Roadfood.com

Search Results

All recipes have been approved by the Roadfood.com editors.
Ambrosia Coconut A special-occasion salad, especially suitable for Thanksgiving dinner. This is popular throughout not only the South, but the Midwest as well, where it is also known as Millionaire Salad because of the luxurious nature of its ingredients.
Amighetti Special Amighetti's is a landmark sandwich shop in St. Louis' Italian neighborhood, known as the hill. Leading the menu is one called the Amighetti Special, which is ham, roast beef, salami, a couple of cheeses, a spill of hot pepperoncinis, and – the kicker – Amighetti's tangy-sweet house dressing. The dressing is great on almost any hearty cold-cut sandwich, and can be refrigerated for several days (although it loses its punch over time). This recipe, which we believe pretty well duplicates Amighetti's proprietary one, makes about 1 cup. That should be enough for 3 or 4 foot-long heroes.
Antipasto Platter No longer need shoppers hunt down a salumeria or pork store in the Italian part of town to find meats for a good antipasto platter. Such once-exotic salamis and sausages are found in many good supermarket deli cases. Of course the best meats are still found behind the counter of true Italian butchers.
Antipasto Salad Chicago likes big salads, especially big salads that have lots of ingredients not normally found in a typical bowl of rabbit-food greens. This one includes virtually all the meats and even cheese from an antipasto platter, plus greens. Make sure all the ingredients are diced very fine. Your goal should be to have nearly some of everything on every forkful.
Beef Carpaccio with Porcini Mushroom Relish Beef carpaccio was first served in Venice at Harry’s Bar, which is also birthplace of the Bellini (white peach nectar and sparkling wine). This elegant recipe is from Harry Caray's in Chicago.
Bourbon Sauce Alcohol is not served at the Blue Willow Inn, but their bread pudding is greatly enhanced when topped with this simple bourbon sauce.
Broccoli Salad A great dish for broccoli lovers, for here the florets retain their snap and flavor as they are highlighted by a bath of oil, garlic and lemon juice. The peppers and Kalamata olives make it a beauty.
Caesar Salad The reason many restaurants make Caesar salad as a tableside event is that it never should be mixed in advance. If not served immediately, Caesar salad can get watery and its romaine leaves limp. Caesar dressing is customarily made in a large wooden bowl that serves as a kind of mortar for crushing the garlic and anchovies together. It is also possible to make the dressing separately and combine it with the lettuce just before serving.
Chicken Caesar Wrap The Sand-Wege is a small storefront near our house with a big sandwich menu. One of its most popular items is a chicken salad in a tortilla wrap of spinach, tomato, southwest spice, honey wheat ,or plain. These are big ones, over a foot across, and we've noticed that one of the things distinguishing them from other versions is just how tightly they are rolled. Even the messiest sandwiches – and this one can be pretty messy – tends to hold together as nicely as a hand-made cigar.
Crab Louie Crab Louie can be made with any good fresh crab meat (or, for that matter, with cooked shrimp instead of crab), but tradition demands it be made with Dungeness crab from the Pacific Northwest. We concocted this recipe based on the Louie we found long ago at a downhome restaurant called Jerry's Farmhouse in Olema, California. It makes four very large whole-meal portions or 6 modest-size ones.
Crab Melt The better the crabmeat, the more delicious the sandwich. At the Cottage in LaJolla, California, rock crabmeat is preferred. Dungeness crab would work fine, too. If using canned crab, be sure you rinse it well and drain away any excess water.
Dakota Burger Junellia Meisenhoelder, chef and proprietor at the Sport Bowl Cafe didn't tell us why this delightfully simple beef sandwich is known as a burger, but there is no point quibbling about labels. Since getting the formula from her, we think of Dakota burgers any time we have leftover roast beef or, better still, pot roast. The more tender the meat, the better! While it is possible to make a Dakota burger on an interesting bakery bun or even a Portuguese roll or small foccaccia, we highly recommend using supermarket-bought hamburger rolls. This is a case where you want bread that is little more than a soft muffler for the meat inside. And the fundamental gentleness of the beef precludes using bread that would require serious chewing.
Giardiniera For many Italian beef eaters in Chicago, a lode of giardiniera atop the beef is as essential as the beef itself. Our recipe includes the "sport peppers" that are so popular at Chicago's beef and hot dog stands, but any small, very hot pepper will do. Obviously adjust this to your taste ... but giardiniera should not be mild!
Green Tomato BLT Of all the variations on the classic theme of the BLT, the Loveless Cafe's version, layered with crisp fried green tomatoes, is one of the most beguiling. The tang of the tomatoes and their brittle crunch provides extraordinary balance for the savor of bacon and gentle notes of mayo and lettuce.
Ham & Beef & Cheese Double Decker While lesser known than chili outside of Cincinnati, the double decker is every bit as big a deal to Queen City chowhounds. As the name suggests, it is a variation of the club sandwich: three slices of bread interleaved with multiple ingredients, almost always constructed in such a way that the sandwich is taller than it is wide, defying the most wide-open jaw. Ingredient choices for double-deckers range from bacon and egg to hot ham and cheese, turkey, beef, and bacon, all generally piled in with lettuce, tomato, mayo, mustard, pickle, etc. We are especially fond of hot ham, which is sliced thin and loaded into the bread in moist clumps, and generally paired with American cheese.
Heroes' Hero Throughout the mid-Atlantic states, no self-respecting hoagie shop is without a wall of fame where pictures of famous clientele gaze down on sandwich-eaters. Several years ago, at a Philadelphia eatery called Ragozzino's, we spent an afternoon studying the sandwich makers' art and came up with the following blueprint for the archetypal hero sandwich. Of course, the ingredients can vary, but the roster listed here are what many sandwich menus refer to as the "Italian classic." More important than the specific list of cold cuts and/or cheeses included is the bread itself. Bread makes or breaks a hero sandwich. Spongy cotton loaves cannot be redeemed by the finest capicola and Provolone. You want a fresh, crisp-crusted, brawny-crumb, full-flavored torpedo that is sturdy enough to contain a double-dose of oil and vinegar condiments.
Hopkins House Apple Salad The Hopkins House, famous for old-fashioned, eat-til-it-ouches boarding house meals, is no more. But during our last visit in 2003, we watched Margaret Pope and her son Mike cutting apples into chunks in the kitchen, then later sat down at the lunch table to discover the salad they were preparing. We love this concoction, not only for its brazen sugar content, but as culinary contraband – hail the Maraschino cherry! – and also because it exemplifies the candidly sweet (and canned-ingredient) salad found at so many southern buffet tables.
Horseradish Pickles Garnishing every plate at Porubsky's in Topeka, Kansas, are hot-hot pickles. They start as briney dills, then get doctored up as follows. Serve them with sandwiches, or as they do at Porubsky's, chopped up on top of chili!
Hot Lobster Roll While the typical hot lobster roll comes with the meat already gilded with melted butter, the Maine Diner's version is even simpler than that: plain, warm lobster piled into a toasted bun, presented with a cup of drawn butter on the side. Proprietor Dick Henry explained, "We found that if we served the meat already buttered, the bun fell apart." So it is eater's choice: either pour all the butter all over the sandwich, risking bun disintegration, or simply pick chunks of meat and shreds of toasted bread from the plate and dip them in the cup of butter as you wish. While not essential, New England split-top hot dog rolls with flat surfaces on each side are by far the best kind of bun to use. They are made for grilling … in butter, of course!
Local Hero Before K.C. Scott opened up Magnolia's in April, 1999, it took a long while to come up with the right name. Then one day, standing in her kitchen, she found herself looking at one of the antique signs she had collected … for Magnolia Dairy Products. "I like Magnolia because it has a slow, Southern feel," she explains, noting that her goal in starting this seductive little restaurant was to create a place that provided quality food at a reasonable price in a setting that was as relaxed as a friend's kitchen. Her "Local Hero" sandwich, named for a movie she likes, is made on Magnolia's focaccia and dressed with Magnolia's vinaigrette, but if you are not quite that industrious, these ingredients can be store-bought.
Mojito Chef Doug Shook of Louie's Back Yard said, "You could call this a Cuban mint julep, but it's lighter and more refreshing. It's an addictive cocktail, appealing to look at and easy to drink."
Mud Pie When mud pie is served at the Dutch Kitchen, the waitress tops each piece with extra peanuts and chocolate syrup as well as whipped cream.
Muffaletta The name "muffaletta" once referred only to the bread, a chewy round loaf turned out by Italian bakeries. New Orleans grocery stores that sold the bread got the fine idea to slice it horizontally and stuff it, and the muffuletta sandwich was born. It has become a signature dish of The Big Easy, but, like the po boy, has become known nationwide. It depends on good bread and cold cuts, but the soul of a muffaletta is its olive salad. This is the recipe used at the wonderful All-Star Sandwich Bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Orange Salad Now run by a third generation of the family that started it in the 1930s, Carbone’s, of Hartford, Connecticut, is a deluxe restaurant, especially in the evening when the dining room is lit up by the pyrotechnics of tableside presentations of everything from steak Diane to bocce ball dessert. Perhaps the best loved dish in the house is Sicilian orange salad, so well-known to regular customers that it isn’t even listed on the menu!
Peanut Butter Pie Although it sounds like child's food (and children do tend to like it), peanut butter pie is fundamental to the serious-dessert repertoire of the south. This creamy, peanutty pie is on the Blue Willow Inn dessert table every day, and according to Louis Van Dyke, customers have been known to fight over what appears to be the last piece. Usually, it isn't. When one pie gets down to its last couple of pieces, the kitchen has another to take its place.
Pesto Sauce Originally from Genoa, pesto is named for the pestle traditionally used to grind up basil leaves with garlic as the basis of the verdant sauce.
Real Italian Sandwich Colucci's Hilltop Market makes two kinds of Italian sandwich: a "real Italian," which means salami and provolone topped with tomato and green pepper, pickles, onions, olives, and oil; and a regular Italian, which features ham and American cheese. The big issue among Portlanders is not so much lunch meat or seasoning, but bread. Unlike hero sandwiches of the Mid-Atlantic states, Portland's Italians are made on soft white loaves similar to the kind of bun that traditionally encloses a lobster roll … but about four times the size.
Red Beer Red beer is popular in much of the West. We first came across it in Pendleton, Oregon, during the annual Roundup. Beer is always the main ingredient; tomato juice is second fiddle; but the exact ratio can vary from an effervescent 5:1, in which the beer is merely flavored, to a 2:1 mix as fruity as a drink in a health food juice bar. V-8 juice, regular or spicy, may be substituted for the tomato juice if desired.
Rodger's Big Picnic Michigan is farm country, a source of superb fruits and vegetables from spring berries through autumn apples. One of the best places to get to know the Michigan bounty is the Ann Arbor Farmer's Market on Detroit Street, open every Saturday throughout the year on Wednesdays, too, May through December. Here you will find farmers selling fresh-picked produce as well as maple syrup, jams and jellies, eggs and cheese. Rodger's Big Picnic is Zingerman's Deli's vegetarian ode to the market from which many great sandwich ingredients can be bought. Specifically, this sandwich depends on good asparagus, preferably Michigan asparagus. Zingerman's Ari Weinzweig says, "I love roasting (as opposed to steaming) asparagus because it concentrates the flavors so nicely."
Sugared Pecans Sugary things are fundamental throughout the day and for virtually every course at the Southern table, from peach preserves for morning biscuits to Karo nut pie at supper's dessert, with plenty of sweet tea in between. For a munchable snack to fill that bill, The Blue Willow Inn recommends sugared nuts, a recipe given to the Van Dykes by Margaret Hale.
Sweet Italian Cheese Platter For those with a serious sweet tooth who aren’t interested in frilly cakes and puddings, Harry Caray's of Chicago offers a platter of cheeses adorned with booze-infused fruits and sugar-toasted nuts.
Waldorf Salad Hob Nob Hill in San Diego is one of the most polite, and most delicious coffee shops we know. With dinner, diners get a choice of salad: Waldorf, Caesar, spinach, etc. All come with a chilled fork! This recipe isn't actually Hob Nob Hill's, but it is the traditional way to make this kinda swanky salad, and Hob Nob Hill is all about tradition.