FoodB

Once again I made my annual trip to Comic-Con down in San Diego. Since this is a food site and not a fanboy site I won't bore you with details on what Bill Willingham said about what was upcoming for Fables and try to focus on the food aspect of our trip.

This year mark the first time I attended a Con where I was married and had a budget in mind. I always noticed that my biggest expenditure outside of the hotel room was always eating. 3 Meals a day for 5 days can rack up a pretty hefty price tag considering we are staying close to the Gas Lamp district in San Diego and alcohol is never cheap. So with this all in mind I figured that I could take my crock pot and make at least 3 dinners and work out the rest when I got there.

So I made a menu consisting of Pot Roast, Pulled Pork sandwiches and Pasta Figole soup. The pot roast was the first thing that came to mind. Anytime I think about crock pots I always think of pot roast because it was the only thing I remember my mother making in the crock. I have had success in the past also with pulled pork and it is about the easiest recipe I have ever made since I used to microwave hotdogs when I got home from Junior High. The soup was a bit of a stretch though. I found a recipe online that mimicked the Olive Garden's Pasta Figole soup and have made it in the past. It is an easy soup to make but the amount of ingredients (somewhere around 20) made me think twice. I went ahead with the soup once I found out that my friend Dan was all for eating in the room and since he was driving I wouldn't end up carrying groceries 10 blocks.

First night there we got in around 3 and there was no time to cook. Once we picked up our badges and visited the preview night there was no way in hell that I was cooking. We all decided to head over to Kansas City Barbeque because it was steps away from our hotel. What a mistake. If you are a big fan of Top Gun the movie this is definitely your place to go (and if you are what the hell are you doing on my website?) otherwise I would advise to stay far, far away. I am generally more forgiving of BBQ restaurants because I know first hand how hard it is to serve good food to a large group of people when they are expecting it now. The moment we walked in the service was horrible. Comic-Con has been going on for sometime now and the local eateries are hip and hire extra help or get everyone to chip in on overtime. Feeding over 100,000 nerds for a weekend is no easy task. Yet this place had only 3 waitresses as far as I could tell and no busboys. It took us about an hour to get drinks and 2 hours to get food. We were all to tired to walk at that point and ended up toughing it out.

I ordered a sliced beef sandwich and the meat was dry. I have been learning about BBQ techniques now for about 2 years and know that there are very simple ways to keep the meat you are serving warm while not losing too much moisture. For a place that has been in business for over 20 years not to know these is unforgivable to me. Also the decor is pretty laughable. Back in the 80's they filmed the end of Top Gun in the bar area and ever since KC BBQ has been pimping that fact. If you have a good movie filmed at your establishment that is somewhat relative to modern times I could see spending a little on advertising that fact but to honor such a flashy no story action movie about American Cold War fighter pilots almost seems like a joke. I would love to see the Sherman Oaks Galleria with a banner that says that Commando was filmed here. Next time I am in San Diego and in need of BBQ I will go to Phil's BBQ instead.

I could go on with my complaints about this place because there are more but I am choosing to digress.

Thursday morning I made the soup. Being the most difficult item on the list I decided to get it out of the way first. To start I had to brown a pound of ground beef (tricky in hotel room with smoke detectors I might add). Once that is done I put it in the crock along with one chopped onion, a half a bag of peeled carrots (chopped in half), three stalks of chopped celery, 2 cloves of chopped garlic, 1 can of red kidney beans with juice, 1 can of great northern beans with juice, 1 can of tomato sauce, 2 can of chopped tomatoes, 2 Tsp of vinegar, and 1 12 oz. can of V-8 juice. I prepared the spices a head of time being a mixture of Oregano, Basil, Thyme, Salt, Pepper and Garlic Powder. I set it for 10 hours on low and headed of to the Con. I got back to the room about 4 o'clock and added some cooked macaroni and about 30 minutes later we had soup. I was pretty good and the only thing that would have made it better for me was a touch more salt. That was the one thing I forgot to bring to, Erg!

After cleaning the crock pot that night I decided to go for the easy recipe on Friday, Pulled Pork. Dan had brought some crock pot liners which really kick ass and made my life a lot easier. Go out and buy some if you ever use your crock pot because they cut down cleaning to about 2 minutes. For the pork I threw in a 4 pound boston blade butt roast and added a half a cup of vinegar as well as garlic powder and salt and pepper. All together I think it took me 30 seconds to put it all in and leave. Once again I set it to 10 hours on low and headed out. I got back later and the only thing I needed to do was shred the pork which because of the cooking time and amount of moisture produced was a snap. I pilled some of the pork onto a hamburger bun and poured BBQ sauce over it. Those were some pretty good sandwiches and if they weren't so unhealthy I would be eating them way more often. For those of you not into BBQ'ing as well this is a pretty easy way to fool your friends. Just add some liquid smoke to the recipe and brown it for about 2 minutes a side in a frying pan once finished and no one will really know the difference (except me of course).

Saturday I got sick and we were planning on going out to eat anyways, so I stayed in the room and ate dinner rolls left over from the soup night. Something has been wrong with my stomach for the last few weeks and I think that the amount of fresh fruit I was eating was doing funky things to me. Whatever it was it was not pleasant.

Sunday was the pot roast. Once again using Dan's magic crock pot bags, I threw in a 4 pound roast along with the rest of the carrots, some more chopped celery, and another chopped onion. For the spices I forget the mixture I used but if you are really in need of pot roast, just about anything will do as long as you don't add to much salt which will dry out the meat as you cook. After eating it I once again longed for a salt and pepper shaker (which I wasn't smart enough to go to any fast food place before I ate and partake in their condiments bar) but I still enjoyed it. A pretty good end to my little experiment. I plan on going camping pretty soon and hope to employ some of the lessons I learned on this trip as to preparing better and knowing your cooking environment.

Later today I will write up what my wife cooked up last night. Since starting this site she has been pulling out her A-game because she has been afraid of a bad review on here. All these great meals are going to make me one very happy fat man.