August Birthdays: Part 1

Alright, in full disclosure, today was not actually a day in August nor was it any family or friend's birthday. Due to schedule conflicts, however, it was necessary to celebrate my mom's birthday a little early. This commenced with a breakfast cooked by my dad. That started off with some breakfast sausage with bacon.

Look at all that wonderful grease! Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm! But what to do with it? Surely we can't let it go to waste. Oh no, far from it!

In go the eggs! Nothing like eggs cooked in all natural grease! But hey, it's more natural than oils, spray oils, and maybe even butter. After all, this is literally just melted fat. I know butter is essentially the same thing, but butter often has other ingredients mixed in there for flavor or texture. This is plain and simple fat. It's also plain and simple delicious!

To round out the breakfast, some buttered toast was added.

This was essentially all I would eat until dinner, since we would be going out to dinner. It was decided that we would be dining at a barbecue restaurant. This particular restaurant was also voted one of the best overall restaurants in Kansas City. If it was really that good, I knew I wouldn't be holding back, so I saved as much room as possible for the impending expansion.

I did, however, indulge in a very small portion of cashews, pecans, almonds, and chocolate. This also served to kick start my metabolism after a reasonably long time without eating.

But then it was time. It was time to eat!

In case you can't quite tell what the sign says, it's "Q39 BBQ, Wood Fired Grill, Bar." Q obviously stands for barbecue, and 39 stands for the street that it's on, that is, 39th Street. After looking over the menu, we decided to start with a couple appetizers. The first one was macaroni and cheese.

The second one was a cheese fondue with pretzel bread and apples.

Both were good, but let me tell you the pretzel bread with cheese fondue was really, really good.

For my main course, I got one of their combo plates. This one included beef brisket, burnt ends, and a rib. It came with corn bread, potato salad, and cole slaw with some extra barbecue sauce as well.

After I had eaten my corn bread, my mom volunteered some of her fries to visit my plate.

After sampling, resampling, and utterly devouring everything, I can say that everything was extremely good. The true winners were the brisket and burnt ends, and the cole slaw was very good as well. The barbecue sauce was perfectly spicy. Overall, after everything was eaten and I had considered all the barbecue that I had ever eaten, I came to the conclusion that this was one of my favorites. I will mention, though, that I am not ready to say that this is better than Joe's KC (formerly Oklahoma Joe's). I would quite literally need to do a side by side comparison of the same items (ribs, burnt ends, brisket) to make a real decision. The other thing to consider is that Q39 is a sit down restaurant, whereas Joe's KC is a fast service place where you go up to the counter and order then sit down. But if you're looking for a slightly more fancy place or are all about being waited on, Q39 does that quite well. I think that even if I compared the two side by side and made a decision based only on food quality and flavor, I could still be happy going to either. It really depends on the experience you're looking for.

But now, here comes some more excitement. I leaked a little teaser yesterday, and the full reveal is about to happen. Yesterday, I made a cake. It was the first cake I have made in quite some time. Now, I used to be quite the cake boss, so it wasn't my first rodeo by any stretch of the imagination. But it was a new recipe. I wanted to make the best chocolate cake ever, so I scoured the interwebs in search of just that. I found that there are a lot of chocolate cake recipes with "best ever" in the title, so it was actually pretty challenging to find a good recipe. Eventually, though, I found one. I read through the article, the ingredients, the directions, and I was sold. The culmination of that searching and my efforts:

Not my most sophisticated cake decorating, but it gets the point across perfectly I think.

Paired with some of that cookie dough ice cream from last night, it was really good!

I'm not sure if I can call this the best chocolate cake I've ever had, but the chocolate buttercream frosting was definitely up there with the best frosting ever! I'd call this cake a success. It looked decent, tasted good, and above all else my mom really liked it. That's really all that matters, after all! Happy Birthday Mom!