Text 35108, 84 rader
Skriven 2010-02-23 10:02:50 av Michael Loo (1:18/200)
Ärende: hotel food 840
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Many tastes on recent travels.

Block & Barrel original kettle style potato chips -
great texture but a little bitter and overcooked.
Like your standard kettle chips, only just slightly
more industrial. A Sysco product.

Wise Cheez Doodles puffed white cheddar cheese flavored
baked corn snacks - interesting; started off tasting very
much like the stain your fingers kind (no surprise) but
(surprise) ended up tasting more corny, less cheesy, and
a touch scrapply - herby sagey notes and a rich almost
porkishness. I got a big bag for $2, and it lasted me
2 full meals and a couple snacks.

Even though I didn't have cooking facilities in the place
I was staying, I picked up an "eye round steak" at 4.49/lb
marked down from 5.49/lb. Any small child could have seen
that this was a Porterhouse. I ate this raw, tearing it apart
with my fingers and teeth; a nicely atavistic experience. It
wasn't bad, tenderer than the Hilltop Steakhouse steak I'd
recently had (which was tough though rare); decent flavor,
just a little dubious on the edges, but I ate around the fat
(I do draw the line somewhere). A 3/4 (a bit more than 1/2,
not counting the bone) lb steak done the way I like it for
3.50, you can hardly go wrong. The only thing that could
have made it better would have been if I had a blowtorch to
broil the fat and gristle; but I'm given to understand that
blowtorches are discouraged aboard aircraft.

Sara Lee reduced-sodium roast beef - had a cured, corned
taste that didn't make sense because of the reduced-Na
stuff. I eventually decided that in order to get some of
the salty tang, the factory must have used some acid
instead of NaCl. Couldn't tell, though, as this came from
the deli counter. The beef itself was top round and not
bad at all. I got it sliced really, really thin; the
meat quality was such that next time I might try for a
couple notches thicker.

Ron Medellin (aged 3 years in oak) - quite harsh, alcoholic,
not much rum or brown sugar flavor; pretty neutral in taste
despite its brownness and the oak aging claim. Was improved by

Barritt's ginger beer (claimed on the label to be Bermuda's
favorite) - pleasantly spicy; rather sweet (the good: cane
sugar; the bad: too much of it; the ugly: needed lime to fix).

=

Three Bolognese sauces, the second two not at but near hotels:

Short ribs with pappardelle Bolognese (TusCA, Santa Clara)
- this was in the Hyatt where my conference was. TusCA means,
of course, Tuscan food in CAlifornia. The people at the table
to my left were enjoying what looked like supermarket sushi;
the olden lady to my right, a steak frites. My food wasn't
particularly Italian, either. What came: glue noodles, quite
nasty in a white cornstarchy sauce; quite a lot of short rib
meat the color of Vienna sausage, you know that pale pink
that comes from stewing unbrowned meat. The meat tasted boiled,
the pasta tasted unboiled - rather, soaked in dishwater, and
the sauce was Bolognese-ized by the presence of a few halved
wilted cherry tomatoes. Unutterably bad.

Penne Bolognese (Vin Santo, Willow Glen) - as good as the
previous was bad. The penne were perfectly al dente, the sauce
long-simmered and made of good tomatoes, rich in flavor but
enhanced (word not used ironically) by abundant chunks of
Italian sausage; the kitchen, apprised of my lactose issues,
was notably understated in the addition of Parmesan.

Mamma Mia's meat sauce (Fresh Choice, Mountain View) - as you
might expect from a largely vegetarian-friendly and heart-healthy
place, this was a tomato sauce (not cooked long enough, seasoned
hardly at all) with a perfunctory scattering of bits of lowfat
ground beef in it. The absence of fat was made clear by there
being nothing to balance the acidity of the tomatoes (unless I
went back to put some raisins from the salad bar in, which I was
tempted to do). Oddly, this mess for the palate dead was next
to a very nicely spiced chicken pozole stew that I took only a
couple tablespoons of for fear it be nasty.
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