Have we gone lazy?

I was thinking about this the other day when I was making my own ice cream.  But, have we become so lazy of a society that we don't make anything ourselves anymore?  People know that bad things like artificial colors, artificial flavors and sugar substitutes can be found in all sorts of store bought items but is it really so difficult to make something at home?  People are willing to go and shell out $10 for a quart of freshly made ice cream but yet with about $5 of ingredients, you can make this all at home. 

I even thought about the work that goes into getting some fresh corn to eat.  I bought a selection of white and yellow corn for 50 cents each at Dierburgs.  I then shucked them, which means to remove the stalk and the silk, and then trimmed them and boiled them in water for 10 minutes.

 

After I cooked them, I let them cool off and then held them on their ends and trimmed the corn off of them.  The corn will get mixed up in some fake butter and salt and taste like sweet, sweet corn.

I also planned on making some chili and any chili you make your own, is better than canned.  So, the hardest part of chili is perhaps the soaking of the beans.  These beans soaked for almost 24 hours.

I took this, added some chopped up steak pieces that were marinating in some Budweiser, and then cooked it up with some garlic, onions, tomatoes and other goodies.

Also, I know that most people can't do this, but a good ice cream machine is totally worth it.

I am a Highlander...

And so the Highlander was hungry and thirsty and found himself a good lunch meal at the Highlands Brewing company in Kirkwood.  My friend and I decided we needed a drink along with some good food and as we didn't have the hour to wait to get a table at the Bottleworks, we decided to go to Kirkwood and enjoy the Highlands Brewing company.  The place is nice as they do brew their own beers, all for draft.  We first sat down and I tried their 5 beer flight and unlike other places that have beer samplers, I had the opportunity to choose what beers became part of the sampler.

Next we had to have some appetizers.  I ordered the fresh chips and an order of fried greenbeans.

The chips were simply made, good chips where all of them were cooked all of the way through, unlike other bars that serve fresh made chips.  They had some Parmesan cheese on them and they were lightly salted.  They were also served with a Santa Fe ranch sauce.  The sauce really didn't go well with the chips and they tasted great with a few splashes of malt vinegar.  The chips were better than other Saint Louis bars/pubs and I give them about a 3 out of 5 stars.

The fried green beans, I had to get as I never heard of them before, outside of that traditional German casarole.  The beans were coated with the same beer batter that they often use on onion rings and then fried, just so the beans were still crisp and very tender and the coating was crunchy.  They were very good and I would give them a 4 out of 5.

We then ordered and I had a simple burger.  The reason for the burger as while it may have sounded like a Scottish restaurant, there was more Italian things on the menu.  Who goes into a bar for Chicken Marsela?  I ordered their burger, without the cheese, because by default, it was a cheese burger.  I also ordered it medium, so I expected some amount of pink.  When I go it though, it was beyond well done, with some areas on the outside charred.  Normally this is a good thing, but in my experience, places char the outside of a burger when they want to hide something: in this case, the burger had no flavoring.  The burger was okay, as in, it wasn't cooked the way I wanted it and it tasted like a very dried out hamburger.  A 2 out of 5 stars in my book.

Now, overall, I would give the place a 3 out of 5 stars as the only things that were really good were the starters.  My friend ordered a Reuben sandwich and it hardly had any thousand island dressing and tasted okay but wasn't great.