Tag: food

review of America 13-50 restaurant

Today some of the Buffet o’ Blog staff had lunch at a fairly new restaurant called “America 13-50“.  It’s a somewhat odd name, but that doesn’t matter to us.   This was our first time to dine at this establishment, and there weren’t many other patrons there, so we decided to post a review so more of you know about it.

America 13-50 is located downtown, across the street from Larry’s Pizza.  (If you live in Conway, you should know where Larry’s Pizza is.  If not, you’ve really been missing out and you need to go eat there at lunch during the week to enjoy their “pizza parade”.)  The inside of the restaurant was nice-looking, making me initially wonder if this was going to be an expensive lunch.  Fortunately the prices were reasonable.

Two of us ordered the Alamo Burger, which has bacon and chipotle mayo, and the menu calls it “a two handed beefy burger you’ll remember”.  The other guy ordered the Ozark BLT, which was a blackened catfish sandwich with bacon (which is not something we’d ever heard of before).  They were all delicious, and the portions were generously-sized.  We all talked of going back to try other items on the menu.

I realize this post wasn’t all that funny or random, so it kinda doesn’t fit with this blog.  But it was about food, which is an important subject among the staff.   If you’re itching for something funny (or at least ironic), here’s a food-related quote for you:

America has more food to eat than any other country in the world and more diets to keep us from eating it.

Ain’t that the truth!

Anyway, check out the restaurant.  You could tell them Buffet o’ Blog sent you, except they wouldn’t know who that was — we were incognito, protecting our secret identities.   I don’t think the waitress was prepared to handle the full outburst of randomness that can erupt from a group of us.   So we kept it on the down-low, to maintain some degree of order.  But what are we doing maintaining order?  We’re supposed to promote randomness.  True, that is.  But some people can’t handle the randomness (hence the warning under the title of the blog).   Some folks have to be eased into it, or their mind may implode (and that’s not pretty).   So it was for the greater good of those involved.

Now you’ve got me to rambling (which is what you wanted, right?).   Just check out the restaurant, and perhaps you’ll see us there.  Don’t worry if you don’t know us by face — if you see a table of the coolest guys you’ve ever seen, that would be us.

Meat Madness

As you’ve probably heard, March Madness / the NCAA tournament for college basketball is underway.  It can be fun to fill out your bracket and see how well you predict who wins what games.  But I don’t keep up with it enough to know all the teams, so some of it would be just a blind guess for me.  But there is a similar-style bracket that I would know more about: Meat Madness.

Meat Madness has a tournament-style bracket of 32 contenders.   There are 4 regions: the “Red” Meat Region, the Poultry Region, and Pork Region, and the Seafood Region.  Not every meat fits exactly into those categories, but it’s close enough.  There are no rules on how to vote — you can base your vote on flavor, cost, convenience, whatever.  Personally, I think flavor trumps all other considerations.

Click the image for a larger version.

The Pork Region is stacked!  Bacon is favored (hence its #1 seed), but there’s some good challenges there.  And in a way, it’s unfair to have steak be only one entry, because there are several different tasty varieties.

I didn’t create this (though I find myself wondering why I didn’t think of this first).  Here’s the link to the original meat madness bracket so you can read their description of it, along with the comments to see how it played out.  Ironically, ESPN came out with their own Meat Madness bracket a week after So Good did.  ESPN’s has 64 seeds, but the article debates each one and tells you the winners without reader participation.  Still, if you want to look at it, here’s the link.

I’d like to get a group of guys together to vote on this sometime to see what really does win.  If that happens, I’ll let you know who wins.   In the meantime, you can share your predictions with us in a comment.  Who should win, and why?

ideas for new Mexican restaurant

One of my friends recently started a new Mexican restaurant, and I was given the opportunity to make suggestions for new food combinations, along with ideas for entertainment and promotions.  I have some ideas, but I’d like to hear what things you’d like to have in a restaurant.  I figure we don’t need to list the qualities that all restaurants should have, like cleanliness, affordability, tasty food, etc.  But if you had the opportunity to add items to the menu, what would you choose?  (For me, there needs to be more items with bacon and/or cheese dip added.)

If you have any good, innovative ideas, you can share them in a comment.  Funny ideas are welcome, too.  Let’s think outside the box.  Surprise me.

Buffet o’ Bacon 4

Last night I had the Buffet o’ Blog staff at my house, and I knew there had been rumors of more bacon “research”, but I wasn’t expecting much, given various circumstances.  But this turned into quite the bacon extravaganza!  We had five (5) bacon dishes to test.  Of course, I took some pictures to go with my analysis and commentary.  First up is bacon-wrapped pineapple — on a stick.

It seemed weird to mix bacon with a fruit, but it didn’t taste too bad.   The texture was weird to me.  But pineapple by itself has a somewhat weird texture.  Nonetheless, it was pretty good, but was overshadowed by some of the other bacon experiments.

Next up in our buffet of bacon was bacon-wrapped Twinkies.  How would you expect this to be?

We were skeptical about it before, but it proved to be the tastiest of them all.   The key here was cooking the bacon prior to wrapping the Twinkies.   Once wrapped, we placed them in the oven just long enough to heat the Twinkies (and we did it too much, as evidenced by the creamy overflow).  The taste was great — a pleasant mixture of bacon and sweetness, and it was not greasy at all (which was my main concern before trying it).  I would definitely eat these again… and again… 🙂

Next we made small sausage balls (of just pork / breakfast sausage), wrapped in bacon, and held together with toothpicks.  We had intended to apply the BBQ sauce before cooking, but didn’t add it until about halfway through cooking.

These were very delicious.   (Would you expect otherwise?)  You just have to make sure the sausage gets cooked thoroughly.  And be sure to cook these on a raised rack of some kind to let the bacon grease and sausage grease drain off.  Failure to do so may result in a “gut-bomb”.  (For a documented example of that, see the second comment about our initial Buffet o’ Bacon.)

Next up was a BLT — bacon, lettuce, tomato sandwich, with Miracle Whip.  Nothing revolutionary, and tasted like you would expect.

Last but not least in our “research” was chocolate-covered bacon.  The bacon was cooked first, with all grease drained, then dipped in molten chocolate.   The molten chocolate was made from semi-sweet chocolate chips plus butter.

Chocolate-covered bacon may sound gross if you haven’t tried it, but it’s quite delicious.   The salty bacon goes well with the sweetness of the chocolate.   You really should try it for yourself sometime.

If you would like to read about our other Buffet o’ Bacon events, here’s a link to search the blog for “Buffet o’ Bacon“.  (It will find a few other posts which reference it, but using a search will also find future ones, too, once they’re published.)  You could also have your own bacon research parties.  It’s a really fun time (as you would imagine).  You could post your results on your blog, and be sure to link back here so we can check it out.