2 weeks of food

We watch a lot of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. We've been to a few of them on our trip to California. I'd only go back to one of them, the other ones were nothing to write home about. 

One thing we did discover is that biscuits and gravy are not that great. The 'cream' gravy is gross. So when we decided we must try Chicken Fried Steak with cream gravy, we knew we wouldn't make it with the cream gravy. When I say "WE",  I mean me. When I emailed the recipe for Chicken Fried Steak to Kerry, the reply was pretty much "Yum! But I've looked over the recipe and can't figure out where the chicken comes in." I responded with "It's either 'fried like chicken' or it's 'fried by a chicken'. You decide."

I had a hard time finding the steaks we needed. Good think I like hanging out at the butchers. They always find meat for my odd requests, they cut the steaks and tenderized them for me. Cheap Cheap. I was impressed.  It was a messy ordeal, touching raw meat is not one of my favourite things to do, dipping it in raw egg makes it worse. But the outcome was worth it. I made mushroom and shallot gravy topped with onion rings, garlic mashed potatoes and green beans. 2 thumbs up. It's one of those meals you should only have maybe once a month or every other month. Unless you want to die young.

My mom made these, I don't know if they have a name. She said she found them from my blog somehow. One of my readers, commenters, had a link to a recipe. It's all vague. They are pretzels with Kisses melted on top. They were so good, sweet and salty. And cute! Thank you!

One of my favourite meals on our trip was at the Cocina Cucamonga in California Adventure. I had my first tamale. I found all the ingredients to make them at home so I tried last week. It was a little time consuming, mainly the wrapping. The soaking of the corn husks and slow cooking of the beef wasn't too bad. Set it and leave it really. The big surprise was how much Emily liked them. She doesn't eat polenta/ corn meal, but has enjoyed ripping into these little corny packets.

I've been trying different foods from the Oriental Market. We haven't gone there for dim sum, it's on our to-do list. But they do sell the items frozen so I thought I'd try 'pork buns'. Not to be confused with bbq pork buns of a few weeks ago, these are more like gyoza/dumplings/wonton. They had to be steamed. They got eaten as fast as I could steam them. Can't wait to pick a new item next time I'm at the market.

Did you notice a theme or lack of one? Very few or no veggies! We are working on changing that. I had a physical this week and won't go into details but the scale was where I thought it would be, and it still wasn't something I wanted to see. The dr. said that some of my 'issues' could be weight related, and I'm getting some tests done to rule out a few things.  I have to do a bit of fasting before the blood test, which isn't a problem, it's the actual blood test I can't handle. I should go in tomorrow but am thinking I might rope someone into going with me....just incase. I tend to scare other patients with my lack of control.