Bar Gernika (Review)

I've been broke enough long enough that I feel self concious when people offer to give me things, but that being said I'm only human, and being able to turn down a free meal is a talent I don't have. Such was the case Saturday morning. Wife and I had been out hitting the yard sales, with Boy reading his comics irritably in the back of the car, but our end destination was my Mother-in-law's house, where Grandpa intended to take Boy to an airshow in Nampa. Wife and I had intended to return to the sales, but soon she was helping her mother assemble a file organizer kind of like this one, and I was drooling over a Pampered Chef catalog, admiring Himilayan salt and knives that presumably don't suck.

By the time we were finished, we didn't really have time to do much but eat lunch before visiting our friend in the hospital. Not wanting to go home, we contemplated having lunch at Mother-in-law's, before realizing that anything worthy of our efforts would take longer than we had. I had the feeling one of us was seconds away from putting up the white flag of surrender to Top Ramen, when MIL said the magic words. "I'll spring for lunch."

Carmel Apple Bread Pudding (Recipe)

Every summer it seems, we wind up having guests who for all intents and purposes live with us. While our refrigerator contains enough food for myself, the wife, and the kids to get by it isn't quite set up to take on additional comers, and given that most of our friends are for lack of a better word "hippies" the budget doesn't expand much with their arrival. Fortunately many local churches offer food boxes for those without an income, and while the merit of giving said food boxes to traveling road kids is probably debatable, my family and I certainly aren't going to turn up our noses at incoming food, no matter its origin.

Los Betos (Review)

I wasn't sure if I should review Los Betos. It is, after all, part of a chain of restaurants. But this was the first time since I started working on this blog (other than some Papa Murphy's pizza the wife brought home) that I had the opportunity to eat out, and I was itching to review something. That, coupled with the fact that it's not exactly a franchise giant (and after all, Boise's own beloved Flying Pie has two stores, which technically means that it's a chain as well) was enough to make it official. The small group of Mexican fast food joints based out of somewhere in Utah would be my first.

One man's menudo is another's tripe

Menudo. According to Wikipedia, it contains "tripe, honeycomb and 'librillo' stomach beef meat along with the beef feet and tendons" Just the thought churns my stomach a little. Yet in Mexico, this traditional soup is considered both a star of special occasions and the ultimate hangover cure. Why should I reject tripe, pickled pigs feet, or fish with heads? Certainly, the old saying "don't knock it until you've tried it" should apply, right? After all, every day we eat foods filled with aspartame, which has a higher rating on the hazard diamond than the stuff I use to clean restrooms at work. And it's silly to worry about beef feet when you eat the modern cow in the first place. Besides, I've been eating Rocky Mountain Oysters....calf or sheep testicles, for those of you who might not know, for years. That's way more disgusting than some intestine, right? But my father, who grew up eating them on his family's farm in California during the Sixties, wanted to share the experience with me. He picked out the small ones (without the rubber band like veins so prominent throughout) and deep fried them, serving them to me as "veal nuggets". It's a matter of conditioning. And it's an unfortunate fact of life that a society so obsessed with eating meat is also picky about where it gets it.