The Ram Restaurant & Brewery

I was asked to pick out a restaurant near Allstate Arena in Rosemont this past weekend. The in-laws were taking the family to a Chicago Wolves game, and while I opted out of joining them (because sitting in the Allstate Arena is near impossible for me), they wanted me to join them for dinner. The only problem was Rosemont is basically expensive hotel restaurants and subpar fast food. Well, that’s the only Rosemont I’ve seen. It’s O’Hare Airport’s city, so it almost comes across as a transient place to live. So many people travel THROUGH there you almost forget people live there, too. Needless to say I didn’t know where to take them.

On a good day, it’s a tough call to randomly pick a place. When you’re trying to not let down an entire clan, there’s even more pressure you put upon yourself. While they’re far more adventurous in dining than my family is, I wouldn’t want to take them to an unknown foreign food restaurant and hope for the best.  You don’t want to hope for the best in some circumstances.

What I found was The Ram Restaurant and Brewery. It’s not a local place, but a chain found in 5 states, getting its start in Washington. What surprised me was it’s a restaurant founded by the same group of people who founded Shakey’s, a fond restaurant memory of my youth. I used to love going to Shakey’s with my family. It’s where I learned such a thing as a pizza buffet existed. It’s where I learned the upper limits of how much pizza a human body could handle.

It turns out that for a chain restaurant, the food is far above average, although I can’t necessarily say the same for the beer. Nothing much struck my fancy, with their seasonal Big Horn S’No Angel Winter Weizenbock being my favorite of the ones sampled. It was a bit darker than I prefer, but the spice went well with the food.

The appetizer we went for was almost a dare. I mean, they were called Armadillo Eggs. Made with chicken, fresh chopped jalapeños, pepperjack cheese, “secret sauce” and seasonings, they tasted mostly like deep-fried cream cheese. You couldn’t much taste the chicken (oh yeah, I eat chicken now). But for a cheese lover, I wasn’t complaining. I love jalapeno poppers and these were a tasty distant cousin to those.

Like a lot of chain restaurants, their menu is massive. They have an ample selection of burgers, sandwiches, salads and more. My choice was the Chicken Amber Ale, a chicken breast marinated in an amber ale marinade, Porter BBQ sauce, slaw, tomato, onion crisps, roasted tomato-chipotle mayonnaise and a pretzel bun. They had me at onion crisps and sold me at pretzel bun. The chicken was tender and well marinated, and the sandwich itself was a sloppy mess with all those sauces. It ended up being a fork and knife situation by the end.

While the food was tasty and received accolades all around, there was one big problem. Most, if not all, of the burgers came out under prepared. Medium Well came out mostly pink in at least 3 situations. Luckily, the people who received the mis-cooked burgers didn’t mind the extra bit of pink, but it seems like something they should pay a little more attention to something like that.

Most of us agreed we’d still go back, and with the comic con coming up in August, I now have a place to direct my friends when we need something to eat. It’s a much better alternative to walking down to McDonald’s or ordering a $7 pizza from the convention center.  I’d most likely steer them away from the burgers, just to be safe, but otherwise it’s a nice place to have a meal.

Plus you get to tell people you ate Armadillo Eggs, and that’s always worth the price of admission.

I do not like your recipes Biggest Loser

We’ve been attempting to eat healthier, and to do so we invested some money in the Biggest Loser cookbook collection. We’ve also discovered the problem with many of the diet cook books: The food is bland. Chicago magazine’s food section, Dish, had a great quote from Andy Rooney (something I never thought I’d say):

“The two biggest sellers in any bookstore are the cookbooks and the diet books. The cookbooks tell you how to prepare the food, and the diet books tell you how not to eat any of it.”

Diet cook books as a rule tend to rely on only the essential ingredients for getting you everything you need to survive. But in many cases they also sacrifice flavor in place of weight loss. I’ve always felt that you lose weight because you end up hating what your new image of food is in your head. Most of us that are overweight love the TASTE of food.  Even with a salad wouldn’t you rather have the one that includes goat cheese, cranberries, candied walnuts and apples over spinach instead of the one that’s merely lettuce, tomato and cucumber? Of course! There’s different flavors blending together. The goat cheese’s bitter mixes with the cranberries’ sweet to provide you with something that tastes good rather than just filling not only your belly but your dietary need for vegetables.

Yet all those little extra things add up calories, and that’s not even counting a dressing if you get one. All those extra calories, even at 10 here or 20 there, soon snowball into you eating far more than your daily intake should be. For someone my age height, I’m told I should weigh 200 pounds. My current LoseIt calorie limit is 2000 calories. Man that seems like more than enough food for one day!

Yet I’ve yet to find a great cookbook that learns how to balance weight loss and taste. Skinny Bitch in the Kitch has some great recipes, but I can’t vouch for how diet friendly they truly are. Weight Watchers has a vegetarian cookbook, but man, most of those recipes are just not good. And as I’ve mentioned, The Biggest Loser books have some great ideas with just okay results.

Instead, like the recipe below, we’re learning to adapt things to have a little more flavor. Sure the calories may increase, but at least we’re trying to make a difference in our lives. The recipe started as a healthy Biggest Loser chicken cheese steak sandwich. The closer we got to finished, the more we realized this was going to be a bland meal. So what started as a cheese steak turned into a shredded chicken BBQ sandwich. We switched out fat-free cheese with fresh Muenster. We added salt and pepper. We made it taste better at the sacrifice of strictly adhering to the idea of losing weight. But how many sacrifices do you make before you’re once again fighting over what you weigh and what you want to weigh?

Anyone have any good weight loss/diet cookbook recommendations?

Shredded Chicken BBQ Sandwich

• 1 cup white onion, quartered and thinly sliced
• 16 oz Trader Joe’s Chicken-less Strips
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp pepper
• 1/2 cup BBQ sauce
• 4 slices cheese of your choice
• 8 ounce baguette, or sandwich roll of choice
• 2 tablespoons olive oil

Heat the oil in a pan. Once hot, add the onions and cook over medium heat until soft, about 9-10 minutes. While the onions are cooking, shred/slice the chicken into thin strips. Add the chicken to the onions once onions are soft.  Add BBQ sauce,  salt and pepper. Mix thoroughly and cook until chicken is hot throughout.  Slice the bread into 4 equal servings (about 2 ounces per roll) and heat in the oven or microwave. Fill each roll with chicken mixture and lay a slice of cheese on top. Heat in oven or microwave until cheese is melted.  Serve.

Makes 4 sandwiches (3 if you were as hungry as we were)

Vegetarian Philly Cheese Steak Sandwich

I saw this recipe over on The Lazy Vegetarian, and realized it was pretty much right up my alley.  Hell.  I’m lazy!  I’m a vegetarian!  I know the lyrics to Fresh Prince of Bel-Air!

But seriously, this couldn’t be a simpler sandwich recipe that easily makes about 4 sandwiches if you use an average sized roll.  I used provolone cheese for mine, but I know the usual is a nice Swiss.  I, however, am a heathen and just don’t like Swiss cheese all that much.  Deal with it Philadelphia!

Vegetarian Philly Cheese Steak (from TLV)
Makes 4 sandwiches on average

INGREDIENTS

• Bakery Rolls
• 1 package Morningstar Farms Meal Starters Veggie “Steak” Strips
• 2 – 3 Tbsps Canola oil
• 1 onion, cut into strips
• 1 green pepper, cut into strips
• Provolone cheese

Preheat oil in large flat-bottom skillet. Cook onion and pepper over medium heat for about 5 minutes. Add strips and cook until strips are heated through. Seperate, in the pan, the mixture into individual servings. Place cheese on top until melted. Transfer to rolls.