Foods or meals you don't find in restaurants

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Actually, I've seen Chicken & Dumplings at a number of "home-style" restaurants, but the "dumplings" are the Pennsylvania Dutch thick-noodle type - not the Czech/German bread/potato type.
 
I've never seen pasties like grandma use to make..Or her sweet/sour red cabbage and ribs...
Well guess I better make some next week :LOL:

kadesma
 
mish said:
Great topic, vanwingen! Never having heard of City Chicken, I did some poking around. The results I found was it is not chicken. During the depression when chicken was too expensive, the dish was made with pork and shaped in the form of chicken drumsticks or on skewers?

There was a great Polish restaurant in the East Village in NYC I miss, growing up in the Big Apple. A restaurant that served several different stuffed pierogies, and a great breakfast menu. I miss a little restaurant chain? called Chock Full o' Nuts - cream cheese on date nut bread, a cup o coffee and a brownie. Sandwiches were very thin - almost like tea sandwiches, but bigger.

I remember? a place called Tad's Steak House ? growing up. Great steak and all the fixin's. The food at the Horn & Hardhart Automat (sp?) in NYC. Sure there are others. Will have to go back in my memory bank.

so, it's really pigs dressed up like chicken, drag racing and blaring their music.
 
I don't think i've ever seen manicotti served in a restaraunt, but I think it's more of a "make at home" type food so it could be that I just wasn't looking for it. Another one of my favorites is the "leftovers sandwich". It usually appears shortly after holidays and combines one of everything in your fridge.

I also think a lot of families have their own creations that act as comfort food for them, and that you would never see in a restaraunt. Every faction of my family has some sort mac 'n cheese variation, be it with tuna and peas, or ketchup and hot dogs, etc.

This made me think about something else though; non-traditional holiday foods. I know since my dad has remarried, we have brought some of my step-moms foods into the home (she's Filipino(sp?) and Polish). Our staple christmas food used to be a turkey or a ham, but now we have various kinds of polish sausage for christmas dinner.

My girflfriend's family (mexican) does a deep-fried turkey now in addition to their more traditional christmas fare which used to include carnitas, barbacoa(sp?), tamales, and tostadas.

Anyone else have any special holiday meals?
 
Actually we do collect old restaurant menus, although recently they have become very dear, and yes, chicken was for years, even before the depression, more expensive than many meats.

Have some menus where chicken is as expensive as fine cuts of beef.

So I guess faux chicken with pork should not seem all that strange.

Anyway would love a recipe.

As far as dishes that are not generally served in restaurants, and I will use the term 'anymore', for they once were, I came up with:

Steak Dianne
Veal Oscar
Lobster Thermidor
Lobster Newburg
Veal Cordon Bleu

Maybe these are still available, but we have not seen them in years.

But then again maybe we just don't get out enough or to the right places.
 
Sometimes, when we're particularly inspired, HB and I fix meals that you couldn't get in a restaurant, unless it was some very high-priced gourmet joint. I remember in particular a fresh venison tenderloin that we marinated, grilled to rare, and sliced into medallions.
I've never seen Dutch oven pot roast in a restaurant. I think that would be very difficult to prepare in quantity, and it's not something you could fix to order, either.
 
texasgirl said:
What is city chicken? They ride a bus instead of a horse??

I was biting my tongue, TG... but you dragged it out of me.

City Chicken:

a. Fear of going to the City

b. The original title for "Sex and the City"

c. Mudbug, help me think of the third. :LOL:
 
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City chicken...my mom made it for block parties when I was a kid. The knowledge of how it was made passed with her. I hadn't had it in almost 20 years, when (ironically enough, just a few weeks ago) I made a chicken recipe out of one of Ina Garten's cookbooks called something else, took one bite and
realized that I had just found it once more :P (the style was a bit different...my mom made them in cube form on skewers, Ina's versions are flattened breasts). Was so amazingly pleased at the discovery.

As to what you don't see served anymore...goulash comes immediately to mind. Pot roast is somewhat difficult to find (at least a good one). Stuffed shells (thank god). Porcupine meatballs (or any meatball for that matter).
 
Constance said:
Sometimes, when we're particularly inspired, HB and I fix meals that you couldn't get in a restaurant, unless it was some very high-priced gourmet joint. I remember in particular a fresh venison tenderloin that we marinated, grilled to rare, and sliced into medallions.
I've never seen Dutch oven pot roast in a restaurant. I think that would be very difficult to prepare in quantity, and it's not something you could fix to order, either.

Where I work, we do a "Family Style" dinner every Wednesday. Today happens to be Prime Rib (last Wednesday of the month, going to be BUSY, especially serving Prime Rib).

Usually once a month we'll do a Pot Roast dinner. We don't actually use a dutch oven for it, though. We cook enough small roasts to feed a couple hundred people, and we cook it it by first browning, then simmering all the roasts in a Trunion (or Tilting) skillet. This is a huge piece of equipment, about 4 x 3 x 1.5'. With that much surface area, we can brown off all the roasts usually in 2 or 3 batches, deglaze with stock, then add the roasts back in and simmer until done. When those are done, we'll pull the roasts out and store them in 4" hotel pans (the big pans used for steam tables), and store those, wrapped, in a hot box until service. Well simmer some carrots in the juices in the tilt skillet, then strain those out and hold them in the same manner. Finally, we reduce the liquid, then tighten it into gravy. We serve this with mashed potatoes.

This way, we can cut the roasts to order when tickets come back. Leftover get used for different things, usually to feed the help.
 
mish said:
I was biting my tongue, TG... but you dragged it out of me.

City Chicken:

a. Fear of going to the City

b. The original title for "Sex and the City"

c. Mudbug, help me think of the third. :LOL:

sorry I'm late to the rescue, mish - here goes....more than one, I'm afraid:

fried chicken that earned an M.B.A.

recent female liberal arts undergraduate starting in the word processing pool at some big muckety-muck firm downtown
 
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