Oysters anyone?

Cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay would be cool and everything. There is also an economic aspect to it.

"Bay pollution is not only an ecological disaster, it's an economic one, too," said Ann Jennings, the group's Virginia director.

For example, the decline of the Chesapeake oyster alone has cost Virginia and Maryland more than $4 billion over the past 30 years, the report said.

Wow! That seems like a lot of oysters. In fact, let's do the math.

$4B over 30 years is over $133M/yr. (I'll assume they're talking about current dollars.)

But how many oysters is that? Well, as of two weeks ago -

The buyers had been paying as much as $42 per bushel but, this week, they lowered the price to $35, said Danny Webster of Deal Island. And rumors are circulating that the price could drop to $30 next week.

OK, at $35/bushel that $133M is going to buy us 3.81 million bushels of oysters per year. Given that the average American eats only about 1 1/2 ounces of oyster meat per year, that ought to pretty well supply all of us.

The PhD Cook is in the House

Winnie has started to post some of the things she is cooking for us. Yup, we're Cooking with the PhD.

Oh, Good Lord!

Winnie wasn't quite ready to make up what I'd gotten out of the freezer for dinner, so we went out. After she had a salad and tiny burger, she said she wouldn't mind a dessert. I had had a half pound burger, but was game to try. So, she ordered this monster.

I don't know if I'll be able to sleep tonight.

Now that's a burger!

Denny Beer Barrel Pub has upgraded their regular menu burgers since the last time I wrote about them. This still isn't as big as their Main Event Charity Burger, though. That one was 80 pounds of meat.

CLEARFIELD, Pa. - It took Brad Sciullo 4 hours and 39 minutes to finish a marathon. A meat marathon, that is. The 5-foot-11, 180-pound western Pennsylvania chef is the first person to eat a monstrosity called the Beer Barrel Belly Bruiser: a 15-pound burger with toppings and a bun that brought the total weight to 20.2 pounds.


The mountain of beef is the product of Denny's Beer Barrel Pub, about 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh in Clearfield.

Sciullo, 21, of Uniontown, said he was surprised he finished the sandwich Monday. "About three hours into it, things got tough," he said.

When asked what possessed him to eat a burger that big, Sciullo said: "I wanted to see if I could."

The burger included a bun, lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, onions, mild banana peppers and a cup each of mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard and relish, pub owner Dennis Liegey said.

For completing the challenge in the under-five-hour time limit, Sciullo won $400, three T-shirts, a certificate "and a burger hangover, as I call it," Liegey said.

Well, I should think so.

Don't believe it exists? Go here.

The New Corn

A few months ago everyone seemed to be on the bandwagon to plant corn for ethanol production, including the little farms around here. Now, it's wheat instead.

A worldwide shortage of wheat caused by droughts and disease abroad is driving up the demand here, along with the price. By next summer, near harvest time for winter wheat – the only major Virginia grain crop that grows during the colder months – the price is expected to be more than $7 a bushel, said Chesapeake extension agent Watson Lawrence.

“The world inventory for wheat is the lowest it’s been in 30 years,” he said. “Last year, farmers were selling wheat for $4.20 a bushel, and they thought that was great.”

Mmmmm, Chili

Tonight I am making beef chili. Not for us, but to take to work on Tuesday. We are having a "going away" for one of my coworkers. USA Major Carr has been called back for a second tour in Iraq. Last time he was gone for about 18 months, and I think he's only been back about 2 years.

I'm hoping this will come out pretty good. Winnie set out all of the spices for me before she went off to band practice tonight. So far it looks, smells, and tastes good.

It's bound to be better than the dinner I made Friday. I did a chicken pot pie, with lots of vegetables and white meat chicken. It looked great. It tasted awful. Mikey has a disturbing tendency to cook without tasting. Otherwise he would have known it needed about 4 times as much salt as I put in. The only salt you could taste, was where I sprinkled a little across the top of the crust. It could also have used some thyme or something.

And then there was the matter of the vegetables. I tried not to over cook them before it all went in the oven, and the result was the potatoes, parsnips and carrots were all hard.

But the dogs loved it.

What Can't Science Accomplish?

If you like pizza. If you like beer. You're sure to be disgusted by pizza beer.

(CBS) ST. CHARLES, Ill. Beer and pizza are tastes that, for many of us, just seem to go together. But, beer that tastes like pizza?

As CBS 2’s Vince Gerasole reports, a suburban brewer has put a new twist on tap.

Something’s brewing in a garage in St. Charles. Tom Seefurth is mixing up a concoction he'll eventually pour out as beer – pizza beer.

“It's pizza and beer in a bottle,” Seefurth, a self-proclaimed beer nut, says.

There are actually real pieces of pizza stirred into the mix.

Road Eats! - IV (Big Texan)

My theory when I started posting these little blurbs about restaurants was that I would do one really good restaurant (Good Eats!) and a matching average or dive place that I also liked for some reason (Road Eats!). As I start to make a list for myself though, I find I know a lot more dives than really good places. That's not too surprising since going to the good places is usually reserved for an anniversary or birthday, or some sort of special occasion.

Compounding this, I wanted to include hyperlinks to every place I named. This in turn cuts down on the dive places as, after all, how many of them are going to have web sites? So, neither group is getting as many examples as I wanted. Ah, well! What can you do?



Today I wanted to mention the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo, Texas. It's right on the northside frontage road along I-40 on the east end of town. If you've driven anywhere on the Interstates in Oklahoma, Texas, or New Mexico, and probably beyond, you seen signs encouraging you to stop there.

When we lived in Oklahoma City and when we drove to Denver we would pass through Amarillo. The first couple times we just kept going, thinking it was funny. But, eventually we had to stop in. It was all you could expect for road food.

It's quite a meat-heavy joint, not surprisingly. (It would make all of my co-workers from India faint.) Steak, and steak, and more steak.

The signature meal is the 72-oz. steak for $72. About 42,000 people have ordered it, and only 7,000 have finished it. They ask that you pay for this ahead of time, and then refund your money if you finish it.

They say the youngest person to ever finish eating the entire steak was an 11-yr. old boy. I think I know who this was! Clearly, this was Bobby Hill.

Road Eats! - III (Lambert's Cafe)

One of the places we once discovered is "Lambert's Cafe, The Only Home of Throwed Rolls." We started seeing signs for this back in Kansas, and the place is located an entire state away, south of St. Louis, just off of I-55. Winnie's maiden name is Lambert, so we had to stop in.

It's definitely a family place. The sort of place chain restaurants like Cracker Barrel wish they could be. A nice relaxing, fun atmosphere after being on the road all day.

"Throwed rolls"? What's that mean? It means a guy comes out of the kitchen with a pan of rolls just out of the oven, and a pair of tongs. He yells "who wants a roll?" You stick up your hand. He picks it up with the tongs, and throws it across the room to you. Do you want some sorghum syrup on that?

Food is simple, and the "pass-arounds" are a great deal and fun. They put a big piece of butcher paper on your table, and then come around and scoop out fried okra, or potatoes or whatever on to it. Dig in and share.

Good Eats! - III (Briarwood Inn)

Continuing our on-going restaurant reviews, we come to The Briarwood Inn.

I first visited the Briarwood in about 1978. The place had just opened as an upscale restaurant replacing what was formerly, as I recall, a biker bar. The professors in my department took out the graduate students for drinks and hors-d'oeuvre s just before Christmas.

That was my only visit until 31 Aug 1980, when Winnie and I had our wedding reception their. What a Sunday brunch that was! After we moved back to Colorado we went there several times for anniversary's and even a couple of times for lunch. It was never less than great.

All of the dinners come with this amazing appetizer tray with shrimp, pate, salmon butter, etc. Follow this up with your entree. Just when you think you can't eat another bite, they show up with a dessert tray of petit fours and fruit. Groan!

Road Eats! - II (Three Crabs)

Another restaurant in Sequim, Washington is the Three Crabs. It makes the "road eats" list rather than the "good eats" list.

Look, there's nothing wrong with the place, we just thought it was over-hyped, and pretty much average seafood sort of fare. Yes, there's a nice view, and it's a place you can take the family, but listing it as one of the greatest restaurants in the Pacific Northwest is too much.

If you travel anywhere on the Olympic Peninsula you are going to run across flyers for this place. Go ahead and visit. Just be aware; it started as a roadside seafood shack, and the main difference now is that you eat inside.

Good Eats! - II (C'est Si Bon!)

Swinging over to the far side of the country, another great restaurant is C'est Si Bon in Sequim, Washington. (Yes, my niece, near you!). We discovered this place in a magazine, I think it was, when we visited Washington for a second honeymoon in 1990.

It's a family run, French restaurant. The wife is the chef, the husband the host, and I think their kids sometimes wait tables too. We met everyone the first time, and they were really nice (considering my faux pas about ordering white wine and red meat). It's someplace we stop every time we are in the area.

Expensive? Well, duh! But how could you resist this menu?

Road Eats! (Denny's Beer Barrel Pub)

By contrast there are good to not-so-good places everywhere to eat. Maybe I should say something about those too.

How about ordering up the world's biggest burger. -

CLEARFIELD, Pa. -- The newest addition to the menu at Denny's Beer Barrel
Pub is one meaty monstrosity of a burger.
The Beer Barrel Main Event Charity
Burger weighs in at 123 pounds. The sizable sandwich features an 80-pound beef
patty, along with a pound each of lettuce, ketchup, relish, mustard and
mayonnaise, 160 slices of cheese, up to five onions and 12 tomatoes.

It's topped with a couple of pounds of banana peppers and 33 pickles, then sandwiched
into a 30-pound bun.

There's a pretty hefty price tag, too: $379.

For the light eater, they also have 2- and 3-lb. burgers.

Good Eats! (River's Inn)

Food is a "favorite thing" for me. (Just look at me.) There are quite few places I've visited that are great dining spots. So, I'm going to highlight some of these over time.

I'll start with a plug for this great restaurant, all of a mile from our house - The River's Inn.

They almost bought it in Hurricane Isabel. But it's a great place to go for a special occasion, or even a special lunch sometime. We also like to visit in the summer when the Crab Deck is open, and eat outside.

We've had several anniversary dinners here, including one I set up where the champagne was already chilled and at the table when we arrived. The menu is almost exclusively seafood, to no one's surprise, but there can be some other good things as well.