No, That is Not a Hot Dog In My Pants

I think we may have achieved the greatest invention in the history of mankind. The saying "the best thing since sliced bread" may now be replaced. I give you the HOT DOG VENDING MACHINE! Also available in Kosher.

An Open Letter to the Belcher

This has nothing really to do with Quizno's and is certainly not their fault, it was a customer. I'm going to go ahead and do this in open letter form.

Dear Fat Ugly Bitch In Quizno's,

I'm not sure you know what it's like to lose your appetite, your appearance certainly doesn't lead me to believe you do know. As someone who does lose his appetite on occasion, let me tell you what can cause something like that to happen. The appearance of puke, a bad smell, a dirty brown spotted toilet and someone belching loudly in a restaurant. Unfortunately for me, our paths crossed right when you belched.

I understand that it is a natural process to belch. What I would like to inform you about is manners. It is not acceptable to belch as loudly as you possibly can in a public place, it is also not acceptable to stand up to belch so the table doesn't get in your way. It IS acceptable to say "excuse me" after you belch.

I realize that you've probably spent the past 35 - 60 years of your life (It was difficult for me to determine your age because looking at you after hearing you belch made me throw up in my mouth a little bit) mainlining mayonnaise, shortening and butter and may not be versed in social conventions. I'm sure you've never been bothered by people wishing to speak with you because of your lack of manners. So I write this letter out of kindness to inform you of these things called manners. They can be picked up by watching children's shows or by watching friends (a friend is someone who talks to you and sometimes tells you things such as "you are being rude").

Please, don't be confused, I don't wish to be your friend, I've got a lot on my plate (that is NOT a reference to food so don't get excited) and don't have time to teach you the things my 4 year old daughters know (actually my 1 and a half year old son says "excuse me" after he burps). You should probably start trying to make friends at Hometown Buffet or Ryan's or the Red Balloon or The Stables and work your way up as you attain certain appropriate behaviors.

In the meantime, your takeaways from this letter are, try to belch discreetly, if you are unable to belch discreetly, say "excuse me" afterward. If the belch is heard by numerous people trying to eat, you may want to apologize to anyone who heard it.

It's not that hard to be an acceptable human being and while you have clearly failed at it up until this point, it's not too late to change. I'm rooting for you.

Sincerely,

Bull E. Vard

This letter is directed at one particular customer in Quizno's on Johnson Dr. in Mission. But it is applicable to anyone who may have stood up and belched in a Quizno's today. Let's broaden that even more, if you stood up and belched in any restaurant today, this letter has some takeaways for you too.

The Barbecue Forum

I took a vacation day today so I can go to my kids' parent/teacher conferences. As I was sitting around with the kids watching Handy Manny (I like to try and figure out which episodes Wilmer recorded after all night coke binges) I was monitoring Twitter. Matt Yglesias, author of a very smart liberal blog, tweeted that he was in KC attending an economics forum at the Kauffman Foundation. Since I grew up with wonderful midwestern values and consider myself an emissary for Kansas City, I replied to him that he should have someone take him to Oklahoma Joe's.

Apparently, Yglesias is a little better at reading Twitter replies from non-followers than I am, because he responded within minutes. Kauffman Foundation had brought the attendees Oklahoma Joe's, and Arthur Bryant's and I'm guessing, Gates. The nosy bastards at the Huffington Post also responded that Kauffman provided Oklahoma Joe's. They served them a wide variety of KC Barbecue. The Kauffman Foundation really knows what it's doing.

For the record, the favorite was Oklahoma Joe's. This is the reason why it is my pat answer to the question "where should I eat in KC". Every city has fine dining restaurants that are pretty close to the same. Oklahoma Joe's is not replicated in other towns, there is simply nothing else like it.

Actually, THIS is why you're fat

A quarter of the American population is on a diet. Of those people, the second most popular indulgence is mayonnaise?! People limiting what they eat in an effort to lose weight want mayonnaise almost as much as ice cream? How the eff are cookies fifth???

Maybe it's my overall disdain for white, creamy substances, but that is just fucking gross. I don't even want mayo when I'm not watching what I eat...and this blog is a solid testament for the level of shit I digest on a regular basis.

Frankly, I've had to stop eating at Chef Burger for their insistence of putting mayo on items but not listing it on the description. Mayo on a hot dog, Rob? What the hell? Just the thought that some of you might be eating mayonnaise with a spoon has got my gag reflex on blast for the next few hours.

(via Experian Simmons by way of Serious Eats)

RJ's Bob-Be-Que and Baseball

Last year around the time of the Royals home opener, I decided to try RJ's Bob-Be-Que in Mission for lunch on my work from home day. I remember watching the Royals game while eating my pulled pork sandwich. It kind of became a little tradition for the first couple of months of the baseball season, as there were a bunch of Thursday day games early in the season.

The mini tradition fell out of favor a little bit for no real reason. Until recently when I discovered that I hadn't been to RJ's in several months. When I drove by a couple of weeks ago I noticed that they had added a little carryout entrance and had a carryout special of a sandwich and fries for $3.99. That's about as cheap of a bbq lunch you can get in this town.

On my work from home day last week I went over to RJ's and picked up a regular (6 oz.) pulled pork sandwich. As always it was pretty great. They have real good barbecue and better than average fries. But the 6 oz. sandwich does tend to be a little much if you're just not that hungry. The $3.99 special is for a 3 oz. sandwich and fries which ends up being a perfect lunch portion.

I went there and got the special today. While I was waiting for them to package up my sandwich I noticed that a spring training baseball game was on ESPN. So when I got my sandwich home, I turned on the game and the tradition begins anew. I just hope next week there's a Cubs or Indians game on.

Arby's - I Don't Shit Like This

As I drove past an Arby's tonight, I thought to myself what sequence of events would have to occur to drive me to eat at Arby's. An hour and a half later and I'm still trying to figure it out. Even the promise of a free roast burger doesn't make me wish to go.

This got me to thinking, what is the worst fast food restaurant around. I think Arby's is the only one in these parts that I absolutely postitively won't patron. Do people feel the same way about Hardee's or Burger King? Taco Bell can be pretty wretched, I don't have fond memories of Boston Market but their cornbread is pretty good. Fazoli's sure doesn't do much for me, but I do like their breadsticks. Maybe some, like my wife, really hate Long John Silver's, but I consider it a guilty pleasure. The best I can come up with is Church's which makes the least edible fried chicken ever, I've never known chicken that doesn't surrender to the tooth. But, I think if I had to choose between felating Biz Markie or eating Church's, I think I could choke down some Church's.

Given the same choice with Arby's, I think I would be choking down Mr Markie's meat.

Liquor Dinner

I've always been amazed by people who order a hard liquor drink with their dinner. Don't get me wrong, I drink with dinner nearly every day. But I only have a beer or wine which enhances my food.

When the people at the next table at Hereford House started ordering vodkas for a first round I was genuinely flummoxed as to why they weren't ordering beer or wine. Does a vodka drink or a whiskey drink help enhance a meal? I can't imagine it does, but, again, I'm not much one for hard liquor.

A margarita is probably acceptable with Mexican food, but that's about the only mixed drink I can think of that I would drink with a meal.

For those that order a hard liquor drink with dinner, why do you do it? What do you drink? Do you hate your spouse/companion? Are you Russian? Do you disappear from your kids' birthday parties to go drink?

Hereford House's Beef Treatment

For Valentine's Day Stella and I went to Hereford House to enjoy a price fixe menu. Stella and I were going to share an appetizer, get each of us an entree and then split a dessert all for around $50. We went on a Sunday which is half price wine night and we got a Coppola Director's Cut Zinfandel, one of our favorites from our trip to Sonoma last summer.

We decided upon the stuffed mushrooms for the appetizer even though mushrooms seriously skeeve me out. One sight of those canned sliced mushrooms can make me nauseous for a full day. I have to really concentrate on not thinking about what I'm eating to get mushrooms down. I'm only able to do this with stuffed mushrooms or those button mushrooms from the Melting Pot. The Hereford House stuffed mushrooms are stuffed with crab and shrimp in addition to the cream cheese. They were pretty good, though, I may have enjoyed a dipping sauce.

For our entrees Stella got a 10 oz. prime rib and I got the 10 oz. KC strip that made Hereford House famous. Aside from steak and hamburgers we're not giant beef eaters, though we both enjoy sausage. We don't ever eat roasts or meat loafs or various other cuts of beef and rarely eat prime rib. I think Stella's first prime rib was at Thanksgiving at my brother's house a couple of years ago. The times I've had it, mostly at weddings, it's always been shaved real thin and I've never really enjoyed it. But this prime rib came out about an inch thick and covering the entire plate sitting in it's own au jus. I knew that I should have ordered prime rib right then.

My KC strip came out as pretty as a strip can be with perfect grill marks. One minor annoyance was the fries I got with it were the steakhouse cut fries which I normally despise. When I ordered I asked the waiter (he wasn't really our waiter more like the dining room host who was covering for the waiter*) what kind of fries they have and he didn't understand the question. So I asked if they were shoestring or thin or if they were the big cut kind and he said they were regular fries, so I went with fries. Luckily, the Hereford House steakhouse cut fries were really good. My steak was a perfect medium rare, with the same pink color throughout the entire steak. It was perfectly cooked. My problem with it, as it has been with every Hereford House steak I've had, is that it was underseasoned. I don't know what they have against salting there steaks but I always have to add some or the meat just borders on flavorless. And after spending the past 10 years only using kosher salt, regular salt shaker salt just doesn't seem like it can get the job done. It would be nice if restaurants put kosher salt on the table in addition to regular salt, but I rarely add salt to my food anyway, so I guess the point is somewhat moot.

*Our waiter had several tables to cover but the problematic one was the one right next to us. It seemed to be grandma's birthday and all of her children and grandchildren were there celebrating totalling about 12 people. The youngest grandchild was probably about 12 and all of the children were at least in their 40's. This was all fairly unremarkable except grandma loved her vodka and had a vodka straight up. Several of her children also ordered vodkas or gins, the most mixed drink of them all was someone ordering a gin and tonic. The funniest order was one of the children, again probably a 50 year old, asking how they made the martini. Our waiter explained that they pour the vermouth over the ice, dump the vermouth and pour in the vodka. This was apparently too much vermouth for the guy so he just ordered a vodka.

Stella's prime rib, on the other hand, was perfect. It had wonderful flavor, which is probably a function of the cut of meat, and we had no complaints. Stella didn't even use much of the horseradish sauce that came with it because the flavor was so spot on. I was hoping she would get up or turn away for a minute so I could swipe some of the au jus and dump it on my steak.

For dessert we tried to get the white chocolate bread pudding, one of our favorites from Pierpont's (Hereford House's sister restaurant that Stella and I frequent much more than Hereford House). Unfortunately, the waiter informed us that they were out of the bread pudding. We needed a couple of minutes to recover from the shock (I really love bread pudding) and decided between a couple of the other, rather pedestrian, dessert choices. Since I'm not really a dessert person, when I don't have the option of a bread pudding, I generally want something with fruit. So we chose the peach cobbler over the crème brulee. I found it strange that peach cobbler was even on the menu in February, but I trusted that they would have fresh peaches if it was offered.

When the waiter brought the cobbler he noticed our reaction to it and said something to the effect of, “it doesn't usually look like this, I guess they did something different”. What we were all reacting to was the cobbler topping which wasn't a flaky pie crustlike substance, rather, it looked like a pancake was atop the peaches. After eating as much meat as we just had, the last thing we wanted to do was eat a pancake. I took one bite of the pancake and then ate around it, it offered nothing but a little bit of nutmeg and cinnamon flavor, certainly not anything worth eating more than one bite of. The peaches and ice cream were fabulous and the peaches were fresh. With an appropriate crust it would have been a fine dessert.

So, over the past week, we've been talking about how good the prime rib was and I've been trying to make time to write this little blog post (not helped by my idea to write a KC beer baseball roster for the KC Beer Blog). Yesterday as I was looking for something in the kitchen I noticed a $50 gift certificate to the Hereford House. I thought it was the other half of the gift certificates Stella bought at Costco ($79 for $100 in gift cards for Hereford House, she split with her mother). So I asked Stella why the Hereford House gift cards came on paper like that. She told me Hereford House sent it to us after she filled out one of those survey things. She wrote that they had run out of bread pudding and the peach cobbler had some weird pancake thing on top of it. A manager at Hereford House contacted her tout de suite to tell her that none of that should have happened. He didn't know why we were served the peach cobbler and he didn't know how they could have run out of bread pudding. To make it up to us he sent us the $50 gift certificate.

So now, we get to go back and eat a couple of 10 oz. prime ribs for something approximating free. Even without the free $50 meal, we were pretty happy with our Hereford House meal. It was certainly worth the $65 we were out of pocket. But now that $65 has bought us an appetizer, 4 entrees and a subpar dessert. I don't think a better deal could be had.

Fat for Free: Hardee's Country Potatoes

Based off of a flier on the door at the Hardee's around I-29 and Barry Rd and a reference on the website of a Virginia country radio station, Hardee's will be handing out free orders of their country potatoes tomorrow. I know, this sounds about as sketchy as the free Chick-fil-A breakfast sandwich I got the bone on, but it could be free food, and your ass isn't going to get wider on its own.

The Flava of Love

This past weekend, I spent a lovely day with my family trolling around the downtown area. There was frozen yogurt to eat, grocery stores to meander around and snowboarders to watch. As the afternoon got older, and my infant daughter began her nap-time melt, we made our last stop of the day to get a little something that doesn't annoy they hell out of you when it melts down.

My original target was Christopher Elbow's recently crowned number one chocolate in the US, but I couldn't pass up a chance to grab a box of the limited release Valentine collection.

There are two sizes available, the one we grabbed is apparently 17 pieces from the picture below. There are 6 different chocolate variations included, 3 caramel-based and the other 3 ganache. We have yet to dig in, so I can't give a review, but this will definitely be a sweet treat to enjoy on our first Valentine's Day night chained to a demon spawn.

Cake Duel

My daughters are turning 4 this week and they couldn't decide upon one theme for their birthday party. So we were stuck with 2, meaning 2 cakes. The oldest girl (a full 3 minutes older) got a princess cake with a tiara on it and the younger one got a Tinkerbell cake. Both cakes were made and designed by Stella's friend, the Dame of Cakes.

The transportation of these was the worst part. We had a very stressful drive from Olathe to the Bull E. Vard mansion in north JoCo. Stella had to sit on the ground in the back of the van holding the cakes. I had to have a beer by the time we got home.

The best thing about these cakes aside from the design, was that the frosting is made from buttercream and not fondant which tastes like eating box.

Three Little Pigs...in my belly

I have a couple of moments in my life where I will always remember where I was when it happened. When the space shuttle exploded in '86 I was on the rings in gym class executing an iron cross, Coach came out of his office and told the class about the tragedy (I've never done another iron cross out of respect for the astronauts and the fact that I don't weigh 68 pounds anymore). Of course, on 9/11 I was sleeping in a little and heard it on the sports radio show after the second plane hit. Those, of course, were tragedies, but the newest lifetime memory was a very happy occasion, I was sitting on my couch drinking a Bully Porter and watching “No Reservations” (ironically my wife was watching the movie “No Reservations” when I got home from work) when I saw the most amazing sandwich I've ever seen in my life.

For those that didn't see the episode yet, the Three Little Pigs sandwich contains a breaded and fried pork tenderloin topped with smoked ham and bacon. As if that isn't enough it's covered in melted Gruyère cheese and topped with 2 fried eggs, sunny side up. All of this was served on a brioche bun that looked hearty enough to handle the weight and served with some delicious looking fries. This sandwich makes the bacon explosion look like some sort of gimmick.

I call upon restaurateurs in Kansas City to quickly copy this sandwich and put it on your menu. I will come and eat it. In the meantime, I may have to make a drive up to the Silver Palm restaurant in Chicago and get my fill of the Three Little Pigs.