An Amazing Three-Day Weekend of Eats

 A SNACK

I still had lavash left over from the SausageFest the night before, and I wanted a snack in the mid-afternoon. So I put the last of the Angelo's spicy marinara sauce on a lavash with fresh basil and Kerrygold Dubliner - an aged Irish cheese similar to cheddar with a taste that is nutty and slightly sharp. It was as good as any pizza I've had recently.

A HOUSEWARMING

My friend Tim just recently moved around the corner from me - literally a 30 second walk - and he had some people over Friday night for a small housewarming party. To start there was cheese, crackers and salmon. We had a beautiful Wensleydale cheese, goat cheese and brie. Of course we needed something to drink to accompany the appetizers....

Krug champagne worked wonderfully. But it went too quickly.

Luckily, there were plenty of other wines, all excellent.

Tim made a beef and barley stew for dinner. It was the best I have ever had. True, it was a cold, rainy night just calling out for a stew, and I had several nice glasses of wine inside me, but even without those factors I still would call this the best beef and barley stew I have ever had. I ripped off a hunk of bread and sopped up every drop of liquid left in the bowl.

A BREAKFAST

Saturday morning I was watching Pitt vs. St. John's (if any of you are St. John's fans, welcome to the world of Steve Lavin basketball: beat Duke and Pittsburgh in the same season you lose to Fordham and St. Bonaventure) and I got hungry for breakfast. I took out two frozen hash brown patties and pan-fried them for a few minutes. When they were ready I topped each with some goat cheese, a few slivers of chopped basil, and McDonald's hot mustard sauce, the greatest complement to hash browns that I have ever tasted.

WHAT A HAMBURGER'S ALL ABOUT

Since the moment we got our new camera a week ago, there is one thing in particular I've wanted to take a picture of: Animal Fries. Now I have. And I got a Double-Double Animal Style. Elizabeth had a cheeseburger. (Since a lot of people appreciated it a couple weeks ago when I let them know about the nail polish she was wearing, I will do that again: you can read about it right here.)

Obviously, everything at In-N-Out was awesome.

A SNACK 2: SNACK HARDER

It's always the same routine with me and English Muffin pizzas: I don't have one for more than a year, then I make one, think Holy S**t this is delicious! Why don't I make these more often? From now on I'm going to make these all the time.

Then more than another year goes by before I make one. 

This time I added tomato paste (the pizza sauce with an expiration date of December 2011 had mold growing in it so I used paste, which isn't my favorite but will do in a pinch) salami, smoked gouda and dried Italian seasoning.

It was very good. From now on I'm going to make these all the time. 

A SLAM DUNK DINNER

I was in the mood for steak on a rainy night, to sit on the couch and watch the Slam Dunk contest and relax. So I got a flat iron steak from Taylor's and cooked it on a grill pan. I let it rest in foil while I fried up some curly fries and sauteed some spinach with butter and cracked pepper.

The USDA Prime steak was beautiful, just as it's always been, and once again it needed no condiment. It melts on the tongue.

CARMELA ICE CREAM

It was a cold and rainy night so of course we went out for... ice cream. My brother and his friend Nick were going to Carmela so we said we'd go, too. They each got ice cream cones - the pic is of Nick's salted caramel in a waffle cone - and we got a quart of the same for later. I've had Carmela ice cream twice: once at the the South Pas farmers market (I loved it) and once when someone bought me a quart from this store a month ago, not long after they opened (I did not care for it at all).

This time, however, the ice cream was fantastic, some of the best I have ever had, and I ate two bowls of it for dessert. I guess the bad batch I got was the anomaly.

A BREAKFAST 2: DARK TERRITORY

 I fried up some thick slices of bacon, layered them on an English Muffin with scrambled eggs, green onion, cheddar cheese and Taco Lita hot sauce and pressed the whole thing on the panini press. It was outstanding.

STANDING BY PEACEFUL WATERS

"Many years later I found myself talking to this girl
Who was standing there with her back turned to Lake Marie
The wind was blowing, especially through her hair
There was four Italian sausages cooking on the outdoor grill
And they were sizzlin'"

LAVASHAPALOOZA

After seeing the lavash my friends and I had on Thursday night, my parents said they wanted some, too. I said okay. Sunday evening I went over to their house and made some.

Salami, mozzarella, and green onion.

Steak, caramelized onion, blue cheese, and olive oil.

Chicken Italian sausage and sauteed mushrooms with Basque shepherd's cheese. 

Basque shepherd's cheese and smoked gouda. 

BACK ON THE BAYOU

Elizabeth saw my Popeyes Red Hot Popcorn Chicken that I wrote about the other day and she thought it looked good, so Monday afternoon we went there for lunch. She had the popcorn chicken combo and I ordered six piece nuggets (lousy and over-fried) and a "popcorn shrimp craver" (awesome). She let me have a couple pieces of her chicken and they were just as good as I remembered.

Popeyes has the best condiments of any fast food place. It's not even close, really. We had some cocktail sauce with the shrimp, spicy honey mustard and horseradish sauce with the chicken. All were delicious.

A REMINDER MY MUSIC CAREER WAS NOT AS IMPRESSIVE AS I REMEMBER IT

Monday afternoon I sat outside and had a glass of wine with my neighbor Harold and my friend Tim. Tim mentioned performing on Saturday Night Live. Harold mentioned recording an album in Daniel Lanois's New Orleans studio.

I mentioned playing the understudy of Frederick in my 6th grade production of The Pirates of Penzance.

AN EASY DINNER

Not surprisingly, neither of us were terribly hungry on Monday night. We decided just to have an appetizer for dinner. We had a package of fried cheese we got at Target simply because it was on sale. It turned out to be very good. Nothing terribly exciting, but something that would be a good snack most days, and a perfect small dinner on other days when you've eaten way too much over the weekend. 

It's funny, my grandmother passed away 9 years ago this month and I still can't eat fried cheese with honey mustard without remembering all those meals we had together at Tony Roma's when I was young.

Okay, that's all for this weekend. I mean, there were a couple meals I didn't write about, but more on those later...

SausageFest, & A Brief History of the Blog

Whenever I'm asked how I got into blogging, I give one of two answers: if it's not appropriate (or I just don't feel like giving a long answer) I simply say "Aw, just something I write for my friends to read."

But if I want to be more specific, the whole story is this: years ago, when I used to travel much more frequently than I do now, I realized that every once in a while when I was showing pictures to a friend or family member, I would come across a random shot of food, and that would inevitably elicit more interest than anything else. So I started taking pictures of any food on vacation that looked interesting.

At first I thought people liked food pictures simply because everyone eats and thus eating is a universal interest. But I came to realize it's not just that, it's that food is one of the only unique things that you can show from vacation pictures.

When you return from a vacation in New York City, do you think people want to see the 83 photos you took of the Statue of Liberty, an image they have probably seen 10,000 times in their life? No. Do you think they want to see pictures of how much partying you did in Las Vegas, as if you were the first person to ever do such a thing? They do not.

But the Ethiopian restaurant you stumbled into on the Upper East Side because the barbecue restaurant in the guide book had closed down, where the injera bread bounced off the table like a superball and you drank five different kinds of Ethiopian beer that were all delicious? People actually want to see photos of that.

This is the picture I took from the Staten Island Ferry on my way over to see a Minor League Baseball game. Everybody said how pretty it was; nobody had any questions.

This is the dinner I had at Ethiopian Restaurant, which, in addition to having a wonderfully expository name, was one of the top 10 meals of my life. Everybody has questions about photos like this.

"You mean the bread is the plate and the utensils?" they ask.

"Indeed," you answer. "Would you like to see pictures of the Empire State Building?"

"No, show more food," they say.

By the time - 6 years ago - that I went to Memphis in May with my friends Hatcher and Min for the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, I was taking pictures of everything I ate on vacation. And people couldn't seem to get enough. I would email pictures of barbecue to ten or twelve friends and there would be a long email chain with follow-up questions. My buddies Les and Phil told me I should put the pictures online in a blog. So I did, a blog about barbecue and baseball. Phil left a comment on one of the posts that inspired this second, much more popular blog. This is all his doing. Well, sort of.

Years later, I was watching Top Gear and eating cereal one morning when I received a text from Phil that he was in Wisconsin, eating bacon "that must have been made by Jesus himself." He asked if I wanted him to pick up some bratwurst for me.

You can probably guess my response. I once ate lunch at a sports bar across the street from the legendary Lambeau Field in Green Bay. I had fried cheese curds, bratwurst and cottage fries. I'm not sure which meal of my lifetime contained the most calories, but that had to be a strong contender. (A guy a couple seats down at the bar ordered a pizza; the bartender asked if he wanted the base to be pizza sauce or ranch dressing, the first and only time I have ever heard that asked.) And it was all tasty. University of Wisconsin football fans may be obnoxious and the propensity for grown men to wear wedges of cheese on their heads is simply ridiculous, but damn they know how to make good food there.

Phil brought me back a package of Polish sausage and one of andouille sausage.

I invited some friends over for dinner. To start, I sliced up the andouille sausage and put it on lavash with some Trader Joe's cheese with Irish porter, fresh basil, and olive oil.

After less than ten minutes in the oven, the cheese melted into a beautiful mess and the lavash crisped up enough to be eaten as a flatbread.

"This is unbelievable," Murph said.

"Just wait for the main event," I said.

"This isn't the main meal?"

"No," Tracie replied, "this is the sausage before the sausage."

Tracie clearly understood the spirit of SausageFest.

Our wines for the evening.

I just like this picture because I love Sunstone. 

Our beer for the evening, from Monroe, Wisconsin.

I had been worried that it might rain, so instead of cooking the sausage on the grill and eating it plain, I came up with another plan: panini. The day before, I had thought for quite a while about what kind of panini to make with Polish sausage. I considered goat cheese, caramelized onions and an arugula salad. I did a Google search and found nothing like that.

"Maybe I've strayed too far from the herd on this one," I texted Tracie.

"No you have NOT" she replied. That was enough for me to give it a try.

I decided to serve the arugula salad on the side instead of in the sandwich, though; I thought it might get lost in the panini. So I tossed some arugula and greens with olive oil and lemon juice. On a soft bolillo I added a butterflied Polish sausage, caramelized onions, goat cheese and garlic-mustard aioli. (Well, Murph's panini didn't get any of that; he hates all condiments.)

They were outstanding. We all ate every bite. Except Murph.

"This is so good but I can't even finish it," he said.

So I wrapped up half his sandwich and gave him a sugar cookie.

All in all, it was a wonderful dinner. Thank you for the sausage, Phil.