Crawfish beignets: in which New Orleans cuisine achieves its ultimate form.
For this year’s scenic tour of the American South, even if everything else went wrong or turned out boring, we kept our hopes high that the cooking would prove to delight our senses and heap shame upon our own meager kitchen skills. On Day Four we found two restaurants — one a fine-dining restaurant, the other an open-air market booth — that delivered the goods and won the week.
Turkey and pie. Let’s face it: everything else at the Thanksgiving table is disposable.
All this week, every time someone friendly asked me, “Got plans for Thanksgiving?” I’ve had to shrug and say, “Wish I knew.” As of this morning, six days before the big event, neither my family nor Anne’s had communicated a single word to either of us one way or another. No Facebook “event” set up. No direct messages. No general statuses. No phone calls. No cards. No sign of any volunteers. No visible evidence that any of them still considered Thanksgiving a worthy celebration and not a fabricated Hallmark card-selling stunt.
Hoping for the best but planning for the worst, we decided tonight to buy our own fourteen-pound backup turkey. Just in case. Because sometimes you gotta take holiday matters into your own hands.
This week my wife and I have been taking advantage of our hotel’s complimentary breakfasts to save as much money as possible (their modest, cook-to-order omelet bar is a nice touch), but sometimes a guy needs a change of pace. For lunch today I drove an hour north to check out the Denver Biscuit Company, part of a restaurant triumvirate that was featured in a 2013 episode of Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives. That’s not a show we usually consult for travel reference (thanks to a 2012 disappointment in Topeka), but this particular joint had other incentives to lure me away from Colorado Springs.
Pictured above is the Dahlia — sausage, egg over-easy, apple butter, and maple syrup on “biscuit French toast”. It’s one of several creative biscuit sandwiches they serve for breakfast and lunch. For that “Triple-D” episode the esteemed Mr. Fieri sampled their “Elmer”, topped with pulled pork, barbecue sauce, coleslaw, onions, and homemade pickles. For him I imagine it was the only logical option. But I’m a big fan of imaginative breakfasts and knew I had to try it once I confirmed it was real.
The other incentive for my mini-road trip was an invitation from an old friend.
Best of show: the Salted Caramel Pizookie at BJ’s Restaurant and Brewery in Avon, Indiana — an oven-baked caramel cookie as big as a Personal Pan Pizza, filled with almond toffee, pretzel bites, and both white and dark chocolate chips. Because that’s obviously not enough, on top is vanilla-bean ice cream, caramel sauce, and more dark chocolate chips. Just looking at this photo counts as 500 calories. Sorry, dieters.
October has been a delicious month for us, and not because of those tiny prepackaged candies that Big Chocolate wants us all to worship. In that spirit, today we present a montage of five happy treats that provided me much-needed happy-time boosts through a month of unprecedented busyness. Enjoy!
Right this way for four more reasons why I’m not a size Medium!
A baked potato called the Texan, containing steak, bacon, onion rings, jalapenos, cheddar cheese, and barbecue sauce. I’m not the kind of guy to call a baked potato a full meal, but maybe I would if all other baked potatoes were made industrial-strength like this.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: for my wife’s birthday we spent a Saturday walking around Terre Haute, Indiana. In Part One of this trilogy we met an Auschwitz survivor whose sheer force of will shames us both; in Part Two we visited the Clabber Girl Museum and Bake Shop, learned still more about World War II, and had snacks.
Here in Part Three: other sights, sculptures, and shops we saw around town on this fair October day, including poetry, pink ribbons, surprise comics, and her birthday lunch of choice.
Right this way for the conclusion of another birthday road-trip miniseries!
Redfish beignets at the Royal House in New Orleans.
Day Three of our seven-day road trip was our first full day in the city of New Orleans. We already covered our musical breakfast at Cafe Beignet. As noted previously, “Going into this year’s vacation, we hoped the cuisine would be a highlight at our various stops — be it good ol’ Southern kitchen cookin’, Gulf-sourced fresh seafood, or, really, anything outside of international franchisees.” In that vein, lunch and dinner each had their own approach.
Right this way for another foodie episode, but without using the word “foodie”!
Sorry, folks: these dime donuts are for historical display purposes only.
For the last several years, my wife Anne and I have spent our respective birthdays together finding some new place or attraction to visit as a one-day road trip — partly as an excuse to spend time together on this most wondrous day, partly to explore areas of Indiana we’ve never experienced before. My 2015 birthday destination of choice was the city of Fort Wayne, two hours north of home. Her 2015 choice last Saturday was Terre Haute, an hour west of here. In Part 1 of this three-part miniseries, you saw our final stop of the day, the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center, which absolutely made her day.
Our first stop of the day was something completely different: the Clabber Girl Museum and Bake Shop. The longtime purveyors of baking powder, baking soda, cornstarch, and other products under assorted brand names have their factory and corporate HQ in downtown Terre Haute. We happen to be fans of baked goods, and this wouldn’t be our first trip to a museum about baking ingredients (cf. the Mill City Museum in Minneapolis). It didn’t hurt that the museum is free.
Going into this year’s vacation, we hoped the cuisine would be a highlight at our various stops — be it good ol’ Southern kitchen cookin’, Gulf-sourced fresh seafood, or, really, anything outside of international franchisees. We received our first recommendation from the friendly guide at the Alabama Welcome Center, who insisted that during our road trip we had to try genuine shrimp-‘n’-grits somewhere below the Mason-Dixon line at least once. For lunch on Day Two, I trusted her and gave it a shot.
This is not ice cream. That’s not chocolate.
It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides and big-ticket concerts by musicians that other people love. My wife and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context. Usually, 70% of our quest is food.
Each year the State Fair announces the annual theme of a single ingredient and holds a contest daring all the vendors to create a new dish around it, like a sort of Food Network cooking show except I think the grand prize is just “for exposure”. Recent history has brought us the Year of the Tomato, the Year of Corn, the Year of Soy, the Year of Popcorn, and last year’s disappointingly non-food-based Year of the Coliseum, in honor of the longtime event venue that had reopened after a two-year closure for extensive renovations. This year’s theme was “the Year of the Farmer”, a.k.a. “the Year We Ran Out of Food Themes”. For anyone who thought “the Year of the Coliseum” wasn’t directionless enough, 2015 had only a handful of the many vendors offering a random, disconnected assortment of ostensibly new dishes, at least one of which was flat-out pretending to be new.
We tried to make the most of it anyway and found a few items worth actual dollars.
Yes, it’s true: I allowed these in our house. Some experiments you have to try for yourself.
Someone at the Lay’s Potato Chip factory got bored this year and let the general public choose new flavors for their mad food scientists to concoct and test on us consumer guinea pigs.
That was the state of the potato union in 2014 as we saw previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover, and here we are again one year later. The adventurous bigwigs at Frito-Lay decided the previous stunt was so entertaining, they’re trying it again with four more theoretical flavors suggested by fans at home. The official site for their “Do Us a Flavor” contest lets eaters vote for their favorites and get to know the lucky fans whose suggestions became mandatory work orders for Frito-Lay’s top nutrichemists.
One of the flavors was suggested by a fellow Hoosier who recently spoke to the Indianapolis Star about her new-found claim to potential fame. If she’s one of three losing finalists, she receives a mere $50,000.00. If she wins and America loves her idea, she wins $1,000,000.00, the flavor becomes an official permanent product, and Frito-Lay keeps all future profits in perpetuity, assuming we all don’t band together as a country to troll them by choosing the worst flavor and wrecking their 2016 P&L sheets.
In the interest of food science and life lessons, my wife and I tracked down all four flavors and held our very own two-person chip-tasting party tonight. Also, because we can.
At last, it’s our turn for Coke to really speak to us! Or so we tell ourselves.
Not every stretch of highway is an endless parade of merriment. Not every side quest earns us a Trophy or Achievement. Not every minute can be filled with photogenic overstimulation. Sometimes we’re okay with that, because sometimes we need time to relax and breathe on our so-called “vacations”.
Sometimes the clock works against us. Sometimes it’s a choice on our part. One to-do item is sacrificed so another to-do item might see fruition. Failure and compromise play into every road trip.
Sometimes we find little moments between the grand occasions and the oncoming letdowns. And sometimes there are snacks.
We weren’t ready for lunch by the time we left the Zachary Taylor National Cemetery in Louisville, but we knew I wouldn’t last all the way till Nashville without food. We pressed ahead another hour or so, letting Anne nap for a bit and keeping a lookout for a convenient lunchtime stop that was not a national chain. Interstate exit signs trying to entice us into McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, Dairy Queen, Subway, and/or Waffle House were a waste of logo paint to my eyes.
Pictured above is my prize for outstanding achievement in the field of stubbornness: a pork shoulder sandwich on a pretzel-roll bun with barbecue sauce, discovered in a town called Munfordville, population 1600.
If you think this is large, wait’ll you see what my wife ordered…
While my lovely dinner companion and I await our charcuterie, a tiny Eiffel Tower twinkles merrily at passersby.
Our very special MCC extended interlude concludes!
Once again we return to Massachusetts Avenue, the part of downtown Indianapolis where trendy eateries cheerfully serve those of us who don’t live in any of the upscale north-side neighborhoods. For my birthday last May, my wife and I tried a relatively new place that specializes in unpronounceable French cuisine. Anne and I met in high school German class, but we did our best to fake our way through dinner from one of Germany’s notable European colleagues.
Our very special MCC extended interlude continues!
Ye olde, venerable International House of Pancakes may be a chain restaurant, but they’re not known for dullness or restraint. You can order pancakes as your primary meal, as befitting their moniker. If you’d rather have an omelet, you’re entitled to a side order of toast, biscuits, or the same pancakes. The strawberry banana pancakes in the above photo were given to me as the sidekick to my omelet. That would be great if I were someone likely to burn thousands of calories over the next few hours, such as an Olympic pentathlete or The Rock before his first three morning workouts.
Our very special MCC extended interlude continues!
Pictured above: the Salad Nicoise at Indy’s Bazbeaux Pizza — albacore tuna, anchovies, eggs, pepperoncini, red onions, artichoke hearts, and hearts of palm. Guys like me don’t normally walk into a pizzeria and order a salad for dinner. One night last May, it just seemed like the thing to do.
Right this way for a tangential follow-up to an MCC entry from May!
Our very special MCC extended interlude continues!
Four out of every five business days I bring a home-assembly turkey-‘n’-cheese sandwich to work for lunch. It’s one of the little ways we cut budget corners so we can set aside more disposable income for conventions, vacations, comics, movie tickets, and so on. Spending eight or ten bucks a day on lunch works out to $40-$50/week, or $160-$250/ month, or $1,920-$3,000/year. That’s an awful lot of geek merchandise and travel frills to leave behind. So cheap sack lunches are the rule of my routine.
Once a week I do lunch out with a coworker. On extremely rare occasions, when I’m absolutely sick and tired of Oscar Meyer, and we didn’t have any leftovers in the fridge that I could bring to work and nuke, then I might go out alone for a bite. Pictured above from one such outing is a burrito topped with chili sauce and chili con queso, garnished by a small sidekick of salad, all from a Mexican place called Acapulco Joe’s. I’d been wanting to try it for years, but I kept forgetting it was there. From the dingy decor and rustic exterior, I hadn’t expected an arty presentation that looks like something Two-Face would order from his personal crime chef.
Our very special MCC extended interlude continues!
Dateline: October 2014 at work. One of my teammates retired after twenty-odd years with the company and per regulations was entitled to one (1) retirement party with visitors, memories, congratulations, family guests, gifts, speeches, food, fruit punch made from random two-liters, and the opportunity to enjoy all of this on the clock. It’s all part of the company’s sincerely generous retirement package. Food varies from retirement party to retirement party based on the whims of the retiree. This time: cupcakes.
Our very special MCC extended interlude continues!
Dateline: January 31, 2015. As part of our annual pilgrimage to see the Oscar-Nominated Live-Action and Animated Shorts, my wife and I have to travel up north to Keystone Fashion Mall, home of Keystone Art Cinema, the only art-house theater in Indianapolis, a long drive from our side of town. The Fashion Mall overhauled their food court a few years ago into a much wider, brighter, more modern space with newer, trendier dining options replacing several of the sort of meat-scoops-on-rice joints that rule all the other malls in town.
[Due to circumstances entirely under our control, we here at Midlife Crisis Crossover are taking a much-needed getaway for reasons that should be easy for any longtime readers to guess. Trust me when I say we’ll have plenty of new stories to share upon our return. We ask for your prayers and kind hopes that the preceding statement doesn’t turn out to be grim foreshadowing to a brutal cautionary tale.
So! While we’re retreating, recharging, renewing, rejuvenating, and restocking our production stations, please enjoy the next several daily entries’ worth of Fun Moments in Food from our past fifteen months. As a proud “nicheless” blog, MCC skips around from topic to topic depending on where all the whims lead, so if this all-foodie salute isn’t your favorite thing ever, rest assured we’ll get back to geek stuff and/or normal stuff viewed through geek lenses rather shortly. Updates as they occur. Enjoy!]
Dateline: my birthday, May 2014. My mom wanted to take us out to dinner. I picked a Mexican place in Brownsburg called Tequila Sunrise for two reasons: one, I was in the mood for it. Two: their menu items contained words we’ve never heard beyond episodes of Chopped.
Three Saturdays ago my wife and I returned to town after a long, long drive and had neither energy nor willpower to cook supper at home. We weren’t in the mood to wait 60-120 minutes for a table at your Olive Garden/Red Lobster level of weekend hotspots. We’d already racked up a number of single-day expenses and were neither amenable nor properly dressed to go overspend on a nicer, classier, posher, less crowded establishment. So we decided to stop for fast food.
On a Saturday night. I know better than this.
When things went south, they set off a series of flashbacks to my previous career track and reminded me exactly why I should know better.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 