Food Blog

A short break from my Arizona reviews to make a feeble attempt to catch up with some food blogs.There’s lots of more I’ll get to in a bit, but here are some themed blogs.Ag Moment “A little agriculture news to go with your morning coffee”The Chippie “My particularly refined taste in chips has been cultivated by years of eating chips. I have no formal training in food, chip making or chip consumption. Sadly, no one pays me to eat chips.” Austin, Texas.Confessions of a Butcher “I know all about your meat”The Forklift The authors wrote a cookbook with methods and recipes for dealing with the large portions bought from warehouse food stores, now they have a blog.Opinionated About Dining “a guide to where to eat and why you should eat there” There’s an enormous amount of restaurant info here, and I like his reviews and writing. However I’m going to be opinionated about his graphics and photography. We’ve all heard the discussions before about flash photography in fine dining rooms, and putting aside the aerial photography style of shooting dishes, what will get this guy banned is his use of enlarged pixelated, aliased, artifact-filled restaurant logos. It’s sure to upset restaurants that spend as much on designers and Identity as they do on a year’s supply of foie gras. Despite my opinions, you should check out his photo albums of great dishes and chefs.Kitchen Contraptions.com “is a blog dedicated to everything you need to make your cooking experience better!” One of those very commercial blogs in the BlogPire network, but a great way to find cool things like Temperature Controlled Butter Dishes and Coffee Presses for Nalgene Water Bottles.The Cooking News Also on the BlogPire network.

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Empty!

Don’t worry. I’m getting to all the fancy places I ate in while in Phoenix, but I did want to mention this place- Molly Brannigans in Mesa.

It’s an Irish Pub in a mall, but with the traditional look, complete with fine handcrafted woodwork and obligatory fireplace in the back. Behind the bar area was decorated with the usual Guinness toucans, Irish knick-knacks and walls of Jameson bottles, which disturbingly, were all empty. Brannigans is a small, supposedly family owned, chain with pubs in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada.

We didn’t eat here, although the menu had a few interesting things, like 6 kinds of boxty. I only mention this place because the Irish Whiskey list was as impressive as I’ve ever seen, but I was driving so I resisted the temptation. I got to sniff one.

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On one of my Arizona driving adventures, we stopped at Tortilla Flat, and old stagecoach stop, turned tourist stop. There is a restaurant there, but the prickly pear ice cream is what I was there for. Prickly pear tastes like watermelon with touches of pear and berry.

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