Patronizing almost every restaurant in the DFW area last weekend made me think: why don't I just look at some menus and try to recreate what I would have ordered there? It's kind of like a cookbook, but chancier. I vowed to buy nice flowers for the table and put on some mellow music and pretend like all of our dinners were still restaurant dinners, ignoring of course the presence of small children (the benefit of being at home, of course, being that you can lock said children on the back porch carry on with dinner without disturbing other patrons).
A couple of things went awry with my plan, obviously. For one thing, the nicest flowers that $4 can buy at HEB actually take a few days to bloom, so that ambiance is just going to have to wait. For another, when the first song on my Genius playlist was this, the third song was this. (When the first was this, the third was this. So I guess everything does fall apart, right around song three.)
Nevertheless. First up was a recreation of Pecan Lodge's Hot Mess.
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| So much greener than I remember it. |
Recipe: 1) Have your father spend three hours smoking chicken.
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| This might be my favorite of all the things my dad is good at. Sorry "entertaining grandchildren" and "discussing college football"! |
2) Abscond with some of it. 3) Throw it in a baked sweet potato with green onions and inexplicably still-thriving chard from your garden. 4) Realize how widely your reinterpretation has veered from the original. Eat anyway.
Next: Fancy grilled cheese! Recipe: 1) Buy fancy cheese. 2) Grill it.
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| 3) Applaud yourself for being a genius. |
Third: Hummus wraps. Recipe: 1) Get a tortilla. 2) Put hummus and and bunch of other stuff that you think will taste good together inside of it. 3) Watch your toddler show interest in the cucumber slices alone.
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| 4) Dip in ranch. |
We're pretty ready for the weekend around here.
Some more cautiously ready than others.
