Burrito Bites....

We’ll let the oysters by themselves another day or so and go over some goings on...somehow mostly related to Mexican Food...

The third of the holy trinity of restaurant signs has finally appeared on Plaza Tolteca

And guess what?  The very first day (a week ago, Tuesday or Wednesday) the sign was hung, the parking lot was full.  Certainly the novelty and curiosity of a new place will bring people, but it sure seems like there are a whole LOT of people who eat out a LOT.  And as I have mentioned before it’s not like there is a paucity of Mexican restaurants to choose from around here.  In fact, this place is pretty much right across the road from Chipotle (okay, not quite the same) but only maybe a half mile from Monterey in San Souci.  Pizza, Chinese, and Mexican... can't have too many (apparently).

And as fate would have it, we were coming home from one of those lectures I have been lecturing you about lately, and we were kind of hungry as we had not had dinner prior to the program.  It was also kind of late, and we came to the realization that there probably wasn’t much to choose from at the digs.  So kind of on a whim, MFO wheeled MOMSTER II into Plaza Tolteca and I went inside to see if they did do carry out.  As in the previous incarnations of the building the "stand" is right inside the main doors (with bar right, dining space left).  As I approached the stand, there was a heated discussion going on amongst four of the employees and what I assumed to be a straw manager.  It was not being conducted in English so I had no idea of the content, but none of the participants were smiling.  Finally I was acknowledged, and yes, they did do take out.  They handed me a four paneled, two sided menu, one side of which looks like:

(Demonstration purposes only, do not attempt to read)

containing an astonishing number of choices (in astonishingly tiny print).  I am not sure what it is about Mexican, Chinese, and maybe Thai restaurants that they feel the need to provide hundreds of items.  Might be an interesting culinary/cultural research project. To save you the trouble of squinting, the menu had all the usual (Tex) Mexican dishes we have come to expect: Appetizers (Guacamole, Nachos, and 17 others); Fajitas (6); Burritos (8); Quesadillas (4); Seafood, beef and steak, Chicken, Pork Dinners (27 all told);  Especialidades de la casa (15); you get the idea.  A little nuance is that there is a section called “Healthy dining (9)” which seems to be all vegetarian.. Desserts, sides, a bewildering amount of things..  Everything has a number, but they are not consecutive.  The ten entries in the Seafood section are numbers 99, 135, 146, 7, and 8, and some in the 160’s. There is a luncheon menu, and something called “Street Food” which are all Tacos so they are up on their current food trends.

I went back out to the MOMSTER, we perused the menu (held close up), MFO decided on steak fajitas (#139), and not knowing what to expect I did my sort of chicken Mexican dish, Enchilada’s Suizas (#184). I have found this dish to be relatively safe, being composed of chicken, a tomatillo sauce (which is usually mild) and melted cheese which oddly enough is NOT swiss, but cheddar, Monterey Jack, or a traditional Cotija..  don’t ask me why.   We didn’t notice anything special about the food, pretty much standard stuff, but again, newly opened and carryout.  Keep seeing a full parking lot there..

Hopeful?

Was driving into San Souci yesterday and saw what I took to be an encouraging sight at another purveyor of Mexican food:

Busily Working

 

A chain being demolished and eliminated?  Upon further consideration, I suspect it is probably just a makeover.  We’ll see.

The Cycle Begins Again

Further into San Souci I discovered yet another first in the holy trinity of restaurant signs

This one is affixed to the window of the space that the Subway vacated to move across the street.   So, instead of a Subway the front now looks like:

announcing that "coming soon" will be:

So yet again, somebody thinks “we can make it!”  It occured to me that the motif and the cuisine are kind of reminiscent of the shuttered CoCo Cantina.  One of the reasons I heard they left the Lone Star site in the park was that rent was too high.  This is much less square feet, so maybe it would be attractive to them.  Just a speculation, I’ll talk to some sources.  At least it appears to be independant...

Surprise

Since we seem to be mostly devoted to Mexican/Latin food subjects today, a little factoid for you:  You know that little Mexican Market on Great Mills near the dry cleaners and the Dollar General?  Apparently they have a few tables and serve food.  A loyal reader told me about it and said that he has a co-worker who hails from Mexico and swears by it.  Says a rudimentary knowledge of Mexican language is a big help.  Sounds encouraging..  maybe a “just right” place??  not sure how you would

DFD

 

EXTRA TO DO:  not mexican food, but yet another lecture.. tonight at the Historic St. Mary's City Visitor Center will be a free program centering on the Calvert house, the dig there, and what they are learning...

Moving, Church Food, and Horizons

Just some random stuff and a note about expanding horizons at the end..

Moving

I may be last to the parade here, but just to pass along….  Word (reliably) has it that Monterrey (or Monterey depending on where you look) will be pulling out of San Souci and relocate into the Damon’s building down south by gate one.  Seems a bit odd, San Souci was a pretty good location one would think.  Lot of lunchtime synergy there.  But, as I have grown to learn following the restaurant circuses, sometimes these things get driven more by leases and contracts rather than any food related reasons.  Damon’s was pretty much as I recall set up in a “sports bar” arrangement with flat screens and such..  Be interesting to see how they do it.

Driving through Calloway the other day on Rte. 5, we noticed a sign on the door of Bear Creek Barbecue that they also were moving to be down on Route 249 which heads down to Piney Point.  Locals will remember that about two or three miles down that road was what I remembered as some sort of “Chicken Shack” on the east side of the road.  Had a peaky roof with bric-a-brac as I recall.  Anyway, that is the new home of Bear Creek!!  Pretty drastic reduction in square feet I think, so maybe that "dollars per" drove them out.  Remember they had a fire that shut them down for quite a time.  A restaurateur friend commented that you never recover (monetarily) from an event like that no matter how much insurance you have.  Anyway, will have to stop and see.

Also heard some buzz that Di Giovanni’s on the Solomons has undergone a management change or reversion..

Church Ladies

Saturday MFO and I attended the annual brunch at St. Georges Episcopal Chruch for the Friends of the Library.  One of the highlights at the brunch is the presentation of checks to the various branches of funds raised in the annual book sale.  It’s amazing how much money gets accrued a buck or two at a time (or maybe a book or two)!   Anyway, another highlight for me is always the food.   I usually refer to it as “church lady food” in that it is really made from scratch in one of those kitchens found in church halls.  In this case there were also males involved, but church ladies has a better ring to it.

It is always served on a buffet

With an array of stuff (meats above) in classic church buffet aluminum chafing dishes with lids that fall to the floor with great clatter (one did this year as well).  The complete “menu" consisted of a Green Chile Torte (egg dish); stewed apples; sliced pork; sausage; scrapple; french toast; steamed vegetables; green beans with hunks; Kugel; and intended quiche.  I noticed that the introductions kind of dragged on, and our director of libraries can talk for hours about what wonderful things they have accomplished, but finally the church man came out and fessed up that the quiche was taking longer to cook than he hoped, hence the delay.  After a few more minutes, he came out and said the darn thing(s) still were not done and we would start.  Real stuff.  You don’t get that in chains!!

As I mentioned above the meats consisted of the sliced pork, and also sausage and scrapple:

You might notice that the sausage patties have obviously (I checked) been formed by hand and are not those processed perfectly round discs, and the scrapple was sliced unevenly.  I was not sure of the origin of either, but they were definitely not unfrozen Sysco products.  Due to our somewhat late arrival we were sitting in the back nearer the food.  I kept track and was very much surprised how many people took the scrapple.  I think scrapple is one of those foods that require some time to develop a taste for if you didn’t grow up with it.  Having recently been in Scotland (the one across the pond, not the Southern Maryland version), I kind of compared it to Haggis.  And truth to tell, I liked the Haggis better than the scrapple offered at the brunch.  I also suspect that, like stuffed ham, there is a lot of local variation in the recipe.  This one wasn't overly spicy.

Anyway, it’s these kinds of events and local foods that makes one glad we live here..

Horizons

I am about to embark on a new adventure for me.  The people in our Tourism organization have offered me the chance to post a piece on their site once in a while when something moves me to words.  My first attempt is kind of a “who the heck is this guy?” for those few people in the county that don’t know the Bottom Feeder.  I will not appear under that nom de plume.  The subject matter will be different than what goes into the bottom feeder blog.   There are a lot of neat things in our county and I hope to seek out some of the more interesting ones for them.  But, dear readers, despite that venture, please BE ASSURED that there will be no change in the bottom feeder.  Rants, criticism of chains, calling out bad service, drivers, and manners will remain.. we’ll see how it goes.  Take a look and suggestions are, as always, welcome.  

Here’s the link – by the way, the site is pretty neat and has a lot of good county stuff (Besides me of course).

DFD

Magic in your hand....

For a few years, I used to carry around an iPAQ, a little device that was about the size of a small cigar box, which would alert me when a meeting was to begin, whose birthday was coming up, a phone number for somebody, their address, e-mail addy, that kind of thing. Most folks know that’s called a PDA. It was a bit cumbersome, but it kept some semblance of order to my life. And, being an engineer, people expected you to have funny stuff hanging off of you. After all, I used to have a belt holster for my slide rule.

As years went by, the batteries in the iPAQ became less reliable as did my brain, and it all culminated the other day as I was happily driving along toward Sbucks, glanced over to a building on the side of the road and noted gee, there’s a lot of cars……Holy (insert explicative)! There was a little community kind of meeting that I was supposed to attend that had just evaporated in my mental schedule. Three lanes of traffic negotiated, I humbly walked in right before the “well, I guess that’s all for today” speech. Okay, that’s it. I’ve had it, I have to get something I can have with me. Now, I was quite aware that many of my friends had such various devices because I get a lot of e-mails with “sent from my…….” tagged at the end.

Not completely oblivious to modern technology, I knew there is a bewildering array of products out there that flip, tilt, open, slide, pop, and have virtual and real QWERTY thingies, which is probably what I would need. In the past, I would have conducted an exhaustive web search, talked to friends, looked at Consumer Digest (to discover the best model was made in Kazakhstan, with only 5 produced), scoured the local outlets, etc., for up to a month. Somehow in my advancing age, I have gravitated to the “S---w it, I want it NOW”. So, after just a little looking I decided that the DROID was for me. I know iPhones are all the rage, but to be honest, I do believe those red and blue maps so decided that the V source was better than the A network

So yesterday after a quick phone consult with a geeky friend, I marched into the local Verizon store and now am the proud owner of a little black device that is much smarter than I am. It used to be that the cell phones had an inch thick instruction book with them (only because there was a section in all known written languages, including Sanskrit), but this one only had a “getting started”. After fumbling around for a while and discovering that their idea of the size of my fingers was incredibly wrong, I was able to send a text message with something like: “HJellllop I hazwe aq Drtposd” . I also mistakenly called somebody and was unable to figure out how to cancel the call, so sorry for running your answering machine out of tape. But, i am learning...

I am still in amazement that I can hold this little thing in my hand, (allegedly) get e-mails, find the nearest Pizza joint, and it will give me directions on how to get from my current location (which it well knows) to that destination complete with the “turn left in…” directions. How to they do that? Amazing. It's magic.

I heard the other day that the average teen ager (whatever that is) now spends in excess of 7 hours a day “connected”. I am not sure that is horrible, that generation (whatever letter is attached) is growing up in a world that so different than ours was, that maybe they will be better equipped to be caretakers of it and us. I can only hope that a few of them are spending at least some of those hours learning something on the web, not entirely telling their friends that they just exhaled, or playing Godzilla XIV, so we’ll see.

Okay enough, I’ll be texting you or befriending you.

Oh, and just to reassure you that although I have entered the handheld cyber world, my traditional values are still intact:




And continue to put down the device when it’s time to

DFD

Goodbye to an Old Friend

One of the reasons the flutter’s basement is so crowded is that I have every single issue of Gourmet since 1994 stored there (along with Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, etc., etc.). So it was with some surprise and sadness that I learned my collection will stop with the November issue. I heard about it on our trip, but more pressing matters (like fried pickles, perch, and whitefish) kept it off the pages.

I’ve read a few articles on “why”, and while the immediate cause was lack o’advertising dollars in this economy, the underlying reasons maybe told more about us. Things like “too complicated recipes”; “stuff we don’t care about”; “articles about chefs we’ve never heard of”; were mentioned. As most loyal readers know, I ranked it right up there with the top of the magazines I get (Saveur secure in number one – I hope!) for offering in-depth articles and recipes for stuff I do care about. Ruth Reichl is an icon in the food world, although I will admit I won’t miss that stock photo of her grinning at me every month. I'm sure she'll find work if she needs it. Conde Nast, the parent company, elected to axe Gourmet while keeping Bon Appétit (Best Ten Minute Mains!) plus a couple of bride magazines, and some others. Stats are quoted that show the newsstand sales for Gourmet were down 25 percent, ad pages 32 percent, with less figures for the more plebian Bon Appetit, apparently saving it (for now).

There was also a piece in USA Today (hey – it was free at the Hotel, okay?) about Gourmet with little inset photos of Rachel Ray, Paula Deen, Sandra Lee, and Chris Kimball (I think for his “America’s Test Kitchen Show). Their take was that the food world is changing away from the “old timey” haute cuisine Gourmet approach. There’s a “dizzying array” of recipes available at your keyboard, along with specialty ingredients, blogs (I’m sure they mean this one), how-to websites and so forth. Anybody can be a food expert now. They also mention television resulting in “rocketing to stardom such cooking gurus (italics mine) as Rachel Ray, Sandra Lee, Paula Deen, Chris Kimball, Bobby Flay, and Buddy Valastro, the Cake Boss”. Who the hell is he? Paula "Y'all" Deen a guru? With her face on every chunk of Smithfield Ham? Not to me. Sandra Lee tells us how to do "Elegant meals partially made with store-bought or prepared ingredients". Oh, Goody. Sorry Mr. local farmer we don't need you - we got Kraft now! No mention of Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, Jacques Pepin, Michel Richard, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Julia, or a host of others which provided the base for these fluff masters (excluding CK) to build on.

It also lists the 5 most popular epicurean titles on the news stand as (in order): Every Day with Rachel Ray; Cooking with Paula Deen; Cooking Light; Taste of Home; and Everyday Food. The last one is the only one I’ve ever seen. Thank God. Did I mention that Rachel Ray’s magazine is published by the Readers Digest empire? Fits, doesn’t it? Probably have a large print edition.

Chris Kimball wrote an article in the New York Post, talking about the plethora of amateur bloggers, instant cooks, and those star chefs that pretty well summed it up for me:

“To survive, those of us who believe that inexperience rarely leads to wisdom need to swim against the tide, better define our brands, prove our worth, ask to be paid for what we do, and refuse to climb aboard this ship of fools, the one where everyone has an equal voice. Google “broccoli casserole” and make the first recipe you find. I guarantee it will be disappointing. The world needs fewer opinions and more thoughtful expertise — the kind that comes from real experience, the hard-won blood-on-the-floor kind. I like my reporters, my pilots, my pundits, my doctors, my teachers and my cooking instructors to have graduated from the school of hard knocks”.

I can't improve on that, and, I’ll bet he
DFD

Life Begins Anew

Somebody once said that I would retire when Hell freezes over. Not quite in that order, that’s what occurred yesterday, my first real day of retirement. Unfortunately it was spent huddling in the digs trying to stay warm and hoping against hope that the power that went out Sunday evening would return any moment. It did, but not until around 5. Quite the storm.

Anyway, so here I sit on the first day where I didn’t have to get up at o’dark thirty, show the nice man my badge, scour the tie ins for aircraft facts, put together a “status” and then append the feeder my labor of love. That part I miss, but hope this blog thing can eventually replace it with much more capability. I hope you bear with me while we all learn about blogosphere.

What’s retirement? Today it’s sitting here (in the now warm digs) gazing out at the snow, the birds gathering on the feeder (how do they eat that stuff so fast?), the bright blue water punctuated with the bridge arcing across to the solomons, and thinking, gee maybe those guys are right. For instance, Lunch now takes on a whole new dimension. Normally it consisted of microwaving a little cup of sodium laced food like material, a bag of Doritos, and maybe a Pepsi consumed while running down the e-mails, spilling Doritos crumbs into the keyboard. Now, a whole new universe awaits. One could join one’s spouse at a (tasteful) local spot for a leisurely dish with maybe a glass of wine (instead of “unsweetened ice tea please”), or spend some time at home and make that Reuben just the way you want, or if busy just skip it. freedom of choice. A nice thought.

ADMIN Note: I am having trouble establishing a link between the blogger (me) and readers. I greatly enjoy and appreciate your helpful comments, suggestions, experiences, etc., and don’t want to lose that. Bear with me a bit..and the person who asked about DFD and MFO, I replied but not sure you got it.. learning..hang with me.

Tis Done and Done

After a frantic morning of putting stuff in boxes without regard to value, finally a bare desk was staring up at me, calanderless stark walls, just as I found it some years ago. A working life was neatly packaged into 12 boxes, and with the help of some folks, it was stowed in the MOMSTER for transport yet again to the digs.

A string of good byes to those around and then a visit to the nice security department where i was "de-briefed" (no snappy comments please) and turned in my badges. There was little remorse at handing over the CAC card - good bye access to the NMCI chamber of horrors, so long Activeclient, adios plain text, arrivederici "are you sure this is from a trusted source? That wasn't so bad. Then it was out to the MOMSTER for one final act of separation. The closer i got to the gate in the stickerless MOMSTER, the lighter i felt! Hey, this ain't so bad!

So here i sit upon my bed, laptop on lap, looking out the window to a gray sky and water, a glass of Sauvignon Blanc at my side, and you know what? I don't regret not having stickers on my car. face forward..

A quick thank you to all the people who took time to respond to this morning's feeder with very nice things to say.

Probably enough about the transition, early reports are that it is going well..and we'll try to veer out of the life lane back to some good old stuff about food..