Susan in FL

LOL, that happened! It's hard to see, but it's doing it in the 3rd photo down. I got a kick out of that, too. -Susan, Easily Amused That's a good idea, thanks.

Tonight I cooked from this library book I am borrowing for going on the 7th week now, Nuevo Latino by Douglas Rodriguez. I followed the ingredients list of the recipes fairly closely, but adjusted amounts. There are some really inspirational recipes in this cookbook. Tipi Tapa Snapper [Grouper for us] and Gallo Pinto A trio of salsas: Dried Shrimp Salsa; Plantain, Pineapple, and Serrano Salsa; and Anchovy Salsa We ate the salsas both as a relish to the side of the fish, and with some good yellow corn tortilla chips. The grouper was cooked in our cast iron skillet, and in the coating was cocoa powder, red chile powder, garlic powder, flour, cornstarch, and S&P. Interesting and very good! We drank a white wine from Rioja for the first time -- also interesting, and pretty good.

I asked if anybody has a tried & true butter almond or butter pecan recipe, or something similar... It looks like our taste buds are on the same track.

Not much of a summery dinner, but since we're still taking requests and Morten likes lasagne, I made this lasagne sort of pasta dish for dinner, and a salad to go with it.

We used this pasta tonight for a lasagne-like dish, taking off on the ideas posted here. I tried for the spiral effect in the pasta layers, but it didn't work out very well. Most of them broke up in the cooking, even though it started out looking good. I ended up lining up the pieces of pasta instead of putting them in circles. It tasted great, though!

Here is a link to my "report back" on the California Forum, including beer finds. Good beer was found in surprising places!

In case anyone read this post earlier and noted that I had forgotten the name of the Thai restaurant in LA where we ate dinner at the end of the trip: Between the three of us we were able to recall enough to do a search and found that it was Chan Darrette, and I edited the post to include the description of that excellent meal.

We began our roadtrip after landing in LA, and after we got our rental car, headed up the coast for a beautiful start to sight-seeing. Before driving to my son's house in Lemoore, we went to Solvang and had dinner. We enjoyed a smorgaasbord at The Red Viking. Some of the foods were like what we ate when we were in Denmark at Christmas, and were quite good, especially the Danish style bread. My first beer on the trip was a Carlsberg with that meal. The next morning we stopped for gas in Lemoore before hitting the road, and in the convenience store I found It's It, the first time looking! That was my breakfast. Little did my son know that they could be found right in little ol' Lemoore. We went to San Francisco that day and we ate at recommended brewpub, San Francisco Brewing Company. I had a sampler of beers, which were all good, and the housemade sausage sandwich. The food was great. It was one of the best tasting sausages on a sandwich I've had. Camilla and Morten shared fish & chips and nachos. We were late getting back to Lemoore that night. Michael and I ate pizza and Morten and Camilla ate McDonald's. Throughout the trip, we made stops at McDonald's and Wendy's for dollar menu and value menu, but it wasn't so often that I couldn't tolerate it. Actually, I'll take a Frosty at Wendy's any time. ...This might have been the best recommendation of all. Seriously. Thank you! What a place, and not to be missed if you want good road food and are traveling through the area from Yosemite to Death Valley. Hell, I would even drive out of my way for road food there. They do serve unexpectedly good food, in what seems like an unlikely setting, and decent wine to go with it. You place your order at a counter, where you also pick up your wine or whatever to drink and then find your own table. It's a great place for a trip on a budget like this one was, with reasonable prices and self-service saving on tip. Morten and I got the Fish Tacos and Camilla got the Steak Caesar. It's all good. I wish I had taken pictures of the food and the place, but we were charging my camera while we were eating and I didn't think of it at the time. Here's a website.The Moab Brewery was another much appreciated suggestion. I drank two pints of the Scorpion Pale Ale. Calling all hopheads: This truly is "The Ale That Stings". Food was real good here, too. I got the Beer Cheese Soup and Smoked Salmon Salad. I would love to have the soup recipe. I can't remember what Camilla and Morten ate, but they liked it. Portions are generous. For an appetizer we shared a Hummus Plate, and that could have been a dinner for one. We stayed in Moab that night. The next day, between National Parks, we were very pleasantly surprised with Zion Pizza & Noodle Co. in Springdale, Utah. I would recommend this restaurant, as well, to any of you going through the area. Great beer! I had a Squatter's Full Suspension Pale Ale and Wasatch Polygamy Porter. The Full Suspension got my award for best tasting beer of the trip. Our pizzas were very good, BBQ Chicken Pizza and another one more traditional. Fresh cilantro on the BBQ Chicken Pizza was a nice touch. The site of the best mountainside picnic ever was the Grand Canyon. Morten's on-the-road cooking specialty is pasta. They used his two burner propane stove to make a dinner overlooking the Grand Canyon. I never enjoyed a plate of pasta and a beer (New Belgian Fat Tire) any more than this. Of course, another highlight of the roadtrip was this, at last, in the City of Elsinore, California... my first: In San Diego, we were treated to dinner at the home of my son Michael's girlfriend's parents. They made a delicious crab jambalaya meal and served it outdoors, poolside. There was an assortment of wines and beers. The subject of wines came up and in the conversation I asked if they ever have Two Buck Chuck. I had never had it before, and so I got my first taste. They brought out a bottle and also gave me one to take home ...Another "first"! This was the table setting. We made it to seven National Parks: Yosemite, Death Valley, Grand Canyon, Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce, and Zion. That left no time for wineries, so I saved that for my next trip to visit my son. Also planned for other trips are Stonebrew in San Diego and finding a fried artichoke. Our last dinner was the lucky discovery of a good Thai restaurant in LA (Marina Del Rey area) just before we returned the car and were shuttled to the airport, Chan Darette. This was our most upscale restaurant meal. I was under budget every day, so I rewarded myself for that with this meal, which was not at all extravagant. The nine dollar glass of Pinot Noir was the biggest splurge. I haven't been in any other Thai restaurants outside of Florida, so I don't have a good comparison, but this was the best Thai I've had besides my own Thai cooking at home. I started with the Saigon Spring Rolls which were fresh rolls filled with seasoned vermicelli, cucumber, carrot, beansprouts, and basil, and dipped in a very good Vietnamese table sauce. Then I had a very large bowl of soup, Palo with sliced crispy roasted duck breast on top, and in the broth rice noodles, greens, scallions, cilantro, fish cake, and shrimp-pork wontons. Camilla ordered Chicken Pad Thai and Morten ordered a spicey chicken and noodle dish. We loved it all, except that my taste of Morten's was too hot of seasoning for me. I would suggest this to someone looking for a meal near LAX. It was very close to where we returned our car. Once again, thanks to everyone for the suggestions. You all helped make the eats as memorable as the beauty and adventure of this trip.

First night home from the trip, Russ made us Buffalo wings, steamed shrimp, and grilled vegetables, and then I went to sleep for 15 hours. On the 4th, for dinner we were going to a gathering that was rained out, so we ordered pizza delivery. Last night we had the dinner most requested by the kids when they're here, steak and pasta. We grilled big porterhouses and portabella mushrooms, and the side dish pasta was with an herbed cream sauce that had a touch of tomato in it.

Here is another post of beer interest on a different forum.

Wonderful, beautiful, awesome, exciting, adventurous... I do not have words to describe it. It was a life-changing experience! Thank you for asking. I intend to report back, but it's taking me a while to re-orient myself back to time and place. Hopefully tomorrow I will report back thoroughly. In the meantime, let me start by saying that one of the first places we went was Solvang. We ended up going up the coast a bit in the beginning and going down the coast later. Thanks to the U.S. Navy, we did not do a well planned neat loop as intended, and sort of zig-zagged around California at the beginning and the end. We ate at a few of the places recommended, and they were perfect. Some of the recommended stops were, besides Solvang, the place at the intersection of 120 and 395, a couple of brewpubs, an It's It, and an In n Out Burger. Oh my... so much fun. We went to seven National Parks! More to come soon!

Gladly: I use this recipe from Food Network/ Emeril Lagasse for mango ice cream. However, the directions are faulty! I am intending to modify it, because the directions do not make sense, and post it to RecipeGullet. I'm sure you will see what I mean... It's confusing about what you mix together and cook and what to add to another. If you aren't accustomed to cooking custard ahead of freezing and you're not sure what to do, let me know. Meanwhile, I'll do my best to get the revised recipe on RecipeGullet. I have made the Tropical Fruit Relish once, and it's good, too. For the white chocolate macadamia ice cream, I will need to post that, since I don't have a recipe to point you to online. When I get them done, I'll put a link here.

I'm not sure how recently accurate this is, but the last I knew was that the Tampa-Ybor Trolley was $.50, was running from 7:30 AM to 5:30 PM daily, and had something like 17 stops between Ybor City and Harbour Island. I would imagine that the hotel would have this information and could tell you ahead of time if you called.

This sounds good. A few years ago, back when I could eat all I wanted of anything and not gain weight -- well actually I guess it was like 10 or 15 years ago, there was a period of time that I made ice cream about once a week. Now it's been a year or more since I made ice cream and it was Florida mango ice cream. Some of my favorite recipes for homemade besides mango are white chocolate macadamia, mint chocolate chip, peach, vanilla, and what I haven't yet perfected, butter almond or butter something. I fall into the use-plenty-of-eggs-and-cream and cook-the-day-before-freezing-it camp. Does anyone have a tried and true butter nut ice cream recipe?

It's It is good! I found one the very first morning of our trip, in the convenience store of a gas station in Lemoore (maybe the gas station... Lemoore is a very small town), and had it for breakfast.

For anybody who missed this in the Heartland Forum, here's a link to a post on this festival held in Omaha, including tasting notes. Good stuff!

Thanks so much for the follow-up. Will definitely put Opera on the list for my next visit to Key West. It was good to hear that the restaurant charges were removed from your bill at The Cheeca Lodge. Did you catch anything when you went fishing?

Sorry you didn't get your hoped-for replies yet. Perhaps like me, others were away on vacations without internet access or without time for being online. I'll add a subtitle to your post which will maybe draw attention to the inquiry about this area of Tampa in particular and bring more response. There are a number of threads in this forum about Tampa in general. When we stayed at the Tampa Marriott Waterside, one of the restaurants where we ate was Jackson's Bistro-Bar-Sushi. It was good, and worth eating there especially since it was walking distance, on Harbour Island Blvd. We wanted to have dinner at Il Terrazzo, which is in the hotel, but it was closed for remodeling at the time. Another night we took a cab to Bern's, which you will find discussed in several threads here in the Florida Forum.

I have just returned home from the road trip out west and some of the beer highlights were a sampler from the San Francisco Brewing Company (short of excellent, but good to very good beers); Scorpion Pale Ale from Moab Brewery, which was very, very hoppy and maybe even too bitter for me -- or not the kind of hop bitterness I prefer; Carlsberg in Solvang, California; Squatter's Full Suspension; and Wasatch Polygamy Porter. The last two were a surprise discovery at the Zion Pizza and Noodle restaurant in Springdale, Utah which I didn't expect because that is a touristy area. They had a very good microbrew selection for such a place, and the Pizza we had was great, too. The Full Suspension was probably the best tasting beer on the trip, for me. The most enjoyed beer for me was the one I drank sitting on a cliff way atop and looking down upon the Grand Canyon, a New Belgium Fat Tire that I drank with our cookout.

Lisa, that is a nice beer article. Thanks for pointing us to it.

Good post, Lesfen. Congrats. I just love it when I discover I can finally get something I've been wanting to be carried. That happened for us when we recently found Tuborg in our Publix supermarket. There are probably several who would fire away about that beer, too. It all goes to show that what makes us enjoy a beer (or wine or other drink, for that matter) has to do with a lot of other factors as well as taste. Ah, the flavors of nostalgia... Exactly; however, I didn't consider Brent's reply beer-snobbish. I thought it was a good description about beer style and preference. I didn't care that much for Shiner Bock either, but didn't have the "beer vocabulary" -- as Brent put it -- at the time to explain why.

...Well what d'ya know? I didn't know that!As for rolls, I like 'em soft, too. Sometimes we toast them on the grill or in the skillet, but I still want them soft. We used Kaiser rolls the other night. I went to the store at the last minute and there weren't many choices. I think every dad in Port Orange, FL had hamburgers and hotdogs for Fathers Day dinner.

Yes, there are no beans in the chili itself, but they are often added on top. A four-way chili is the three-way with onions, and the five-way is the four-way with beans. ← Cool, thanks for the added info. I think we should have Cinncinnati-style at least four-way, next time we make chili. Are you reading this, Prepcook? Yes, NYTexan. I would name that Essence of Summer Salad. Nice!

This is the first cookoff for two nights' participation by me. Having done meatloaf already, tonight we did grilled hamburgers. By the way, there is no competition going on between the two in this house. They are two completely different foods. We rarely have meatloaf, but we have hamburgers fairly often. There were four of us tonight. They all had regular burgers, hamburger purists that we are for the most part. The three of them did different condiments, but their's were plain ground round (85/15). Russ is a lettuce, tomato, mayo, pickles, and onion kind of guy: I halved Marlene's PB Burger recipe, and that's what I had, for a change of pace from our usual burgers: We had grilled Brats, too, and Belgian-style fries, left-over coleslaw, all the burger and Brat fixin's, and "hamburger wine."

Great idea, and that looks good. Is Cincinnati-style chili without beans? Bryan, you can cook me a Fathers Day dinner any time. Tonight it was burgers and fries. Though we would probably have had this anyway, we considered it to be part of the eG Cookoff. Nobody but me wanted to try Marlene's Peanut Butter Burgers, so I halved the recipe and made two for myself. We made the good Belgian-style fries again. Morten's girlfriend Camilla flew in last night from Denmark, first time in this country. So last night we had roadside-style BBQ chicken, corn on the cob, and coleslaw as an American food thing. But we also had roasted smashed potatoes Chufi style and bruschetta with it. What can I say, we're just an international sort of family, LOL. Friday night after wings with Yuengling at happy hour, we had take-out pizza and some other samplings from a new-to-us Italian pizzaria and deli. Thursday night... I'm forgetting what was when, but we had chilled corn and buttermilk soup and salad made with left-over steak one night.