Tag: nuts

So it all began something like this via instant message...
June 26th

• Tele: So Savory wants to do Asian night
• me: Asian night? What would we be eating on Asian night?
• Tele: I don't know. He just wanted Asian food.
• me: I don't know any Asian dishes though.
• Tele: Stickybuns!
• me: Stickybuns are Asian? (Thinking to myself-"A stickybun is something warm and gooey with cinnamon and sometimes covered in a thick frosting and nuts. You get that at a bakery. This is so not Asian. What is my husband speaking of?")
• Tele:Char Siu Bao
• me: Stickybuns & porkbuns are so not the same thing.
• Tele: sticky pork buns
  

June 27th

• Savory: Has Tele talked you into making Cha Siu Bao for Sunday yet?
• me: He sent me a recipe link yesterday. I didn't realize that was his way of asking me to make. Then he came home and said that you were both thinking of asking me to make the pork buns.
• Savory: lol

And so be began my journey. I have never eaten a pork bun. I have never seen a pork bun. I have never been to Dim Sum. So I had to do research. No time to go eat this Asain food so the research must all be done on the internet and via further chats with Tele and Savory. I found that Savory prefered his steamed with a little honey baked in. Tele prefered his baked. Well alright, we are off to a start. Baked, I can do baked (I worked at a pretzel shop for 3 years). Steamed, I do not know a thing about steaming. (Tele apparantly did. Whew, one less thing I have to worry about. He can teach me on cooking day.)

I ended up combining 3 seperate recipes to make my one dish. I found a food blog with a recipe that I felt would work well, but I needed a dough that could be seamed and baked. I was not sure that her dough recipe would work well both ways however she had other elements that I would definately use. Her site was extremely detailed and that was a bonus (remember I do not know what this item is that I am making). I do believe that she made her life a little more complicated than necessary by cutting out individual little wax paper squares to set the buns on, I chose to just set mine on one large wax paper sheet. I used her site for the details and the filling as well as how to bake the Pork Buns. She didn't have a recipe for how to roast the meat either as she bought hers pre-roasted. The next order of business was to find a versatile dough recipe that would work well both steamed and baked. I found just such a dough recipe. This recipe ended up being an extreamly simple recipe to make. The dough did work well both steamed and baked. The dough was sweet to the smell, but not to the taste. I then found the Chinese barbeque pork recipe on the same site as the dough.

This dish came out very well. Tele and Savory seemed to enjoy them very much. I absolutely loved them. Both the steamed ones and the baked ones were excellent. My 1 year old baby loved the roasted meat and was eating as I was shredding it! There were a lot of seperate steps to get the dish done, but over all it was actually all very simple to do. You must think ahead however as the meat needs to marinate over night first, then get roasted, cool, shredded and then heated on the stove with the rest of the filling ingredients. I felt like the dish was well worth the work put into it and am glad that these two silly guys talked me into making it.

Because this was all a bit confusing, here is a list of the links I used for the different parts.

• Roasted Meat I did not use any variations, just the Basic Steps 1-5 replacing 6 with shredding the meat rather than cutting into bite sized pieces. I did end up using Pork Tenderloin because it was all my Sam's Club had available 30 minutes before closing.
• Dough and How to Steam Buns
• Meat Filling and How to Bake Buns

You already know that Tele owned up to cheating by making Egg Drop Soup (Thank you, it was excellent!). But what you didn't know is that Savory made Stir Fry (Also, thank you. It was tasty). So now what I want to know is how did I end up cooking for 2 days while they ended up cooking for 15 minutes! I think I shall be much more suspicious next time they "assign" me a dish to cook.

Romano's Macaroni Grill 2001 N Rainbow Blvd Las Vegas, NV 89108

Teleolurian It must have been a busy night.

When we got to the Macaroni Grill, we faced the usual line-out-the-door setting that you get when you decide to go to a popular restaurant on the spur of the moment. Since I wanted to review the food, I decided to forego showing off my crayoned press pass and instead settled in for the half-hour wait.

In recent years, the Grill has gotten quite the menu facelift. Dining here is now more in the vein of classical Italian signature dishes and less of an upscale Olive Garden; however, the prices are still decent, with most dishes in the $10-$20 range.

Upon reaching our table, the server informed us that they were out of bread dishes and wine glasses, finding us some tumblers for drinking the house Red. Luckily, I'm not a bouquet snob, so I used the wine for fuel as I wrote scathing commentary ("she's just using you for your bed") on the paper tablecloth. With a communal bread plate, oil and balsamic vinegar, and an unspoken no-double-dipping rule, we sat around and chatted while our dishes came out.

For me, it was chicken scallopine ($9.49)- a bit heavy, but absolutely superb. The lemon-butter sauce didn't wimp out on the lemons, and the capers were heavily drenched and therefore delicious. Tender was the chicken, and tasty; the leftovers were even rather tender the next day (something you don't get in, say, a country steakhouse).

Savory Masochist

Ding dong the traditional dish is dead. Wait. no. I just didn't get one.

After we got our red wine in tumblers and tore off a few chunks of bread, I decided to go with a build-your-own pasta deal. Macaroni Grill offers these little checklists that you insidiously mark as if you were building your own Frankenstein. I decided on a Penne, with Tomato Cream sauce, and Sun Dried Tomatoes, Roasted Red Peppers, Pine Nuts, and Chicken. It was pretty good, although I can't say as I would get it again. It's my own fault really, for just hitting rand when I was looking at the menu. Oh well. The company was good and we hadn't had a date night in near a decade, so it made up for my pasta. After that, we wrote some generally strange things on the table paper, and we were off! to another crazy adventure.

Oh, I would write a longer review, however Tele pegged most of it in his.

Queen of Tarts
Okay, so when Macaroni Grill opened they had food that was so-so. In recent years the flavors had been stepped up and they redeemed themselves, until...that fateful night. If we offered to do the dishes I think they might have allowed us to do so. They were obviously understaffed being the day after Christmas, but no bread plates and no wine glasses wasn't the end of it. When the SM put in his original order it included artichokes. The waiter had to come back and let us know that they were out of those too. Apparantly not only did we need to do our own dishes, but we needed to go do our own grocery shopping for the ingredients before arriving at the resturaunt. Crazy!

Usually if I am at an Italian place I automatically order manicotti (if its Mexican then it is a bean and cheese burrito enchilada style), but I am trying to branch out a bit. So, on this evening I ordered Chicken Cannelloni (Hand-rolled pasta stuffed with oven-roasted chicken, melted cheese and spinach, then baked in an Asiago cream sauce. Topped with tomato sauce) for $9.99. The dish smelled and looked wonderful. I immediatly dug in and ate one out of the three stuffed pastas. Half way through the second shell I started to wonder "Where is the chicken?" I am a "recovering vegitarian" (as Tele calls it) so it really didn't bother me that I couldn't taste it or find it until I realized I am paying for chicken I can't find. Must find the chicken. So I tore apart the third shell in search for chicken. I eventually found a small sliver of shredded chicken. If this was Iron Chef the plate wouldn't have gotten high marks for the "theme ingredient" being the dominant flavor. Overall the taste of my dish was excellent, but I was dissapointed that with the name Chicken Cannelloni the chicken was not easy to find in the dish.

I have not given up on the Macaroni Grill yet because I must say that there bread rocks (mmm, bread), but I hope to never have the lack of service that we had that night again.