Yin and Yang.

So, I have gone through, what is essentially, a study in opposites in the last 12 hours or so of eating.

Yesterday, I was down with a massive hangover, and as is often the case, my response to this was to crave a big greasy burger. I for some reason passed on grabbing a Jody's melt, and wound up going all through my short work shift without eating anything but a bit of miso and rice. So when I got off work, and my friend arrived to cart me off to Bend, I implored him to take me somewhere for a big greasy burger.

So, we went to Kayo's Roadhouse, a cheesy oddly Western-ish themed, and remarkably large restaurant on the north end of Redmond. My friend remarked that the cheep wood and sheet metal decor reminded him of the Japanese internment camps, and this disturbing ambience would prove to foreshadow the entire meal.

After considerable poring over the rather disappointing menu, he decided on the 8oz. petite sirloin, medium rare at my insistence, while I stuck to my guns and ordered a burger with Swiss, grilled onions, and bacon, despite the rather idiotic pricing scheme (purchase the base burger, then tack on the extras for a dollar a pop).

We were first served a basket of rolls which were obviously cheap and frozen, served with a cinnamon butter, and a simple Caesar salad. My friend was suitably impressed with the cinnamon butter, while I found the choice to be a bit odd to accompany a savory dish. The Caesar was reasonably competent I suppose, if, like most, largely inauthentic.

Then came the entrees, and this is of course the part where everything falls apart. For starters, my burger is not greasy at all, in fact, it's dry as a bone. Because it's burnt. The bottom half of the pre-formed and obviously also frozen, pre-packaged burger patty is a layer of black char. The fries are OK, again frozen but this is a common state of affairs in most American restaurants. My only quibble with those was that they had rather inexplicably added cinnamon to the seasoning salt they were dusted with, which again seemed rather out of place.

My companion's steak was, of course, not actually medium rare at all. As my mother taught me as a lad, the vast majority of restaurants tend to overcook everything, so it is generally wise to order the next level of doneness down from whatever you actually want. As a result, the steak wound up coming to us medium, with only a hint of pink left in it. Thank God he took my advice, and didn't ask for medium as he'd originally intended, as I fear for what resulting slab of likely near-charcoal meat might've wound up on his plate. However, this was a minor injustice compared to what one experienced upon actually tasting the steak. Honestly, neither of us were actually convinced it was a real steak, the texture was entirely wrong. There was no realy fiber to the meat, the mouthfeel more resembled a finely ground hamburger that had simply been pressed into a shape vaguely resembling a steak. And the actual flavor bore a strong resemblance to that organ meat flavor one gets in a beef heart or cheap supermarket chuck steak. The capper on the plate was supposedly mashed potatoes, but I'm personally more convinced it was some kind of synthetic gum resin, given the amount of texture and flavor that was left in them.

A waitress eventually came around and replaced my burnt burger with a second offering, as well as another helping of the strange cinnamon fries, which again wound up being the lion's share of my consumption. I made a half hearted attempt at this second burger and while they had managed to at least not actively burn this twice-damned slab of ground beef byproduct, on the whole it was still largely dismal, and the cheese wasn't even properly melted. It was actually still cold on the corners that stuck out of the side of the burger. Something about the whole thing somehow triggered my nose's sense memory, and I found myself again smelling the unspeakably foul "sukiyaki" from my own place of employ, and my appetite basically disappeared at this moment. I'd managed to fill myself up well enough on fries at this point, so at least I'd managed to feed the hunger from my all day fast.

A manager eventually came around as we were leaving, and comped us for $9 of the bill, which still left us paying $20 with tip, which was still far too much for what is, quite undoubtedly, one of the worst meals I have ever consumed. I don't even know that I would've been entirely satisfied with a total comp, and I will not be returning there ever again.


However, this afternoon's meal, was far superior. Instead of a restaurant, we cooked at home. Instead of Western cuisine, we went with American Chinese, in the form of the crab puff.

I had discussed earlier in the week doing a sort of "deep fried weekend", setting up one of the pans as a deep fryer, and going to town with all sorts of fun things. My main driving thought was Buffalo wings, a personal favorite of mine, and one that's just plain better when it's fresh fried at home. My friend however had seen an episode of Good Eats and been left with a massive craving for anything involving wontons.

As crab puffs are one of my favorite appetizer dishes in the world, they seemed like a natural fit for the combined preferences and cravings, being both deep fried, and wonton related.

So we went to the restaurant supply store, got a fryer thermometer, some wonton skins, a big package of imitation crab and a bottle of Kikkoman sweet and sour sauce, and from the regular supermarket, acquired some green onion, cilantro and carrot. We already had a good sized hunk of cream cheese in the fridge, as well as a big jug of cooking oil that had been acquired earlier in the week in preparation for the "deep fried weekend".

The filling wound up consisting of, of course, crab and cream cheese, as well as peeled carrot, chopped green onion, and dashes each of chopped garlic, salt, pepper, malt vinegar, Olive Garden Fiamme hot sauce, and olive oil, and then mashed all together. This went, about half a teaspoon or so at a time, folded into the wonton skins, first folding them in half and sealing the edge with water, then crimping edge corner flap twice.

These got dropped into hot oil, about 350 degrees F, and cooked till nice and golden brown on each side, generally taking about 3-5 minutes at a guess, turning them at least once during cooking.

The sweet and sour turned out to be largely disgusting, so for a dipping sauce we wound up just using some sweet chili sauce with a splash of malt vinegar.

The sauce wound up being largely superflous however. They were, simply, the best crab puffs I've ever consumed, better even than any of the restaurants I've eaten them at that impressed me with their quality. They had enough of a good flavor all their own, that they really were better without the sauce as tasty as it was.

We ate an insane number of them, in the end splitting something like 30 or more of the things, leaving the both of us stuffed to the gills. I ate so many I don't think I'll be able to think of eating them again for a while.

Certainly made up for last night's pathetic excuse for "food".