Food Thread: Oatmeal Venison Cookies...The Best Of Both Worlds?

That is the vegetable platter served at a rather good Sunday Roast last week. The selection was delicious, and just enough of each food to entice, but not enough to seem as if we had to eat our vegetables before dessert or we wouldn't get any!

The carrots and parsnips (?) were roasted very simply, and as our waiter pointed out, they tasted good because the cook used a ton of butter. And this was said with pride! Which suggests that maybe the United Kingdom still does have a bit of life in her!

That cabbage medley was also damned good, in part of course because there is bacon in it, but also pretty good fresh green peas. Even those dark leafy greens (Kale?) were good.

Look, I'm not an evangelist for vegetables. I consider them a pleasant counterpoint to meat, but not the focus of the meal. But that doesn't mean they have to be tasteless.

These were delicious!

And this was my main course. That strange looking thing sitting on top of the pork belly is the skin of the belly that was wrapped into a cylinder and roasted on high heat until it got incredibly crisp. It was ridiculously crunchy, and ridiculously tasty. The pork belly was good too, but a bit dry, which was sad. I'm still broken up about it, but I tried to drown my sorrows with lots of good English cask ale. And I mostly succeeded!

I usually order venison when I see it on a menu, and while I love the stuff, it is often long on promise and short on delivery.

Not this though! Apologies for the crappy photo, because it really looked good! That's a blob of some sort of compound butter that was very, very rich, and very, very tasty. The red things that look like warts are crispy garlic with some sort of pepper. Yup, it was a spicy dish, but not out of balance for people who enjoy some heat.

But the star of the dish -- the venison -- was amazing! tender and flavorful, with just enough of the wild game flavor without any of the gameyness that can detract from venison. I did not expect to enjoy the combination of heat and venison, but it worked, and is a testament to the inventiveness of the chefs.

Sorry about the crappy photography. I don't like to use the flash in restaurants. It pisses me off when some idiot does it at the table next to me, so I should be consistent and not be an asshole to everyone else in the restaurant.

But life is sometimes not fair, and this is an example of that. Hell, this recipe for Stuffed Fried Pickles adds cheese! How bad could it be?

Pretty bad. I have been burned enough by the whole "Fried Pickle Tease" that I just move on when I see this sort of stuff.

Anyone have good luck with frying pickles?

Damn...it was fantastic. Much better than the standard Quaker Oats recipe, which always leaves me just a bit disappointed. The oats are too evident, which suggests that using cooked oats or even soaked raw oats might be the way to go.

Obviously there is a lot of butter in that recipe, and they look good, but the Platonic Ideal in Dildo-World is a thicker, cakier cookie.

Yeah...I'm just free-associating. So sue me!

Rumor has it that the Bourbon Bubble is bursting. I have seen no evidence of decreasing prices, but maybe the bursting started somewhere else! I think the sweet spot is $40-$60 for excellent and interesting bottles, and bumping that to $100 gets you an incremental improvement in quality, but nothing mind-blowing. More than that and I think you are paying for hype and rarity, which may look good in your liquor cabinet, but doesn't translate to more quality in the bottle.

The problem...or the solution...is to buy lots of bourbon, take tasting notes, and eventually arrive at your favorites! It should take forty or fifty years, but it is worth it!

posted by CBD at 04:00 PM

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