Category: Eats

Food, glorious food

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10-17

Went out to this new sports bar called 10-17 tonight with a couple of friends. Small crowd tonight (not much sports going on I guess). Nice place, although I think it suffers a bit from poor location. It’s tucked away in the Quadrangle Shopping Center next to the Piggly Wiggly on Skylark Drive (across from Citadel Mall).

Big comfy sofas in the front of the room, large spacious tables to gather around in the rest of the place. There are about 4 or 5 big flat screen TVs lining the walls to watch and dartboards and a shuffleboard to play on too. Plenty of board games to play while you’re sipping a few brews or chowing down on some food. The menu is a mixture of standard bar grub and a few German dishes. Since Max & Moritz over in Mt P closed down earlier this year, 10-17’s become about the only place I can think of where you can get decent German food. The two people from Germany that I was there with tonight didn’t seem to object to the food, so I guess it must have been pretty decent by their standards. Prices are pretty reasonable too with most things in the $6-10 range.

Best of all, the whole place is smoke-free, so you can go there and spend a few hours hanging out without smelling like an ash tray when you leave.

Overall, it’s kind of like the Map Room but with sports instead of music. A nice comfy place to go hang out with friends after work.

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Yummy Ham

This was my Thanksgiving ham from yesterday. Just a very simple preparation with a basic brown sugar/mustard glaze. Amazingly simple. Just grab one of those smoked hams from the meat section in the grocery store, stab it with a thermometer and bake until it reaches about 125°F (52°C). Take it out, slather on the glaze and throw it back in the oven until the thermometer beeps at 145°F (63°C). Remove, let it rest for a few minutes and carve.

Add some smashed potatoes, fresh peas and corn and you have Yummy.

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Zappo’s

There’s this new pizza place called Zappo’s at King and Race St that we tried out yesterday. The wife says it’s the best New York style pizza around (she ought to know). She’s never been a fan of Andolini’s, the perennial City Paper Best of, because she thinks the dough is too sweet.

Zappo’s was a pretty decent pie. Thin crispy crust, slightly chewy (not as chewy as Andolini’s) and not too sweet (just the way the wife likes it). Being a deep dish kind of pizza guy, Zappo’s pizza didn’t seem too different from the others I’ve had around here. Reasonably priced though. Haven’t gotten around to trying the other items on the menu yet. It’s located pretty much on the way home from the dog park, so I have a feeling we’ll be stopping by on a quasi-regular basis.

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Carnivore date night

Last night the wife and I went out on a date to Oak Steakhouse. It was a very pleasant evening, although it got a little loud at our second floor corner table with all the noise from people waiting at the bar echoing off the ceiling towards the end of th evening.

The food was quite spectacular and we ate ourselves a little silly. Really, how can you not at a place like Oak. I started with a carpaccio of beef while the wife went with the foie gras. Both very excellent. I’d never had a carpaccio before, so it was an interesting and tasty experience. Not at all like what I expected.

By the time we finished our salads (ceasar for me, the spinach salad for her), we were already getting full. The dressings on the salads were perfect, and we just couldn’t stop eating them.

Then came our entrees. At Oak, being a steakhouse and all, large hunks of meat are the star items on the menu. All of them grilled, and all of them very yummy looking. I went with the 36 oz bone-in ribeye which came out on a hot cast iron pan. The wife ordered the 28oz porterhouse. For some reason ours didn’t come out sizzling like the other diners’ plates did. Anyway, it was a carnivore’s dream. The ribeye was a bit charred on the outside, but cooked to a nice medium/medium rare on the inside. I sliced off a decent sized 5 or 6 oz serving (no way I was going to be able to eat the whole thing at this point) and started eating. A bite of the ribeye with the accompanying foie gras was utterly sinful. Buttery sweet texture and flavour of the foie gras went perfectly with the ribeye.

We left with enough meat to last us through at least 3 more meals. Definitely a place we would go to again, although probably not too often.

4.5 stars out of 5 (-0.5 stars for the rather loud atmosphere on the second floor. I bet the third floor would be much quieter).

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A baking snafu

Tomorrow there’s supposed to be a baby shower/lunch thing for one of the techs at work, so I thought I’d contribute a little something. After flipping through a few of the cookbooks, I found an apple cake recipe in Alton Brown’s I’m Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking. It sounded interesting and tasty, and better yet I already had all the ingredients on hand. I consider myself reasonably skilled at cooking and baking, and the recipe didn’t seem all that complex. Basic cake recipe using the creaming method. Still as I was reading through it I had this feeling in the back of my head that there was something missing. Naturally, I ignored it.

This was what I ended up with.

Unexpected baking result

Doesn’t look pretty, but it is tasty. Hardly presentable though. Think of what it would do to my reputation as a cook!

While doing the post mortem on the ‘cake’, I realized what that nagging feeling was telling me. There was no liquid in the ingredient list! No liquid means no gluten formation, and no gluten means the cake has no structural stability.

Duh. I need to learn to listen to those nagging feelings more often. I’ve made enough cakes using the creaming method that I should have picked up on this earlier. For some reason I didn’t and now I have a pan full of proto-cake.

The book itself is great, but apparently I’m not the only one to discover problems with the recipes, as a few of the reviews on Amazon point out. Sadly the list of errata mentioned in the reviews has apparently gone offline. Hopefully they’ll come back soon because there are some tasty looking recipes in his book.

I guess I’ll have to go empty handed now.