It really tweaks my melon, again

Once again, I'm going to channel my inner Abe Simpson and publicly whine about a few things:

Major League Baseball is on hiatus

By hiatus, I mean I’m not watching any of it this year. A few years ago, back when I was still exercising regularly, I was on the road for work in Utica. I had just gone for a jog and noticed that there was a baseball game being played at the high school next door to the hotel. I went over and watched a few innings. Yes, a game played at the high school level is not played as well as in the big leagues. But it was more fun to watch. And since my oldest daughter has been playing softball, I’d rather be a part of that than watch a pro game. Have you ever seen a college softball game? That’s more fun to watch than a pro baseball game too. But major league greed is what pushed me over the edge. This off season, it has become painfully clear that there are several teams that just don’t care about a winning season for their fans. I’m not taking about a World Series win, I’m talking about putting a pro team on the field that is worth watching. Something more than a game above 500. Tanking multiple seasons has become an accepted practice and every year is a "rebuilding year." Pro baseball doesn’t deserve its fans.

Veterinarian Bills

Our dog Bailey recently got spayed. Now maybe it’s the vet office we chose, but if the cost of spaying/neutering a dog is this much everywhere, there is no reason to wonder why there are so many orphaned dogs. A lot of people aren’t going to pay that. I’m surprised I paid that. A few years ago, there was a great weekend in Boston with a bunch of college friends. We ate and drank and had a blast. Valet parking was involved. That all-out 3 day weekend was cheaper than the sum of our first 3 vet visits. 

I don’t have a lot of experience with veterinarians, but spaying/neutering is something they should probably do a little closer to cost (which should include payment for their time). We needed to return a few weeks after our first visit for a booster shot. They offered to draw some blood for some tests before the spaying operation. It would be $100 cheaper to do in advance instead of on the day. Yeah, sure. Do that. For comparison, I had some blood work done a few months after getting bitten by a tick.

Blood work place: That will be $1200

Insurance company: We’ll give you $49

Blood work Place: OK

What an absurd scam. I don’t expect the vet to lose money with spaying and neutering. But maybe if they didn’t quadruple up on the cost of the procedure, more people would listen to Bob Barker and “help control the pet population. Have your pets spayed or neutered.”

Restaurant Apology

We went out to dinner last night. We weren’t rushing, but we had one daughter with us and had to pick the other up so we weren’t planning for a long meal. After placing the order, we waited. After about 15 minutes, the waiter came to top off our water glasses and said the food would be out shortly. About 10 minutes after that, he came back and told us that they lost our ticket and were rushing to fill our order now. He apologized. We said it was OK, it happens. He brought out the food and apologized again. We started eating. A manager came over to check on us and apologized, asked how everything was and told us she was going to comp an entrée. She said there was an emergency in the kitchen, someone had to rush out and the ticket got lost. We accepted her apology. The waiter apologized a few more times. They offered us a free desert which we passed on because we had to get going and they took a $21 entrée off the bill. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say they apologized for the delay 6 or 7 times. It kind of felt like the Monty Python sketch about the dirty fork: “I am the manager. I’ve only just heard." "I want to apologize humbly, deeply and sincerely about the fork.” 

The apologies worked. I don’t have any ill will toward the restaurant and I’d go back. Truth be told, the only apology I really wanted was for making me have to listen to Phil Collins sing Against All Odds while waiting for dinner.

Reviewing the Reviewer

More often than not, when I buy a Sunday Times Union it’s because I need paper for lighting chimneys of charcoal or fires in the wood oven. That’s probably a sad statement about the newspaper business. I haven’t been keeping up with the weekly restaurant reviews but when I get a paper I read the write up. It’s weird how reviews seem to end up in either moderate, silent reader agreement or passionate, loud reader disagreement. Writing style plays a big part in it too. I’m sure the current reviewer is a great person, but I don’t care for her writing style. Aside from occasionally needing a dictionary to understand a sentence, there have been a few “scat” references that I felt were poor choices in a professional restaurant review. From a review of Forged:

The black bean brownie with tofu ganache ($9) certainly pushed me to the edge, with its constipated scat of solid black beans and oats, and dribbly coconut milk “whipped cream” with an empty taste of melted ice.

Maybe it was an attempt at humor that went by me. It’s ok not to like something, but the Times Union restaurant review can make or break a local restaurant. Leave “constipated scat” out of a review. And water. Water is “the empty taste of melted ice.” In this week’s review of the Galleria 7 Market, there was an unnecessary shot at a nearby restaurant. 

Of course, you've already checked out Innovo Kitchen in the corner, either because your curiosity was piqued by its owners' embezzlement imbroglio at their previous place or because you'd heard they were killing it in their new space. 

Yes, Innovo Kitchen had a stand in the Galleria 7 Market, but it's gone now. It is a stand alone restaurant around the corner in the same strip mall. Why even mention Innovo Kitchen at all? I don't think the owner or restaurant have anything to with the place being reviewed. It just seems like an unprovoked, mean spirited jab.


Then in the description of the pizza place in the food court:

Anna's pizzas, cooked to order in three minutes, have an intriguing tangy tomato sauce and soot-blackened bottoms that could use a little crunch ($11).

I suppose a little bit of burnt/charred crust could be considered soot. I tend to think of soot as the particles in smoke that end up lining the chimney from incomplete combustion of the wood. I guess you could argue that delicately charred crust can be delicious, incomplete combustion.

I’ve been to Anna’s once. It’s not my favorite pizza. As my father would say, “It isn’t the worst pizza I ever had.” It is easy to find worse pizza locally. I had a slice for lunch last week and I’m still mad at how bad it was (I should have just turned around and left after getting a look at the slices). Anyhow, the reviewer wished Anna’s crust was a little more crisp. Now, I’ll give you Anna’s isn’t a true Neapolitan pizza, but it is clearly inspired by the style and that style is not crisp. To my completely insane pizza obsessive sensibilities, that’s like saying, “the pizza was alright but I wish it was Chicago Deep Dish instead” or “I ordered the steak but wished it was chicken.”

An Anniversary

One year ago today, according to my brother in law's Facebook timeline (and the end of this post), the first pizzas came out of the wood oven.

Made some good progress on the oven since then. It's snowing now but the forecast calls for 40s on Saturday. Time to fire up the oven and make some pizza. I think I’m going to try to make some bigger pies this time. I’m usually in the 13-14 inch range. I’m going to see if I can bump a few pies up to 16 inches. As I age, it’s amazing what passes for excitement.

Note to Phairhead - I hope you are feeling better soon!

Another "We're Out"

The Mets just lost so I'm going to complain about something stupid and petty and stupid and I would have probably let it go if the Mets didn't just lose. But I'm going to bitch and moan....about ketchup.

I like to think that I'm usually sympathetic to mistakes. I get it. Things happen. I already wrote about running out of stuff already here. I get it if a special sells out. And I get it if you thought you'd have enough but you misjudged and ran out. However, if there's an easy opportunity to restock what you're missing, I don't understand why a restaurant's management wouldn't just take care of it.

Tonight, the restaurant was out of ketchup. Our waitress explained that they were out and offered a bowl filled with some to-go packets of Sysco ketchup. As it turns out, the fries were good and I wouldn't have put ketchup on them anyway. Disaster averted...for me. I'm going to guess that 75% of the plates coming out of the kitchen come with fries. Other diners got stuck with crappy ketchup, or just had to go without ketchup. I know, tragic right?

At 5:30 on a Sunday with football games and a World Series game later, they're looking at some demand for ketchup with a night full of fries and burgers on the way. All they have is teaspoon packets filled with ketchup no one wants.
 
There's a supermarket across the street. They sell ketchup. So does Target, BJs, Walmart and lots of other places. Buy a few bottles, squirt some in a little dish and give it to people that request ketchup. If you got lucky and caught the hours right, Restaurant Depot would have cases of it. Problem solved until your next Sysco delivery, your servers don't have to uncomfortably explain that you're out of ketchup, and your customers will be happier without old packets of crappy ketchup.

There are many difficult aspects to the food service industry. Finding ketchup is not one of them.

Did I mention the Mets lost? And I may or may not be drowning my sorrows with adult beverages. The ends of games 4 and 5 were brutal.

Restaurant Whinning

Maybe this is wussing out, but I'm not going to name the place. I've been a few other times and had significantly better experiences. I'll chalk this up to a Restaurant Week anomaly. So I'm going to bitch and moan about nothing of life changing importance. Hopefully none of this will get read by an actor.

I was downtown earlier tonight, me and two kids on tow, and without realizing it walked into one of the restaurants participating in the almost ended restaurant week. We got there at 4:45. The place was mostly empty. I asked for a table for 3. The hostess asked if I had a reservation and I did not. Apparently that was an incorrect answer. My response was met with sighs and paper flipping. Another host came to the stand. The first said to the second, "I have 3 walk-ins and I don't know if I can put them anywhere." Sorry to inconvenience you with my patronage of your restaurant.

I noticed a Restaurant Week sign, realized they looked like they were going to get slammed and said, "If you are booked up for the restaurant week, we can come back another time." I was told all they had was some tables by the bar or something in the lounge area. The kids were tired and hungry - I had them running all over town for the last 5 hours. So, we tried the lounge area. It looked nice enough, but I envisioned one of my kids dumping something all over the couches there and opted for a high table near the bar.

The kids got burgers. I went with the restaurant week menu. The appetizer and dessert were nothing special and get to escape the whiny, tirade that follows. The main course was not good. A dish that failed from it's inception. It was the dish that a chef proudly presents to Gordon Ramsey or Robert Irvine prior to getting read the riot act about why their restaurant sucks on a restaurant reality TV show. Everything about the dish failed:

The pasta wasn't good - no shit, you could buy better out of the freezer case of any local Italian market.

The sauce was a completely separated oil slick.

There were rings of a bizzaro kielbasa-ish meat, allegedly chorizo.

The diced tomatoes were those Styrofoam kind that get cut into huge chunks and top iceberg lettuce salads in the winter. Probably would have been better and cheaper if they came out of a can. Even cheaper if they never made it onto the plate.

There was some broccoli, mushrooms and shrimp in there too. Very backhanded compliment: though flavorless, the shrimp weren't over cooked.

I find it hard to believe that a professional chef in a pretty popular restaurant came up with the dish. I know, I know, I know...I'm whiny food snob and probably even worse. I wasn't expecting fine dining and I'm sure several corners were cut in trying to make some money at a $20 price point. But for how much chorizo was in the dish - buy a hunk of decent chorizo and use less. You'll need less anyhow. The pasta, you could probably do better at BJ's. Restaurant Depot probably has something along the same lines and maybe better. And the sauce, a line cook out there needs to learn how to make this one. The chef overseeing him should have taught him how to make this sauce prior to the last night of the restaurant week. In fairness to the hosting staff, the place did fill up while we were there. Although when we left, two of the reserved tables had yet to be seated.

Less bitching. More seltzer.

Large Book Stores Are Running Themselves Out of Business

There's a book I want. I looked it up online at Barnes and Noble because I have a gift certificate for the store. Online the price is $27 with tax and free shipping included. I work near Colonie Center so I figured I'd walk over there at lunchtime and pick the book up. I find it on the shelf in the food section (where else?) and there are about 5 copies. I look it over, read the flaps and start to walk over to the sales counter when the price on the book catches my eye. It's $40 in the store. I ask the guy behind the counter about the price difference and he says, "We can't do an online price."

"But it's your online price," I responded.

"Yeah, we can't do online prices," was the reply.

So the book went back onto the shelf and I came home and ordered it from them online. If this is the case with all of the books that cost $25 or more, I don't see how a store like that will ever be anything more than a place to go and browse. This is probably why Borders is gone from the area. They probably couldn't compete with themselves either.

Ewww

This is wrong on so many levels.

"Vilhelm Lillefläsk’s Squeez Bacon® is fully cooked 100% bacon. Due to the patented electro-mechanical process by which Squeez Bacon® is rendered, it requires no preservatives or other additives. Each serving is as healthy as real bacon, and equivalent to 4 premium slices of bacon! You can put it on sandwiches, pizza, pastas, bacon, soups, pies, eat it hot or cold (warm Squeez Bacon® on toasted rye is to die for), substitute it for bacon in your recipes, or even eat it right out of the tube like we do! If it’s edible, it’s better with Squeez Bacon®."

Father's Day 2010

A wee bit late on this one...but I spent Saturday and Sunday of father's day weekend with a weed whacker trimming around cow fence. It was not thrilling. And the week whacker wasn't working right. Damn thing constantly jammed and the engine wasn't firing correctly either. I got a few blisters and a little itchy patch of poison-something-or-other on my hand. I am probably taking my whining a little too far with this, but the red line is fence that I weed whacked. On both sides. Cue pitiful violin music please.

On the plus side, I got lots of nice cards, a GPS thingy for the car, and a few cute drawings. Had a nice talk with my dad too.

I don't want to go to work tomorrow

Some of the blogs I have been following seem to update several times a day with pretty interesting posts. Don't know how they do it. I have a lot of food related projects I want to do, but by the time the day winds down and I actually have some time I usually go for the mindless sort of time wasting before passing out.

Projects in the pipeline include:

Making pate a choux because Michael Ruhlman told me to make some. Well, not me personally. He was more trying to get everyone to make it. Awhile ago he encouraged me to make my own popcorn. I'm not sure why I needed his encouragement, but I haven't had anything out of a nuke bag since. If you are in the Honest Weight Co-Op, they have excellent bulk popping corn. Making popcorn this way will change your life. "Popping my own popcorn will change my life?" you ask. Yes. It will make your life better.

Holiday cookies. There are a lot of cookies to make. Fortunately, once we are done,there will be a lot of cookies to eat.

Sopressata - The follow-up to the Tuscan Salami will be a sopressata beginning to age some time in January. I've got to come up with some other stuff to cure too.

Snowy day pasta-making with the kids. Next time we are snowed in, we're making pasta.

Vanilla bean experiments - I promised my older daughter we would make some vanilla ice cream. (The extract, by the way, keeps getting darker. Going to wait awhile longer before I try it.)

I haven't cooked anything on our charcoal rotisserie for awhile. That needs to change.

The family's Summer in February will be coming up.

These projects will have to wait because unfortunately, this week is going to be the kind of week that makes me buy Powerball tickets. A dollar and a dream....I have a project for work that I'm not exactly excited about doing. And by not excited I mean dreading. It involves at least 3 nights of working the overnight shift. All-nighters used to be fun. In college, I used to stay up all night for no reason. Piece of cake. Even fun. Now, I need a week to recover. It is like having a hangover without enjoying the fun that caused the hangover.

When I come to and can focus long enough to use a knife without hurting myself, I'll be back in the kitchen. Everything is based on a construction schedule so who knows - maybe it will all get canceled tomorrow.