This Place Is a Stranger

This place was in Palm Harbor. The sushi is the best sushi I have ever had. The rice was fresh, the wasabi strong, and the eel sweet. And who can deny the badassery of the boat?

I absolutely loved it, and thank you Aunt Gigi for taking us there multiple times!

Located on Clearwater Beach

I had muscles boiled in cream sauce and onions with a side of fries. It reminded me of France

Laura had lamb shank and potatoes.

Also pictured here is Garlic Hummus with pita chips, Amberbock, and Sangria

This menu was hilarious. The bar/restaurant was primarily gays, so the imagery is great.


This was an incredible meal. The omelet was swiss and spinach. The potatoes were Cajun style with Cheddar, and the pancakes were... pancakes.

Most days I just let the fruit rot on the vine, or sit inside while my father waters and picks what he wants. But today I picked about twenty pounds of tomatoes, peppers, and one squash from Molly's plant.

Brains, while delicious, are comically high in cholesterol.

Burger Up, as you would expect, serves seafood, salads, and fried mushrooms. The Dog (pictured) surprisingly packs its menu with hot dogs and sausages.

And now the point of convergence: Hamburgers.

Burger Up is an "upscale" hamburger place that is really worried that you won't recognize and appreciate how local and organic everything is. They are so worried about selling people on the idea of everything being fancy that they forgot to learn how to make a hamburger. The truffle fries and fried mushrooms were excellent. The burger was a dense, dry, overcooked, flavorless disc.

The Dog is just the opposite. They make their namesake menu item great, and just do a mediocre job on everything else. The burger was overcooked, dense, and dry, but it was no worse than the joint at Burger Up, which cost twice as much.
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The first tomato to ripen was a blondkopfchen, which I thought was a spitze in transition. It fell off into my hand, and was delicious, though the skin was a little prominent.



The other tomatoes I can identify are the green zebras, which are gorgeous. Unless they suddenly turn purple, and then they will be one of the two black russian tomatoes that I can't distinguish. More stuff after the thing.
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One of Lexie's favorite dishes is the smoked salmon salad at Landmark in Galesburg. Since we were given a smoker this week, I picked up a side of salmon, cured it, smoked it, and shredded it just for her.

We forgot all about dressing, which is typically a raspberry or cranberry, walnut or hazelnut, type vinaigrette thing. We blended bing cherries, blueberries, honey, salt, sugar, vinegar, and oil together and it turned out well. Also, petit fours from Sweet Spot, and watermelon.

OMG, the Shrimp Pho is suh good.

Today's my wife's birffday and to celebrate we're having a couple of friends over for a dinner I get to make.

I am going to make a few rolls of sushi, and keep it simple. The pièce de résistance is going to be dessert. This month's issue of Bon Appetit had a recipe for traditional (on a biscuit, not cake) strawberry short cake with a balsamic vinegar and pepper glaze. We tried it out at work and it was great so I brought what we did at work home and changed a bit of it.

Later tonight I will take pictures of the completed dessert and upload them, along with a writeup of what i changed.

But I've already made the biscuits from scratch, southern style with a twist.

Here is a link to the original recipe: Link.

Vodka is one of my favorite alcohols because its largely tasteless, and the most versatile.

In this particular round I have started with a Mango/Orange infusion, and also a Mint/Lemon infusion.

More after the Jizzump.
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Bubble tea is basically a tea smoothie that commonly has giant tapioca pearls and jelly bits in the bottom. Wikipedia confirms my suspicions about bubble tea, saying you can find it in "various trendy college towns." We had the lychee and pina colada flavors.

A girl at work gave me some kimchi her mother made. It tastes great on a burger but texturally it's not a winner.

We made pork chops and topped them with a nectarine mint salad. Also pictured are ginger ales mixed with royal anne cherries, which are unimpressive but it was still good.

Olive and Sinclair is a Nashville chocolate company that imports the cacao beans to make the chocolate instead of buying the liquor or just mixing the cocoa powder with cocoa butter or whatever less fancy and less expensive companies do. The results were all pretty good, but the sea salt bar was by far the best. The chocolate was at just the right darkness and really fruity and flavorful. The only two questions I'm left with are, Is the Salt and Pepper chocolate bar any good, and why are they called Olive and Sinclair when their names are Scott Witherow and David Sellers?

I used basil from my garden for the first time, mixing the lemon basil (which has a sort of Pinesol scent) and the milder lettuce leaf basil together. Also there was chicken, and granny smith apples. I ate three sandwiches in a row, so it was pretty good.

Now that Lost is over California sweet corn is coming into season, so last night the wife and I made some spicy corn chowder from a recipe I made up, with some fancy grilled cheese. These pictures suck, because we have very dim lights in our dining room. Recipes after the jump.


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Made hot sauce from jalapenos, onions, garlic, capers, and plenty of vinegar, and also took a stab at pickles. More on that later when I've actually eaten them.

These are awesome. It wasn't intentional, but the dough stretched in the oven to form pale stripes that didn't touch the boiling baking soda solution or the egg wash. A couple of them got cinnamon and sugar instead of salt, and they are fantastic. I stuffed one with walnut cheese leftover from microtorch adventures, and then I blacked out. When I woke up, I had cheese on my shirt and I couldn't find my cell phone. Cinnabon, Aunti Annie, Wetzels, you will lose sleep at night over what I'm gonna do to the pretzel world.

All the plants which did not have enough extracurriculars or letters of recommendation get planted along the side of the house. This way, I don't have to really do anything with them, and I can compare the results to those grown in the garden where I've put time and money. I actually took twelve gallons of gardening soil and mixed it with about forty five gallons of clay to stretch it out. In the Extreme Gardening Annex, plants will just have to man up and squeeze their roots between the five pound rocks and impenetrable clay.

Today we played with Nick's microtorch. We roasted cheese-stuffed peppers, made smores with Nutella and marshmallow cream, and coated walnut cheeseballs with brown sugar and used the torch to carbonize them. Food discovery of the year. Later, I made half-pound cheeseburgers using ziplock bags and water immersion, and put them on homemade pretzel buns. More pictures and details after the jump.

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This delicious piece of heaven was grill fried in Olive oil. I basted it with Garlic, Horseradish Mustard, Honey, Smoked Pepper, Onion, and Salt.

Man it was tasty.

Served with delicious fresh corn on the cob.