Problematic eaters on the Brewvies Menu.

Brewvies, this local place, gets requests for particular foods which are off the edges of normal industrial food. Though, lets be upfront about it, Brewvies food is almost all hand made in house to order: it is a funky care filled local foodie glory hole and not a heatless industrial bun filler. But the menu, nonetheless runs a little roughshod over the particular food desires of its progressive patrons.
Three particular groups are common and should be addressed in the menu: Vegetarians, Vegans, and Atikinsers. And historically all three have been considered at some level or other. However currently, the vegan selection of the menu has diminished hugely for several reasons.
First, the chips are made in house, which is nice, but makes them not vegan, as they share the oil with the various fried meat appetizers. The marinara which used to be the basis of the best vegan pizza in the Utah now has cheese in its current version. And the veggie chilli has butter in it.
There are some extraordinary items available for the vegetarian at Brewvies. The black bean egg-rolls are hand made and more than a little special, and thats a Bing Crosby special, mind you, not a Conan O'Brian special. And the nacho's are really good, and ordered as those kitchen gods make them unembellished, are vegetarian. Holler out you carnivores for the BQ pork on your nacho's, its just plain good.
The Brewvies Falafel wrap is a portamento foodie moment made for two hands. Like a piano combines percussion and strings, it combines to great ideas, the middle eastern tradition of chick pea fried filling in a Mexican tortilla. Strongly flavored with Madras curry and Greek olives it is a world tour in one eye opening bite. And vegetarian. Ordered with an alternative dressing like a balsamic vinaigrette - it comes with a yogurt based curry dressing - and it is a good vegan choice - if you can live with the shared fry oil. Still. close....
Many of the pizzas are vegetarian, and all of the burgers can be ordered with black bean garden patty.
Atkinsers, those who eat meat and veg and oil and fruit, but avoid carbs and sugar, can order a number of things pretty happily.
It seems like there might be some angle in seeing if you couldn't get a salad instead of fries with fish and chips or the chiken finger basket. Or have a particular wrap, like say the falafel, made as a salad. This would be a good approach to avoiding the carbs. Also the salads all can have chicken put on them. or the Ceaser salad in its current version comes with chicken fingers on it already. And I think that the Ceaser at Brewvies is delicious. I often get it as a side with a Creole burger when I eat there.
I don't know exactly how much a place should consider food minorities in its menu selection, but it seems like a place as obviously progressive and as likely to have a captive audience as Brewvies is, might consider a few intentionally friendly foods for these people, marketed more broadly as delicious dining choices which happen also to be favorable the the particular foodie.

Basmati, finally restaurant good at home.

I have been deeply pleased with my newest attempt to cook basmati rice. I have been trying for years to cook it reasonably well, but I guess I haven't been looking in the right place for instructions. On the internet the other day, it was suggested that one should soak the rice for roughly half an hour. And during this time stir the rice to remove the starch and change the water three times. And then, using a regular rice cooker add the rice and new cold water in a 4 to 5 proportions. Add about a teaspoon of lime juice per cup of rice and about a teaspoon of butter. So a table spoon of lime and butter per three cup of raw rice. The rice cooker does the rest

Comcast, is it worth a second try...

I am trying to decide if I should switch from direct tv to comcast cable. I have had comcast cable and loved the features they offer. Explicitly, I love the on demand. But the reliability was less than stellar, and the help on the phones was often dishonest and inept. Things would be agreed upon and placed in my "File" and then the next interview regarding the fixing of the problem would find my "file" empty.
I do have cable internet from comcast and it would save me money to combine my internet bill and my cable bill, but I would have to have a few new cables run to have as many stations in my house as I have with direct TV. And I know that would cost a fortune. And even if they promised to give me a deal, the bill wouldn't reflect that. And when I called to complain, no record of the deal would exist. This is my experience.
If anybody has any ideas regarding this, and whether comcast has improved this history of mixed consumer relations, please reply.

Asian Pears

It's been a week of pears. I've eaten two or three everyday. And, except for olives, and grapefruit, they are my favorite fruit. But the truth is that I have eaten asian pears only this week, and they have been a revelation. Unlike the desireable full wine filled succulence of a brown skinned bosc pear when it is really ready to be eaten, which has historically been my clean toothpick test for fruit goodness, asian pears, as near as I can tell, are crisp like apples, but still terrifically succulent.
Pears enter my life as a child, in the canned and sandily textured syruped pear that was like a fruit coctail fruit. And they remind me of Lagoon and the long set of colorful slides that were there near the north end in 1975. I ate a can there for lunch with some friends when I was eight. And they were terrific. Which is a good thing for food to be at Lagoon when you are a kid. My experience being that whatever you ate there, you were going to meet again going the other way when you vomited in the parking lot before going home. Which I believe I did every time I went there, except as a senior in High School. And that is probably becasue I was an tricyclic antidepressents in high school which made everything so bland and tired that vomiting seemed a bit of a drag.
I think my next awakening encounter with pears was when I was an assistant clinical medical librarian at the University Of Utah. I love hospitals and I love hospital food. And the U's hospital had almost year round, a great pear selection. It was almost impossible to get a bad one. They were almost always russet skinned bosc pears that looked a little sad. But they ate like candy. I probably ate one almost every time I worked for six years. I stained many tee shirts with the teltale brown drip of pear juice.
I recall hearing about asian pears from friends who had gone to Manhattan, one on a romatic quest, and one on a punk literary quest, but in each case, an asian pear appears in the narrative of a special evening. And oddly enough, in each the pear is eaten on a roof top while looking over the city.
But for me, they were always the obscure, expensive fruit which seemed to come in a burn unit dressing of criscrossed rubber and plastic. Too fru fru for a lowbrow consumer like me, so one has to consider the pure numbers of asian pears that have crossed the doorstep to my gut this week.
First, my resturant manager brought in a half bushel of the treasures the other night and stuck them in the walkin. I had one, and it was hard and bad and not ripe. So...
The next night I had one, hoping for better, and it was simply marvlous. It has the wine like richness of a juicy squichy pear, but the crisp bite of an fuji apple, and it was hugely sweet, like flowers would be sweet, if they were sweet to the taste and not the nose. I've been eating them like crazy now at work, probably three a night. And have been trying to find them. Now, Salt Lake City, is a funny place, and I haven't tried some of the pricy small botique stores, but I have shopped wild oats, which had a sad and sloppy selection of only two asian pears, smiths, which had no asian pears at all, and wallmart -- heaven forfend -- which had two varieties of asian pear, both for only a dollar and a quarter a piece, much cheaper than wild oats, and they were simply out of this world delicious. I've had so so luck with walmart's produce, but here they smoke the competition.