Colorado Cuisine

This past week, I've been out of town. I was sharing an extended stay hotel room with 3-4 other people, and there were not enough dishes for that in the meager kitchen. So, even though we'd intended on cooking food, we mostly just ate out. If one of the guys had had any say about it, I think we would have eaten at Chick Fillet every night. The first Saturday we arrived at 10:10pm, all of 10 minutes after it closed, and then on Sundays it is closed! So. We went there two other times.

We also went to two italian places. Biaggio's was really good! I ate a great cheese ravioli with a cream, tomato and pesto sauce. Yummy. The bread was served with a oil/cheese mixture the waiter touted as "Biaggio butter", which was just olive oil, basil, pepper, parmesean cheese. However, when one of my friends remade it (because there was a lot of bread!) he called it "Biaggio butter alla Phil" or "Biaggio butter alla Awesome" because he added salt. I did it better though because I swirled the olive oil, which TOTALLY makes a difference :P The food was pretty great overall, although a little expensive. The other place wasn't very great, Zio's Italian kitchen. We went for lunch and I got a standard manicotti. They used a weird combination of cheeses (maybe some romano or something that was a lot sharper, which isn't great for Italian food?). I never ate the left overs, although I wanted to just on principle.

There was also a restaurant called SmashBurger. It wasn't as great as everyone was saying. I had a burger with bluecheese, and the standard toppings. I didn't really like the smash sauce and the rosemary fries were so so. The other middle class food (not FAST food but not a sit down restaurant) I ate was Noodles and Company. I eat that all the time at home, even just the simple buttered noodles. It was definately not as good as the stuff on the east coast. It probably has to do with the altitude though, athough I don't have much experience with cooking at different altidudes.

The only real thing that I cooked all week was a roasted red pepper and garlic chicken sliced over and garlic, cheese, olive oil pasta. The picture of it is near the top. It wasn't really all that great but for the place we had it was the best we could do. It was so strange not even having the basic spices around. I didn't even marinade the chicken myself; it was the Sassy Chicken from Whole Foods. I found it very interesting that half the pasta tasted extremely bland, and some of it was only so so. My friend had made half the pasta previously and so I could tell how amazing salt is for pasta since mine tasted quite nice. Everyone liked the dish though, so that was pretty great!

Anyway, I'm back now, will try to post more!