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Driving from Virginia to Maryland the evening of Thanksgiving, we noticed a distinct difference between the highways there and in St. Louis. You could actually see the lane lines, I mean you could really really see them. So many of St. Louis interstates have barely visible lines differentiating the lanes. This was fantastic. Dale was driving when I took a 15 second video just to prove this point.
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Color me skeptical but reading through this list of the Best Burgers in the US from Food and Wine brought to mind the old P.T. Barnum quote, "There's a sucker born every minute." I don't want to be too snarky on a Friday morning but let's take a look at some of the prices you'll pay for some of these burgers.
In San Francisco the Zuni Cafe offers a burger topped not with pickles but with thin cut zucchini strips pickled in cider vinegar, mustard seeds and tumeric sandwiched between a Brioche bun and asks 15 dollars. I guess cider vinegar costs a lot in San Francisco. And zucchini! wow, there's an endangered vegetable.
At New York City's Minetta Tavern the Black Label burger topped with carmalized onions will cost you 26 dollars.
It looks like using a Brioche bun is a way to make things sound fancy enough to add a few dollars to the cost.
But not all on this list are as expensive as the first two mentioned but all are over ten dollars except the venerable, coveted, In N Out Burger from California. So many people long for one of these restaurants near them and while they are on this list, the burgers only cost 3 dollars. It also seems like the more important the city the higher the price for a "best burger" goes. New York and San Francisco, looking at you.
Give us Midwesterners an In N Out Burger place, please.
And in the St. Louis metro area I can't think of any burger that can top the one you can get at Collinsville's Sandwich Shop on Main Street. A longtime favorite, the Sandwich Shop (not Shoppe, the extra p and e would mean higher prices) has burgers which are formed loosely packed so that each bite is tender and well seasoned. Fried on the grill it comes hot and delicious. Not expensive either. Too many burger places take a large chunck of beef and toughen it up by densely packing it, making it an unpleasant chew.
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The photo is gorgeous and the idea of having a bowl of sugared cranberries for snacking is a novel idea, one which would never have occurred to me. Basically we eat cranberries (I hate to admit this) from a can or dried in salads or juiced from a bottle. Too soon old, too late smart, as my dad always used to say.
Photo and recipe via The Faux Martha.
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I mentioned the other day that an outdoor Christmas tree we bought at a Maryland Home Depot and had shipped through UPS encountered some sort of delivery issue. It was called an exception. Well I just checked the tracking number and after spending last night in Earth City Missouri it is now on the truck and out for delivery later today.
Yay.
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Kirt keeps a plastic bag of dog treats in his campus Gator and believe it or not, Ferdie can differentiate Kirt's Gator from all the others from any distance. This morning we were at the far end of the Chapel walk and Kirt was at the other end. Ferdie sprinted toward the Gator and waited for Kirt to open the door and give him a treat.
Who believes for even one minute dogs can't think?
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Each Christmas we fill our side yard with white and blue lighted trees. The first trees were purchased some years back and like all things some deteriorate and need to be replaced. The trick to this is that it is nearly impossible to find stores which carry things they had 7 years ago. We've been looking for a blue LED lit string tree for some weeks with no luck, but then found the perfect one at a Home Depot in Rockville Maryland last week. After seeing it I went back to Katie's and checked online to see if our local Home Depot had it, but no. None of the St. Louis and Metro East stores carried it. It was not available from Home Depot online either. Nor does HD ship store to store.
So what to do? Finally we bit the bullet, bought the tree and took it to the local UPS store to have it shipped to us. Yay. Then yesterday I received an email from UPS which said, "The carrier reported an exception for one or more packages in the shipment to Diane Meyer. What?!!
So we have no idea what this means but it would be upsetting if it does not find its way here.
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We were lucky to taste these cookies last week while out at Katie and Charlie's last week. I don't remember where she said she first came across this recipe but I am here to tell you that they were gobbled up faster than I've ever seen cookies eaten.
The main difference between these chcolate chip cookies and the traditional home made ones must be the addition of browned butter plus one egg and one egg yoke. Even Dale who normally won't voluntarily ever eat a cookie was tossing these back as if they were potato chips.
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I did not know that my favorite go to chip, Tostitos, came out with Artisan style. It's like Gangnam Style food. Artisan chips sounds almost like health food or...gourmet. The two new choices the company now has include Roasted Garlic and Black Bean as well as Fire Roasted Chipolte.
The reviews are great, casual foodies seem to love both of these and I have to admit they both sound intriguing, although the chips themselves are the 9 grain type which I have always found kind of dry and coarse. The link describes them as straddling the line between a real Tostito and a Sun Chip.
The Artisans sounded good til I came to that description.
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A couple of local items
How convoluted can one issue be for a city? Sometime back...a long time back...the Maplewood city council reached an agreement with Quik Trip to allow the company to move its station to the corner of Manchester and Big Bend. It is currently located a bit south on Big Bend. Conflict arose when some in the school district became adamently opposed since the high school is just west of the intersection. Now some residents vow to put this issue on the ballot and let voters decide.
Frankly, this is not a ballot worthy question, all it will do is encourage anyone who has a future beef with local officials to petition others allow voters to decide about anything. Gridlock. Approving or dismissing municipal development is for the locally elected people. Don't like something? Vote out the council.
As if red light cameras, cameras in stores and cameras placed on city streets aren't keeping us watched every moment of the day, now we learn that many St Louis area police cars have cameras attached to the roof line light bar and are randomly scanning thousands of cars and license plates. yours is probably one of them. The argument in favor of this action is that it helps solve crime and get criminals off the street. I'm one of those who love having those who break into homes and cars arrested, but really, this type of surveillance should make all of us uncomfortable. It's intrusive and violates our individual privacy. But sadly, it's already part of the culture and there's no going back.
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