The Moose Factory - Virtual Bar and Grill - Version 3

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

My wife made some stuffed shells tonight, I think we'll set those out to share.   I'm not much of a wine drinker, but I suppose they would go well with a nice, light white.  Nonny would undoubtedly know.  I'm not really sure, but the full bar is open, so whatever you'd like, help yourselves!

[SimRico 968]

I think I will have some Calamari and a redwine please?

[Odainsaker 2,137]

I actually don't really drink much, but I can't pass up sangria.  A bowl full of sliced tropical fruits will go just well with a red wine glass filled with colorful, sweet fruits.

Recently, I have been watching cooking videos on shakshouka, a North African and Middle Eastern dish of eggs poached in spiced tomato sauce.  I don't know if shakshouka will go with sangria, but I have no problem pairing foods based merely on alliteration.  Slices of toasted herb bread for dipping or even garlic naan would also be good.

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Oh, wow, a real bar in Portugal offers sangria with shakshouka.  Porto, however, is a little out of my way, and I am already happy coming here.

 

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

Shakshouka looks delicious, I think I'll try some of that with you.

 

We have put together more Asian fare for tonight.  Non-fryer "fried" spring rolls, gyoza, and spicy Thai-style noodles are spread across the table.  Help yourselves, everything's delicious.

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

Marquette is having Restaurant Week this week, and my favorite restaurant is serving special lamb empanadas.  They look so good I think we'll copy them and give them a try here, as well.  I suspect that they'll go well with a sangria, although I'll be having a Corona.

[Odainsaker 2,137]

I could do a whole dim sum meal of just gyoza, shumai, spring rolls, and lumpia.  Maybe even just a round plate of gyoza, especially if it is filled and fried in front of us.  We might also add to the picking spread manapua, steamed buns filled with char siu barbecue pork, but just one or two these can fill a person fast.  I've always wanted to try with dim sum a flowering Ganlu or Kanro tea, where the dried flower bulb holding the tea seems to magically bloom open in the cup.

Youtube chef Maangchi was showing off hotteok, a Korean fried pancake here made as savory yachae hotteok stuffed with vegetables and stir-fried glass noodles.  Deep frying anything in my house is a guaranteed mess, but Youtube chef Aeri's Kitchen has a less oily version of veggie hotteok, and she also makes an accompanying spicy dipping sauce.  Any sort of spicy Korean sauce means I'm going to need a crisp lychee or thick taro bubble tea so that the milk can sooth the heat.
 

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

Holy Toledo, that all sounds delicious.  I think we'll need to add my wife's homemade miso ramen to the spread.  This reminds me of dinners at my in-laws back in Japan, the table would be covered by all sorts of great (and not-so-great) food.  They're pretty traditional people, so I ate a LOT of traditional Japanese food, like not the food that most foreigners tend to know.  I still don't know the names of half of what I ate, but I liked most of it, and the fish that my father-in-catches and my sister-in-law grills was just fabulous.  Hm, this is making me a little homesick for my home away from home...

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

TACO TUESDAY!  (Honestly every day can be Taco Tuesday, but today it actually IS Tuesday, so-)  We have a wide variety of fresh tacos, from vegetarian tacos on soft flour tortillas to simple hard-shells with seasoned beef, lettuce, and cheese.  Me?  I think I'll have seasoned whitefish with onions, verde salsa, and purple cabbage on a soft(ish) corn tortilla, and wash it down with a Corona or three.  Vive la taco.

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

Pizza is the order of the day.  My preferred toppings are bacon, mushrooms, onions, and green peppers on a hand-tossed crust, although I do love me the occasional Chicago-style.  How do you take yours? 

[SimRico 968]

Double the anchovies please!

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

You'll have that pizza allllllllllll to yourself hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

[Odainsaker 2,137]

Pepperoni, sausage, onions, green peppers, and extra sauce or outright deep-dish.  I look for fennel seeds...if I see fennel seeds and other herbs and spices in the sauce, I'm happy.  The rest of the household just does not understand--they keep insisting instead on just cheese with green peppers and maybe extra cheese with little to no pizza sauce!  Aaaarrggghhh!

A friend of mine orders sometimes anchovies on his pizza, and as the pizza parlors don't want to waste any anchovies leftover from the single preparation for one random customer, he often gets the entire can piled on top.  It's definitely his alone.

I remember when growing up in Hawaii that us kids would always want to go to Round Table Pizza franchise in downtown Honolulu.  The round shape of pizzas suggested round tables, which suggested The Round Table of Arthurian legend, which brought forth a restaurant theme of crenellated castles and medieval knights.  This being Hawaii, the staff were often Japanese or Filipino, dressed in pseudo-Renaissance Fair uniforms, offering menus in Ye Olde Engrish, and serving Italian pizza.  Like Chuck E. Cheese, kids ran about lapping it all up while their parents sat put in their tacky tavern tables and groaned.

 

[catty-cb 4,412]

8 hours ago, Odainsaker said:

Pepperoni, sausage, onions, green peppers, and extra sauce or outright deep-dish.  I look for fennel seeds...

Sounds good except for the fennel seeds

 

 

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

Mmm... pizza...  Nature's perfect food.

 

Tonight we had some om-rice: rice mixed with your choice of meat and veggies (we usually do bacon, onions, and green peppers), shaped into a dome, and covered with eggs, kind of like an omelet, hence the name, a shorter Japanese way to say omelet rice.  It's delicious.  I add hot sauce to mine, usually I do Louisiana hot sauce, but tonight I tried sri racha and that was pretty good, too.

[catty-cb 4,412]

sounds perfect, I'll have some thanks

[Odainsaker 2,137]

I once watched a pizza maker use mozzarella slices rather than shredded or diced cheese, and the result was one of the most beautiful pizzas I had ever seen.  Shredded cheese makes for a more uniform topping, but I thought the contrast between cheesy and saucy areas left by the arrangement of the mozzarella slices was more interesting and even tastier.  The rest of the family doesn't understand and just dumps shredded cheddar on top of everything.  Philistines!

I've been squeezing onto my eggs chogochujang sauce, a thinner, milder version of the Korean red hot chili pepper paste gochujang.  I'm too weak to dare mess with the thick paste, which is scooped out of deep red tubs of concentrated taste bud death.

Bacon is on my proscribed list, but we can put in my rice some char siu pork or chicken.  Jun's Kitchen from YouTube couple Rachel & Jun had a great episode making fluffy omurice.  I can't flip eggs or control my fat cats in the kitchen like Jun does, but the virtual bar and grill has now fixed that.

 

[Odainsaker 2,137]

The family strikes again tonight:  vegetable pizzas with spinach!  Once at Cici's Pizza I mistook a spinach pizza for a margherita pizza with fresh basil leaves, and was nearly brought to tears trying to force it down past the gag reflex.

Oh well, I'm having cravings instead for a hearty, spicy goulash with lots of onions.  Maybe also with a fried egg, potatoes, and buttery garlic bread.

 

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

Oo, goulash, that does sound good.  I would have served that up yesterday but our internet was unresponsive.  We couldn't even get our nightly fix of TNG, so now we'll get that goulash ready, along with all the fried eggs, potatoes, and garlic bread you could ever hope for.

[blunder 1,080]

On 2/9/2018 at 4:58 PM, NMUSpidey said:

Time to bust out the Romulan ale and Klingon blood wine, we're delving back into Star Trek.  First round is on the house!

Q'PLAH! To the coming of spring! To the end of the season of cold. To the start of the season warm as a beating warriors heart. To the quest for honor and glory! But first, more blood wine while i sharpen my bat'leth...

 

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

19 hours ago, blunder said:

Q'PLAH! To the coming of spring! To the end of the season of cold. To the start of the season warm as a beating warriors heart. To the quest for honor and glory! But first, more blood wine while i sharpen my bat'leth...

 

*Spock nod* Quite logical.

 

We've completed TOS and the TOS movies (oh what a great ending The Undiscovered Country was!) and have moved on to our second run-through of TNG.  We finished season 1 and started season 2 last night.  Once we start Voyager again we'll get Neelix to come into the kitchen to cook us up some Delta Quadrant fare.

[Odainsaker 2,137]

To think that they dare talk about Klingon table manners!

Omigosh, there is actually a Star Trek "Conspiracy" episode bento of pasta worms and alien parasite bread:

 

However, I want to order me some Dune spice stuffed sandworm bread rolls with almond sliver teeth:

I'll finish that plate off watching the movie.  Be sure to add enough cinnamon spice so that after I eat it I can fold space and see the future.

 

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

Hahahaha, we were watching that episode last week and we were like, "WHAT IS BODY HORROR DOING IN A STAR TREK TV SHOW?"  It was awesome.

 

No grubs here.  At least not until the Ferengi show up on a regular basis.  Instead I'm feeling a bout of sashimi coming on.  Let's slice up some salmon, mackerel, scallops, amberjack, bonito, sea bream, octopus, ye olde standby tun, and for the adventurous, FUGU (I hear it makes your tongue go numb).  I'll be having mine alongside a Black Label Sapporo (my favorite), but we have anything you like.  Pull up a stool and I'll have have my boy Makoto get his sharpest knives ready for us.

[Craig-Abcvs 1,595]

Hey Spidey!  So you're bar keep in here these days?  I see my corner stills has that funny smell...   

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

I could never bring myself to clean if after your visits, it would feel too much like washing you away!

[SimRico 968]

On 3/26/2018 at 1:55 PM, VMIUJcadet09 said:

Happy to hear you guys have been doing well. Sorry for the much delayed response, life has been very busy, and in my free time I have been playing Cities Skylines and Xbox One.

 

You guys are the best.  

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

It's been a tough week at work, so my wife decided to make it a bit brighter she'd make turkey-stuffing meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and noodles slathered in butter.  It's delicious, and I think you will all like it, too.

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

Well, we just got 2 feet of snow.  How fun to be knee-deep in snow when we're supposed to be knee-deep in spring!  I think we'll get out the ice cream for such an event.

[blade2k5 1,523]

1 minute ago, NMUSpidey said:

Well, we just got 2 feet of snow.  How fun to be knee-deep in snow when we're supposed to be knee-deep in spring!  I think we'll get out the ice cream for such an event.

Join the party.  Here we've gotten at least 4 feet over the last three storms, more than the rest of winter.  Utterly ridiculous.

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

Now that the temperatures have rebounded and the snows are melting away I'm going to grill some hamburgers.  Would you like cheese?  Freshly sliced onions?  Avocado?  Anything you like, all laid out for your enjoyment.  Feel free to help yourself to some french fries, we made them in our non-fryer so they're healthier than the deep-fried alternative.

Mm... avocado burger...

 

@blade2k5 You're in Canada, right?  Or am I confusing you with someone else?  I can never seem to remember these things.

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

So I'm working with a guy whose parents claimed to have come straight from Italy, but upon doing one of those DNA ancestry tests found out they were 0% Italian.  I'm certainly not Italian, so in celebration of our lack of Italian-ness, let's have some pasta for dinner.  We will cook up some spaghetti Bolognese, some carbonara, some fettucini alfredo, a few pizzas, and... GARLIC BREAD.  Everyone loves garlic bread.  Buono!