Homemade Vanilla Extract

In my Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie post, I offered to share my homemade vanilla extract recipe with anyone who asked for it. And lo and behold, Michele asked for it!

The problem was, I couldn’t find the recipe. I knew I got it from a magazine, and I assumed it was Food Network Magazine. But after scouring six months worth of back copies, there was no trace of the recipe.

Then I googled it. A whole bunch of recipes came up, but none of them was the one I used. I knew this because every one called for a liter of vodka, and I don’t care how much I want to make my own extract, I am not giving up an entire liter of vodka to make that happen. (Note: this is also the reason why my attempt at homemade red wine vinegar failed.)

I resolved to e-mail Michele and let her know that I spoke too soon, and share one of the other recipes for her. But before I did that, I had to make a little progress on packing for my upcoming move.

And guess what I found? Yup, you guessed it – the recipe! For some reason, I determined that the logical place to put it was in my coffee table. Not my recipe box. Nor that folder where I keep random recipes. Not even written in the inside of a cookbook. My coffee table.

So here it is.

Homemade Vanilla Extract

Courtesy of Martha Stewart and Martha Stewart Living magazine.

Ingredients

• One vanilla bean
• 1/2 cup vodka
• Glass vessel with a tight seal 

Method

• Split the bean lengthwise with a sharp paring knife, and then use the tip of the knife to loosen the seeds by gently scraping inside the pod.
• Pour the vodka into a clean glass jar with a cork stop or screw top lid.
• Submerge the pod and the seeds, and leave them to soak at room temperature for one to two months.
• Once the extract is ready, discard the beans and store the jar in the refrigerator.
• It will keep for up to a year.

Generally speaking, it is probably not very cost effective to buy a vanilla bean for the sole purpose of making the extract. At my grocery store, it costs about $8 for a package of two beans. It also costs about $8 for a jar of good vanilla extract.

However, I have found that whenever I’ve needed a vanilla bean for a recipe, I’ve never needed more than one (usually only 1/2), so this is a great way to make use of the extra bean(s) before they dry up.

I did do a blind smell and taste test between my extract and the store bought extract (the good stuff – not the cheap, imitation kind) and the homemade version was much more fragrant and subtle in flavor. In fact, I assumed it was the store bought one because I couldn’t believe something I made at home would actually be better.

If you’re like me, and want to get a jump on planning your holiday gifts, Martha suggests beanilla.com as a resource that charges $13 for 10 vanilla beans. They also feature glass jars in the $4-$6 range. I used the 8.5 oz version of this jar available at The Container Store for $2.99.

Happy baking!

Cook's Illustrated's PERFECT Chocolate Chip Cookies

For those of you who are regular readers of this blog, you know how fond I am of all things America’s Test Kitchen. So imagine how excited I was to learn about their new Cook's Illustrated Boston Blogger Cookie Challenge.

Yup, you guessed right – seriously excited!! The challenge was pretty straightforward. Bake a batch of their Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies, take some pictures, and blog about it. I could not wait to get started…

Yesterday was the day. I went to the market to pick up the ingredients (fresh is best!), charged the batteries in my new fancy camera, and got to work.

The first step, as always, is mise en place – getting all my ingredients measured, prepped and ready to go. I’m still surprised at just how much easier the entire cooking process is when I do this. No rushing to chop or measure something before it’s too late, no realizing you don’t have enough of some ingredient, and it even makes cleaning up easier. Not to mention, 9 out of 10 times, the food comes out better in the end.

Okay, mise en place done and now I’m ready to go. Just look how organized everything is!

The first step is easy – whisk the baking soda into the flour and set aside. Check. Even I can’t screw that one up.

Then come the steps that were a little new to me. I’ll confess, when I make chocolate chip cookies, I buy a bag of Nestle chocolate chips and follow the recipe on the bag. Other than throwing in some toffee chips and maybe some peanut butter chips to give it a little something extra, I normally stick to the tried and true. Why deviate from what you know works, right? (Blogging challenge, that’s why!)

First up is to melt the butter. What? Softened butter sure, but melted? That seems odd. But like I’ve said before, these guys know what they’re doing. Just go with it.

The Test Kitchen recommends not using a non-stick skillet for melting the butter because it’s difficult to gauge the brownness of the melted butter. Unfortunately, my non-stick skillet is brand new and my stainless steel skillet wasn’t quite camera ready after a bad experience with a veggie burger over the weekend. But I digress...

I watched the butter closely, taking the non-stick skillet warning very seriously, because I did not want it to over brown. If anything, it was probably slightly under-browned, but I think that’s better than the alternative.

I melted most of the butter in the skillet, then melted the remaining butter in the melted butter in a heat safe mixing bowl. (I will confess, I was not quite confident that my mixing bowl was heat safe, so I did clear the area in case an explosion occurred. Despite my history of kitchen accidents, this experiment turned out okay.)

When the butter was fully melted, I added the sugars, salt and vanilla to the bowl, then the eggs.  (Side note, I used my homemade vanilla. Vodka and vanilla bean - leave a comment if you want the exact recipe. This vanilla will stand up to anything you can buy in the store any day. I swear it.)

This stage of the recipe called for an interesting technique of whisking and resting, whisking and resting, and whisking and resting once more. Each whisk period was 30 seconds long, and then we would rest for 3 minutes. I used my oven timer to ensure I didn’t rush the rest period. At first, I found this a little bit annoying, but then I found the break really helpful as it gave me the opportunity to clean as I go without delaying the baking process.

Here are some pictures so you can see how the batter changes after each stage of whisking and resting. Also, my right arm could kick my left arm’s butt in a fight after the workout it got from all the whisking.

I couldn’t resist the temptation to taste at this point. Butter and brown sugar is kind of like heaven on earth – rich, buttery toffee flavors that are out of this world. Yum! I was starting to see (or taste) the genius of this recipe.

Now it’s time for the flour, then the chocolate chips. I opted to use chocolate chunks since I wanted to go for a bigger, gooier chocolate flavor.

The dough definitely looked and felt a lot more wet than your average cookie dough, but it made sense what with all the melted butter and all.

And it tasted pretty darn good.

Okay, it’s time to get that dough on the cookie sheets. Three tablespoons per cookie, and all I have is a two tablespoon ice cream scoop. I decided to use that ice cream scoop because even though it wasn’t the right size, it was still better than a spoon. I aimed for a 1 1/2 scoop fill, and it worked. I scooped out exactly 16 cookies – just what the recipe intended.

Time to bake. This is where I usually screw up. The recipe suggests 10-14 minutes per batch, turning halfway through. When I was a kid, I was told that you always bake cookies for less time than the recipe suggests. But in my older days, I have found recipe times to be far more accurate. So I split the difference and cooked the first batch for 12 minutes.

Halfway through...                    All the way through

You know, 12 minutes was slightly too long – at least it was in my oven. The cookies were still fine, just a tad darker than “golden,” if you know what I mean. I cooked the second batch for 10 minutes, and these came out perfect.

After a couple of minutes, I transferred the cookies to a wire rack to cool. This may sound like an odd choice, but I use a fish spatula for transferring still-warm cookies. It’s nice and thin, as opposed to all of my plastic and silicone spatulas which are pretty clunky and can do more harm than good. With the parchment paper on my baking sheets, there were no worries about scratching and the cookies transferred without issue.

Naturally, I couldn’t wait to try one. After I burned my mouth on some oozing melted chocolate, I decided to wait a few more minutes and try again.

Ah, this time I could actually taste the cookie. I think the “perfect” in the recipe title is an apt description. But let’s be fair. Here I am, awfully proud of myself. I may not be the best judge of my efforts.

Since there was no way I could fairly assess the outcome of these cookies, I had to wait for my favorite taster to come home. My poor husband barely got a chance to put his bag down before I was twisting his arm to try a cookie. He wanted to wait until after dinner, and there was no convincing him to eat cookie first, chicken later. (Um, hi, we’re grown ups – we can eat dessert whenever we want!)

But it was worth the wait. My husband’s verdict was music to my ears: crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside, big chocolate flavor. Yea me!! Well, really “yea Cook's Illustrated,” but I at least executed the recipe correctly so I do deserve a little credit.

At the risk of being accused of brown nosing the judges of this blogging challenge, I can honestly say it is the PERFECT chocolate chip cookie recipe.

To try the recipe for yourself – and I highly recommend that you do – visit this link to the recipe on the Cook’s Illustrated website. Try it once and it will be your go to cookie recipe. I promise.

You can also learn more about Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen by clicking here, and visiting their website.

Small Appliance Obsession



The one that
started it all.



I’ve had a thing for small appliances for some time. I think it started when I was in college. I saw a commercial for Presto’s Chip Shooter and proclaimed I had to have it. (And sadly, my then-boyfriend bought it for me for Christmas.) The Chip Shooter lead to a deep fryer, because despite the advertised delicious baked potato chips, they weren’t so delicious.



I guess it’s not so bad that I’m obsessed with small appliances. It could be worse. But I do have an awfully small kitchen, and this has lead me to buy small appliances, get rid of them when I run out of space, then re-buy them at a later time because I decide I need them again. And the cycle continues.

Here is a list of the appliances I can remember…

• Chip Shooter
• Deep fryer*
• Bread machine*
• Crock Pot
• Toaster with an egg poacher
• Hand mixer**
• Stick blender**
• Stand mixer**
• Regular toaster**
• Blender**
• Popcorn popper*
• Can opener
• Food processor**
• George Forman grill*
• Mini chopper
• Aero garden
• Yogurt maker
• Indoor grill (in addition to the George Forman ones)*
• Quesadilla maker
• Espresso maker
• Coffee machines

Not the indoor garden solution.

One asterisk (*) refers to an appliance that I have bought, gotten rid of and replaced. Sadly, of the 5 listed, two of them I only still have. So yes, that means I have bought, gotten rid of, replaced and subsequently gotten rid of more than one deep fryer and bread machine. I still own a crock pot and a popcorn popper (two if you count my beloved Whirly Pop).

Two asterisks (**) indicate appliances that I got rid of due to an upgrade. Basically, when you have the opportunity to replace that generic brand with a KitchenAid product, you do it.

Today, in my tiny kitchen, I own a Keurig coffee maker, a hot air popcorn popper, a crock pot, a stand mixer, stick blender, food processor, and hand mixer. That’s it. That’s a lot of money wasted over the years. Or, as I like to refer to it, a lot of money recycled into the economy.

So I don’t blame my husband when he says that we should “hold off” on the keg-o-rater for our home bar, and that we should “wait a while longer” before we buy the Soda Stream (even though I insist it will pay for itself in 19 months if we use that instead of buying bottles of seltzer every week, and it’s more environmentally friendly because of all the plastic bottles I won’t use). My track record is not good. 



Did make a great egg sandwich,
but hard to clean.

At the end of the day, my love of a non-cluttered space wins out over my small appliance obsession. But here’s the thing…


We’re buying a new house. My tiny 8x8 foot kitchen with only is being traded in for a spacious 27’x15’ kitchen with 21 cabinets and 7 drawers, not including the space in the island!! I have plenty of room to cultivate and nurture my small appliance obsession. And even develop of a gadget fetish.

Sure, maybe I shouldn’t be spending money on unnecessary things while we get used to the bigger mortgage and weather all the unanticipated expenses that come with this house. But, really, won’t I be saving money by making my own seltzer and baking all of our bread? And draft beer is pennies on the dollar with your own keg-o-rater… it’s ordering it in a bar that is the money waster.


You're next, baby.

I don’t think my poor husband has any idea what he’s gotten himself into…

And the Secret Ingredient is...

B and I went to Ken’s Steak House in Framingham, MA for dinner last night. We’re doing the no carb thing right now, and we wanted a steak at a place that didn’t have a bar that would entice us to order a martini. So that pretty much left Ken’s as the only option.

Ken’s used to be the place to go, back in the day. Probably back in my grandparent’s day. If you go there now, it’s like a museum of that day. Nothing has changed in years – the carpet, the paint, the décor, the tables and chairs. Nothing. Well, I’m guessing the menu changed since buffalo wings are now offered as an appetizer and they didn’t exist back in my grandparent’s day. But they look old enough to be the ones my grandparents used.

Nonetheless, we thought we could still get a decent steak there, and probably not a decent drink. So this was the place for us.

The poor waiter endured our ordering – double vegetables, no potato (but not the green beans that are so sautéed in oil they might as well be deep fried). No B, you can’t have a tonic water – you need to go with the club soda (no sugar). Yes, you could have the regular Italian salad dressing.

I did explain to the waiter that we aren’t normally this picky, but we’re on a diet and need to avoid certain foods. (Then B asked him to please take the bread away.) I’m quite certain that he didn’t care.

Fast forward to our meal… I got the filet mignon with butternut squash and steamed broccoli. B got lamb chops with butternut squash and carrots. Everything was good. No complaints. Until…

After eating a few forkfuls of the squash, I noticed there was something in it. No, not sugar, which would have squashed my no carb diet. Something much, much worse.

It was a twist tie. You know what I mean – the flexible metal coated in plastic or paper that is used to tie up loaves of bread or the bag you filled with tomatoes in the produce department of the grocery store.

There was a twist tie in my squash. Or as I like to call it, trash. There was trash in my squash. I know chefs are experimenting with all sorts of new ingredients and techniques these days, but I’m pretty sure none of them would intentionally put a twist tie in a dish. And I’m pretty sure that any decent – or quite frankly, not so decent – establishment would take every precaution to ensure that a twist tie or other non-belonging item does not accidentally end up in a dish.

We immediately alerted the waiter – quietly, and without a lot of drama. He took the squash away and went to speak to the manager.

A few minutes later, the waiter was back to relay that the manager was sorry and he would like to treat us each to a free dessert.

Okay, I appreciate the gesture. Sort of. Not sure it really makes up for what I consider a pretty egregious error. Especially since we did say that we were on a diet. Now, as B said, the manager didn’t know we were on a diet. But the waiter was told, and apparently didn’t remember and failed to inform the manager that a free dessert may not be appropriate remediation. Needless to say, we declined the dessert.

At the end of the day, the meal was pretty average and the restaurant is so old and out of date that it looks dirty and rundown. Regardless of the twist tie in my butternut squash, we’re probably not going back to Ken’s. I think there day is done. At least for this diner.

But still… I’m kind of not okay with how the restaurant chose to handle this. While they did offer us something, I thought they didn’t offer enough. I wasn’t expecting to have our bill entirely taken care of, but I think they could have taken my meal off the check. Yes, the squash was the only thing that was a problem, but I didn’t really feel up to finishing the rest of my food after discovering the twist tie. I certainly didn’t want to order more food, so the dessert felt like empty compensation. And quite frankly, they should have at the very least offered to replace my side with another option. I basically paid for something I couldn’t really eat – BECAUSE IT HAD TRASH IN IT!

What do you think? Did they offer enough, or should they have done more? Have you ever found anything in your food at a restaurant that didn’t belong? What did the restaurant do to make it up to you, and hopefully keep your business? Am I being too hard on the waiter for not remembering that we were on a diet? The comment section is open, folks. I would love to hear about your similar experiences and if you think my expectations are on the money or out of line.

Becoming a Master Bartender

I signed up for a week long master bartending class. I had visions of me walking out with my bartending degree (okay, certificate, but I’m still getting it framed) and the ability to create glamorous cocktails that are prepared by throwing bottles in the air and catching them behind my back, a la Tom Cruise in Cocktail.

After the first day, my perception has changed. Surprising for me, I didn’t drop anything. Maybe because the first lesson was “don’t drop it, spill it, lose it, or give it away” and I was scared to death. (Even though all the waters are filled with water, colored to mimic the liquor or mixer they represent.)

By the end of the week, I should possess the skills needed to make drinks quickly, be a good partner in bartending (because your fellow bartender is as important to you as your customer), and hopefully able to remember some popular drink recipes. There is a test, and there is a lot to remember. I’m a little overwhelmed after just the first day. It’s been a long time since I had to study for a test. Time for flash cards!

So what motivated me to sign up for bartending school? Initially, I just thought it would be fun. It was something I always wanted to do, but it was difficult to find the time when I had a demanding full time job. Enter early retirement and suddenly my calendar is wide open! And I have visions of a really cool bar in the house that B and I eventually buy, with all the different glassware, even a signature cocktail that we’ll always have available to serve our guests. B already signed off on a wine fridge and a keg-o-rater, but I have some work to do on getting the soda gun installed. He thinks it’ll be a little too much trouble for a home bar. (He won’t say that when he has perfectly carbonated tonic water on hand 24-7. My B likes his gin and tonics.)

Plus, I’ve always been a huge fan of bartenders and their work. And after only one day, I’m even more impressed with what they have to know and do in order to be successful. I doubt I’ll ever be able to live up to the abilities of my favorites in the industry, but I can still tip my hat to them by trying to better understand their trade. Right?

And how cool will my bartending school diploma look framed hanging over my bar?

Hopefully I’ll be a better bartender (or drink maker, more realistically) by the end of the week. One thing is for sure, I’ll be a much more critical customer.

Feeling Blu

B decided it was time to inject a little culture into my life and bought tickets to see Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice at the Cutler Majestic Theatre last night. I figured it was an excuse to try a new restaurant, so why not?

After doing a very quick and strictly location based search on Open Table, we ended up at Blu, which is the restaurant at the Sports Club LA inside the Ritz Carlton. (I still want to call it the new Ritz, even though the old Ritz has been the Taj for many years.)

The restaurant is on the 4th floor, and appears to also have a snack bar too. I guess this is all part of being part of the gym. And I probably wouldn’t have been so surprised if I had done any research at all into this place. (I had no idea it was at the Ritz or associated with the gym.) I did find it odd that you have to walk through the cafeteria-like snack bar to get to the hostess stand. Or host stand, I should say, since we were greeted by a man – a man whose tie was about 6” too short. (B could not get over this, nor let it go. Every time the poor guy walked by, he kept urging me to turnaround. Yeah B, I only need to see it once.)

We were coldly greeted, but promptly seated. The host reminded me of one of those “I’m so much better than you” hostesses that are always depicted in TV shows that take place in New York City. I find this odd, because I’ve never actually experienced such a hostess when dining in New York City. Maybe he was preparing for one of the Yankees to show up (based on the crowd of people in Yankees hats and shirts outside the hotel, one could only assume that they were staying at the Ritz while in town to play the Red Sox), and his only resource for how to behave was Sex and the City marathons on E! But anyway…

Once seated, we were very promptly greeted by our server, whose name I do not recall, but was perfectly lovely – polite, friendly, and attentive without being overbearing. B ordered a Hendricks martini and I opted for the ginger mojito. We also ordered an appetizer – spicy mussels in pepperoncini broth.

I love pepperoncini. I eat them like potato chips. Seriously, I’ll fix myself a bowl and snack on them. That being said, other than the boiled pepperoncini that was in the bowl with the mussels (which I ate), there wasn’t any pepperoncini flavor. Nor was there any spice.

Don’t get me wrong, the mussels were actually quite good. They just weren’t spicy, and they didn’t have the advertised pepperoncini flavor. If I were the chef, I might choose to describe them differently.

We each ordered a salad and an entrée – B with his typical Caesar salad and swordfish dinner, and me with the watercress and endive salad and the pan roasted rainbow trout dinner.

My salad was really good – watercress, endive, bleu cheese, candied walnuts and gala apples dressed with (if I recall correctly) a honey vinaigrette. Or maybe it was a champagne vinaigrette. I honestly can’t remember because I think I almost ordered another salad that had whatever dressing my salad didn’t have. The trout came with carrots, spinach and Brussels sprouts, sprinkled with some crispy bacon bits. It was the Brussels sprouts that sold me. I enjoy a nice rainbow trout, but I love Brussels sprouts and will pretty much order anything that is served with them.

The portion of fish was smaller than I’m used to, but it tasted good. (In fact, the whole entrée was a pretty small portion.) The other parts of the plate on the other hand… The carrots tasted like carrots. Fair enough, that’s what I expect carrots to taste like. But the spinach tasted like garlic, the Brussels sprouts tasted like oil, and the bacon tasted like lemon. I didn’t really taste the lemon anywhere else – it was like the bacon was marinated in the lemon. It literally drowned the flavor of the bacon.

For a restaurant that touts its affiliation with a gym, and even boasts “LA Sports Club approved menu selections” on its menu (a mere three – two appetizers and one entrée), there was a pool of oil left on my plate that was big enough to probably re-cook my entire dinner and still have leftover oil. Didn’t feel very healthy to me (although my lips are no longer chapped).

Since we still had some time to kill before the play, we ordered dessert. Usually we split one, but I couldn’t decide so we each ordered one – the cinnamon crème brulee with biscotti and fresh berries for B, and the Kahlua tiramisu for me.

The cinnamon crème brulee was delicious – the perfect amount of cinnamon flavor, and dusted with a sprinkle of powdered sugar. The biscotti were adorable! The smallest cookies I have ever seen. They were like Teddy Graham sized biscotti. Simply precious. And the fresh berries? I mean the single strawberry garnish? It was almost in season, it was so good.

The tiramisu was fine… nothing special. I know Kahlua is a coffee flavored liqueur, but there was no distinct Kahlua flavor in the dessert, just coffee. I think they tried to make it special, and just couldn’t pull it off. Maybe a Bailey’s Irish Cream tiramisu would have been better – a complimentary vs. a similar flavor to what is already in the dessert.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad meal. We ate everything that was put in front of us, and the service was really prompt and good without being rushed. It just didn’t feel like a Ritz Carlton meal. And it certainly didn’t feel like a $121 meal (not including tax, liquor and tip).

(And in case you are wondering, the ginger mojito was quite yummy…)

No Longer An American Girl

I know it’s been a while. I’ve been meaning to check back in, but I’ve fallen victim to the Angry Birds. It’s an obsession.

Anyway, I’ve had a couple ideas of things I want to write about but haven’t mustered up the enthusiasm to put pen to paper, or in this case fingers to keyboard. Until this morning…

B and I were good and went to the gym this morning, and decided to reward ourselves with breakfast out. We were going to go to the diner down the street, but we saw a news program that did a segment on board games and featured the new Angry Birds board game. Of course, I have to have it and I convinced B that we should immediately go to Toys R Us to buy it. Since we were there, we thought maybe we’d treat ourselves to brunch instead.

We found ourselves sitting at the bar at Joe’s American Bar and Grill in Framingham. For those of you who know me, you know that once upon a time I loved this place. Not the greatest food in the world by foodie standards, but solid fare that didn’t disappoint. Granted, I mostly was going there to meet friends at the bar, but I was somewhat of a regular back in the day.

Joe’s is no longer my regular haunt, but B and I will still stop in every now and then. It was a no brainer to stop in for brunch. There entrees are always good, and they include a very tasty Bloody Mary (or you can choose a mimosa, screwdriver, or even a Bud Light if you desire). We arrive promptly at 11 o’clock and seat ourselves at the bar.

The place is practically empty, and it takes a couple of minutes for the bartender to appear. While it really wasn’t that long of a wait (to be fair), a couple of minutes can feel like a lifetime when you are thirsty. When B and I place our Bloody Mary order, we are surprised by the response.

“I’m sorry, we don’t serve alcohol until noon on Sundays.”

A little history for those of you not from Massachusetts… despite its reputation for being an extremely liberal state, Massachusetts still has a few very Puritanical laws on the book. One of them was that a restaurant or bar cannot serve alcohol before noon on Sundays. (But you can get yourself a nice eye opener at 8 a.m. every other day.)

Wait a minute… didn’t that law change? Well, yes it did. In July 2010, the Massachusetts legislature passed the Restaurant Rejuvenation Act which allows restaurants to – you guessed it – serve alcohol before noon on Sundays. The logic behind the act was that more people would go to restaurants for brunch, order alcohol, and business would increase. Along with increased business comes higher tax revenues from meal tax (and an alcohol tax which was present at the time but has since been overturned), and even income tax as more people work in restaurants on Sunday mornings.

For whatever reason, Joe’s American Bar and Grill and assumingly the Back Bay Restaurant Group (which owns Joe’s, as well as a number of other restaurant concepts, all of which are open for Sunday brunch) choose to honor the old Puritanical law as opposed to embracing the new, drinker friendly rules. The bartender could not offer an explanation. In fact, he didn’t appear to know that the law had changed – he just quoted restaurant policy.

I find the fact that Joe’s would not embrace the law change baffling… In fact, after doing some googling on my iPhone while at the restaurant, I even found a quote from their corporate beverage guy stating his support for the proposed legislation and how good it would be for the restaurant industry. (Thankfully I’m a blogger and not a journalist, because for the life of me I cannot put my hands on that quote now – I was planning on siting it.)

It was bad enough that we couldn’t get a Bloody Mary, which was pretty much the entire reason that we went there, but things continued to get worse.

We placed our orders at approximately 11:05. I opt for eggs, sunny side up, with home fries, bacon and an English muffin. I get tomato juice instead of the Bloody Mary. Even though the Bloody Mary is included, the tomato juice is considered an even swap. Not so much in my book – one has vodka, the other does not have vodka. I think if the restaurant is going to have a policy, then perhaps my entrée should have had a slight price reduction or maybe they shouldn’t serve brunch until noon. I don’t think it would hurt business, because the place was pretty freaking empty.

Brunch includes a basket of “breakfast breads.” At around 11:30, the bartender brings us a loaf of their lunch bread, indicating that it “finally finished cooking.” You open for service at 11:00, but you can’t manage to have your bread ready for a half an hour? And not only that, it wasn’t even the bread that was supposed to go with my meal. (Don’t worry – during the wait, we were able to enjoy some cartoons and an exercise DVD infomercial on the two TVs over the bar. Perfectly appropriate bar viewing. Does anyone else find it ironic that they won’t serve alcohol an hour early, but they will play children’s entertainment in the BAR?)

I ask the bartender if they still offer the breakfast breads. He says “you mean the mini muffins?” I’m paraphrasing a bit… he didn’t provide terrible service. Although, I wish that he could have perhaps told us that there was a delay in the bread rather than leaving us sitting there for a half hour. Long story short, we get a basket with some warm carrot cake muffins and some ice cold and dry corn muffins (couldn’t even eat the corn muffins – no amount of butter could save them).

Approximately five minutes later our meals came. So we ordered at 11:05, got bread at around 11:30, and got our meals at 11:35. And the place is still pretty empty. Thirty minutes to get eggs. At an empty restaurant.

And that’s not all.

I prefer my eggs with dry whites and runny yolks, which can be a difficult thing to achieve. So I will settle for a little bit of runniness with my whites (when what I should do is just order them over easy). I do not like to settle for eggs so runny that I have to scrape the raw whites off the cooked whites and move them to the side of my plate.

And for whatever reason, thirty minutes is apparently not enough time to get the bacon and English muffin ready at the same time as the eggs and home fries. Wait a second, correction…. I think the home fries were ready first since they were room temperature at best. The eggs were rushed, and apparently the bacon and English muffin were started after the eggs and home fries were plated.

The bacon gets brought out a minute later, and a minute after that my English muffin appears. Fortunately there was some butter with the lunch bread, otherwise I would not have been given any to butter my toast.

I’m very disappointed. Joe’s has gone up and down over the years, but their brunch was always something I could count on. I’m afraid there has been too many downs over the last several years, and B and I are finally crossing it off our list. A chain restaurant on route 9 in Framingham has gotta keep up – there’s way too much competition in the neighborhood, and those competitors just won a little bit more of our business.

Then again, maybe their brunch was always this disappointing and I’ve just been too drunk on those Bloody Marys to notice. Hmm.