Gables Eatery has the Right Idea

I just treated my father to dinner at an interesting restaurant: Randazzo’s Little Italy, in Coral Gables. It’s a red-and-white Italian joint, which is pretty much the only kind I like. If pink vodka sauce turns you on, swell, but like I said in my book, in my opinion, if a color isn’t in the Italian flag, it shouldn’t be on the plate.

This place has two big-screen TVs playing Godfather movies over and over. The music? Sinatra. Louis Prima. Connie Francis. Too funny. And the menu is consistent with my philosophy. It contains helpful little reminders, like, “This ain’t a health food joint.”

I ordered the spaghetti with Sunday gravy, which means tomato sauce. It came with two meatballs the size of a baby’s head, plus sausage, plus ricotta, and I would guess the portion they gave me weighed about three pounds. No exaggeration. I was hoping to try the cheesecake, but the spaghetti did me in. And it cost me $26, so I should have expected no less.

Very comfortable place. I’d go again. But I would order something smaller.

It’s kind of irritating, knowing how to cook. In the old days, I went to restaurants and ate the food and generally figured it was okay. Now I always find something wrong with it, because I’ve had such great luck with my own recipes. I think these guys should consider putting a little butter on the spaghetti. Butter has magical qualities.

If you’re ever in the Gables, you might want to drop by the place, have some food, and watch Fredo get whacked.

Convenience

I’ll tell you what’s sad about being a cookbook author. You may forget to shop for normal food, but you will generally have ingredients for nutritional disasters on hand at all times. Which is why I am about to make another pizza. It’s either that or drive to Winn-Dixie to check out the on-sale meat.

I’m almost angry at Winn-Dixie for discounting meat all the time. I used to go into the store and buy what I wanted. Now I feel like I’m not allowed to buy anything that costs over six dollars per pound, and I try to stay under two dollars.

Finding out that Costco cheese is actually pretty good has been a problem. I have several pounds of it, and I bought a couple of cans of delicious Stanislaus Super Dolce sauce the other day, and I feel like I have an obligation to eat all the cheese before it turns green. So I have to eat about three pounds a week. I also want to test it in calzones, so I have to make some of those this week. I think calzones should be less demanding, because my big concern with the cheese is that the low fat content will cause it to scorch, and inside a calzone, scorching isn’t an issue.

Thank God I don’t have ricotta, or I’d be making calzones with that, too. When it comes to calzones, I like pizza sauce, mozzarella, and maybe ricotta. But it seems like most pizzerias just use ricotta and maybe some crap to season it.

It’s a shame I didn’t go into calzones in the book, because you can make absolutely anything into a calzone, and they’re fantastic. If you have the book, just decide what you want to calzonify, make a 14-16″ circle of my dough, plop the ingredients on one side, fold the other side over, and seal the edges together by wetting them with water and pressing. If you haven’t made a cheesesteak calzone, your life has been wasted. Or a pan con lechon calzone. Oh. Oh.

I have been told that Paula Deen uses cottage cheese in lasagne. Sounds horrifying and WASPy, but I can’t argue with her reputation. Maybe I’ll put a spoonful on the pizza somewhere to see what it’s like.

Mike may be coming into town this week. He could definitely help me get rid of that cheese. Is it immoral to feed your excess cheese to a friend, knowing it’s just as bad for him as it is for you? I guess. But sometimes you have to look out for Number One.

It’s funny, but there are some TV chefs almost nobody criticizes. It seems like some chefs can’t manage to write a single recipe that pans out for home viewers, but others rarely fail. Paula Deen and Alton Brown seem to fit that description. You never hear anyone say, “I tried Alton Brown’s recipe for X, and it was disgusting.”

I would be really uncomfortable if I had a successful show and a string of restaurants, and most of my food was bad. I guess I’m nuts.

Pizza is imminent.

Not Surprising

I would appreciate a couple of small favors.

First of all, as I said Friday, a TV executive has expressed interest in the rights to my cookbook. I don’t know if there is any point in pursuing this or not; I am now told that the idea is for me to sell the rights to them, and they’ll hire a professional chef to do the show. You can see the problems with this. I’d get a little check for the rights, and then I’d be gone. The show wouldn’t be very good, because I’m what drives the concept, and I wouldn’t be there. The show would probably have little relationship to the book, so it wouldn’t be very helpful in terms of sales.

The obvious concern here is that if I don’t go along, someone will take the idea without paying for it, and they’ll do a bad show, and I won’t get squat.

So I would appreciate it if you would include me in your prayers, to prevent that from happening. This idea has a lot of potential, and I’ve worked very hard on it for a long time, and if it is taken away from me, I’ll be at square one.

Second thing: someone I know has been harassing me for a while, and it has been very distracting. I won’t go into details, but it’s basically a hopeless attempt to squeeze money out of me. And this person has done a number of risky, wildly self-destructive things in the process. Help me out and join me in praying that this person has a change of heart, accepts salvation, and learns to use God’s power to be a positive and healthy force in this world. And of course, please pray that the situation is resolved without harm.

If you could help me out here, I would truly be in your debt.

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This, from reader JeffW:

Praying here also. If anyone finds time, my wife could also use some prayer. Due to cancer in an ovary, she just had an Oophorectomy (like a hysterectomy except they remove the ovaries too). She is “clean” now, but we’re in the recovery stage (1-week down, 5-weeks to go).

Just when I think my problems are important.

Dishwasher

I just installed a dishwasher. I removed the old copper inlet line. I replaced it with two braided lines connected end-to-end. I used to have maybe seven feet of extremely fragile, leaky copper. Now I have ten feet of braided stainless. If the dishwasher goes bad, I can move it around all I want, without fear of sending water spraying all over the kitchen. My question: why couldn’t the people who installed the last dishwasher have done this? Answer: because they took no pride in their work, and all they wanted was to get a signature and get back on the truck.

No one does anything right any more. And it’s not a question of skill or knowledge. Yesterday I knew virtually nothing about installing a dishwasher. Today I have an installation which is infinitely superior to what I would have gotten had I paid the delivery guys to do it.

How did we end up like this? Time and time again, I find myself in a position where I would be thrilled to pay someone to do a job, but I end up doing it myself because I can’t find anyone to do it right.

On top of that, the money people charge for services is insane. I could get rich running a business where I only charged people fifty bucks for the fifteen minutes of work an appliance installation requires. That’s because appliance stores charge over a hundred. Lawyers don’t make that kind of money. Why would I pay it to a blue-collar guy who can barely be considered skilled labor?

In case you’re wondering, it looks like Kitchenaid makes the best dishwashers these days. Braun gets higher ratings, but they have an eco-weasel “feature”: no heating element. So your dishes never get dry.

I went to Consumer Reports and saw how they raved about Kenmore. Then I read the reviews from the unfortunate people who had actually bought the machines. Oh, man. You couldn’t give me one now. But the Kitchenaid owners all seemed ecstatic. I went to J.D. Power to check, and I saw four stars by Kitchenaid, and that was enough for me.

So I guess what this means is that Consumer Reports is right in there with all the other people who do their jobs badly.

I’m glad I’m learning to do all these things for myself. I am so sick of having people tear up my home and belongings; I am so tired of having to follow up and complain until they get it right. I just don’t need the aggravation. Better to suffer with the actual work than to spend time on the phone yelling at people who don’t care. I have the sort of feeling I would have if these people were deliberately conspiring to punish me with bad work until I got the message and quit hiring them.

Do I sound crabby? Maybe just a little? Go on. You can be honest.

In other news, I heard from a TV production company today. They expressed interest in the rights to Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man. How about that? I looked them up. It’s a real company. I don’t think they’re like the vultures who appeared when I put my press release up, offering to put me on THREE TOP LITERARY WEBSITES or let me buy an infomercial from a company whose name sounds almost sort of like a famous shopping network, but not quite enough like it to justify a lawsuit.

I don’t know if it will amount to anything, but it proves I’m not the only person on earth who likes this concept. Who knows? Maybe some day you’ll see me on cable at 2 a.m., putting together a turducken.

I don’t like the idea of having my face on camera, and I am sure America and I are on the same page in that regard. But PR is the key to riches, and regular TV appearances are hard to beat. The TV-chef pantheon is full of rich people who can’t cook. Investors even buy them restaurants. Where the food is bad. And people buy it and swear it’s ambrosia.

I’m not desperate to get rich, but I would like to generate a solid income with this stuff. Maybe there is a way.

New Trip to Gordon Food Service

I forced myself to get a haircut, and while I was beyond the cave mouth, I made a run to Gordon Food Service for some wonderful Stanislaus Super Dolce Pizza sauce. I bought two gallon cans, for $11.58. The price has gone up, but you can still top around a thousand pizzas for under twelve dollars. And it’s wonderful on pasta.

I checked the frozen cheesecake while I was there. Remember now, this is what you generally get when you order cheesecake in a restaurant. A few restaurants make their own cheesecake, some order from bakeries, and a lot buy pre-made cakes from food service companies. And guess what? They’re full of guar gum and Crisco. The ingredients are listed on the sides of the boxes you never get to see. So when I tell you I have the only good cheesecake recipe in the world, you ought to listen. It’s nearly true. Have you been to the Cheesecake Factory? Cheesecake is their main draw, and their version tastes like sweetened lithium grease.

It’s hard to believe how easy it is to eat well for cheap. They had huge slabs of spareribs for $1.59 per pound. It’s funny, but some of the best foods on earth are also among the cheapest.

I’m going to slop together a pizza, with Costco cheese and Super Dolce. I already know it will be great. I may chop up the provolone to see if I can get away with using four ounces. I’m concerned that by not using slices that totally cover the part-skim mozzarella, I’m inviting scorching. I guess I’ll find out.

Are you as creeped out by the Muslim threat to attack at the Olympics? It has been giving me the willies since yesterday. A few days back, I had a dream about the Olympics, in which a big translucent stadium sort of a thing was essentially melted by a terrorist attack. It glowed kind of a yellowish orange, and it sank inward from the top.

These guys are like psoriasis. They never go away.

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Now I’m more creeped out than ever. I just took a look at the National Stadium in Beijing, and it sure looks like what I saw in the dream. Although I think the stadium in the dream had translucent sides, sort of like the swimming stadium.

Anyway, I am really tired of videos from Islamist nuts.

I Feel Like Lot

I made another Costco-cheese pizza yesterday. Blogged it at Manly Grub. I have no complaints. As far as I can tell, their shredded mozzarella is fine, apart from being part-skim. If you like part-skim, there’s nothing wrong with it at all. My one complaint is that the provolone is sliced a little thick. I used a single layer on top of the mozzarella, and I still got some oiling off. This is not exactly the end of the world, but I think the provolone would be better if you could cover a pizza with four ounces (four slices) instead of six.

In any case, the mozzarella is a good buy. If you have to get thin provolone somewhere else, you’re still saving money because the mozzarella is so cheap.

Here’s something that would be fun. Make a pie, add six ounces of mozzarella, and then add 4-6 ounces of very thinly sliced Swiss or Jarlsberg.

I can’t quite get used to Bonta sauce. It’s good, but Super Dolce is fifteen minutes away by car, and to me, it’s better.

People are still giving me comments on rifle scope choices. I have decided the best thing is to get a .22 with peep sights and practice at 50 yards. Once I feel like I can shoot a rifle, I’ll start worrying about the scoped guns.

A reader suggested .17 HMR, which is a fairly inexpensive caliber. The guns cost about what a .22 does, and the ammunition runs around ten bucks for 50 rounds.

I don’t understand ballistics at all. I don’t understand why some calibers are more accurate than others. You would think that if a caliber had accuracy problems, the people who design the ammunition and barrels would fix it, but I guess it doesn’t work that way, because some calibers shoot better than others. That is the situation with .17 HMR and .22 LR. Supposedly you can shoot the toes off a fly with a scoped .17 HMR, and you can actually kill vermin at three hundred yards. I’m starting to think a .17 HMR rifle might be a good move, once I feel good about the way I shoot with open sights.

In connection with this caliber, I found what may be the greatest website in the universe. I am referring to Varmint Al’s. This guy shoots pest animals for money, and he has some crazy gear. He lives in Northern California, where they have a ground squirrel problem, and ranchers pay him to go out and pop ground squirrels on their property. He’s also a machinist, and he has all sorts of skills. He seems to like the .17 HMR a whole lot. You can go to the site and see photos of his many victims.

Last night I tried to find Brother Andrew’s book, God’s Smuggler. The B&N site said a local store had it, but they were wrong. I tried another store, and of course, they didn’t have it either. But if I had wanted books on witchcraft and idolatry, or if I had wanted books by shiny-haired, disappointing televangelists, I would have been all set. They had plenty.

It’s peculiar, but it seems like bookstores down here really push the occult stuff. For years, I’ve noticed that they tend to put it on the eye-level display areas behind the checkout counter. And the kids they hire always seem to be creepy little Goths. Am I the only one who has noticed this?

The second store had Corrie ten Boom, so that’s good.

I took a look at The Screwtape Letters. I don’t think it’s for me. It just doesn’t speak to me. It seems like it’s about an intellectual approach to Christianity, whereas I see Christianity as a matter of faith, character, and emotion. I’ve had certain types of experiences, and I want guidance from other people who have been down the same road. I don’t see how a completely fictional book could serve that purpose. When religious writing becomes too theoretical, it loses me. Even Christians can be effete. I want to hear about things that have worked in practice, in the real world. A real-life example is worth more to me than a library full of theory.

I had to order God’s Smuggler online. I wonder if the US is becoming a country where you can get any kind of porn you want locally, but you have to have a computer to find religious instruction.

A reader sent me a link to some downloadable sermons, and I listened to a Baptist preacher who said he had slowly been squeezed out of the public eye. When he was young, people used to ask him to pray at public functions, but the invitations dropped off with time, and people even turned down the free use of a building belonging to his church, because he refused to cover up the scripture on the walls. In the sermon, he flatly stated that America isn’t a Christian nation any more. Man, that is scary. God made us great, and he can take it all away. It’s strange to realize that the United States needs evangelism. This is one reason I want to move to a nice backward area where you can have a flag in front of your house and go to a church with a heterosexual pastor. Maybe that’s wrong; maybe the proper thing to do is to try to improve the area where you live. But I don’t like being in a place where people are beginning to see Christians as evil. If things continue to deteriorate, I can see us winding up a persecuted minority within 25 years, at least in some areas.

Costco Comes Through Again

I tried the Costco cheese. I made a 16″ pizza with Bonta sauce.

I highly recommend it. details at Manly Grub.

I am the Almighty Costcolio

I have two fantastic pieces of news.

1. Costco has moved to a new location near me, and it’s twice as big as the old place, and parking is way better.

2. The old Costco is going to be a Lowe’s!

Does life get any better than that?

I stocked up on $4.79 flap meat, and I bought a few pounds of blueberries to freeze. I can’t face life without access to blueberry cheesecake. Not sure how they’ll look after freezing, but it can’t hurt to try.

Here’s great news, for everyone who enjoys seeing me dribble my own money away on food experiments, so you don’t have to. I bought a bag of Costco mozzarella, and a package of Costco provolone slices. The slices gave me the idea. It looks like good provolone, and it’s about $2.50 per pound, so I couldn’t resist. I’m going to make a Costco-cheese pizza and see what happens. If this works out, it would be great news for men everywhere. Think about it. You go to Costco and buy 5 lbs. of each cheese, and you divide it up with one or two friends, and you get super-cheap pizza.

I decided to break down and try Costco’s 12-year-old Macallan Scotch. It costs about half what the 16-year-old does. I’m disappointed. Truthfully, I think 12-year-old blended Scotch is better. I found it harsh. I guess if you want good single-malt Scotch, you have to give up and spend some money.

Fortunately, I have no complaints at all about their $23 Pinch.

He’s Large and in Charge

I have an exciting announcement. Manly Grub now has an honorary mascot. I have awarded that honor to Prince Chunk, the recently discovered 44-pound housecat.

Drop by the forum and tell us how you would cook him. Call it a contest. I’ll look at any recipe submitted by Monday. On Tuesday, I’ll arbitrarily and unfairly choose a winner, who will receive nothing. Probably.

I predict it will be less than two weeks before a rapper decides to name himself Prince Chunk.

Me, Mainly

I have a nice media opportunity today. Do me a favor and say a prayer for me. After all, ultimately, God decides who succeeds and who does not.

Keep Your Hazmat Suit Handy

I did something horrible yesterday. I got myself more blueberries, plus a half-pint of raspberries. You can guess what’s going to happen to them. CORNBREAD.

I truly hope I can get the blueberries to occupy the proper altitudes inside the cornbread this time, instead of forming a big purple layer on the bottom. You really need to try this stuff. I do not lie. It’s wonderful.

If you haven’t signed up for Manly Grub Forum, you should consider it. People are contributing a lot of wild recipes. Elisson contributed one for something called Strasbourg pie. It’s hideous. You roast an entire foie gras (duck liver) in puff pastry, with other crap. You put it in a long pan and fold the pastry over it. What you end up with is a fatty loaf of death. I don’t know if I could stand it, due to the liver, but if liver doesn’t bother you, this may be your bag.

If anything worthwhile happens when I make the cornbread, I’ll put photos up in the forum.

The categories have been expanded a lot. Guns, charities, beer, wine, various spirits, and so on. I just created a board where you can post links to your favorite food sites. And as I had hoped, the boards haven’t devolved into a typical Internet-forum snakepit. We have over 1100 posts up, and I haven’t had to execute anyone yet.

Back on the Juice

Several times over the last week, I have broken my own commandment and indulged in the marvelous juice of the coffee bean. I gave up my morning coffee some months back, when I had to get cosmetic dental work done because I had been grinding my teeth at night. But the busier you are in the morning, the harder it is to give up coffee. I’m not chugging a quart any more. But that one relaxing cup, while I take a break and surf the web…that is a hard pleasure to forego.

I make my coffee with espresso grounds, and my new thing is to add sugar, half and half, and a squirt of chocolate syrup.

I can always buy new teeth.

No Joke

Is this for real?

I Prescribe Doughnuts

Happy Sabbath, or Sunday, or whatever it is to you.

A day or two ago, I read the book of Romans, and in it, Paul said we were not to get agitated over which day we chose to give to God. That’s good to know. I assume I understand him correctly:

In the same way, some think one day is more holy than another day, while others think every day is alike. You should each be fully convinced that whichever day you choose is acceptable. 6 Those who worship the Lord on a special day do it to honor him.

I got a great surprise when I turned on my computer today. A reader left a comment on my main site. Apparently, my book is HELPING his health. I never saw that coming. Glad to hear it, though. I blogged it here.

I think he’s onto something. If you want to gain weight, this book is tough to beat. The cheesecake, fries, biscuits, flan, and brownies may be the worst (or best) items. The steak, on the other hand, is probably healthy, if you don’t eat it with a big serving of carbs.

Temptation Gets the Best of Me

Here is some bad news. Putting the blueberry cornbread in the freezer will not make you safe. Unfortunately, it microwaves really well, in about 90 seconds.

And even more sadly, while I was eating the second half of the pone I made the other day, I remembered the dark maple syrup Mike gave me.

Do NOT make this stuff.