Davydd

A St. Paul, MN regional beer, Summit Grand is a good Pilsner.

Other than the top rated Pilsner Urquel I generally do not care for the others. To me they are kind of all non-beers. Too bad they did not include some other regional beers available to compare to Pilsner such as Summit Grand, Schell's Pilsner, Lienenkugels, or Bells brands.

I was in Houston this week and I sought out a "Midwest deep fried breaded pork tenderloin sandwich". I actually found one at the Heights Camphouse Bar-B-Q in Houston's Heights area with a little bit of Google sluething. It was on the menu as a "pork loin burger" so I was a little apprehensive about what was to come would imply what we think is a ground up pork fritter. I told the server what I was looking for and she concurred it might be what I was looking for. The cook volunteered that it was like a chicken fried steak but pork and with no gristle. Yes! that is what I wanted. Still the apprehension because my experience was the farther you ventured from Indiana the more bizarre or not quite right the sandwich would be. I am happy to report they hit it just right. It was indeed a very good sandwich. It held its own with the best in the country. My cousins, expatriate Hoosiers living in Houston since 1960 were ecstatic that such a sandwich could be found in Texas. Try one and you will wonder why you put up with chicken fried steak. OK, OK, you have cattle, lots of cattle. The Midwest is hog dominant. I posted a picture of the sandwich on my deep fried breaded pork tenderloin fun web site along with some of the reptutedly best in the country... http://www.porktenderloinsandwich.com

Choppys Pizza in Chisholm has long been known for its breaded pork sandwiches. SB (really cheap too!) ← Chisholm? Thanks for the tip. I'll have to try it on my next northern Minnesota trip. And to think I just flew down to Houston, Texas this week to try the "pork loin burger" as they call it at the Heights Camphouse Bar-BQ. To Texans the breaded pork tenderloin is a chicken fried steak only pork and without the gristle. OK, OK I am down here on real business and the stop was just an opportunity.

It's time for this Minnesota guy to check in. SnowAngel you have a piece of Heaven on Earth with your cabin. Sadly, yours is now a rarity even in Minnesota if you have seen how the Brainerd area and the North Shore have evolved over the years. It was 36 years ago in the Navy base library in Newport, RI that this former Hoosier boy came up a book called, A PLACE IN THE WOODS, by Helen Hoover with pen and ink illustrated drawings by her husband. She also wrote a few other books including, THE GIFT OF THE DEER. They are still in publication through the University of Minnesota Press. Theirs is an account of how they shucked Chicago and moved to the end of the Gunflint Trail on Gunflint Lake that is part of the BWCA. So inspiring, Minnesota was our destination after mustering out. We headed north in a van with two pre-schoolers and another on the way. Alas, we stopped in Minneapolis. My profession was tethered to big city opportunities. It hasn't been too bad. My inlaw cousin is a member of an association that purchased 440 acres including a 90 acre lake with 8 others back in the 60s when it was considered waste land adjacent to a state forest. The association built their cabins on one side of the lake and left the land wild and banned motorized boats. We occassionally get to partake in that valhalla. No city water, telephone or electricity yet some of those original people now are millioinaires. Some now have fancy photoelectric solar collectors to supply needed electricity. But it is still primitive, quiet and loons, eagles and beaver inhabiit the land. We felt as if we pulled a coup as well in buying for a song what was considered an outlot in Tonka Bay that backs up on a marsh (but not on Lake Minnetonka). We built a timber frame vaulted ceiling open cabin like house 300 feet off the road in the woods so you cannot see our house in the summertime from the road. We now have the gift of the deer -- http://www.tonkawoods.com. We keep a pontoon boat on Lake Minnetonka and we have accumulated sea kayaks and canoes. As much as I would like to eventually seek that end of the Gunflint Trail cabin I don't think it is going to happen unless lucky lightning strikes again. We have been scouring northern Minnesota. It has become a minor hobby looking at properties everytime we head north. This year we opted for a complete campervan with stove top, cabinets, refrig, microwave, bathroom, air conditoner, generator, even a TV, and electric sofa that converts to a king size bed in a little 22 ft. package -- a Sprinter conversion van that is totally self contained but an electrical hookup would always be nice. We decided on that so we can still go to the end of the trail and camp where we tent camped all these years -- the National Forests, the state forests, state parks, etc. There is just the two of us now so it is feasible. We didn't want a large motorhome or a trailer that would limit our out of the way nomadic ways. Last week we camped in the UP of Michigan at Tahqaumenon Falls at the eastern end and Porcupine Mountains Wilderness at the western end. It was great to see the Milky Way again. On our way home we found some National Forest primitive camp grounds on lakes in Wisconsin we may try later. Gosh, how is this food related? The campervan is now my official pursuit vehicle for pork tenderloin sandwiches. We found 6 new places in Indiana and Wisconsin. Just pasties in Michigan. http://www.porktenderloinsandwich.com my odd little hobby pursuit that I am having fun with.

Yes, that would be the preferred way for me. I can drink a beer from a bottle almost anytime. I can drink a beer from a can if out on a boat, but in my home I will pour a can of beer into a glass. I suppose I would do the same with a plastic bottle. But I have never had beer in a plastic bottle. Just whiskey.

No kidding? I would've never thought a manufacturer would get that specialized. What's the camera make/model? ← It is a 2 year old Olympus Stylus 500 Digital. It has several shooting modes you can select and Cuisine is one of them. The current model is the Stylus 600. Here is a review of that camera. Olympus Stylus 600 Digital Review I'm not sure exactly what Cuisine setting does but it is one of 26 pre-selected. Others are shooting behind glass, sunsets, fireworks, nightscene, portrait, etc. I assume it locks in preset settings. Kind of a dummy's point and shoot camera. I think most of the Olympus Stylus brand cameras have the Cuisine mode. It does seem to give more intense coloring to the picture.

We ate in quite a few restaurants but I only remember Dumbo and the Taquena Brewery Restaurant by name. La Estancia kind of sounds familiar. Other than a few other places on the El Prado we took a cab up the El Prado toward the memorial, across the river, to the right a mile or so to a retail area with a promenade and ate a restaurant there that served good steak. I should have wrote this stuff down in a diary. What I do remember is that dinners were amazingly inexpensive. Those Dumbo breakfasts generally cost less than $2 for something you would pay $15 in the USA. Complete steak dinners might typically be 30 Bolivianos which worked out to be around $4.

The sandwiches look very good. Can you tell a little about how they're made? Don't mean to go off topic. ← ChefCrash, At http://www.porktenderloinsandwich.com you will see two other sites you can then click and go to. One is my BPT_Tutorial where I do describe in great detail how I make the sandwiches and the other is Nick's_Kitchen, a photo tour of the restaurant that started it all in 1908. I spent $20 to get that porktenderloinsandwich URL address because the real URL address is difficult to remember. That was just a little luxury expense for myself. I'm strictly an amatuer hobbyist having fun with the pork tenderloin pursuit. No expensive cameras. No tripod. Pictures are for informational only. Most of those on the website had been posted on the 4 year old message thread discussion on pork tenderloin sandwiches at Trackforum.com. It's a Hoosier thing centered around the Indy 500. After some 2,700 messages I thought I would try to organize my pictures than hunt back through the messages. I think I might try Chris' rapid fire approach on the next one and see how I do.

That Food Photography blog was indeed a great link. However, after looking quickly at the examples I don't know if it answers the question about photographing food in a restaurant, at least on an informal and impromptu basis. I have gotten over my inhibitions. I just snap away with a small Olympus digital camera. Nobody pays any attention and they don't know you. I use a 3X zoom and try to get the camera as far away as possible and zoom in so the flash will not burn out the subject. The camera I have has a "cuisine" setting option that is suppose to make the food look better. So, I generally take two pictures, one with the normal setting and one with the cuisine setting for each shot. Generally the cuisine setting looks better but not always. I have been photographing deep-fried breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches this past year for fun and the pursuit. I managed to throw together a web page photo library of them that you can double-click on individual photos or view them all as a slide show. Hey, I am just an amateur photographer but you can see them here... http://www.porktenderloinsandwich.com

Beer made with rice is not my favorite. Granted Bud might win taste tests, but that is because the vast majority of drinkers simply do not want a heavy beer. They really want carbonated water with a hint of beer taste. As for beer evolving, I think the craft and micro brewers have pushed the envelope forcing the majors to improve their products. Beer of my youth in the 60s was not as good as what you can get today. There were a lot of short change, foul tasting and stale beers on the shelves back then. Quality control has improved across the board.

The twist off caps dominate now simply because the bottles used are cheaper. All the macro brewers use them. Many of the micro brewers now use them as well. Sierra Nevada and Summit for instance both come in shorter twist off bottles that seem to fit in the fridge on more shelves than the long necks. If you home brew and want bottles you kind of limit what brands you buy. One local brewer to me in Minnesota, Schells, New Ulm, MN, still use the crown caps. Schells is the second oldest brewer to Yuengling. Schells also OEM craft brews a lot of beer you think you are buying as micro brews in places like Texas, Arizona, Montana and elsewhere. If you home brew you know you occassionally break a bottle during capping. That hurts. Each break is 2% of your valued production batch.

Yesterday I bought a 12 pack of Summit IPA just for a change. The India Pale Ales are a rather hoppy brew. Summit is a St. Paul, MN micro brewer. I don't know how far they extend beyond Minnesota. Their Pale Ale is by far their most popular brew and is in many Twin City pubs on tap. My favorite of their brands is the Grand, a Bohemian Pilsner.

Oh yeah, I have witnessed that. A biker gang of middle-aged guys bedecked in the leathery traditional garb came rolling in on their Harleys and to a T were all drinking Miller and Bud light beer. If they were drinking it to keep the calories down it didn't show.

Mugs, especially mugs in freezers are for root beer not beer. If you want a branded glass to match with your drink your odds are greatly enhanced if you order Guinness. They seem to get their brand out there ubiquitously. So does Sam Adams.

Most of the beers on the list I generally do no or would not drink as a first choice. I usually always seem to be counter to the masses as I have rarely drank a "lite" beer for instance and never buy Bud/Miller/Coors. I think our tastes are acquired and if you have ever brewed your own your taste get all the more fine tuned in looking for a good beer if you have to buy one. So, I doubt you will really ever get a consensus opinion on best because there are so many. I was heartened to find my favorite, Boddington's Pub (not Pale, BTW) Ale heading the list (OK, OK alphabetical ). Why do I like this ale? After traveling for over a week seeking out the oldest pubs of England in London, Bray-on-Thames, Windsor, Salisbury, Oxford, Stratford-on-Avon, and generally trying to taste the localist of their brews and many times settling for Guinness when I did not find a new one, I ended up at Dolserau Hall, a country inn a couple of miles outside Dolgellau, Wales in the Snowdonia National Park area. The inn keeper offered me a Boddington's, my first, as an apology for having nothing else and that magical moment in a magical place imprinted me to this brew. Whether anyone agrees or not about its merits, it is now my favorite.

I have a similar stainless steel deep fat fryer as initially advanced. They take about a gallon of oil. I have used peanut oil, like it, but found that Canola oil (rapeseed) is just as good in what I mostly fry - the deep-fried breaded pork tendeloin sandwich. I strain the oil back in the container and keep it in the refrigerator or outdoors on our enclosed porch during our Minnesota winters. About two times is all I use it. Canola oil costs about 40% of what peanut oil costs where I shop. Canola oil and peanut oil have higher flash points so are suitable for frying at the high temperatures the deep fat fryers are capable of. I think the Canola oil is one of the healthiest oil you can use in regard to low saturated fats and trans fats if you can call deep-frying healthy.

I ran out of Summit Grand Pilsener so bought a six pack of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale for the NASCAR Talledega race today. I know they are not a sponsor and I will not drink Bud. I suppose if I was actually at the race I would get strange looks.

I never drink AB or Miller products unless that is all there is available usually at a social event. If they tweak with more hops then those events will at least be a bit more palatable. Right now in my friidge this weekend is a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and a Boddington's Pub Ale.

Godito, Thank you for correcting me on Pique Macho. The name was really escaping me and going on to Machu Picchu in Peru can further mess up your memory. I couldn't find it with a Google search. I had that dish in at least three times. I guess I kind of liked it. I don't recall having corn served just as corn in Cochabamba. There was one serving similar to hominy but I don't think it was hominy as we have it here. Potatoes are in everything and served all the time. I heard various accounts about pototoes. One was there were over 200 varieties and another over 800. Bolivians claimed potatoes but then when we got to Peru we heard the same. So I say the Incans long before there were countries. It seems the countries claim Pisco Sour too including Chile but since the town of Pisco is in Peru I have to give it to them. BTW, we have a Bolivian grandson born to our USA son and daughter-in-law in Cochabamba. So we will always have a connection to that beautiful city. He was born in the home of the attorney's house I mentioned where they maintained a small apartment that probably would have been a maid's quarters otherwise. They came in from the farm house they were renting near Sipe Sipe and had to walk almost the whole way because of the road blocks last June shutting down all public transportation. They got to Cochabamba just in time. The doctor made a house call on a Saturday night with his date that night who helped with the delivery.

We spent a week in Cochabamba, Bolivia last August and thoroughly enjoyed the food. We had meals in better restaurants, in the home of an attorney and in the country side on a farm. We also partook drinking of Chicha, a fermented corn brew sacred drink of the Incas three separate times. Some of this can be found in a pictorial slide show at... http://web.mac.com/davydd/iWeb/Site/Cochabamba.html and http://web.mac.com/davydd/iWeb/Site/Incallajta.html I think we got a good taste of what was available in and around Cochabamba, a beautiful city in the Andes Mountains. Breakfast in the hotel usually consisted of a wide variety of fruits and fruit juices brought in from the Amazon basin. Coffee Americano was a dark thick syrupy expresso that had to be cut with hot water to bring it back to what we think of regular coffee. Bolivians think it strange that I drank it black with cream. Potatos are served with every meal. We ate at a place called Dombo's for breakfast a few times. First thing to get used to is hash browns are what we think of as french fries and many times were served cold. A good hearty breakfast would be meat, potatoes, fried egg and green peppers. Empanadas and/or saltenas were standard fare for breakfast as well. They contain meat, potato, greens, sauce, onion and in ours usually a hard boiled quail's egg. I thought of them as tiny pasties. I had roast duck at the Taquena Brewery Restaurant. A typical dish might be meat (chicken or beef) cut in strips, fried potatos, onions, green peppers, tomatos, sauce with rice or pasta. Generally the food was not spicey. I think they called it Machu Pachu. The food was nothing like what we associate with Mexico or Latin America in restaurants in the United States. I quite liked just about everything I tried. When we got to Peru, the menus got a bit more exotic. We had Alpaca steaks there and a common item on the menus in Cusco restaurants was guinea pig. I did not have the opportunity to try it. Drinks were beer and wine. Bolivia has some good breweries in Taquena, Pacena and Huari. The wines were mostly Chilean. The ancient and sacred drink of the Incans is Chicha, a fermented corn brew. We first had this in Pocona, a small village in the mountains, in a Chicha bar. A typical chicha bar would be a large room with a dirt floor and benches along the walls. Chicha is served in a gourd that is passed around. The gourd is filled but before you drink you must spill a little bit on the floor to the Momma Pachu god and then drink the entire gourd full in one gulp. We did the same in private homes on a farm and in a well to do attorney's home. In the case of the attorney's home, yes we spilled on the beautiful marble floors. Bolivia was a great experience. We were there on a visit to our son and daughter-in-law doing doctorate anthropology studies in a small village so there was nothing tourist structured and we got to meet with the locals. Our son and daughter-in-law both could speak Spanish and our daughter-in-law was also fluent in Quechua, the ancient Incan language used by most. In our hotel, some of the staff could speak English. We got along fine.

Contact the brewer, Sunday River Brewing Co. and see if they will ship it to you or if the ship to Florida anywhere now. Most likely not though. I had the same problem. I wanted a New Zealand brew called Barooni brewed on Waiheke Island offshore from Auckland. I contacted the brewer but there was no way they could get it to me since it had to stay refrigerated. It is not imported to the US. The pains we go through for a good brew.

I've got to dip my toe into these forums so what better place to start than with beer. My choices this weekend were England's Boddington's Pub Ale and Summit Grand, a Bohemian style Pilsner brewed in St. Paul, MN. Two years ago we were making our way through England and Wales hitting the oldest pubs we could find in the towns we visited--some in continuous operation since the 12th Century. Mostly I would drink Guinness but when we got to Dogellau, Wales in the Snowdonia National Forest area and stayed at Dolserau Hall, a country inn in the middle of a sheep pasture. The inn ran out of Guinness and the innkeeper offered Boddington's. I've been hooked on it ever since. Boddington's is a smooth creamy light colored ale with the same smoothness as Guinness. Summit Grand is not often on tap in bars because the Summit Pale Ale seems to be the choice in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Boddington's Pub Ale is rarer but two places within a block of where I work serve it, the Local, an Irish Pub and Brits, a Brittish Pub in Minneapolis.