Boots in the Oven

The reports of our business are not exaggerated.

Sorry to make our three readers stare for more than a week at that hideous picture of the three pounds of meatloaf I ate at Logan's Roadhouse.  Husbear's still in Killeen, plugging away on this commercial 15 hours a day 7 days a week, while I have undertaken the job of finding us a place to live.

I've had an awful lot of conversations in the past week that have gone something like this:

me: "Yes, I saw an ad on Craigslist for a 1/1 apartment in North Central Austin - where exactly is the apartment?"

agent: "Well, how familiar are you with the area just south of Dallas?"

me: ....

And when I've finally gotten in to see a couple of apartment locators, they've been dismissive of our insistence on a 1/1 within 5 miles north of downtown for under $800 a month, so they've been repeatedly taking me to 165-unit Godzilla complexes in bumfuck nowhere that cost... wait for it... $800 a month! 

I actually looked at an apartment in an INDUSTRIAL PARK, between UPS and the USPS processing facility!  Half of our rent would have gone towards maintaining the three "sparkling" pools, the 30-piece fitness center, and the indoor basketball court!

I finally made contact yesterday with a locating company that works with smaller properties (Igloo Hunters, and they've been great), and the agent showed me four places out of six that I could really see working for us.  I've had to give up on the dream of bringing our washer and dryer with us, but that's workable, as long as we have a dishwasher again.

Hopefully, we'll have this worked out by the end of the week, and I can go back to posts about how much we miss the wondrous food of Southeast Asia, especially when we find ourselves in Killeen eating 1. room service or 2. Papa John's.  I kid you not.

Dueling Roadhouses, from the blog that brought you the Fat Duck. No, really.

So, look.  We're in Killeen, Texas, proud home of Fort Hood and the place where Husbear's working on and off for the next couple of weeks.  Hopefully.

Killeen's a strange town, an army town.  The vast majority of the men you see here have crew cuts or are actually in uniform.  Lots of restaurants and bars have happy hours from 9 to midnight, something I've never seen before.

Also, it's a center for chain restaurants.  I've never seen so many chains in such a small town - every one you could ever imagine.

And they've sucked us in.

So, for your reading pleasure: Dueling Roadhouses!  Last week, we visited Logan's Roadhouse and Texas Roadhouse on two successive nights. 

The facades:

Logan's.

Texas.

Here, I have to give the edge to Texas Roadhouse.  A behatted Texas beats out a sign with half the lights burned out.

Logan's 0, Texas 1.

These places are shockingly similar inside.  Peanut shells strewn all over the floor, fake wood, lots of neon beer signs, et cetera.  As soon as you sit down, you get a bucket of peanuts and a basket of bread.

Logan's:

Texas:

Both places make a big deal about their bread - "We bake it every 5 minutes," said the waitress at Texas Roadhouse.  They were basically the same, though Logan's Roadhouse had regular whipped butter and Texas Roadhouse had stickily sweet cinnamon honey butter.  The yeast rolls tasted like they could have been from the same overly-sweet mix, though Logan's were cooked a little longer and had a reasonable facsimile of a crust.  Ish.  Plus, the peanuts at Texas Roadhouse were stale and dry.

So 1 point for the peanuts and 1 for the bread, both to Logan's Roadhouse.

Logan's 2, Texas 1.

On to the salads!  At Logan's Roadhouse, on our first night, we tried two.  And were too naive to ask them to leave off the grated cheddar cheese.

Logan's Caesar:

And Logan's House:

And Texas Roadhouse's House, which we asked for without the cheese - see, we learn eventually:

Honestly, all of these salads were kind of silly.  It's sort of sad that there are probably people who think a salad is a healthy alternative here, only to find out that it's covered in cheese and eggs and fried bacon and topped with dressings including, of course, ranch, bleu cheese, and deep-fried lard. 

Logan's balsamic vinaigrette dressing was less sweet and a good bit more tart than Texas Roadhouse's Italian.  Plus, the croutons at Texas Roadhouse were soggy.  Point - Logan's!

Logan's 3, Texas 1.

And, because I know this is the moment you've all been waiting for....

ENTREES!  No, we didn't order steak.

At Logan's, Husbear ordered the fried shrimp and catfish with a side of macaroni and cheese (hey, it counts as a vegetable, right?)

and I got their hilariously enormous grilled meatloaf, which comes topped with these onions they're apparently particularly proud of.  My side?  Mashed taters.

Husbear thought the shrimp were fairly good and the catfish was sort of sad - not enough seasoning in the breading, perhaps?  My grilled meatloaf was... food.  Not good, not bad, certainly wouldn't have been memorable but for the fact that my leftovers (more than half the plate!) stank up our hotel room every time we opened the fridge.

At Texas Roadhouse, Husbear ordered an appetizer portion of their "award-winning" ribs.  Ha.  Think crunchy outside and almost powdery middle - it was like meat product had been reconstituted around a bone structure (Husbear's description).  The fries were nothing special.

The enormous cricket crawling along the wall was something of a shock.

Trying to be a little healthier than the meatloaf extravaganza the night before, I ordered a grilled shrimp kabob on rice pilaf.

There were lots of factors that kept this from being anywhere approaching healthy.  First, the double portion of shrimp.  Second, bacon in the beans, though that was hardly a surprise.  Third, what the hell is that dipping sauce?  It tasted like the butter substitute that goes on popcorn at the movie theater, which is apparently called "buttery".

And the rice pilaf was inedibly bland and greasy.  Hmmm.

In terms of our arteries, the meals are probably a draw, but I have to give a slight tastiness edge to Logan's.  Slight. 

This brings the final score to....

Logan's 5, Texas 1!

Winner and still CHAMPEEN!

Not that we'll be back to either anytime soon, if we can avoid it... though I might want to run some sort of experiment on which chain has the squishier rolls.

TCB in HCMC

I'm back to Southeast Asia!  Things are a little crazy here in Austin - we have a lot of adjustments happening very quickly.  Details later, when things are a little more settled.

Anyway, I am on the second-to-last day of the terrific time we spent in Vietnam.  We had arrived late the evening before from our three-day Mekong odyssey, so we did sleep in a little before heading just down the street to the Ben Thanh Market.  I'd done some Noodlepie research, and Grant easily convinced us to spend several meals eating as much as we could at Ben Thanh.

And I'm an idiot who just lost half of this post and has to rewrite it.  ARGH!

OK, so we ordered the My Quang, which I'd also read about on noodlepie and really wanted to try.  Turns out I may have found my new favorite Vietnamese dish, and I've never seen it on a menu here in Austin.  Of course.

There are so many textures and flavors here, and so many ways to put together the components of the dish.  Shrimp, rice cracker, several types of sliced sausage, some sliced pork, bright yellow noodles, morning glory... and all bathed in this unreasonably delicious stock.  It's not like a soup, sort of like a wet entree.  I'm a big fan.

We also ordered their banh beo, which is on offer at lots of the stalls around the market.

Here's where I differ from the opinions expressed on noodlepie.  I LOVE rice paper and will happily scarf it in pretty much all its incarnations.  Here, there are two types - the disks around the outside, with a dash of mung (?) bean paste spread on top, and then the clearer dumplings you can see in the middle (under the sweet and peppery sausages and fried shallots), that are stuffed with chopped shrimp - shell-on!  This is all topped with a dash of fish sauce.  I was a big fan.

Not so much of the che, a cold, sweet cross between drink and pudding.

Husbear's a big fan, though, and likes to order one with everything.  Beans, tapioca cubes, shredded... something, you know.  For me, it's too starchy, and I feel like it's coating my tongue with powder.

After our lunch, we took a brief perambulation around Ben Thanh. 

Much of the market seems to be devoted to flavorings.

There are also sections devoted to tourist tat and fabrics, but we didn't tarry to take pictures of them because any movement in their direction caused the vendors to descend on us to show off their wares.

Plus, to be honest, we were more interested in the food section.  You guys can all thank US customs that we didn't bring home dried fish for everyone!

We also walked through the meat section, which was quite a bit smaller than the big markets of Italy as well as being even more open-air.  People squatted on the tables to cut the meat.  But, everything did look really fresh, and the smell was of fresh meat, not rotting.

And, of course, the vegetables.  We saw so many things Husbear wanted to cook with, and were really feeling the lack of a kitchen.  These eggplants, in particular, caught our eye.

We left the market and walked along the side, where you can find still more fruit sellers.

More sexy fruit porn, piled lasciviously for your voracious eye, you perv:

Whew!  I have to wipe my brow after that!

Also outside of the market is an entire wall of flower vendors, with intricate displays.  Some of them were weaving flowers into gigantic wreaths right on the street.  These guys seemed like they were pushing arrangements on unsuspecting children.

We actually had a bit of a mission for the day - I wanted to have an ao dai made, the traditional dress of Vietnam.  It's totally elegant and I thought it would be a great souvenir.  First, we wanted to find a tailor shop that made ao dai.

Found one!  Yes, we looked around for a while first, but the tailor shops in our guidebooks were expensive and mostly made 80s style business suits.  Plus, there was something about this one that we really liked...

They had a rack of finished ao dais just inside that looked beautiful and well-made.  Three people sat in front, each working on their own piece, while an older man and woman stood at the back cutting fabric.  They spoke about ten words of English, and my Vietnamese was limited to "thank you", but we worked out two patterns and they wrote down how much fabric I'd need to buy.  So, to the fabric store!

We brought the fabric back to the tailors, and without any pushing from us, they told us the finished garments would be ready the next day!  Wow.

Taking care of all this actually took several hours, by which time we were a little peckish again.  So, we stopped for a banh mi or two at the corner by our hotel.  This lady made some of the best banh me we foung on our trip.

Figuring, you know, what the heck, we ordered one savory banh mi and one sweet - with Laughing Cow cheese spread (I swear it's ubiquitous in Vietnam!) along with strawberry preserves.  The two sammiches made a great snack, along with a beer or two!

We munched contemplatively on our sandwiches, wrapped in what appeared to be paper cut out of the HCMC Yellow Pages (hey, it's free, right?), and tried to explain the presence of this charioteer on the side of our absolute trip of a trash can.

After hiding from the blazing sun for, well, several hours, we fancied ourselves up and took a taxi over to the Rex Hotel.  This is where press briefings were held for the foreign press corps during the war.  Now, it's a fancy hotel with a nice rooftop terrace where you can buy some of the most expensive mixed drinks in HCMC.  We're talking like $7 or $8.  It's very strange.

After dinner, we made our way back to Ben Thanh for dinner.  There was a place we'd passed the night before that we really wanted to try...

Here's what their kitchen looks like from the street, which should give you an explanation of why we wanted to check the place out.  Yes, those are frogs tied together on the end of a long string.  And some clams that appear to translate to "blood area."

We orderd bi cuon, spring rolls with shredded pork skin (bi), of course - these may have been the best ones we had.  They tasted like they were made fresh, which is more than we can say for a lot of the dry offerings we tried.

We also got an order of chao tom, shrimp paste on sugar cane - YUM!  All grilly and shrimpy, and I have a weakness for seriously processed meats. 

Here's an interesting video of the method for making these, from Noodlepie:

And here's what we should have ordered, but didn't see until we were leaving - a brick of rice, tossed back and forth in hot oil while it puffs and puffs up into a huge ball of fried ricey deliciousness.  I guess they chop it up for a tasty treat.

And then a walk back to the hotel and collapsible girlie and husbear!  One more day left in HCMC, before we go back to Thailand and take a day on an island paradise!

And l'shanah tovah tikatevo, happy new year to you and yours!

Labor Day Weekend Redux

Though it wasn't nearly as ridiculously bloggable as our festivities last Labor Day weekend, when we ventured into the backend of Tuscany to eat at the table of arguably the most famous butcher in the world, this Labor Day weekend was entirely sweet and all-American.

If you count eating what turned out to be copious amounts of Vietnamese food all-American.

Our Labor Day weekend started a little early.  Friday lunch found us visiting a brand spankin' new Vietnamese restaurant here in Austin.  Thanh Nhi is on the north side of town, part of the two or three mile stretch of North Lamar that's packed with Vietnamese and Mexican and Pakistani joints. 

We overordered - there were several items of interest on the menu that we hadn't seen before, like these $3.00 "grilled pork paste" spring rolls.

Neither of us has ever seen spring rolls like this on a Vietnamese menu.  I asked the young waitress where they were from, and she answered "Vietnam."  Yes, well... where, more specifically?  "Chinatown."

I asked if it was the Chinatown in HCMC, and she said "I really don't know."  So, does this look familiar to anyone?

Inside, we found a small slab of delicious, peppery grilled pork sausage, a leaf of lettuce wrapped around shredded carrot and sliced cucumber, and a long cigar of fried spring roll skin.  The textures were great - cold, hot, crunchy, snappy, meaty.

I ordered a bowl of the Phnom Penh - style noodles, which turned out to be sunk in the bottom of a bowl of rich pork broth, topped with lettuces, thin slices of pork, and a fried bready item with a small shrimp pressed in the center.

As usual, I drank almost all of the broth and left most of the noodles and about half of the meat.  I need to figure out a way to get double the broth so I can bring everything home for another meal.  This particular noodle soup was good, though a little on the bland side.

Husbear ordered what's fast becoming his regular, or at least his yardstick, the pho tai.  That's pho, beef noodle soup, with raw brisket added so it cooks in the soup.  It seems like most places here in the States are afraid to add totally raw meat, and this place was no exception.  They did add a raw egg yolk, though.

I won't talk about the pho, since I think Husbear is planning a rundown of Austin pho restaurants at some point.

In a final act of silliness, we ordered a banh mi.  We've been trying to find a good one since we came back to find, to our deep chagrin, that Ba Le morphed into some kind of extremely brightly painted Mexican seafood restaurant while we were in Italy.

We'll have to keep looking, though I may try some of the other sandwiches on offer at Thanh Nhi.  This is their banh mi with shredded pork skin, which was seriously porky.  We were sad to note that there was no lard or aioli or any kind of sauce on their sandwich, and that their pickles weren't actually pickled.  Huh.

I do think we'll be back to Thanh Nhi, though.  Huge menu of noodle soups and crazy fried rice dishes, along with a glimpse of a downright beautiful bowl of bun going by to a table of middle-aged Vietnamese men, is enough to re-attract us.

Then, well, we went pants-shopping.  I had no luck.  Gawd, shopping for pants is not fun... though I did discover that I dropped two sizes during our time overseas.  FIST-PUMP!

Though if we continue to eat like this, I don't know how long that will last.  (Ha.  No, I've been doing aerobics!  I KNOW.  Peppy and crazy and jumping around.)

Dinner?  Vivo.  Puffy tacos and delicious, though expensive margaritas.  Our Canon SD800 actually took a couple of passable pictures, given the extra low-light conditions in there.  The bartender actually comped our first two margaritas!

Husbear says he's never been wowed by the food at Vivo, though I am a big fan of their puffy tacos, especially the ones filled with guacamole.  Hot, fried, soft and crispy, with cool, creamy middle?  They're delicious.  But it's the salsa that's the real standout - it may be the best in Austin, though we're pretty sure they've toned down the spice level.  It's a crazy dark brew of smoky chilies with a hefty garlic punch.  Positively addictive.

After dinner, we drove over to Asti, where some friends were having dinner, and totally crashed their party.  (Don't worry, we were invited.)  Some day, we'll bring the camera to that restaurant and do a review - they're one of the more tasty places in Austin.

The next morning, Labor Day Saturday, found us on 290 heading towards Houston.  It's still a little strange to me that the fastest way from Austin to Houston is via a limited-access highway with a 70 mph speed limit, but hey, it's Texas.

We were driving there to see my brother.  He lives in Chicago, but was flying down for the weekend to see his girlfriend, who has just started at Rice.

On the way, we sampled a very strange fusion... a boudin kolache!

Yup - a Chzech pastry stuffed with Cajun rice sausage!  This should have been better, but at least it kept us from gnawing our arms off before we got to Houston.

We met my lil' bro and his lady friend at Madras, a South Indian restaurant that's part of a small chain here in Texas.  Their food was... OK, but the conversation was great.

Our first cultural stop after our bellies were full of dosai and uttapam was the Houston Museum of Natural Science, because we're all geeks who like to geek out, and if you've had your head under a rock recently you might not know that LUCY is on tour!  (Um... I didn't know either.  She's not as much of a rock star as I'd like to think.)

First, though, we admired the huge sundial outside that tracks not only the time of day, but the month.  Stupid thing doesn't even adjust for Daylight Savings Time, though. 

Lucy's our first ancestor to walk upright.  We arrived expecting protestors from perhaps some ID-ers and an anti-Darwinist or two, but not a peep.  We were even able to get tickets for an entry time just an hour and a half after we arrived.

While we waited for our entry time, we checked out a couple of exhibits at the museum.  They have an absolutely stellar gem and mineral area, where we were impressed by quite a few of the natural formations, as well as some spectacularly glimmery jewelry.

This huge sample of pyrite (fool's gold) looks like some sort of 80's bachelor pad sculpture.

This turtle is made of something I've forgotten.  Oops. 

The jewelry area is impressive.  Most of the pieces were fashioned by a Houston jeweller, though this particular piece is from Beverly Hills.  That's a 215 carat emerald, btw.

After this exhibit, it was time to see Lucy.  Actually, we were a little surprised to see that the exhibit does not focus on Lucy herself, but spends a lot of time on the country of her discovery - Ethiopia.  We learned an awful lot about that country, enough that I spent some time today searching on Kayak for tickets to Addis Ababa (I really want to see the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela!), but overall it seemed like the exhibit spent very little time on the origins of man. 

We then drove downtown to check out Houston's oldest bar, La Carafe, where we had wine and talked about Illinois vs. Texas politics, and then, still not being hungry, we drove out to the Galleria.  This is Houston's premier mall, counting an indoor ice rink among its blandishments.  We wandered a very small area before deciding to head back downtown to a restaurant Husbear was jumping at the bit to revisit - Dolce Vita Pizzeria Enoteca. 

An hour and a half wait.  Yup.  At least we got seats at the bar, where we were able to order an awesome, dry, strawberrylicious rosato from the Salentine Peninsula along with three really nice appetizers.  Tops among these was their fennel served with bagna cauda - the fennel was just as good as the stuff we could find in Florence, and their bagna cauda was quite yummy, though the flavor of roasted garlic predominated.

When we were finally seated, we agreed on three pizzas and got a bottle of a 2003 (la gola?) morellino di scansano, still one of our most favorite Italian wines.

We were dismayed when the pizzas arrived at the table and we saw that they had been pre-cut for our mass-market convenience!  Dammit!  When we were here last summer, they were proud not to cut their pizzas, like an acutal Italian pizzeria, but I guess stupid people incapable of cutting their own food complained, and the policy has been changed.  I think it caused the pizzas, cooked in an exptremely high-heat woodburning oven, to dry out faster than normal.

The margharita was very good, a solid rendition with a nice tart tomato sauce.  The calabrese was surprisingly yummy - we normally aren't sausage-on-pizza fans, but this one was nicely spicy and savory pork goodness.  The bottom pizza, a festival of taleggio topped with pears and arugula, was refreshing, but would have been better with less industrial-appearing arugula and perhaps a bit more taleggio.

We did leave happy, and we would go back were we to return to Houston.  Though there are so many great restaurants there, it's hard to repeat...

It was so wonderful to see my little brother, guys.

The drive back to Austin sort of sucked.  We got home at 2 on the dot.  Next day, we had to treat ourselves to more Vietnamese, right?  Le Soleil, here we come...

We didn't make it in time to order off of their lunch menu, so I'll blame the fact that we insanely over-ordered on the fact that we didn't know our way around the menu.  Right.

Well, one of the things we ordered was off of the appetizer side of the menu and was called "grilled pork with rice noodle."  Turned out that the dish covered four plates, and was actually roll-your-own spring rolls!  This was really tasty, but we didn't care nearly as much for the banh xeo.  This rice-flour crepe was larger and greasier and puffier and contained twice as many bean sprouts as the ones we enjoyed in HCMC. 

The rest of Sunday was spent shopping at the newish outlets in Round Rock, because my husband is very very very nice and doesn't mind shopping for jeans with me.  In fact, he's good at it.  So ha. 

Actual Labor Day, we grilled.  We had to, I think it's a law in Texas.  We packed up lots of food and ran by Central Market to pick up all sorts of ingredients and drove waaaaaay up to Husbear's cousin's house.  They live in the same complex we used to live in, and when we lived there we had no idea just how far out of town it is!  Lucky we like Kyle and Jessica.

Unfortunately, Jessica wasn't there - she was still on her way back from Louisiana, where she'd been visiting her family - so she didn't get to partake of Husbear's grilling insanity.

Not only did Husbear grill duck legs for the first time ever, he also grilled foil packets of plums and figs along with romaine hearts for a grilled salad.  And he made Israeli couscous for a starch.

It made for a seriously high-falutin' grill fest of deliciousness.  Grilled duck is a great idea - Husbear marinated it first for about an hour in chicken broth, wine, and lemon.  The grilled stewed fruit was finished witha little butter and cinnamon, and the amazingly awesome grilled romaine was topped with a raspberry/apple cider vinegar/mustard vinaigrette, toasted pistachios, and fresh raspberries.  Wow.  No, double wow.

Well, jeez.  That post turned out quite a bit longer than I was thinking!  Sorry.  I guess it was kind of a long weekend.  Get it?  Long weekend?  Eh, I'm tired of writing.

I do promise I'll get back to posts about Southeast Asia soon - honestly, I was getting a little burned out.

Thanh Nhi: 9200 N. Lamar #104, Austin, (512) 834.1376.  Open 7 days, 9-9 (full restaurant 10-9).

Vivo: 2015 Manor (It's Maynor, non-Austinites!), Austin, (512) 482.0300.  Open 7 days, closed Sunday lunch.

Dolce Vita Pizzeria Enoteca: 500 Westheimer, Houston, (713) 520.8222.  Open Tuesday - Sunday dinner only.

Le Soleil: 9616 N. Lamar, Austin, (512) 821.0396.