variety of dishes that there are to choose from.

That being said, one of the best aspects of Mexican food is of course the cerveza.  Mexican beer may not be the best quality, but that is why we have limes, and boy do they go down easily.  In my blog post about brunch I gave you a hint about one of my favorite drinks, the Michelada.  This delicious beer drink is mixed up with tomato juice, Worcestershire, hot sauce, and spices…  Basically a bloody mary mixed up with beer, lime, and a salted rim.  This beautiful concoction works for every meal of the day from early in the morning to late at night, you can find one these in my hand if I wander into a Mexican joint or am sitting on a beach in Cozumel.

For dinner one night I wandered down to the local Taqueria Arandas, one of many of a chain that is found throughout Houston, Dallas, and a few places in between.  These restaurants are open early and close late, a good option for a cheap breakfast or a hearty dinner.

Like many other places around the Houston area, Taqueria Arandas rocks the double salsa, a robust red and smoother green.  Now in the past I have found these salsas to be irresistible (ok so maybe I have a slight salsa addiction issue) but this night they were a little out of control.  Don’t get me wrong this is a good sign, when a restaurant makes their salsa from scratch you tend to have a few variables once in a while so I would rather suffer a little (and have to drink more beer) in order to get some good fresh salsa.

Now traditionally my dinner at this place has been the Arandas Special (theory:  if a place is willing to stick their name on it they better do it right), a plate full of fajita meat, veggies including tomatoes, avocadoes, beans, and a pleasant surprise side of cactus. That’s right folks those prickly little plants you find in the desert make a tasty side dish, nopal as it is referred to in Spanish is a dish similar in texture and flavor to a green bean with a slight twist.

That was my plan as I walked into the restaurant, but that was stopped cold in its tracks by a sign hanging on the door for a new special reading, Chipotle Fish Tacos.  I LOVE FISH TACOS! They are quite possibly one of the greatest dishes ever invented, chunks of flaky fish grilled up with flavor filled up into a corn tortilla, topped with some garnishment, and a side of limes.

Chipotle is one of my favorite seasonings in food these days, a chipotle is a smoked jalapeno that goes from a ripe red (yes jalapenos are red when ripened not green) to a nice brown dried pepper full of all sorts of flavor.  It covered up whatever low quality fish may have been used in these tacos (let’s be honest we don’t want quality fish going in cheap street style tacos), and went perfectly with the onions and cilantro that were packed in these tortillas.  Squeeze a little lime on them and you can do no wrong.

Fish tacos and beer, as our friends to the south say “muy bueno”.  Oh yes, and to complete the opening phrase, first I must admit that I did not come up with this on my own but instead stole it from Fuzzy's Taco Shop in Dallas, so in conclusion:

... it's got to be a tasty dish.

Parlez-vous français?

Just a quick update…

As you can see the demon squirrel has returned and was caught red handed in the act of molesting my poor innocent plants.  If only I still had my BB gun the next blog posting might have been how to make squirrel stew.  None the less I don’t have it anymore so I am going to dangle some delicious French food in front of you tonight.

As I have mentioned other places in this blog, I welcome feedback from all of my readers if you have suggestions or complaints, and I finally received one.  One of my loyal readers complained that I was not eating enough “healthy” food and seemed to be focusing far too much on greasy unhealthy options.  Naturally I argued that it was the point of the blog, hence the term Glutton, but because in the end I am a people pleaser I decided to get something a little less greasy than the usual Glutton for Punishment blog posting.

I wandered into Café Bretagne located on Park Row in Katy, and decided to dive in full force into French cuisine.  The décor was simple to say the least; basically everything seemed to be painted black with the exception of a few red accents and a few model sailboats around the café.  Basically odd décor but I didn’t let that distract me from the simple but delicious menu.

The first arrival at my table was a basket of delicious French bread, a nice tough crust with fluffy white interior that tasted like I could have eaten an entire loaf of it if someone was going to twist my arm. 

After satisfying my immediate hunger with a piece or two of the bread my main course arrived, a delicious salad known as Salade Ouessant.  Little background information on the name, Ouessant is an island in the French region of Brittany, or as they say in French, Bretagne, coincidence?  I think not.  It came at recommendation from the waitress so I figured why not live it up a little since the lunch menu here is so reasonably priced (items start around $3.50 and my lunch being the most expensive item was $8).

The salad was coated in a light layer of dressing that had a rich flavor, with a big pile of smoked salmon in the center, 4 shrimp, tomatoes, onions, corn, and lemon wedges.  The salmon was scrumptious; there are few flavors I enjoy as much as a good smoked salmon. 

The shrimp was overcooked, so it was way too tough and the salad probably would’ve been much better if it did not even make an appearance.  The veggies were all good and flavorful, but the lemons were my favorite twist, the tart sweetness went excellently with the other flavors going on in the salad.

Then trouble showed up, as I prepared to take my check from the waitress she asked the most loaded question ever…  Would you like a crepe?  Now I am not usually a dessert person, but the moment she started to describe the Classic French Crepe to me I melted like the butter and sugar that she described in this crepe.  Just soak up these pictures and take my word that the crepe was amazing…

Such a nice fine layer of sugar on a light airy crepe, divine way to end the meal.

So Café Bretagne is a simple café that does food right from what I can tell in the few dishes I sampled, and I will definitely be back to broaden my experience in the cuisine française.

How To Get Written Out Of The Will... Or Jill vs. Ikea

So I was raised by a mother who is not exactly the greatest cook in the world, sorry mom, but in most cases she would be right there with you admitting it.  However there are a few items that she is skilled at making, and one of those would be Swedish Meatballs.  Considering that she is ½ Swedish it is a good thing that she can at least represent our cultural heritage in the kitchen at least once a year.  I will be the first to admit that Swedish food tends to err on the side of gross, items like pickled herring and blood soup make my stomach turn at the thought, but they do know how to make a good salmon and of course the famous balls of goodness known as Swedish Meatballs.

That is why my next foodventure was a risky gamble of being written out of the will if it ended up being stellar, let’s be honest it could very well lead to me being written out of her will if I say that Ikea makes a better meatball dish than her.  That’s right, I said Ikea, the massive Swedish furniture store famous for cheap build it yourself particle board furniture, and perhaps less famous for the cafeteria style restaurant that hides in their monster stores. 

The set up is simple in the Ikea restaurant, operating in a bare bones kind of set up in order to keep their meals cheaper (you can get most meals for around $2.99+).  You also get some nice table side reading suggesting which furniture pieces you are dining on so that you can buy them yourself if you find your rear end so pleased by your seat.  Basically they have no issue shamelessly dangling their products in front of your face while you eat, like these happy lanterns.

For my meal I decided to go big, I upgraded from 10 mini meatballs to 15, which come with a small side salad, mashed potatoes, plenty of gravy, and a dollop of lingonberry jelly.  Basically a very filling meal for around $5.99 can’t beat that.

To get in the Swedish mood I opted for a glass of lingonberry juice, it was very similar to cranberry juice, a tart sweet juice that went quite well with the rest of the meal.

The meatballs themselves were actually good, I was expecting low quality crappy food and actually found them to have good flavor.  The gravy was pretty damn good as well, I am a gravy junky and tend to be a little picky over my gravy, but this brown gravy was good and rich complementing the meatballs and potatoes.  Heck even the potatoes were actually good; they were creamy but still lumpy, giving them the feel of homemade mashed potatoes.  The salad was the weak point, it was a self serve buffet set up and basically was like a wilted salad in a bag so my recommendation is to just skip it and focus on what they do right.

The real added twist was the jam, mixing the flavors with the gravy meat was a party in my mouth. Sure that may sound gross but it wasn’t and if you disagree than quite frankly I will not be buying you a fancy meal at Ikea any time soon.

Then there was one, next thing I know my meatballs have all disappeared, probably stolen by those brats running around but alas what can I do.  Now in terms of will this lead to me being written out of the will?  No!  They were good, the gravy was awesome (we only get gravy once in a while if my mom would choose to make it with the drippings but usually they are eaten dry) so that was an added perk, but Jill’s meatballs are still reigning supreme.  Now Christmas just needs to show up so I can get more of these little balls of happiness.

California Dreaming

For those of you who do not know I spent a few years of my childhood growing up in the Bay Area of California.  Before you completely judge me please don’t forget that I was born in Texas and fortunately got out of California eventually, although I went to Missouri from there so not quite sure if that one was truly a saving grace.  Fortunately, I found my way back to Texas as time went on, but there are still some lingering memories of California foods, like Chinatown in San Francisco, clam chowder from Fisherman’s Wharf, and of course In-N-Out Burger.  The latter has finally seen the light and worked its way into the promise land by opening up a new location in Dallas.  Unfortunately, with the newness of the place it was still a circus even with it being a Monday night; the feeder road has cones everywhere directing you around the block even though it is on 75 right through the middle of Dallas, pure chaos.

These simple diners crank out some of the best burgers around, so good that even Tim Lincecum of the Giants has no problem stuffing 3,150 calories in his mouth at this place. I might have let you down by telling you this but I could not even come close to eating his meal so instead I will just share with you mine.

But first, a separate order of business.  Some of you may have noticed a mention of Kevin a time or two in some of the previous blog postings.  Just to give you some background information on him, he is my cousin, and he lives in Dallas, and he likes to eat too… Go figure.  Here is a picture for you to imbed in your mind for all future mentions of the word Kevin, and yes please imagine him in the hat no matter where we go or what he eats.

Now on to the main course, one of In-N-Out’s most famous features is their not-so-secret menu, a whole list of options that you will not find on the menu but will know about if you are in the know.  My research and associations with residents of the state of California have tipped me off about these over time so I felt obliged to live it up with these items.

As you can see this meal was hit on our way home from Kansas so there are three double burgers in that tray.  My mom rolled with a standard cheese burger, but Kevin and I rocked out the Animal Style Burger.  It is a burger with the spread (basically Thousand Island dressing similar to all secret sauces everywhere else it seems), cheese, grilled onions, and your standard burger toppings of lettuce, tomatoes, mustard, etc.  And to be honest it was nothing short of an amazing burger.

Of course no burger diner experience is complete with a basket of fries, and the other not-so-secret menu that I had to get my hands on was Animal Style Fries.  These were basically the same as the burger, piled high with cheese, grilled onions, and spread. We also had to get a regular basket of fries just to ensure that we had a control flavor, and that everyone was happy.  Unfortunately, the fries were not up to par but I know they can do better so of course I will give them a second chance to get them right the next time I find myself in the Big D.

This trip into the diner truly made our road trip that much better, few things good can happen during 12 hours in the car, but sure enough this was a great silver lining… even if we had to put up with Kevin while we enjoyed the burgers.