use real butter

Last night we went to First Bite Boulder with Tom and Kellie at Laudisio. The new restaurant is far bigger and more chic than the old establishment. It moved to the new upscale, bourgeois 29th Street Mall. I like the old restaurant better. It had more of a family feel to it, and now they have bimbo hostesses, and clueless young waiters who don’t know that you need a spoon, not a fork, to eat crème brûlée.

The food itself was okay, and I think that had more to do with the set menu of First Bite Boulder and the fact that the place was hopping. I suppose we’ll go back some night and order from the regular menu just to see if the place has become a different restaurant, but last night was not overly impressive.

That wooden spoon in the mouth trick really does take the edge off of slicing onions. It’s the ethylsufine that makes your eyes water. This chemical is released when you break the membrane of the onion cells that keeps a certain enzyme and sulfur compounds separate. The two mix and hence the sobbing begins. Onions go in just about everything. Imagine life without onions. We would have sad stews, sad soups, sad non-onion rings, no mirepoix, sautés would be dull, lonely beef, lonely chicken, guacamole without that certain special something… And french onion soup would be reduced to french soup. Not to mention what would happen to all of those french onion dips: sad chips.

But that’s someone else’s life, not mine. Inspired by what Nathan made for Nicole (a geophysicist who cooks – you have to love that!) I revisted an old favorite tonight. I use regular onions, not sweet onions, because sweet onions taste bizarre to me in this soup and the sugars that already exist in the regular onions get somewhat caramelized anyway.

**Jump for more butter**

I like potato chips very much. I like most salty snacks very much. And because I know myself so well, I don’t buy them at the grocery store so that I won’t have any in the house when I get munchy. The other day, I walked into the kitchen feeling peckish and what did we have? Cinnamon buns with homemade cream cheese frosting, fudgy and chewy brownies, chocolate chip cookies, apple cranberry crisp, ice cream, and several pounds of high quality dark chocolate. Blegh! I didn’t want any of those… I’m not a fan of sweets like some folks. I puttered about the kitchen and finally settled on washing some grapes and eating those. That’s how it is supposed to work out, but I had potato chips on the brain for many days.

In fact, I picked up some Cape Cod salt and vinegar potato chips at the store yesterday. But those are for skiing because you need something fatty and salty to convince you NOT to spend $10 on a burger at the summit restaurant. For sandwiches, I got roast beef and muenster cheese (I’ll be honest, turkey sandwiches will send me straight into the line for a $10 burger – I crave beef when I ski – plain and simple). Jeremy calls it roast beast and monster cheese. It is a favorite of ours. Which got me thinking about where I first had roast beast and monster… at the Williamsburg Cheese Shop in Colonial Williamsburg (bastion of idiot tourists from hell). It’s one reminder of why, unlike Jeremy, I loved high school.

**Jump for more butter**