Text 19360, 103 rader
Skriven 2011-12-24 06:49:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: trip to Sac's 400
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We landed on time, and I hustled out to the exit to find Clean Dave,
who transported me away in style in his snazzy mostly restored F100
pickup from 1960. I'd sort of hoped he would cruise around until I
showed up and whisk me away; instead, he had just stopped in the
garage, where he paid an extortionate $2.50 for about zero minutes'
parking.

Back home, we started on the week's round of tasty tastes:

Ikea milk chocolate - Dave referred to it as a nicer version of
Hershey's. I didn't detect any of that rotten milk almost cheesy
Hershey quality but found it oversweet and without much chocolate
flavor - more milk (fresh, but I don't favor that either) than
anything else.

We later tasted the dark chocolate version - I pegged it at 50-55%,
owing to excessive sweetness; the label claims 60. There's a
tropical oils taste (coconut is what registers), and I don't see
the point of this, either. I wonder what they cost: if less than
$2 for 3 oz, fair, but still I'd not buy.

Target red velvet chocolate milk - Lynn is very enthusiastic about
this, perhaps because of the lurid color, which is a neon pink that
I imagine approximates the appearance of the favorite drink of some
of the African tribes - cow milk mixed with cow blood, a sort of
raw beef chowder. The texture is thick and noglike; the flavor a
not-too-chocolaty chocolate milk.

Maryanne's colleague's wife had made a peanut brittle of exceptional
awesomeness - I think it owed to precooking the nuts to a near
burned state; others thought it had a secret ingredient. Bacon fat?

Dave had bought a gallon of cider that had turned. It was delicious.

Time for dinner! Despite nobody's being particularly hungry.

Our destination - the Royal Buffet in Chicopee, which is known for
its abundance of seafood, including on weekends snow crab clusters,
some other kind of crab legs, and oysters on the half shell.

I guess octopus is the new squid - there were two rather nice
preparations on offer, a Japanese-style red baby octopus salad that
I thought a bit heavy on the ketchup, a little underseasoned, but
not at all bad; and hot pepper octopus, somewhat bigger (about 3"
diameter) fish in soy, black bean paste, and sliced peppers both
hot and sweet, my favorite dish of the day.

The raw oysters came and went, mostly went. Dave noticed one of the
customers had "oyster-dar," managing to be present whenever the
oysters showed up, and filling her plate in seconds with the best
ones. I had two plates - six picked-over ones, which were okay,
and then four decent ones (I gave Dave two more) when Dave caught
up with me at the restroom and excitedly said that the oysters were
back - I said, they'll be gone by the time you get back, and they
were. This table also offered boiled shrimp, decent, and greenlip
mussels, decent but tough. I found "shrimp scampi" at another
station - these same shrimp soaked in garlic butter and much better
that way.

Don't expect a report on the Chinese food, as I don't generally
go for this, as it's not made fresh the same week. Here, it did
look somewhat better than at the low-end buffets, but given my
morning indulgence, I didn't feel like going for more of the same.

There was an offering simply labelled as steak: there were a few
fattibits, so I took those, as fattibits are to me what candy is to
normal people. The meat attached to them was medium-to-medium-well
and rather chewy. It appeared to be your $3/lb shell sirloin nicely
peppered and then cooked at an insufficient temperature until gray.
The fat was decent.

A frightening-looking rump pot roast was labelled roast beef; again,
I picked some fat out - had to perform some surgery to get it, though.
This fat tasted better than the sirloin fat.

There was a surprise offering of roast duck, which was really red-
cooked duck with star anise. It was as you might suppose, only a
little more dry, and I had a quite tough leg that was worth it for
the skin.

Fried chicken wings were pretty good.

Desserts: sliced fruit, some nice, some nasty; the kiwi were fairly
ripe, and had I known this earlier I might have saved room for them;
honeydew were crunchy disgusting. There were canned fruit including
lychees (good, standard) and mamoncillo (like lychee only sour and
squishy).

Banana cream pie in a tray and chocolate pudding, both less than
awesome; vanilla pudding with some of that weird wintergreeny
disgustingness that I find in some commercial puddings.

After this, the Dollar Tree next door, which offered lobster sliders,
more on that later; then Kappy's, where a bottle of sweet red wine
from the Rheinhessen, a bottle of Carolans with two glasses, and a
12-pack of Lowenbrau Munchener Helles set me back $31 total.

Back home we picked some crabs Dave had got at Costco for crabcakes
for the next day for his family reunion.

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