Pizza Ranch

Perham, MN

We were up at my parents' place for Memorial Day weekend, which isn't in Perham. There is a little knitting store in Perham that my wife likes and they were having a sale that weekend, so she really wanted to go. We decided to go Saturday afternoon. It wasn't going to be a problem because my dad and brothers were going to be in the field all day and mom was busy making cakes and going to graduation parties.

I just have to show off this cake she made.





Anyway, we were off to the yarn store, but first thing's first. We needed to get some lunch. We had been planning on going to this barbeque place we had heard about in Hawley, but we weren't sure if it was open or even still there. I consulted with the Google but it didn't have much information. We went anyway and, sure enough, it had moved to Fargo. That's another 40 minutes in the opposite direction of the yarn store. Instead, we headed towards Perham knowing we had other options. We also searched the Garmin to see if there were other options we didn't know about. It had a listing for Dee's Ribs in Detroit Lakes and we were both skeptical about whether that was there either. We juggled 3 options; try Dee's, go to Zorbaz in DL (which is pretty good and the DL one has a pretty good draught beer selection), or Pizza Ranch in Perham. After much hemming and hawing the decision was made to see if Dee's existed then go on to Pizza Ranch if it didn't. Well... unless there was a rib joint inside the clinic, then it wasn't there. Pizza Ranch it was.

Pizza Ranch is an upper midwest chain with restaurants in mostly smaller cities and towns in 9 states. Eating at Pizza Ranch brings back memories of college. There's a Pizza Ranch in Morris, where we went to school, so I have some previous experience with the place. Some of that experience is selling a lot of it at the concession stand as a fundraiser for the baseball team when UMM hosted high school basketball tournaments. The free slices here and there were always nice.

We got to the one in Perham for the lunch buffet. You gotta love a pizza buffet. I know I do. I had some of the cheesy Ranch stix as well as pepperoni, sausage, buffalo chicken, chicken broccoli alfredo, bronco pizzas, and cactus bread. It was all very delicious. The buffalo chicken pizza is particularly good with a little bit of ranch dressing to dip in or drizzle over. It's got some kick but certainly isn't too hot (well it might be too hot for the typical Minnesota taste buds).

Alfredo pizzas can often be not very exciting, but the chicken broccoli alfredo was very tasty. This was the only thin crust pizza on the buffet and I think the thin crust goes well with this particular pizza. Their thin crust is very thin and very crispy. It's rather cracker like, but in a good way. Their original crust keeps the same crispiness on the outer crust and is soft and not too chewy on the inside. The rest of the crust holds up very well. They also have a "skillet crust", but I don't think I've ever had that.

The Bronco pizza is their "all meat" pizza with beef, Italian sausage, pepperoni, Canadian bacon, and bacon pieces. It's hard to make something like that not taste good. The cheesy Ranch stix are basically like a breadstick pizza topped with lots of cheese and then cut into sticks. Again, very tasty.

Finally, the cactus bread. Cactus bread is a can't miss item. It's their version of a streusely dessert pizza. I was somehow able to limit myself to only two pieces of cactus bread. Yum.

Plaza Moreno - Owatonna

Owatonna, MN

My wife and I and friend were in Owatonna last weekend (the one before Memorial Day weekend) and needed to find a place to eat. We decided to take a chance on Plaza Moreno for some Mexican food. The service was good, everything else... meh. It was Mexican food for the meat & potatoes Minnesota palate.

They immediately had chips and salsa at our table to start, naturally. The chips were fine. The salsa was super mild, bland, and very thin and runny. I kept fishing for some chunks of tomato... or anything. Then came time to order dinner. My wife wasn't very hungry so she just ordered a couple tacos. I ordered the pork tamales and our friend ordered the chicken tamales. It was three tamales served with rice and beans, again, naturally. The tamales were ok. The pork had some flavor, but the tamales had zero spice. The rice looked like Spanish rice, but had almost no flavor, and the beans, sadly, were as spicy as the rest of the food. The sour cream on the side seemed very unnecessary. Was that there in case I accidentally found some spice in my food? I did find the spice, though. It was all in a bottle at the end of the table. The hot sauce improved both the tamales and the rice.

My wife said the tacos were ok, but also on the bland side.

On what sometimes is a plus side, the portions were huge. When I was finished it looked like I barely made a dent eventhough I almost finished the tamales and ate over half of the rice. It reminded me of the PJ Bland's commercial.

How is everything?

Average, but there's a lot of it.

Scoops Ice Cream

Bloomington, MN

Since it hit 97° here on Tuesday, ugh, we found ourselves at an ice cream shop. We are both born and bred Minnesotans so we don't need an excuse, like it being incredibly hot in May, just to get ice cream. We'll eat ice cream in any weather. You'd be amazed at how many times we eat ice cream on -20° days. That's just how Minnesotans work. But, since the temperature reached god-awful, ice cream was required.

We played a round on mini-golf at Dred Scott and then went to Scoops, which is just across the street. It's in a strip mall at the corner of Old Shakopee Rd. and Bloomington Ferry Rd. They have a selection of about 15 to 20 different flavors as well as soft serve and shakes. Some of the ice cream is Kemps (I think it was Kemps) and they have a few from Sebastian Joe's, which is a very popular ice cream shop in Minneapolis, and the rest must be their own. If you ask the owner of Scoops (who was in the shop when we were there) a question about the ice cream, it's clear he really has a passion for it.

I had the Pavarotti, which is a Sebatian Joe's flavor. It's banana, caramel, and chocolate. It was really good, but it's rather banana-y so be warned. My wife had the birthday cake ice cream. I don't remember the name. It was a Kemps flavor and it had cake flavored ice cream with chunks of yellow cake and sprinkles mixed in. That was very tasty as well.

Scoops is a fun little shop to visit any time in the Summer (it's closed in the winter) but especially when it's stupidly hot out.

Punch Neapolitan Pizza

Eden Prairie, MN

I took my parents out to Punch Pizza on Mothers Day. I decided on Punch because plans for this weekend were a bit up in the air until the last minute on account of the weather, my dad is a farmer, so I couldn't really make reservations for some Mothers Day brunch. And, I didn't want to wait some place for 45 minutes to an hour and fight crowds and noise for some food where the quality had more than likely been sacrificed in order to feed a giant number of people on account of the holiday. I knew with Punch it may still be busy, but the wait wouldn't be long and the pizza would still be good and, above all, mom would like it.

Punch is authentic Neapolitan style pizza. In fact, they are one of only about 25 U.S. members of Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, which is an international trade association that seeks to “promote the culinary tradition of the Neapolitan pizza”. They have strict rules for members ensuring the authenticity of the pizza, which include wood-burning domed ovens and dough that is made from only flour, yeast, water, and salt. Punch actually flies in some of their toppings from Italy each week.

We arrived there with my parents at 11:35. I remember this exactly because I was going to meet my parents at their hotel at 11:15 in order to be at the restaurant at 11:30 and I would have been perfectly on time had I not nearly forgotten mom's card and had to turn around to get it and waste 5 minutes in the process. My brother and his fiance were meeting us there and beat us by a few minutes. The place was still pretty quiet at this point with maybe not even half of the cozy dining room filled. We spent a few minutes going over the menu and my wife and I tried to answer any questions the best we could but neither of us have done the "craft your own" option, so we weren't exactly sure on all the details. I was willing to spend as much time as needed on the menu because I had some concerns about bringing this group here. My mom, my wife, and I will eat pretty much anything. My brother's fiance is a really picky eater. She does a good job of making it her problem and not everybody else's, but I really don't know the things she likes and doesn't. My dad is Norwegian and most of my siblings display this trait when it comes to food. I seem to have overcome this affliction.

My brother and his fiance ordered and grabbed a table while we spent another minute on the menu. My wife ordered her favorite, the Siciliana (proscuitto, artichoke, picholine olive, basil), and then I ordered my favorite, the Visuvio (spiced salami, saracene olive, cracked red pepper, pepperoncini, basil). Mom order the Palermo (spiced salami, sun-dried tomato, saracene olive, oregano) and then told the girl at the register that "you're going to have to help him" and pointed to dad. Dad then explained to her that "I'm Norwegian". He ended up ordering a Napoli (sauce, oregano, mozzarella) with ham, sausage, onion, and garlic. My brother had also ordered the Palermo and his fiance got the same thing dad did but without the sausage.

We couldn't have been sitting at our table for more than five minutes before our pizzas came, which is about par for the course. It only takes 90 seconds to bake a pizza in their 800° oven (there is video of this on their website). If you aren't familiar with their pizzas, they are individual sized and are very thin crust. The outer crust rises in the oven and the middle stays thin and doesn't get crispy. You will need to be prepared to use your utensils or carefully dive in with both hands. It can be a messy experience between that and the wonderful charred spots on the crust that can leave your fingers and lips black.

I just love Punch and everybody in our group seemed to really like it too. The ingredients at Punch are very flavorful and I love the spiciness of the Visuvio. The only blemish was that my brother must have missed that the Palermo has olives on it and, after eating a couple, he picked the rest off. I'm not a fan of olives myself, but I do kind of like the saracene olives that are on my Vesuvio.

Punch has 6 Twin Cities metro locations.

UPDATE:
Here is that video I mentioned, courtesy of Punch Pizza.



They also have a Flickr page where you can check out some photos like this one.


The Siciliana.

Stella's Fish Cafe

Minneapolis, MN



8 thumbs up!


In all seriousness... ok... in some seriousness, we went to Stella's on Friday night with some friends. We started with the sushi grade tuna dip. It was some pico de gallo, guacamole, and small chunks of slightly seasoned raw tuna served with tortilla chips. That was pretty tasty, or "yummers" as our server liked to say. I had the Florida Stuffed Grouper as my entree, which is stuffed with shrimp, crawfish, and brie. My exact words after taking a huge first bite were, "Oh hells yeah." My wife shared some of her King Crab legs with me too. It was a good night.

Umbria Pizzeria

Bloomington, MN

Yesterday evening we went out to Umbria Pizzeria in Bloomington. They have several other locations around the Twin Cities. Our motivation to go was because we are looking to cater in some pasta for an upcoming party and we knew that Umbria had both catering and pasta. As the name suggests, Umbria also has pizza, which we have had several times.

Let's start with the pizza. There has been an increase and improvement in pizza options in our corner of Bloomington since we moved there a year and a half ago. At first there were a couple of the major delivery chains, Papa Murphy's, and the local Frankie's. Frankie's isn't bad, but it didn't really float our boat. (Ha ha... I just had a flash back to school lunches and pizza boats.) It's worth trying. It just wasn't our thing. Then Umbria showed up, or we just found out about it, followed by Nick-N-Willy's. Our delivery preference has now shifted to Umbria.

Umbria's pizza has a thick crust, not deep dish by any means, but thicker than most places. It's maybe a little breadier than most crusts too... if that's a thing. They have a wide range of toppings and, overall, it makes a very nice pizza. We've had a few different kinds of their gourmet pizzas. The one that stands out the most to me is their gyro pizza. It sounded interesting and possibly tasty and it turned out to be surprisingly awesome. They have some pretty good gyro meat and this Greek white sauce that really makes the pizza. We always end up getting an order of garlic cheese bread when we order pizza, partly because they always have coupons for it and partly because it's really good. It's pretty much perfect.

Back to the pasta. We decided to each order a different pasta so we could have an idea of the quality. My wife ordered the meat ravioli and I got the cheese tortellini and then we shared a bit. The pasta dishes come with a salad and a piece of garlic bread. My tortellini was in a creamy alfredo sauce. A lot of times alfredo sauce can be pretty blah, but this one actually had some parsley and a nice peppery kick to it. The pepper might be a little too much if you're eating an entire plate of it, but I was able to break it up with the garlic bread and some of my wife's ravioli. I would eat it again.

The ravioli were huge and were stuffed with what must have been pork sausage. The sausage had a little bit of a spicy kick to it, but certainly not enough spice to scare away too many Minnesotans. We both enjoyed the ravioli.

After we ate we talked briefly with the manager about catering. He did tell us that the pastas aren't limited to the menu. If we wanted to add stuff like chicken or spinach or whatever, they would do it. It would cost a little extra, but they would do it. They may even do that for you in the restaurant.

We don't really go out for pasta very often. When we do, we like to find a place that's really special, like Donatelli's. However, if we were craving some pasta that we didn't want to make or don't normally make, Umbria would certainly fill the bill.

Super Easy BBQ Pulled Pork Spare Ribs

Seriously, it doesn't get any easier. I make these on occasion. Take a package of pork spare ribs and put them in a crock pot and top with enough of your favorite BBQ sauce, we like Famous Dave's Rich & Sassy, to cover the meat. Put the crock pot on low for, like, 8 hours. It's really probably like 6-8 hours. If you're at home you can check it around 6, but if you turned it on in the morning and went to work it'll be good and ready by the time you get home. Then just take the meat out and pull it apart with a couple forks. After you've done that, dump the shredded meat back in the crock pot and stir it around to rejuice it. There's a lot of tasty juice in the bottom of that crock pot. Serve it on some bread or buns and top with just a little bit of BBQ sauce.

I have in the past put a dry rub on the meat first. It definitely added some nice flavor, but a good BBQ sauce alone really does the trick. This time I put some salt and pepper on the meat before adding the BBQ sauce. I'm not really sure if that did anything, though.