Part of my enjoyment of restaurants is my predilection toward dishes I’ve either never had, or cannot make at home for various reasons.  I’d like to think that I’m a pretty accomplished cook (I am not a chef, I’ve never taken a course, and my wife will not hesitate to tell you that I am not a professional chef, no matter how much I may wish I was one).  Give me a recipe and I’ll nail it, and add my own flair to boot.  If I try something in a restaurant and it is translatable to a home kitchen, I’ll usually be able to pull it off.  Many dishes are done very well in my kitchen.  Some things, however, just cannot be done at home.

Sadly, it will be some time before I have a Berloni kitchen or a Viking range with super-suck-o-matic 5000 ventilation hood and an 800 degree salamander, so a genuine steak frites will have to wait.  However, sometimes satisfactory do-it-yourself fare can come in the simplest formats.  So in true Idiot-Box-Local-News Fashion, I Ate The City presents some don’t waste your money ideas for dining in.

Sunday night, we decided that we would emulate two of our favorite Cincinnati-style chili parlors and add a little bit of old-timey nostalgia.  Start with the footlong coneys from The Rootbeer Stand in Sharonville, put Gold Star chili on ’em, and then serve it with a Skyline-style greek salad and some cold High Life.  Instead of schlepping all over town and paying a premium for our various parts of the singular Cincinnati gastronomy, a brief trip to the supermarket and some extra packets of salad dressing (courtesy of the nice waitresses that like me at the Kenwood Skyline) is all it took to bring it together.  

Cut to tonight – second verse same as the first: LaRosa’s runs their Spaghetti-A-Plenty on Monday and Tuesdays.  If I worked late on Tuesdays, I would eat at LaRosa’s every Tuesday night.  There is something about their red sauce that is just addicting.  It could be the heroin.  I could be wrong.  Sans heroin, we recreated the LaRosa’s experience at home, only with healthier turkey meatballs, whole wheat pasta, and Bove’s organic roasted garlic pasta sauce.  And instead of cheesy garlic bread, we toasted up some Servatii bakery sesame sandwich pretzels, spread on some cream cheese, and topped it with jalapeno jelly.  Killer.

There is a certain pleasure to be derived from not only enjoying your favorite flavors from random joints – whether swanky or dive – but also in making them your own.  One of these days I’ll document and post my filet mignon fried rice recipe.  Because leftover filet is a terrible thing to waste.  Other D.I.Y.s to look forward to: Fried pickles a la Hofbrauhaus and garlic fries, Napa-style.