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The preceding culinary period has been a long stream of pop tarts, corn dogs, criminally uniform ravioli, and turkey sandwiches. Less turkey sandwiches than I should have eaten, as I forayed too often into the aforementioned realm of over salted/sugared/deep-fried foods, but I finished. I lived to tell the tale. I escaped with my desire for fine foods intact. The terrorists haven't won this round.

So, Christmas, needless to say, has been an equally steady stream of fine items: chevre, well-crafted fishes, aerated wines, (non-fried, non-canned, non-peaked colored, non-limp) vegetables, and good Oklahoma meat products. It's been a delight to taste and then recall memories of good food, past recollections meeting present culinary tastes and aromas, in a cosmic uniting of..really, acceptable, non-offensive foods.

Christmas has also delivered that stark reminder that four months of not writing about food or men makes an already amateur food/men critic more amateur. We'll call this a growing post, to be followed subsequently by wittier culinary/social commentary. I will note, however, trip food highlights included a male dining companion at Pizza Hut. However, critiqueing food in places like that is like criticizing a kindergartner's coloring skills... it's just kinda..mean.

Let us begin by what I missed the most: American food. From the grill out back or from the fancy chef. Eaten in bed or on oddly-shaped modern plates or in a grease-reeked diner or on wobbly checked-tablecloth-decked tables or in plastic baskets. It really hasn't mattered.

Christmas (as the holiday on the 25th of December) sort of went on without me this year. My Christmas lunch was at the Atlanta airport:

It was both some of the worst Chinese I've ever eaten, as well as the Chinese meal I have eaten the most quickly (to keep from missing my flight back to a destination I just came from because of the weather).

Dinner was better, which is saying little. When you know you are going to miss Christmas and have neither car nor cable, you pay $17 for a veggie pizza.

And you eat it in bed.

And act Miss Haversham like, but without the wedding dress. But the same sort of despondency, but with microbrewed beer. Patiently attending you on your nightstand.

Then you snap out of it, your parents thoughtfully buy you a business class seat home when the weather clears so you don't despondently continue eating bad food in bed, and you have Christmas. Hours after you land. Then you start enjoying America's culinary fruits.

One of the top fruits in Oklahoma is Chelino's. We are such dedicated patrons that my father purchased my mother and I Chelino's aprons for Christmas. It's not American food, but it's Tex Mex and thus American by extension. And they very ably make Tex Mex food without slathering everything with cheese; there is a remarkable amount of non-orange/brown color on their plates.

Chelino's coctel de camaron, with avocado, onions, citrus juice (orange?), and shrimp

Chelino's array of chip baths: salsa, queso, relish and their "special salsa" (free, not on the menu, and spicy)

Then we began the process of new-restaurant-sampling. My dad is very good with spotting new restaurants and taking me there when I'm in town. We ventured to Sage, an innovative little cafe in the Deep Deuce area of OKC. The menu is slightly pricey, pretentious enough to attract a crowd that will keep them in business, but with a solidly varied menu to encourage multiple visits. The service was slow and the soup was lukewarm but I got chocolate cake bigger than my head.

Ground turkey noodle soup (with fancy grilled, buttered bread)

My double-entree topped salad with shrimp and portabello mushroom, with chevre and tomatoes over spinach (with balsamic vinaigrette)

It's not just big because it's in the foreground.

After hydrating after airplane flights, I got a flight: of Belgian beers at McNellie's in downtown OKC, which included Chimay, Maredsous, Hoegaarden, Lindeman’s Framboise, Triple Karmeleit. The last two were a bit sweet, but look how beautiful they are in their little glasses.

I also got fish and chips, but if I don't photograph unhealthy food, it's like the calories don't count.

Then, I got my first home-cooked meal: fish from the grill on a bitterly frigid night (from what I heard, I lazily drank my beer inside). My dad talentedly made:

Salmon on a cedar board with carmelized pecans

...and swordfish with lime. And some barbecued shrimps.

Satisfied with our American culinary forays, we ventured to a new Mediterranean restaurant, Camilya's on May Avenue. Camilya needs a website, but that's it. One man ably cooked for us and served us delightful lunches. Tabbouleh is our constant: we judge the quality of a Mediterranean place by the proportions of parsley to bulghar wheat and oil to lemon juice. Tabbouleh construction is indicative of a restaurant's broader ability to make anything.

My dad's perfect, photogenic taboulleh

An inviting cornucopia of kafta meat

...And my lunch, tabbouleh and hashwa (rice cooked with black angus ground beef, pine nuts and almonds, served with cucumber/yogurt sauce)

Mere hours later, we celebrated a New Years vespers dinner (in early anticipation of the new year) at Paseo Grill. Just thinking about dinner has caused me to readjust my typing position to a more serious (combative) posture. I joke about restaurant pretension, but in a restaurant, I'm paying to be served. And, I'm the boss. To myself pretentiously be self-referential, this same experience has happened before. I admire a restaurant's effort to keep on-schedule for timely table turnover. I don't appreciate when a cheeky waitress calmly explains to discerning adults that the new tenants of our table have arrived and we can get our dessert to -go, implying that eating cheesecake from a Styrofoam box in the parking lot will soften the blow of spending $150-plus dollars to be unceremoniously kicked out of your feed trough for the next herd to come in.

I was already a little perturbed that I left my driver's license in my gym jacket. This, in turn, caused me to be a bit humiliated that I had to pull out four types of identification, piecing together analytically that my voter registration card, judging by its date of issuance, suggested I was at least 21 now. I even pointed out I had wrinkles. My mom ordered my cocktail, let me sneak the four sips I got out of it, kindly ordered my chardonnay for me, and played waitress/manager look-out so I could enjoy it without being arrested. I'll demur on criticizing America's liquor laws now, and focus my attention instead squarely on Paseo Grill's unsophisticated and offensive efforts to kick out guests 89 minutes after they are seated, to make room for the next set of fools to move in and blow on the same New Year's noisemakers. I sort of wish I had made a scene; they couldn't have blamed it on the alcohol.

Dinner was tasty though: blackened trout with avocado kiwi salsa, a side of orzo and pine nut pilaf, and a small up of a hearts of palm and artichoke medley salad. It would have been a hell of a lot better if the wine were in front of me instead of by my mother, to be spirited away when no ridiculous wait staff were watching.

My dad had the ribeye...

My mom had the filet...

And I got the last laugh because I get to write nasty things about the Paseo Grill on my blog prolifically read in the Oklahoma restaurant community.

And we got Christmas-lights viewing instead of dessert.

New Year's Day brought football and pastitsio/dolmathes eating. As well as some pretty sweet baconful black-eyed peas, plus a visit from Yiayia.


New Year's resolutions took us to Ron's Hamburgers, home of the $16.95 burger (not inflated DC burger prices because of the ridiculous addition of truffle oil), the "Who's Your Daddy," two patties of beef, seven slices of cheese, with fried and raw onions. My burger was $3, so imagine the beef- to-dollars extrapolation. And check out the fried okra: perfectly crisp and Kermit-green on the inside.

Below, my dad's cheeseburger steak.

After extricating ourselves from the grease-induced euphoria, we took advantage of OKC's Museum of Art. There's no food link here, but the photos are too good. Plus, I went on a date here way back in the last decade, so there's a man link. But he lingered way too long in the modern art wing and I think I had to buy our lunch, so we'll just keep this excursion non-blog-germane. The museum has a great collection of glass from eccentric artist Dale Chihuly.


The glass tower is 55 ft. tall.. it's delicate and majestic and made by a guy (non-pirate) with an eye-patch.

Sans eye patches.

While it's a convenient segueway to call BBQ art, we all agreed pre-blog-writing today that Leo's BBQ's banana cake is art. Call it performance, edible, or 3D art, it's genius.

I got a mangled piece, but liked the linearity of the barbecue sauces ("red is hot, white is not"). But admire this:

And at a coy-ish banana cake angle:

If you've read this far, I thank you. Bon appetit.