Day 4 of Las Vegas

With the okay buffet at the Bellagio and the bad service at the bar at the Wynn, we wanted a day where we knew that we would have a good time.  This started with a lunch that my wife was looking forward to for the whole trip:

Hot n Juicy has the best tasting hot and garlic sauce that we have ever had.  So my wife got a lobster and mussels and I ordered the Cajun fries and a basket of potatoes and sausage.

Cajun fries were crispy and spicy.  A 3 out of 5 stars.

I placed the potatoes and sausage on the fries, so any sauce would drip on them and make them tastier.  Again, a 4 out of 5 as being good.  The thing with this place is that the food is always good.  It is well worth a trip for people who like seafood and sausage and things like this.  http://hotnjuicycrawfish.com/

My wife wanted to check out a tea store and we went to this place on the same road called Tea Station.

It was a simple place inside, seats for maybe 20 people, and a bar where the guy behind it would make all of the tea and tea drinks.  My wife ordered a honeydew milk tea and the cup smelled like fresh cut honeydew, a 3 out of 5 stars. 

She ordered a desert for the two of us to share, I did not know it would be huge:

What this is: is a giant shaved ice desert.  It has a huge mound of shaved ice in the middle.  It had red beans on top, grass jelly to the left, some boba to the right and the foreground has some agar balls made with rice, purple potato and sweet potato.  There was a small shot glass of warmed up sweetened condensed milk that was poured on top of everything.  Everything turned into something very sweet and yet most of it was very low calories.  It was delicious and an easy 3 out of 5 stars.

That night, we had reservations for the Foundation Room: (http://www.houseofblues.com/lasvegas/fr)

The food here is not expensive, but not cheap either.  The service was as good as Rose.Rabbit.Lie and they were very interesting and knowledgeable.  We ordered some pork belly:

An easy 4 out of 5 stars.

We ordered a side of grilled asparagus, which was a 3 out of 5 stars:

My wife had ordered two appetizer dishes as her main course: The yellow tail tartar bruschetta and the Stefano Farms burrata:

She loved both and would give a 4 out of 5 stars.

I ordered an 8 oz steak with a horseradish crust:

This very good, but not super.  I do eat some horseradish and spicy foods, but this crust was very spicy and had my scraping it off of the top of the steak to cut it.  It was tender, perfectly cooked to medium rare and completely seasoned.  I'd give it a 3 out of 5 stars.

The Foundation Room is a special members only or paid access club at the top of the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino.  The bar area has music and some dancing space for the DJ, there is a balcony overlooking the strip and on the other side is the restaurant, which was good enough for us to return.  Check it out if you go there and please wear something nice, no chubbies and flip-flops.

Russian hamburgers or country fried steak?

While in this Russian, Polish and German cookbook, there was another recipe I was trying: Russian Hamburgers.  Now, what makes this interesting is that this recipe looks like it descended from Wiener Schnitzel from Germany.  Wiener Schnitzel and chicken fried steak, which are almost identical, is basically a meat cutlet, coated in flour or batter and lightly fried in a hot pan.  These Russian Hamburgers are very similar.

What started was I switched out some ground turkey for ground beef, which does change the flavor but makes them less calories.  As per the recipe, I had a bowl of bread crumbs, added milk and mixed them with meat.  I then added the egg and mixed it and created the patties.  I dipped the patties in simple flour and laid them carefully in a hot pan with some extra virgin olive oil.

You cook them for a few minutes on each side and then take them out when they are finished.  I actually under-cooked mine so when they are re-heated for lunches and dinners they come out perfect and not too dry such as some re-heated turkey or chicken items.

These should be served with your favorite condiments and perhaps some cooked cabbage, another recipe from the same cookbook, where you bake some cabbage with some tomatoes and chili powder.

Now, as I have listed up there; it is thought that this recipe derived from Wiener Schnitzel.  A theory is that German immigrants brought this recipe to America where it was turned into a Southern favorite: chicken or country fired steak.  Wikipedia suggests that perhaps it had changed names because of the war with Germany.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_fried_steak