HEB Breakfast Flautas

Let me give them their full name.

H‑E‑B Select Ingredients Flautas For Breakfast Sausage Egg & Cheese

These are pretty good.  Most of the stuff you buy from the prepared frozen (or should that be frozen prepared?) breakfast items assortment are relatively bad.  Mostly, they just do not taste the same as the fresh equivalent.

The example that comes to mind is a major brand English Muffin with Egg, Canadian Bacon and Cheese sandwich, which comes out of the microwave as a true mess.  The biggest problem with all these products is that if they include anything that comes under the "bread" heading (bread, muffins, tortillas, pitas, etc.) then they are lost to the effects of a microwave oven.

I think is was Hot Pockets that pioneered the use of the "crisping sleeve" which only partially fixes the problem.  The true answer is the toaster oven.  Let me demonstrate.

The flautas above, which are a house brand of the HEB grocery chain which is very common in Central Texas, come with crisping sleeves.  You put two flautas into the sleeve and put them in the microwave for 1:30 (minutes).  They come out hot, all the way through, but all you have to do is touch the tortilla wrapper (carefully, they are hot) to know that the tortilla is not crisp by any reasonable definition.

So, take them and pop them directly onto the rack in your toaster over, and set it to one standard toast cycle.  When the toaster oven dings, the tortillas will be crispy on the outside.  Be careful, they are still very hot.  A few minutes on a plate is all it takes to let them cool slightly to crispy delicious.

And they are really good.  The eggs taste fluffy (can things taste fluffy?), and the ensemble is very satisfying.  I think they could use a little picante sauce, but you will have to be the judge of that.

Mince, Croissants and Quiche

Okay, so I have been gone for rather a long time, and to get things restarted I thought I would just jump in and ramble for a bit.

Mince and Dumplings

I was rewatching an old Hairy Bikers program and was reminded of this recipe.  As with all such recipes, I tried a modified version.  I was trying to keep things cheap, so I avoided a couple of ingredients.  I did not use celery, but then again, I hate cooked celery, so it may have been that, more than the expense.  Strangely for me, I did use onions.  I chopped them very finely and then cooked them down to the point they basically disappeared.  Unfortunately, I also did not want dumplings, so I served it over potatoes.  The biggest problem was that I did not pay attention when I grabbed a can of tomato paste and I ended up with tomato paste with tomato pesto in it.  So, it ended up a bit Italian tasting, rather than good old British.  It was good, but I need to try it again.

Croissants

I spent two years in France and I like a good Croissant.  I have now tried Croissants from a variety of places in Austin, Texas and I thought I would offer a few opinions.  First, a list of the contestants.

• Upper Crust Bakery (4508 Burnet Rd)
• Texas French Bread (2900 Rio Grande)
• Central Market-North (4001 N. Lamar Blvd)
• Phoenicia Bakery-South (2912 S Lamar Blvd)
• Phoenicia Bakery-North (4701a Burnet Rd)

From all but Upper Crust, I bought a Croissant, often called a Butter Croissant, and a Petit Pain au Chocolat.  For those who do not know, a Petit Pain is a Croissant with a semi-sweet chocolate bar baked inside it.  Both are common in France.  At Upper Crust I bought a slice of quiche, more on that later.

A croissant should be flaky and airy.  Buttery is something that American bakers like, but it is not necessarily part of the French croissant experience.  Three of the five met this fundamental criteria, Phoenicia South, Central Market and Upper Crust.  The Upper Crust croissant was just the slightest bit dense, so it finishes third, but I cannot really make up my mind between the Phoenicia South and Central Market croissants, both were excellent.  The Texas French Bread croissant made me wonder if the baker knew the difference between a croissant and a loaf of bread.  It was overly dense, and rather heavy, which is not at all a good quality in a croissant.  The Phoenicia north croissant was flat.  There is really no other way to say it.  It was a little on the greasy side, which is a potential problem of the Butter Croissant, but it seemed like the baker did not use enough leavening in his dough.  I am not sure.

All of them tasted good, but texture is important in a croissant, and only three came close on the texture.  So, if you want a good croissant in north Austin, head over to Central Market, and in south Austin, Phoenicia Bakery.

If you have any suggestions, please leave me a comment, I will be happy to try more croissants.

Quiche

I have been thinking about making quiche, and when I stopped at Upper Crust and saw Ham and Cheese Quiche, I could not resist, even though it was rather more than I wanted to pay.  I was rather disappointed.  There was nothing wrong with it, but it tasted a bit bland.  First, I think it was the choice of Ham over Bacon, which is what I like to use in a quiche.  Bacon has a bit more zing, which stands out in the blandness of the Egg.  Then, it occurred to me that I could not really taste the cheese.  It was very disappointing.

I hope to be back regularly from now on.

The Great Austin Burger Hunt - Wally's Burger Express

Wally's Burger Express
8107 Mesa Dr, Austin, TX
(512) 345-7441

They are not off to a good start.  The first thing was trying to get the burger out from under the fries, and there was so much juice coming out of the burger that it burned me.  The meat patty is so hot that it burned my mouth.  It was blistering hot, in the way that I associate with a microwave oven.  I find it hard to believe that anything came off a cooking grill, got put into a burger and arrived at my table that hot.  The bottom bun is completely soggy.  The lettuce is mostly overly thick and chewy sections of the leaf, and because of the heat of the burger it was basically soggy before it reached me.  Minutes after arriving at my table, it is still very hot.  Everything about this burger points to the key word in the name being express, rather than burger. 

The taste of the burger is okay, but there is nothing here to rave about. The meat tastes like meat, but there is little or no spice on the burger.  The bun is a complete loss, basic plain white bun, tasteless, and it was soggy when it arrived and went downhill from there.  I finally pulled the lettuce, and again it was terribly hot, and the lettuce was a complete loss, adding nothing positive to the burger and going soggy before more than a bite or two could be taken from the burger.

The fries are okay.  They are very basic fries, hot, crispy, tasty and they seem to have pretty good legs. 

Nothing special on the drink front.  They have Diet Dr. Pepper, but not Coke Zero.

The restaurant is pretty common burger place, a step above McDonalds, but only one step.  Of course, the fly that hovered about through about half of my meal did not help.

And now to the last problem with Wally's Burger Express.  A half pound burger, with small fries and a small drink was over nine dollars.  That is pushing up into premium burger territory for something is no where near a premium burger.  I would add Wally's to my Not Again list, but they do make a good chili dog and I might be back for that.

A Disappointment of Onions

Is there anything more disappointing than biting into a sandwich and finding it full of onions?  I understand that many sandwiches, and most burgers come with onions by default.  It is one of the defining factors of my existence, that I have to special order things and tell them to....

....wait for it....

Hold the Onions!!!

But, three times recently, I have been annoyed to find that what I bought had been infested by a disappointment of onions.  Yes, I just coined the phrase.  You have a murder of crows, a pride of lions, a mischief of mice, and now, I am adding to the English language...

A Disappointment of Onions

Which, shall be defined as...

Enough onions to ruin whatever dish they are added to.

If I ruled the world, every menu would be required to include ONIONS in big red letters beside any dish that included onions.

When I can see the onions in the picture of the item, or can reasonably assume that onions will be in the dish (you do not know how hard it is for me to put "reasonably" and "onions" in the same sentence), then I am careful to order them without the offending onions, but today's sandwich showed no outward sign of onions (and there was no big red ONIONS on the menu), and since it was a chicken sandwich rather than a burger, I gave no consideration to the possible presence of the evil onion.

Well, I think that this is my first onion rant, but I doubt it will be my last.  The last two onion offenses were both by browned onions, I am not sure I would call them caramelized, but I am betting that they do.  But, onions on a BBQ chicken sandwich?  That is simply not necessary, and it is not listed on the menu, nor does it show in the picture.  Unfortunately, it was a fast food restaurant and I had driven off before I discovered the onion pollution.

Well, at least I will remember next time.

Hunan North

Hunan North

9306 N Lamar Blvd
Austin, TX 78753

(512) 837-2700

I cannot think of a clever way to start this review, so I am just going to jump in. I ordered my usual Sesame Chicken. It was a little above average in price, being over $8 including tax. It it's even more above average when I discovered there was no eggroll included. I was rather surprised. The meal did include Hot and Sour Soup.

It smelled good as I carried out out to my car. The pieces of chicken were quite large, some thing else that was above average. I cannot say the same for the portion, which was adequate. There was broccoli mixed in with the chicken and an adequate amount of sauce. The soup cup was filed right to the top.  The rice was fried and their was a double scoop, once again above average.

Unfortunately, the taste was not above average. The chicken was fatty and often chewy. The sauce was a little on the sweet side, and worse had very little flavor depth behind the sweet. It was a bit bland. The rice was much worse, since it was very bland. Fortunately there was enough sauce to flavor most of the rice.

Now any regular readers of this blog will know that I am more of a fan of Hot and Sour broth than I am of the soup. The first I tried it I was rather put off by the unidentifiable floaty bits in the soup. Much later I discovered that the worst looking stuff was the egg that is put in at the last moment.

Hunan North's Hot and Sour Soup was in keeping with the rest of the meal, large in portion and average or maybe just below average on taste.

Patty Melts and Sloppy Melts

Now, I am a big fan of patty melts, and I have been for a long time.  In fact, I have been a fan so long that I remember when patty melts did not come polluted with caramelized onions, and before people forgot that the proper cheese for a patty melt is swiss.
 

Patty Melt
 

Ingredients, per patty melt

• 1/4 lb ground beef
• 2 slices rye bread
• 2 slices swiss cheese (maybe more)

Form the patties so that they will fit the shape of your bread, season to taste, and then cook as you would cook any hamburger patty, then set aside to rest.
 

Butter one side of each slice of bread, and cover the other side with cheese (this is where you may need more than one slice of cheese, depending on the size and shape of your bread).  Place the burger patty between the slices of bread and grill the entire sandwich on both sides until golden brown.  Extra points for getting the cheese to melt down onto your pan so that it can fry into an extra bit of crispy goodness.
 

So, I made Patty Melts for my son and myself the other day, and then a couple of days later, I was trying to think of something to do with frozen ground beef and I came across the idea of Sloppy Melts.
 

I started by defrosting the beef in a pan.  As the outer layers soften, they can be scrapped away to speed up the process.  I then made the browned ground beef into sloppy joe meat by adding barbeque sauce, mustard and Worcestershire sauce, along with my usual burger spices, salt, pepper, garlic and onion...powdered onion, of course.
 

Then, I did roughly the same thing as above, except that we only had Colby cheese in the house, so I used that.  Rye bread, cheese, sloppy joe mix, cheese, rye bread.  It turned out pretty good.

First Try - Spaghetti Carbonara

So, I have decided to give a special title to something that I have been doing all along.  I like to experiment with food, and some of that is trying new recipes....well, almost.  When I try something new, I will title it as First Try.

I have seen Spaghetti Carbonara on several cooking shows recently and thought I would like to try making it.  I read several recipes before tonight's experiment.  Most of them were for more food than I wanted to eat.  Tonight, it was only me and my son, and we don't need a pound of spaghetti.  The other problem is that you get totally different ratios of ingredients. 

The basic ingredients of Spaghetti Carbonara are:

• Pasta
• Bacon or Pancetta
• Olive Oil
• Garlic
• Eggs
• Parmesan and other Cheeses

All but one of the recipes called for 1 pound of Spaghetti, and the lone man out called for 12 oz.  I decided on half a pound of pasta.  The problem is that the amounts of the other ingredients changed wildly.  One called for a pound of pasta and 8 eggs, while another called for only 2.  So, I decided to go with an amalgam of several recipes and it looked a little like this.

• 1/2 lb. Spaghetti
• 6 thick slices of bacon
• 2 teaspoons olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 Eggs
• 1/2 cup Parmesan Cheese

Now, I had to make a few substitutions because I was lazy and making this during a bit of a thunderstorm, so I was not going out to get fresh garlic, or fresh parmesan.

I fried the bacon in the olive oil, which looks rather a mess in the middle, as the bacon begins to render it's fat, but hasn't started crisping.  I also thought I might end up in a time crunch, as the timing seems to be pretty important.  Just after the bacon started to crisp up, I tossed in my garlic, which started browning pretty quickly.  I finally had to turn the bacon off while waiting for the pasta to cook.  I mixed the two eggs with the parmesan cheese and set that aside. 

Drain the pasta, toss it into the pan with the bacon and garlic and mix until all the pasta is coated.  Then stir in the egg and cheese and mix until it no longer looks like raw egg.  The pasta should be hot enough to cook the eggs, so you cannot let it sit after draining. 

A minute before pulling my pasta off the fire, I turned the bacon and garlic back on so that it would be hot. 

It came out really nice, though I think it could do with a bit more garlic, but I am thinking that fresh garlic will make the difference.

This is not really all that hard, and it is delicious.