Tabasco Buffalo Style Sauce & The Rest of the Weekend Eats

I couldn't eat every meal at the Crab Cooker over the weekend, unfortunately, so here are some of the other things I ate. 

I have mentioned more than once the Tabasco Sweet & Spicy sauce I got last summer in New York and fell in love with, the flavor that apparently can't be purchased in California. Well, recently I read about a new flavor: Buffalo. I immediately went online to use Tabasco's product locator to see if I could get it anywhere around here. Nope, nothing.

So you can imagine my happiness Friday evening when I found it on sale at Ralph's. I grabbed it immediately. (This makes me wonder, though: Tabasco says you can't buy the Buffalo sauce in Southern California, but obviously you can. Does this mean you can also buy the Sweet & Spicy sauce here, too?)

The first thing I tried the sauce on were some crinkle-cut fries. Like every other Tabasco sauce, the new Buffalo flavor is delicious. It's not very spicy but it's full of flavor.

I had been craving a Reuben sandwich for a few days, but instead of going out for one I opted to make my own at home and watch baseball. I used thinly-cut pastrami, cole slaw, Russian dressing, and Swiss cheese. I cooked the sandwich on the panini press. Wow was it good. Elizabeth isn't a big fan of pastrami but she took a bite and also liked it.

After we got back from the Crab Cooker with my parents on Saturday, we decided to have a drink on their patio. I had a Somersault and it hit the spot perfectly. So I had another. And then I had a third.

"Wanna just stay here and make dinner?" I asked.

"Sure," Elizabeth said. She was enjoying Abita Purple Haze.

My parents had some sweet corn from the farmers market at their house, so I rubbed the ears with butter and roasted them in the oven. I had just read an article the day before than sweet corn is starting to taste great for the first time this year. And I agree, based on these ears.

There was a bag of spicy greens from the farmers market as well, so I mixed up a dressing of mustard, garlic, Parmesan cheese, oil and vinegar and spooned it over the greens. Also excellent.

I decided to make burgers for dinner.

I looked in the fridge to see what kind of pickles or relish my parents had. There were three kinds: sweet, mustard, and hot dog relish. So I decided to mix them all.

I grilled a burger patty, melting Muenster cheese on top. I then assembled it with onions (I caramelized two sweet onions, turning them into a golden paste), some of the spicy greens, and my special relish blend. It was a fantastic burger, one of the best I have made all year.

I added a little A.1. Sauce to the last couple bites of burger. Notice how the bottle says "NOT FOR RESALE" on it - it's a "Food Service" bottle, packaged for the industry. And yet there's a price tag on top. Somebody is selling something they shouldn't! But I won't say who.

My parents did not want burgers, they wanted sausage. So I cooked them two kinds: Sweet Italian sausage that I grilled and bratwurst that I cooked in a pan of beer.

"What wine can I open?" I asked my dad.

"Well..." he said, while pausing, "anything in the house."

I thought about opening something very extravagant - or his bottle of Thunderbird that he has kept in the wine closet for twenty years as some kind of joke that I have never gotten -  but I'd already had a few beers so I went with something nice but much younger. A Domaine du Trapadis "Cotes du Rhones" red wine. My parents could not remember where it came from, but it was outstanding.

Have you ever felt really, really lazy on a Sunday? So lazy that you couldn't even be bothered to roll out pizza dough, you actually bought Boboli crust, something that you swore off years ago? 

I stayed up really late on Saturday night, later than I have in quite some time. I watch the season finale of Saturday Night Live and then noticed Spy Game was coming on at 1 A.M. There are only a handful of movies that I cannot stop watching, and that is one. So I don't know what time I finally fell asleep, but it was late. And I was dragging on Sunday. 

So instead of getting pizza dough and making pizza that way, I just went up to Albertson's and bought a twin package of Boboli - an overpriced, not-that-good pizza crust that I have not eaten in about a decade. 

I made one pizza with just cheese. It was mostly mozzarella, but when it starting puffing up in the oven I poked it with a knife and threw some Gouda on top. It was good - I mean, it's still pizza - but all I could think was Wow, I just don't like Boboli very much.

For the second pizza, I used the leftovers from the night before: sausage and corn, with mozzarella, Gouda, and chives. This was a little bit tastier than the cheese pie.

But the cheese pizza went wonderfully with the Tabasco Buffalo sauce. If I'd had more energy I would have made a Buffalo chicken pizza. But I didn't.

I also got two chicken tenders at the Albertson's deli so I could try one with the sauce. It was also very good.

Sunday evening I still didn't have much energy, and we just wanted to sit on the couch and watch basketball (me) and cartoons (Elizabeth). So we went by the McDonald's three blocks away. I got my jalapeno-cheddar McChicken and added several slugs of the Buffalo sauce. It was good but I prefer the heat of the jalapenos on this sandwich. 

Did I roll a McNugget in the sauce and add a dollop of blue cheese? Why yes I did. Did it taste like a Buffalo wing? You know, it kinda did.

That's all for the weekend. I went through half the bottle of Buffalo sauce in 48 hours. But, unlike the Sweet & Spicy sauce, I know where I can get more.