Sriracha Mashed Potatoes

So I wasn't able to find any recipes for Sriracha mashed potatoes online anywhere (if anyone has one please leave a comment!) so I experimented and came up with the following ratios that I liked (your tastes may vary of course):

Per each russet potato you are using (mine were about .8lbs each if that helps) use:

2/3 cup of half-and-half (warm)
0.4 of a stick of butter (little less than half)
1 tablespoon of sriracha
salt and pepper to taste
chives and cilantro to taste

Follow this or your own method for making the potatoes themselves: http://www.chow.com/stories/11951

I just added the sriracha, chives and cilantro at the same time as the butter/half-and-half.

Enjoy!

Spicy Miso Ramen Recipe

So I have been craving miso ramen recently... Unfortunately the closest decent ramen place is probably 20-30 minutes from my house depending on traffic. Instant ramen never quite lives up, so recently a Japanese friend of mine (Thanks Yumi!) translated a recipe for spicy miso ramen that she found. I tried it the other night and it turned out really good, though I overdid the veggies a little bit, probably want to use less next time.


recipe for spicy miso ramen (2 servings)

• noodles (the typical kind used for ramen)
  


• veggies - I used leeks, green onions, seaweed, tofu, mushrooms, bean sprouts and baby bok choy. I told you I went a little overboard ;-)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


• roasted sesame oil (just for flavor)
  


• garlic (minced) 2 cloves
  


• ginger (minced) 1 piece
  


• 豆板醤 1/2tsp - This is Bean Paste with Red Pepper
  
  


• ground pork 100g (about 1/4 lb)
  


• hot water 4cups
  



• +sake 1 tbsp
  


• +salt 1/2 tsp


• +sugar 1 tbsp


• +Awase (red) miso paste 3 tbsp
  


• +Chinese soup broth base (this one took a while to find at the japanese market, hopefully this picture helps you find it) 1 tbsp
  

Preparation :

Prepare hot water for cooking noodles

1. cut veggies into small pieces.


2. put sesame oil into a pot, add garlic and ginger and 豆板醤 until you smell garlic... then add ground pork.
   


3. just before the pork is fully cooked, add the 4 cups of hot water, and put in all the ingredients with "+" (sake, salt, sugar, miso, broth base), and bring it to a boil.
   


4. Cook noodle in another pot (follow the package direction)
   


5. While cooking the noodle, stir fry veggies (bring the gas level to high) in a frying pan, and add salt and pepper.
   


6. I added the veggies I didn't want to stirfry into the broth at this point
   


7. When the noodles are cooked, remove them from hot water, and drain. Put the noodles into a bowl, then the miso soup that you just made.


8. Put the veggies on top, and it's ready to eat!

Note: Step 7 is pretty important and needs to be done real quick before the noodle gets too soggy.

And that's it, I didn't get a picture of the final product since I was too busy eating it! Enjoy :)

NPR how to make the perfect buger

More for my burger streak lol: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106203291

Sometime soon I'm going write about something that ISN'T a burger though, I swear ;)

cooking good burgers at home

A friend send me a link to this, need to try out their tips: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/dining/01burg.html?_r=1

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/06/30/dining/20090701-burgers-interactive.html

Kuma's Corner

Had Kuma's Corner in Chicago today. Everyone here raves about them and for good reason. They have some of the best (and most interesting) burgers I have ever had (in addition to a pretty good craft beer selection including some Belgian). If they were in the LA area they would definitely rank at #2 just below Fathers Office in burger awesomeness, with an extra bonus for great BBQ pork fries and a very wide range of burger flavors. All of their burgers (except The Slayer apparently) are topped with amazingly delicious 'pretzel buns'. Pretzel bread seems to be fairly common in Chicago (though Kuma's are better than any others I tried there), it is basically a cross between soft pretzel dough and bread, wish I could find some around here!

I had the 'High On Fire' which is topped with: Siracha, Prosciutto, Roasted Red Pepper, Grilled Pineapple, and Sweet Chili Paste. It was really excellent, and not just the stuff on top, the burger was of good quality as well. I added some extra Siracha (they had bottles you could use) as it didn't come with quite enough for my taste (mmm siracha!):




Also tried the Pentagram:


I don't quite remember what was in this one, the sauce may have been a reduction of red wine, craft beer and possibly some kind of duck fat (though I believe Foie Gras is illegal in Chicago) and was REALLY good! This one was a 2-day special because the band pentagram was in town (they had eaten there the night before) so it is not on their menu, but probably my 2nd favorite behind the High on fire.

The 3rd one tried was the Slayer, described as: Pile of fries topped with a ½ lb. Burger, Chili, Cherry Peppers, Andouille, Onions, Jack Cheese, and Anger. We asked the waitress about the 'Anger' part and she said it means she kicks the chef when she puts in the order. As you can see, this one was ridiculous, basically a giant pile of meat and fries and cheese. Missing the pretzel bun here which is unfortunate, it is also a HUGE amount of food lol. Definitely my least favorite of the bunch (all the meat covered up the taste of the burger), and while decent comfort food/drunk food, not as good as the rest of the burgers we tried:




I don't quite remember the name of the 4th one I tried, it was also a special, Jamaican Jerk or something like that. It had at least pulled pork and mango on it, not sure what else, also excellent:

Is your food still good?

Came across a cool site that helps you decide of the food in your fridge or pantry is still good to eat: http://www.stilltasty.com. Enjoy!

Chicago

Trying to come up with a list of places to check out for my trip to Chicago at the end of the month, this is what I am looking at so far, haven't decided on anything yet (I will update as I find more):

http://www.hotdougs.com/
http://www.chicagofoodplanet.com/
http://www.yelp.com/biz/kumas-corner-chicago


Any good suggestions?

Guest Blog: DC "Food Tour"

I have inspired a friend of mine to not only try out a food tour on her recent trip to DC, but also blog about it! Apparently the one she tried didn't actually get them free samples of all the food which is pretty lame, but it sounds like she had a good time anyway; if anyone knows of real food-tours in DC, let me know!

Here is her guest blog:

A couple of weeks ago, I had taken a vacation to visit my sister and her boyfriend in Washington DC. I thought it was a grand idea -- I hadn't gone to Washington DC since my 8th grade trip and goodness knows I wanted to go SOMEWHERE. So DC was perfect. And one of the most interesting things we did, besides explore ALL the Smithsonians, snap pictures next to ALL the sculptures in DC and see every single memorial, was signing up for a food tour.



Now I had never really heard of a food tour before but Ely had recommended that I try one for my trip and I thought, hey why not? I love food and I'm sure my sister does too. After doing some research online we picked a tour called "The movable feast-walking food tour of Washington DC." mmm. What could be better? You burned off the calories WHILE eating them. Brilliant.



Our first tour stop was light. It was at a tea shop called Teaism in the heart of DC. One of the first teahouses in DC, Teaism has a selection of approximately 50 different teas and offers a variety of japanese foods from bento boxes to tandoori kebabs and asian-style sandwiches (there's even a hamburger with ginger and jalapeno). This was probably one of the few places where you could find green tea lassies, which was what I ended up getting, and which turned out to be a milder and less fruity version of a classic mango lassie.



While sipping my lassie, we headed over to Cowgirl Creamery. Originally from San Francisco, Cowgirl Creamery is a small, quaint store that sells the largest selection of cheese I have ever seen, ranging from St Pat (a mellow, soft springtime cheese) to Red Hawk (a bold triple-cream cheese with a distinctive orange rind) and totaling about 3,000 pounds of cheese a week. I thought it was especially interesting that they made wasabi cheese of all things (not sure what you would eat it with -- crackers perhaps?) but at $12 I wasn't about to find out.



For lunch, we stopped over at the infamous Ben's Chili Bowl. At first glance, you think, wow this place is crazy! Half the experience is just about sitting in this cramped, smoky and noisy space. The other half though is about their smoky, salty spicy Half-smokes, DC's signature snack. Although similar to a hot dog, it's about ten time better because the sausage is slightly larger and tastier and doused in chili, cheese, and sour cream. Originally made famous by Bill Cosby, Ben's Chili Bowl was one of the first places Obama visited and ordered a chili half-smoke. Yes, I had set foot in a restaurant that had once been filled with greatness.



After scarfing down our half-smokes, we ended our tour by venturing to first Cakelove, which is a bakery, and then to Love Café, which was across the street and serves all the delicious baked bites created from Cakelove. In addition to being famous for their hand-made cupcakes, both places are known for their owner, Warren Brown, who quit his work as a prominent lawyer to follow his dream making cupcakes. Ever since starting his business, Warren has been featured in numerous shows such as the Oprah Winfrey show and the Today show as well as hosted "Sugar Rush" on the Food Network. Since CakeLove had recently started making red velvet cupcakes, which I love, I bought one with the intention of taking it home but instead ate it on the tram ride back.



All in all, the food tour wasn't quite what I expected it to be. It focused more on eateries unique to DC and their history rather than on really good food. I originally thought we would be sitting at various places taste-testing appetizers and trying a hint of everything instead of buying snippets of food to munch on while on the go. Yet even with these misperceptions, I thought the food tour was an interesting experience -- much better than an average tour of DC -- and will probably try another one again on my next vacation.

Umami Burger

Apparently I am on a burger streak lol, I really do eat other things, I swear!

Burgers are just a prime comparison food since they take creativity to differentiate or make really good. Something like sushi is harder to do a direct comparison since it can vary so much; while one place could have great yellowtale sashimi, another could have amazing caterpillar rolls... Burgers are a single, simple dish that more and more places seem to be trying to take from fast-food to gourmet.

Anyway, now on to Umami Burger. I have been wanted to try out Umami Burger for a while now, I had heard about it a couple different places and as I said in my earlier post, it was #1 on the local yelp page for a while.

I'm not going to spend time on non-food related review stuff, see my yelp review for that stuff. My focus here will be the important part, the burgers! :)



I split 4 different burgers with my dining companions:
The Umami burger - apparently 6 different umami flavors (shiitake mushrooms, sundried tomatoes, fried cheese, umami ketchup, caramelized onions(are these umami?), the burger itself), the most unique burgers flavors I have had.

The Truffle burger - truffle cheese and truffle glaze, yum, amazing, this one is probably my favorite;

The Hatch - Spicy chilies top off a great burger, nice heat but doesn't overwhelm the other flavors.

and The Port & Stilton - Good Stilton flavors, not overpowering, probably my least favorite of the three and that is saying a lot because it was a very good burger. The other three were just more unusual and/or excellent, while this was just a good blue-cheese burger. Also since this one is directly comparable with the Fathers Office burger (the FO burger wins hands down over this one) I don't think I would order it again (despite it being good).

Next time I hope to try their other burgers: the triple pork, hopefully they have the mideast lamb burger back (it is on the online menu, but the paper menu didn't have it when we were there).


So in conclusion, here is my current LA-area burger ranking:

1. Father's Office
2. Umami Burger
3. The Counter
4. The Habit
5. In and Out
6. All other burgers fall into this category...

Just a note on this, I have only been to The Counter once and enjoyed it, but probably picked toppings based on things I like independently but maybe not altogether as a group. I plan to go back there soon and try again (maybe find some recommended combination online, if anyone has a favorite set of Counter toppings, post them in a comment!)

More burgers! (unfortunately looks like no beer this time)

Have been hearing good things about Umami Burger recently (has been #1 on the local yelp page for a while). Any restaurant that focuses their food on a specific taste definitely attracts my interest, plus sweet potato fries and potentially "awesome" burgers always get extra points... I think this will be my next food appreciation trip :)

KogiBBQ!

Hit up the Kogi truck last friday night in the parking lot of The Brig in Venice and I figured I should write something up... In case you have not yet heard of the awesomeness that is kogibbq, the Kogi truck (there are actually 2, roja and verde) is an LA-style taco truck (I know this one confuses people from other parts of the country, but yes we actually have trucks in LA that serve tacos and don't totally suck/make you sick. Not all of them are good, but some) except that they serve Korean BBQ tacos! This is a mix that I am immediately drawn to in my search for new and exciting flavors. The idea is to take korean bbq meats and marinade them korean style then throw them in a taco, fresh from the truck! In an additional stroke of genius, they have a twitter feed so you always know exactly where the truck is and where it is going.



Anyway, KogiBBQ has been one of the big 'foodie' crazes around here for the past 6 months, so as with any foodie fad you hear both the stories of how it is the most amazing thing ever and of how it is "over hyped and disappointing." I would say that (as with ANY foodie fad) it is overhyped, but that doesn't mean it isn't good! I am here to appreciate food not criticize it :) On that note, I would say that I really really enjoyed these tacos. Don't forget the Sriracha, it definitely added a lot for me!

I had one of each kind of meat taco: chicken, pork, and beef shortrib:


I haven't tried their tofu, or any of their burritos but I have heard good things about them as well. In case you were wondering, KogiBBQ does actually taste excellent when you are 100% sober (unlike some taco trucks that are only 'amazing' when you are drunk).

Kogi has also recently been selling out of a brick and motor which I believe also has an extra rotating experimental item or two, so I plan to check that out soon!

Rubio's Salsa Picante?

So if you have never tried Rubio's Salsa Picante you need to, it is incredibly addicting! Their tacos are pretty good in general but the main thing that keeps me going back there is the salsa picante (this is their "spicy" salsa, the darker red one with black flecks in it), it isn't all that spicy but has a great mix of some heat and flavor... Anyway I have been wanting to get some for home use for a while, I recently stumbled upon a post on chowhound with someone claiming to have found a recipe that tastes the same. Haven't tried it yet, apparently 'frying chili peppers releases a fume that can be very irritating to your throat' so they recommend cooking it outside. Anyway, I will try it soon and see if it is really as good:

1 small can of tomato sauce - any brand is ok
2 T or more of red chili pepper flakes
2 tsp sugar or to taste
Salt 1 T or to taste

Toast/char the chili flakes in a frying pan – don’t burn! They should be dark not burnt
Toss the pan constantly for even charring. I leave the seeds in. Don't let them get to blackend. (I used a small saute pan, non stick)I would lift the pan when it got to hot and tossed the flakes all around. When the flakes are at the dark color you desire:
Add the can of sauce, let it simmer and reduce. Tasting it, it will taste like tomato sauce with the flakes - not good and so you will need to add
salt to taste - I added it a little at a time. Now it will begin to start tasting better
Add sugar to taste- same process a little at a time - keep tasting
Let it continue to simmer and reduce on low then turn it off and let it sit. Add a little water to thin it, not too much!
I then turned the heat back on and let it cook a little longer, maybe 5 minutes stirring it to make sure i like the consistency. I added another pinch of sugar at this point turned the flame off and let it cool. Once it was cool:
Pour salsa into a container and serve with taco salads, tacos or use wherever!
The addition of the sugar made it so much better! And today, it was excellent!

Let me know how you think it compares if you try it! Enjoy! :)

Cheese info

Stumbled upon a cool blog post the other day about the longevity of cheese, and learned something that I really should have known already:

Real cheese is alive. Suffocation is the enemy. Plastic wrap, plastic bags, and other airtight containers should be avoided in all cases except the previously mentioned fresh cheeses. These storage methods trap in stale air, as well as prohibiting the cheese from venting moisture and other byproducts. Once a soggy oxygen deprived environment develops, anaerobic bacteria present themselves. This is a bad thing. This is spoilage. Butcher paper, parchment paper, and wax paper avoid this problem.

Read the whole thing here.

Chocolate

I will also be doing this sometime very soon!

Definitely looks like they have some interesting stuff:

Dark chocolate ganache combined with orange zest and spiced with Sichuan pepper, covered with dark chocolate, rolled in dried orange peel.

and

Dark and milk chocolate ganache, with ginger and lemon zest, covered with milk chocolate, rolled in dried lime peel.

:)

Cheese

Haha I might have to try this and/or this sometime. When I get around to it I will post a review...

Lebanese food

In my never-ending quest to try food from all over the world (or possibly just find new GOOD food from somewhere!) I recently tried a great little restaurant in Westwood called Sunnin Labanese Cafe. I don't think I had tried Labanese food before this so it was cool to try something new. It is pretty much "middle eastern food" but definitely really really good! Split their beef swarma which was perfectly cooked and expertly seasoned and their "b'stilla" which was really distinctive and mouthwateringly tasty. I had never heard of a b'stilla before, but theirs is a big round ball of crispy phyllo dough filled with a mix of seasons chicken, pistachios, cinnamon and other goodness. Definitely a great flavor I have never tasted before, which is something I am always on the lookout for!

Check it out if you are in the Westwood area!

Seattle Food part 2

Continued the food tour blog a bit, wanted to make sure you can still read it in order so I just edited the first post, go check it out.

Seattle Food part 1

Seattle was a lot of fun (though cold and a little rainy as is to be expected), as promised here is my review of the food tour:

The tour I went on was Savor Seattle's Pike Place Market Tour. It was a fun and different way to spend a vacation morning. As with the NYC tour, the guide was peppy and friendly and talked about enough history and local stories to be interesting but not so much as to be boring. There was a bunch of interesting history mixed with local myth/color but since this is a food blog I am mostly going to discuss the food. My perspective on Pike Place market itself is that while it is somewhat touristy it is definitely also a real working (and useful) market that locals visit despite the tourists. Other cities have similar markets (SF comes to mind) but from the limited exposure I had, Pike Place seems to be a much better market both in diversity and quality (like having a local farmer's market every day!). Anyway now on to the food! :)

The tour started at the Seattle's Best Coffee at the market, not like you couldn't have it someplace else but I guess at least it is from Seattle and it was an easy place to meet. As we got introduced to the tour, we got samples of their new Blackberry Creme Latte:



I don't really like Lattes in general (I prefer black coffee with sugar if needed if I want coffee, or some kind of mocha frappuccino(ie icecream drink) if I really want desert) so my opinion may be biased, but I was not a fan of these, they were REALLY REALLY sweet.

Anyway, next we walked through the market a bit and went to Daily Dozen Doughnuts which was a cool little stand with its own mini-doughnut machine:



These were great; warm, fresh mini-doughnuts hot out of the fryer.

Next we moved along to a really cool store called MarketSpice. This place is great! The have a really huge selection of specialty, fresh, handmade teas, spices, coffee's etc. I mean come on, they have 16 kinds of salt and 14 kinds of pepper alone! As someone who really likes adding interesting flavors to foods I really love finding a good spice shop. They sell almost nothing online, but fortunately I got their catalog and they ship; though it sounds like the selection changes regularly so hopefully they send out new catalogs! We tried their specialty "Market Spice Tea" which was really a interesting cinnamon, citrusy flavor plus some other hard to place tastes. In addition I learned that clay teapots should only be used for simple unflavored teas (mostly Chinese black, green and oolong teas) and only one type of tea should ever be used with a specific pot because the pours in the clay soak up the flavor. We also tried their 'Salish Alderwood Salt' which is a black large grained salt that has been smoked over alderwood to give it a really nice smokey flavor (real smoke gives a much richer flavor than the 'liquid smoke' you get sometimes). I bought some of the Alderwood Salt, some spicy Vindaloo blend, and some of their Shichimi blend(apparently it is actually spicy, the stuff I have gotten from Asian markets generally doesn't have enough pepper in it).


(forgot to get a picture of the salt, doh!)

Next we went around the corner to the famous "Pike Place Fish" stand where they yell and throw fish. They have a good selection of fresh caught fish and other seafood.



We tried some really good smoked salmon, some even better "garlic pepper smoked salmon" and some salmon jerky (which I didn't even know existed but was a cool twist). Note, it is hard to get pictures of any good to turn out looking good (professionals get paid a LOT of money to make food look good on tv) and smoked salmon definitely doesn't look as good as it tastes but I am going to include the pictures anyway for completeness and you can just take my word for it that it was delicious!

Regular:
Garlic Pepper:
Jerky:


Next we moved on to Frank's Quality Produce, a stand with various fresh local produce. Looked pretty good, your standard farmers market fare except that you can get it any day of the week! We tried a fresh and very flavorful local variety of pear and apple:




Next we walked over to Pike Place Chowder. This place was amazing! They have apparently won New England clam chowder completions all around the country including becoming a member of the "Great Chowder Cook-off Hall of Fame" in Newport Rhode Island after winning "Nation's Best Clam Chowder" three years in a row. Not bad for "New England" Clam Chowder from the west coast! We tried both their award winning new england clam chowder and their seafood bisque, both were rich, creamy and delicious:




Next stop was Chukar Cherries. A local cherry company that makes a variety of cherry related products.



The first one we tried was a cherry salsa, it was a nice change from your normal mango sweet salsa. As with most sweet salsa it could have benefited from a little more heat but it was fresh the flavors were there:



Next we tried a set of their chocolate covered treats, dark cabernet chocolate covered cherry, chocolate covered espresso bean, chocolate and powder sugar covered honey pecan, and a dark chocolate covered chipotle cherry (probably my favorite):



To be continued!

Food tours

So I don't know how many people know about these, but I had never heard of the idea until I was looking for fun stuff to do on a trip to NYC a few years ago.

I think I went on this one: http://www.foodsofny.com/greenwichvillage.php and it was great! Not only does it give you something fun, and only semi-touristy (touristy enough that you learn a little about the city which was cool, but you're not hitting up the standard tourist destinations), but you also get to taste a variety of great food!

I am now determined to try to catch a food tour whenever I travel to a new city (I also need to remember to see if there are any good ones around the LA area), definitely look into it if you are traveling (just good food tours and the city). I will be going to Seattle soon so I will try to write up a review of a food tour there if I can find one that fits my schedule to go on! Enjoy :)

Drinks...

Saw this online:

In the April issue of Esquire, drinks correspondent David Wondrich offers another handy formula for creating cocktails on the fly—one that calls for two ounces of spirits, one ounce of a fortified wine, a teaspoon of liqueur and a dash or two of bitters. Ancestral relatives of the Manhattan and the martini often follow this formula, with excellent results, and best of all, it’s amazingly versatile.

In addition to your standard players in the liquor aisle, you can introduce fortified wines ranging from port to sherry to vermouth to Madeira; while the wine-plus-spirit match may not be perfect, a little teaspoon of Cherry Heering or Chartreuse (or most any liqueur you can lay your hands on), along with a dose of bitters (Angostura is probably your most useful candidate here), tends to smooth everything out and make all the flavors get along.

Definitely sounds interesting! I am not a very sophisticated drinker really but definitely sounds worth a try, I will let you know when I try it out (though probably one with something other than the cherry heering since I generally can't stand anything artificially cherry flavored).


I also had no idea what Chartreuse was when I read this (like I said, not a sophisticated drinker) so I wiki'd it and found that it was a French liqueur composed of distilled alcohol flavored with 130 herbal extracts. Will need to try that one :) Also in looking it up I found this - Some drinkie's blog... He talks about a drink with raw egg in it o_0 (doesn't sound great but hey I'll give it a try some day), but actually more interesting for me was this:

The technique of fat washing is an example of what I mean: you take some bacon, for example, and steep it in bourbon for a while. Remove it, fine strain out the solids, and then freeze the bourbon. The spirit itself won’t freeze, but the fat that’s suspended within it will rise to the top, which makes it easy to remove and discard–or reuse, I suppose, if you’d like some bourbon-flavored lard for any reason. Think about chilling a chicken stock after you’ve made it; same thing happens with stock that happens with bourbon.

He is referring to this, which I haven't read yet but want to soon. Sounds like an interesting thing to try, sort of a food + science or Molecular Gastronomy kind of thing and anything Molecular Gastronomy sounding interests me haha, anyway, Enjoy :)

My first food post...

Ok so I created this blog to do general food related blogging but the post I had in mind when I created it is actually drink related, but I don't want you to get the wrong idea (I am even less of a drink..ie(?) than I am a foodie) so I wanted to post SOME kind of food related post first :)

Lets start with cooking, Since I love food, I also love cooking good food. There is a fun, easy recipe for popovers (I didn't even know those were) that I saw on Good Eats a while back (that show is awesome, science + food, woot!) which I made and it was warm and fluffy and good so check it out: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/good-eats/basic-popover-recipe/index.html. On the cooking note, there are two different chicken dishes I can make that I like, one with mustard and grapes (sounds weird I know!) and one with yogurt that I want to post up on here sometime soon...

Next burgers and beer! As much as I love complex and subtle and interesting food (and believe me I do!), a really good burger together with a really good beer has to be up there with the best meals ever... And for the lucky ones of us who live in Southern California, an amazing bar is here to completely and utterly satisfy on both levels: Father's Office. If you are in the area and have not tried them, you NEED to go... Disclaimer: I have only ever been to the Santa Monica location and not the new LA location, but I don't have any reason to believe the new one is any less awesome. They are a great little bar with the most amazing gourmet burgers I have ever had (no substitutions allowed) along with a GREAT selection of craft (many Belgian, and specifically Trappist) beers on tap. They also have great sweet potato fries (anywhere with sweet potato fries gets a big plus in my book!) and just as good garlic fries to go along with the burgers.

Anyway that's it for now... Enjoy!

Welcome

Welcome to my "food appreciation" blog! First a little about me, I'm not really a hardcore foodie, at least not to the obsessive level of some people on the internet. I appreciate food at every price range. I am not looking for the most gourmet high-class meal out there, just some new flavors/sensations and generally good food. I feel that instead of being overly critical of food, it is better to appreciate it on as many levels as possible. This will then increase your enjoyment. I do have a great appreciation for good food/drink and generally love food so I decided I wanted a place to write down all the food related stuff that interests me. I figured if it interests me, then it might interest you as well. This is that place, Enjoy :)