"How can it be a church dinner without egg noodles?" she cried!
For the love of noodles I made a giant batch, 3 doz. eggs worth for her. I cooked up a big old pot of beef and noodles and delivered them to the elevator last week for dinner. Purse Gurl was so giddy I thought she was going to pee her pants! Later she reports though that no one else at work seemed nearly as interested in eating them as she was, as though the thought of mixing beef and noodles together was absurd. Purse Gurl, DR and I all grew up on homemade noodles and Amish made noodles. DR even sneaks the dough to eat before I'm even done making them! Egg noodles are everywhere back home! Kansas? Not so much.
Purse Gurl is also extremely upset by the lack of pork tenderloins out here. Granted it is beef country but the owner of a local restaurant didn't have any idea how to fix a pork tenderloin! I think Purse Gurl was about to have a coronary. Are you a Hoosier? Then you know a good pork tenderloin; breaded golden brown, twice as big as the bun with pickle, onion and mustard. Pork tenderloin is now on my shopping list. And sweet corn...if I can find it.
Kansans have good food no doubt. There are great steak houses I've eaten at all over the place and DR is always singing the praises of the town cafe down the street from the grain elevator. But Kansans also seem to have popular 'strange' foods. The biggest difference in cuisine here in Kansas would be Bull Fries also known as Rocky Mountain Oysters. Deep fried bull testicles. Sigh....one of these days I'm going to go to a "nut fry" for dinner. It just might take a while to work myself up to it. Purse Gurl won't even consider the notion! I guess you just have to not think about what it is that you're eating when pulling up to a plate of Bull Fries. Or maybe the secret is a really big bottle of barbeque sauce....and beer. Maybe they taste better drunk.
Usually I love traveling the country and trying new foods. On our honeymoon in to New Orleans I lived on gumbo and when we drove through Louisiana the barbeque ribs were out of this world, even the ones we bought at a gas station! Delaware was famous for their giant buckets of crabs restaurants offered. It always amazed me how full I would get on only a few crabs while the locals could literally eat dozens!
Bull Fries.....well, I'll try anything once. And I'll let you know once that ONCE rolls around! For now, I'm going shopping for pork tenderloin. Purse Gurl and I are homesick.
What about you? Do you have any good stories about regional foods?
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There is a story they tell at Farm Bureau gatherings about trying to order biscuits and gravy at a Washington DC restaurant. The chef had no clue and came up with brown gravy on rolls. ACK! Somebody needed to give that man a little introduction to the wonders of sausage gravy! ;-)
ReplyDeleteI would LOVE to travel to New Orleans and try some authentic Gumbo!! Makes my mouth water just thinking about it!!
ReplyDeleteIsn't it funny how cuisine varies so drastically from area to area? I moved from PA to TX, and I'm having an extremely hard time finding any ethnic food, like pierogies and stromboli. (Who knew that stromboli was ethnic, but it must be, cuz it can't be found in Austin.) However there's plenty of Mexican to go around down here.
ReplyDeleteSo, anyhoo, my point is, I feel your pain.
@ Four Ransom's, if you ever make it to Indy tuesday through saturday, there's a little place on the east side called Papa Roux. It's run by a family of transplanted New Orleanians that make great gumbo and other cajun food. Heidi
ReplyDeleteI lived in southern Louisiana for a number of years. Cajun cooking is so easy to love and became a favorite. Later when we lived in Texas, we adopted TexMex to our family cuisine. Still, sometimes I miss the plain 'ol meat and potatoes of the Midwest where I grew up.
ReplyDelete