All Aboard the Sushi Train!

Last month while visiting Minnesota, Susan and I ate at Sushi Train, a local restaurant. I’ve since learned that there is also a restaurant in nearby Tulsa called Sushi Train, but the two places are unrelated. “Sushi train” is slang for any conveyer-delt driven sushi bar, so discovering that there are multiple restaurants with this same name is not completely surprising. It would be like finding two buffets 1,000 miles apart that were both named “Buffet.” It’s hard to know what’s authentic and what’s not authentic when it comes to Japanese and Chinese food. For example, 99% of all wasabi… (read more)

Our Valentine’s Nailed It Cake Decorating Competition

Watch this video on YouTube Nailed It is a Netflix baking competition where non-professional cake decorators with questionable skills do their best to reproduce fancy and artistic cakes in a short amount of time. The cakes are based on their taste and appearance, both of which are often bad, and the results are often disasterous. For Valentine’s Day, Susan came up with the idea of having our own “Nailed It” cake decorating competition. The day before Valentine’s Day Susan found a picture of this cake online, and recreating it to the best of our ability was the challenge. Just like… (read more)

Getting Our Kicks at Ken’s Pizza on Route 66

Susan and I were off work for Veterans Day, and so on Friday Susan planned a day trip for the two of us up Route 66 from Oklahoma City to Tulsa. Route 66 is a road full of nostalgia, and nothing on Friday was more nostalgic for me than our visit to Ken’s Pizza in Chandler, Oklahoma for lunch. When Susan and I were in high school we had an open campus for lunch. At twelve minutes past 11 (our lunch period was from 11:12-12:02 for some confusing reason), approximately 700 juniors and seniors poured out of our school and… (read more)

A Half-Hearted Trip to the Onion Burger Festival

Any review I write of last weekend’s Onion Burger Festival in El Reno wouldn’t be fair to the fine people who worked hard to put on a great event. There was nothing wrong with this year’s festival, nor was it significantly different from any other Onion Burger Festival I’ve ever attended. It wasn’t you this year, Onion Burger Festival. It was me. Dad and I arrived at the 34th annual onion burger festival shortly before lunch, with the smell of caramelized onions already wafting through the streets of El Reno. We parked where I always park, a secret spot just… (read more)

Part Mexican, Part Italian — The Return of Taco Bell’s Mexican Pizza

If you were to take the hottest, most delicious slice of pizza you’ve ever had and combine it with the most tantalizing Mexican dish you ever tasted, the results would be… well, pretty far from Taco Bell’s Mexican Pizza, which returns to restaurants next month after a two-year hiatus. What is it about the disappearance of fast food items that makes us crave them? Back when the McRib was a regular item on the McDonald’s menu, the restaurant could barely give them away. In 1985 the pork(ish) sandwich vanished, not to be seen for another ten years, when it was… (read more)

The Olde Orchard: Old Restaurant, New Location

Live in the same town long enough and you’ll eventually start referring to houses by who used to live there, and buildings by what they used to be. If I were giving directions to someone from out of town to The Olde Orchard, I’d tell them it’s located at 326 Elm Avenue in Yukon in the Old Mills Plaza, just off of Main Street. To anyone from around here, I’d just say it’s where the Miller Grill used to be — and to a real old timer, I might even call it the old Big Ed’s. Pulling into the parking… (read more)

The Latest Collectible… Monster Cereals?

When I was a kid, I ate cereal for breakfast almost every day. As far as I was concerned, the more sugar a cereal had, the better it was. I was a big fan of Cookie Crisp, and loved cereal with marshmallows like Lucky Charms. One of my favorite cereals was Count Chocula. It was full of sugar, it had marshmallows, and if you waited long enough, it turned your milk into chocolate milk. On top of all that, its mascot was a vampire. Count Chocula had it all. I never associated Count Chocula or General Mills’ other monster cereals… (read more)

Bananas and Red Sauce

There’s something inherently American about Chinese buffets. I’ve never been to China so I could be wrong, but I’ve always suspected “bananas in red sauce” is a dessert more likely to be found in Tennessee than Tokyo. I’ve shopped at more than one local Asian market and never run across individual cup servings of ice cream. You know what they do sell? Bags of chicken feet and containers of blood. But not at the buffet. There’s nothing disgusting at the Chinese buffet — no chicken feet or “snake surprise” — only meat that tastes like candy and bananas covered in… (read more)

Cookie Card Nostalgia

Cookie Card

The thing I liked most about television’s Cheers was right there in the theme song: it was a place where “everybody knows your name.” Every time Norm or Cliff or any of the bar’s regulars walked through the front door and down those steps, they were greeted by name by Sam or Diane or Coach or Woody. I have never been greeted by name at any bar or restaurant. I don’t even know how that could happen. No waiter or waitress has ever asked my name, and I’ve never found a smooth way to inject it into conversation. (“By the… (read more)

I (Mostly) Passed on the Cocoa Loco Choco Challenge

“Do you like hot things?” my co-worker asked with a sly grin. I do like hot things, to an extent. I like spicy salsa and wasabi, but I can’t handle “burn your face off” hot. For the record, “Cocoa Loco” is “burn your face off” hot. And then some. Cocoa Loco, made by the Pucker Butt Pepper Company, is a small square of chocolate infused with Black Reaper pepper sauce. For those unfamiliar, allow me to explain “Scoville” heat rankings to you. The Scoville chart measures how hot things are in Scoville Heat Units (SHUs). Think of the hottest jalapeno… (read more)

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