Text 5635, 86 rader
Skriven 2008-04-19 06:21:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: steaks 161
==================
Okay, that was Oscar's. Here are more steak experiences
from the not too distant past.

==

Vinalia. Oh, I already wrote about this one. Bear it in mind
when I talk about the next one.

==

Texas Land & Cattle. On my last visit, Ella had pointed out an
ad for this restaurant, a chain based somewhere else than Texas
I believe. So I figured she wanted to go there at some point.
She's getting pretty fragile and not going out much any more;
we had the opportunity to take her out to look for shoes (to fit
her new leg brace) down at Pinnacle Hills, where, sad to say, no
store could accommodate her problem.

I figured I'd try to give her a good experience - positive
reinforcement to get her out of the house. Well. We were welcomed
nicely by the staff, points in favor, handed over to the bar for
a one-drink wait, and then seated at a nice table in a quite
buzzing dining room. Our waitress was cute and petite and nice
but not enormously efficient.

We started off with wildfire shrimp, about a half pound of
breaded fried things with a red cumin-accented coating, not too
bad but not cheap either. Not, of course, hot in any discernible
way. Salads were not notable (the other two had these). My cup
of chili (one of many sides available) was full of tomatoes and
would have made a decent spaghetti sauce; luckily it was not full
of beans. It was also gristly as anything, which doesn't bother
me as I like gristle.

The main courses were a mixed bag. Steve's ribs and chicken combo
was okay: a fairly moist not too overdone half boob and a few
ribs that I thought okay but that didn't meet his approval (he
likes the fall-apart sticky-sweet Tony Roma style); his side
order, a chili-cheese enchilada, was, surprisingly, the very best
thing on the table, as the cheese tamed the acid of the chili.
Ella had the 12-oz ribeye medium rare, which came as an 8-to-10 oz
ribeye medium well. My sirloin strip (I think listed at 14 oz)
extra rare came medium, so I sent it back, keeping my side order
of about a half head of broccoli to munch on. I encouraged Ella
to send hers back as well, but she refused, which I thought silly,
as if you're paying a buck and half an ounce you might as well get
what you want. I tasted hers - it was decent meat, cooked to the
point of nastiness. It took an unconscionable long time to cook
my steak extra rare, and I'd gone through my broccoli and most of
a second beer by the time it arrived - a big old thing, about the
twin of the 20-ozer that Vinalia had served me, and cooked the
same - just sort of whitish on the outside and completely raw in
the middle, a revenge steak if I've ever seen one. I ate it with
some pleasure, despite the extreme saltiness of the exterior
coating (why do places do this?). A little young critter of an
assistant manager came by to ask how I liked it, and I said it
was fine, but do me a favor and fire the cook [I used some
opprobrious epithets instead of or in addition to the word "cook"].

Ella and Steve split a dessert that consisted of about 12 oz of
vanilla ice cream in a ball, coated with chopped pecans and then
deep fried. It was as expected.

All in all, an educational but not particularly worthy experience.

==


Steve, whose wife gets an employee discount, picked up some
ribeyes at Wal-Mart before I arrived. They sat at the bottom of
the fridge until the day before I left, a week later. When time
came to use them, they were bright rosy red, a bit of a suspicious
circumstance. I cooked them up, and they were just plain weird -
tasted like a bad parody of corned beef, salty through and through,
with the crusted outside tasting like crust but the interior having
a strange absence of flavor (just a salty presence). As theirs were
nicely pink in the middle, Steve and Ella didn't complain, but
certainly this was a letdown even from the previously mentioned
protein. I figure these steaks must have been brined and otherwise
preserved and then gassed to keep the color. Nasty, and I can see
why Wal-Mart is hurting and why the orchestra it gave tens of
thousands to annually is making folding up noises.

___ Blue Wave/386 v2.30
--- Platinum Xpress/Win/WINServer v3.0pr5
 * Origin: Doc's Place BBS Fido Since 1991 docsplace.tzo.com (1:123/140)