rvanrens

Me and She Who Must Be Obeyed live across the river from Loudon - depending on scheduleing, we'd probably come, too... Rob

Thanks. Now I've got plans for the weekend.... Incidentally, I don't miss anything about my grandmother's or mother's cooking. I may be the only person I know who thinks all his older female relatives can't cook worth a damn. At least my mother-in-law doesn't try to pretend otherwise - she was the one who pushed to come here for Thanksgiving, knowing I'm the only real cook in the family, either side. But I digress... Rob

'Round here, we infuse pretty much anything there's a surplus of in liquor. Cherries or wild black raspberries in vodka. Blackberries in brandy. Pears with vanilla and honey in bourbon. For that matter, honey in bourbon or scotch makes a really nice winter warmer. Apricots in a mix of vodka and brandy, again with a heavy dose of honey - it's liquid sunshine. Chose fruits that lack enzyemes like bromelaide. Pretty much that means no tropicals for you, my boy. No pineapple, no papaya, no mango, and while banana works, it's just nasty. Nuts also make excellent infusions, although the oils in them limit thier shelf life to a year or so, and DEFINITELY store them out of sunlight. Herbals are very nice, and you can make your own gins, vermouths, and bitters. Some less conventional things I've tried include tomatoes - makes an INCREDIBLE tomato sauce; gummi bears - works well, but leaves little tranparent gummi bear skeletons on the bottom of the jar; onion and garlic - less successful than the Tomato, but the garlic and onion wine we made one fall was possibly the best marinade I've even used; coconut - didn't work well at all; and peanut - technically worked okay, but only if you like peanut-butter flavored vodka. Most of the infusions are the first step on the way to cordials - we infuse to the desired taste, then sweeten to make it more drinkable. Some of these are also used for cooking - the tomato and onion/garlic are ONLY good for cooking, but spiced apple brandy is excellent for drinking, and makes a truly wonderful pork loin roast. I like using honey in many of them, partly because I get local honey from a beekeeper, and I can often match the flavor of the honey to the friut, and also because I think table sugar gets a somewhat cidery off-flavor in the infusion. (When I was working as a brewer, we avoided sucrose as a fermentable for this reason, and that my account for my aversion to using it in cordials). I have used turbinado sugar with great success, however, the trace of molasses provides an interesting flavor note. Last year we had lots of sour cherries. I infused about 3 quarts of vodka with sour cherries, then let it sit for a year. This year we had lots of sweet cherries. I filtered out the pulp from the sour cherries and added 3 more quarts of sweet cherries, then ignored it some more for 4 months or so. We decanted, filtered, and bottled it all the first of Nov, and it's mostly gone now. It was worth the wait. The sweet and sour layers provided a great deal of complexity and kept it from being too cloying. Mixed with a bit of tonic, it made a fine apertif or cocktail. Straight it was a nice after-dinner drink.

A former landlady of mine used to use to use my oven to make her X-Mas ham...it was pretty simple. Take a Virginia country ham. Cut off the nasty bits. Place in a deep roasting pan or dutch over. Add whisky until it cover the ham. Place in oven at 300 degrees for, oh, about 10 hours. Amazing. Abso-focking-lutely amazing. Transcendant, even. I mean, wow. The only drawback was that I had to live with the thing while it cooked - that wasn't all that pleasant. It could smell better. Rob

Where is this? A bakery that makes good cakes? Please, tell me more. I must go immediately! Mmmmmm.....cake. Rob

Brown Pelican = ugh. Bird's brown for a reason. There are a few worthwhile stops in Fredneck. Il Forno Pizza is one; we're always pretty happy with the wood-fired pizza, pastas are okay, avoid the salads. Most of the waitresses have a crush on my 18-month-old, so we go often. The Tasting Room has already been mentioned. Probably the best food in Frederick. I've had a pretty good steak at Dutch's Daughter, but I can't speak to most of the menu. The best coffee in town is The Frederick Coffee Company. Their food menu is sandwiches and stuff like that - kind of hit or miss, depending upon which of the various teenage cretins they hire is working that day. Since the previous owner left, quality has become somewhat unpredictable. They still roast and brew excellent coffee, though. We by our whole-bean here, for the rare occasions we need it at home. Bombay Cafe on Market Street is excellent, one of the better Indian restaurants in the area. The lunch buffet is not great, but we've always had excellent dinners there. Most of the downtown restaurants should be avoided. Griff's is overpriced and not very fresh seafood. I cannot for the life of me see how La Paz stays in business - the meals I've eaten there have been truly wretched. The Brown Pelican is your grandfather's French restaurant, and Wags is glorified and overpriced bar food. The Wishing Tree is very, very pretentious and very, very ineptly executed. Tauraso's is owned by the same family as the Tasting Room, and it shows. The quality of the food is excellent, though sometimes pretty conservative. This family also owns Proof, a bakery just off Market Square that offer pretty decent soups, sandwiches, and desserts. Isabella's in another perrencial favorite. I just wish they'd stop discontinuing all my favorite tapas... Brewers Alley is worth stopping for, esp. if you like microbrews. They're plenty kid-friendly too. Barley and Hops wants to be Brewers Alley, but can't quite find its way there. I like it, and I'd recommend it, but I will also point out that I contracted food poisoning from some crab there once. Still can't look at a crab cake without feeling queasy... That's all I can think of right now - I'll psot more later when I can come up with a few more suggestions. Rob

Yeah, I went to UW...that was a REALLY sought-after gig. I mean, guys would KILL each other for it. The hope, apparently, was to score in the back...the whole thing is jsut WAY too Freudian. Seriously, the guy who drove the thing was a minor celebrity on campus. Rob

Me and Wife and Boy will be there...we'll bring soemthing spicy and beefy to grill on skewers at the park...

It worth pointing out that MOST not ALL infant carriers (detachable car seat/baby bucket thingys - parents know what I mean) are designed to sit securely on top of a wood restaurant high chair that is NOT inverted. There were on the bottom of ours (and on many other models I've looked at) 4 notches that set exacly ove the seat back and the front retainer bar; there were also clips on the sides to accomodate the safety strap from the chair, thereby making doubly sure that the thing weren't going nowhere... Waitstaff always seemed surpsised when we used the high chair that way. I nearly got into a fight witht he manager at one restaurant over this. The pinhead in question INSISTED that we invert the high chair; he refused to believe that it was safer to do it the way it was CLEARLY DESIGNED for. When he yanked the wooden chair out of my hand and proceeded to turn it upside down for the third time, we left. One other advantage of the seats that set in the highchair right-side up; they allow the little shaver to make eye contact and watch what you are doing, rather than being forced to stare at the ceiling. As a note; we have been taking Shorty out for dinner since he was two weeks old; we've stopped recently as he has developed a regrettable tendency towards temper tantrums while his molars are coming in. With VERY few exceptions, restaurants have been welcoming and accomodating towards us and expcially towards him. Maybe it's cause he's so damn cute. And he'll eat virtually anything you put in front of him, particularly if it's something you rather he DIDN'T eat (like rocks, chicken bones, the cat, etc.). Rob

Nah, I hate golf. Breakfast barbeque, on the other hand, has some intriguing possibilities... Rob

Been to Chubby's twice now, and it was prety good. I've eaten better 'Q' here and there, but never from a roadside stand, and NEVER in Maryland... My only complaint is about the other customers - there should be two lines, one for civilians and one for people who have, at some point in thier lives eaten barbeque before. "What's Pulled PorK?"..."Isn't Brisket really salty, like Corned Beef?"..."Which sauce is the best?"..."How hot is hot?"... and the one that left me speechless "Where do you buy your smoke flavoring?" Friggin' Morons...it should be like this "Pulled Pork, Vinegar Sauce, Slaw, Coke". Know what you wnat and how to order it, knuckleheads. This ins't just Cuhbby's, mind you. I spent two weeks in Western PA in August, and there was a Carolina 'Q' stand set up nearby, really pretty good pork shoulder, nice tangy spicy sauce...good dry-rubed ribs, too. Anyway, I ate lunch there 'bout every day, and there was always a line. People asking for hot dogs, hamburgers, cheesesteak sandwiches, etc. I'm saying "This is a freakin' BBQ stand, you idiots! They've got pulled pork, pulled chicken, ribs, hot sausage and sweet sausage! Two kinds of sauce - vinegar and spicy tomato! They serve Coke and Diet Coke in glass bottles! Everything comes with cole slaw! It's JUST NOT THAT DIFFICULT!!! If'n you're vegetarian, or keeping kosher/halal, great, no offense, but GO ELSEWHERE!!! If you don't like BBQ, EAT SOMEWHERE ELSE!!! If you're too STOOPID to figure out the VERY SIMPLE menu, get OUT OF MY WAY!!! When I don't get my 'Q' fix, I get VERY CRANKY!!! So, as you can see, BBQ Rage resulted in the death of several clueless denizens of ther Pittsburg region. Rob

Grilled Chocolate Muffins are the best....mmmmmmm Must have salted butter, tho. Rob

She Who Must Be Obeyed and I are BIG fans of the Fairfax branch...never even knew that there were other branches. Many of her cow-irkers are Indian of varying flavors, and they think well of the food - and since most of them are young, single men, they eat out A LOT. Fairfax is overrun with good Indian places, but Minerva is our favorite. Rob

Hving grown up in Wisconsin, I can assure that everyone in the Midwest looks down on denizens of the Dakotas...NoDaks and SoDaks, much the same way that the cretinous coast-dwellers look down on Midwesterners. And yes, they do still tell Polish jokes. Like "didjya hear about the Polish NoDak farmer who opened a restarant in DC? Yah, he said he wanted to live someplace where there was no winter". Actually, the last time I visited the ancestral homelands (in N. Dakota), I encountered beef and grain products of EXTREMELY high quality. So yeah, I'd definitely try the restauraunt. Rob

We went a couple of times when we lived in Cherrydale...it being one of the few palces that you could get into at 7:00 on a Friday night without a reservation. It wasn't anything revelatory, but it was okay. Beat the hell out of one more trip to Attila's... Besides, they had fried cheese. No place can be that bad if they serve fried cheese. Rob

I have a disturbing mental image of ravening packs of vegetarians, descending in somewhat polite, deferential chaos upon unsuspecting produce carts and slaughtering the wild tofu by the dozens... Now I'm going to go wash out my brain with my favorite vegetarian consuamble, one made from malted barley smoked over peat fires in Scotland, where vegetarians are hunted down and shot as a food source. Of course, these are also the unrepentant carnivores and junk food eaters that gave us Scotch Eggs (hard-boiled eggs covered in sausage and deep-fried) and deep-fried Mars Bars. Rob

Maybe my pallet has become too accustomed to heat, but I found most of the dishes on the mild side; the spice was pleasant, and definitely added interest, but it's nothing like , f'r instance, Vietnamese country cooking...now THAT'S hot. It was delicious. From our end of the table, the event was a smashing success. Rob must...find...more...kimchi...need...pickled...radish...

Strangely enough, there's the same place on Market Street in Frederick...better selection than the Clarendon one, which I am familiar with of old. Rob

I'd like to come, too, but Saturdays I'm ususally out trying desperately to sell more pots (or, conversely, make more so I have more to sell) Rob

Well, the 1/2 is about two and half feet tall, weighs about 22 lbs, and wants nothing to do with solid food...he just needs a place to sit (high chair) and flirt with anyone who will look his way. Rob

Count me and +1 and +1/2 in, depending upon the day and time... Rob

Whoo-hoo!!! Redneck cham-pag-nee!

We'll be there to take you up on that...to whom do we mention this ad to recieve free promotional item, availible only until supplies last, not responsible for injuries given or received, don't try this at home, etc etc...? Rob Van Rens <edited for speling>

Corduroy for Thanksgiving...Boy Howdy, that was good. MMMMMMMMmmmmmmmm...yummy. Rob

Whoo-Hoo!