Wrap

I generally avoide wraps - it's an emotional thing having to do with the often bitter wrap taste and iccky texture. So last night I took a culinary risk and had probably about the fourth wrap I've ever eaten at the Daily Grind Cafe on Lark Street.

It was ham, swiss, apple, lettuce with honey mustard on a garlic herb wrap. Yum! It was balanced in flavor and made a very good light supper with chips on the side.

I must remember to start taking photos.

Whitefish salad

Eats is the only place I've seen smoked whitefish for sale in Albany, so I procured myself half a fish in order to make whitefish salad recently.


My recipe is based on what I believe I tasted when I first got some of the whitefish salad at the deli counter.

Smoked Whitefish
red onion
softened cream cheese
sweet [or simply not dill] pickle

When I made it this time the pickle I used was pickled pearl onions. - Yum

You must REALLY LIKE fish to make sandwiches from smoked whitefish salad. Serve it as a canape at a party or a little snack on a good cracker as you and a friend drink cocktails while you prepare dinner and you will not be disappointed.

Bomber's - eeeww

It was snowing, I was exhausted and I started baking a chicken just at the time when I wanted to be eating dinner yesterday. So I set the chicken at 300F degrees and went to Bomber's for cheap eats.

I've been trying to taste my way through the menu just to see what they do well and what they do badly.

Last night was mixed. I ordered the Strongbow cider, which is unfailingly lovely.

I was wishy washy about what to order, but settled on the pulled pork BBQ plate. What came was, um,less than lovely. And it didn't have anything to do with cheap eats. It had to do with appalingly bad taste.

The BBQ pork is good. It's tender, seasoned well and has that sweet spicy taste that I like very much. However, it was covered over with an extra dollop of cold sauce with SOUR CREAM on top of it. Now who in their right mind puts sour cream on BBQ? It was absolutely wretched. And anyone with half a neuron firing lets the customer slather on more BBQ sauce as needed. On this plate, the extra sauce just made it sort of sickeningly sweet and more like BBQ soup. Alongside this disaster was unseasoned rice, black beans and totally naked shredded lettuce. When I say unseasoned, I mean no salt, no pepper,no onion powder, nada. Once the aluminum plate gets cold, which is in about a minute, and it starts to cool down the beans and rice they just suck. The plate was horrid.

My advice to Bomber's -- rescue this plate and put it at the top of your popular list:

1. provide a couple tomato slices or ANYTHING with the lettuce to make a salad;
2. provide salad dressing
3. season the rice and beans or provide salsa;
4. lose the sour cream or contain it on the side;
5. put the extra BBQ sauce on the side;
6. re-think the plate altogether and provide baked beans instead of the wretched black beans and rice.

Bomber's has many great cheap eats dishes, but this ain't one of them.

EATS - Stuyvesant Plaza

I shopped at EATS Gourmet Marketplace in Stuyvesant Plaza last night, a shop that has evoked mixed feelings in me since it opened awhile back. It makes me hope that someday we'll get something like The Cheese Connection back again, but EATS is definitely not "it".

I looked for their fabulous smoked whitefish, and there was none in the case. I ordered some great corned beef and gruyere, thinking sandwiches and French onion soup.

There were single eggs for sale at $.35, and I got a half dozen. The staff person told me that they are from the owner's chickens and I liked being able to pick my own half dozen. Now I'm thinking omelets and egg and cheese sandwiches. But there's no bread. There are tons of toney crackers, but no bread.

I've always been a bit mystified about why they don't have bread. I'll have to ask someday.