Ruby Tuesday

1120 Shapiro Drive
Festus, Mo.
On the Web

September 2015 marks this prestigious journal's sixth anniversary! Nearly three hundred highly
researched, sane and articulate posts, highlighting and occasionally skewering eateries in our limited universe.
Once again, I feel obligated to regale you, the fans, with the story of the birth of Eat and Critique.
By September, 2009, we'd lived in Jefferson County for a little over three years. We continued a tradition, an appointment of going out to eat on Saturday evenings. It was a way to interrupt our very busy lifestyles and spend some quality 'us' time.
Choosing a place to go was always a chore. Three years in, we'd pretty much settled into a rut of a handful of places. One of those places was Ruby Tuesday.
If we were celebrating something, a new job, a new client,, etc. This is where we would go, since it was the pricier of the rut-places. I usually got the same thing, yeah the rut was that deep. Steak, mashed potatoes and sauteed green beans. This particular meal, everything went wrong. The steak was overcooked, the tea was bitter, the potatoes over salted, the service was lousy, the courses were terribly timed, the check took forever, our waiter disappeared, twice. . .
I was livid. I complained about it for hours, maybe days. I was threatening to write a terse letter to the corporation. Somewhere in all that righteous indignation, I declared that we would absolutely, positively, drag ourselves out of that rut and find new places.
That's is how all of this started. My frustration with a lousy meal at Ruby Tuesday.
So, in honor of that bad meal, we decided to go there on this, our sixth anniversary.

The Place:
It's a Ruby Tuesday, one of the many mid-level chains of 'sports bars' like TGI Friday, Chili's, Outback, etc. Like the one parodied in the movie 'Office Space'. I can't usually tell them apart on the inside. They used to have more sports junk on the walls, but that went away in a small, infrequent, but refreshing display of good taste.
As you step in, you come face to face for the only real reason we ever go there, the salad bar.
We were greeted and seated in an area to the left of the bar, pretty much the same place we always get seated. Katy introduced herself and handed out menus. Not that we really needed menus, traditionally we always get pretty much the same thing.
The Food:
 The main thing at RT is the salad bar. We pick our meals based on how hungry we will be after we have our big salads.
Due to fairly recent conversations, punctuated with a lot of finger wagging, with my doctor, I have drastically altered my lifestyle. I won't bore you with details, but the alterations have worked, all my 'numbers' are back where they should be. Bottom line, I can't eat as much at a single sitting as I used to. That terrible meal I had six years ago has even been paired back. Instead of the salad bar and a full sized steak, potatoes and beans, sometimes followed by dessert, I order the Petite Sirloin and mashed potatoes to supplement the salad. I don't often even finish that.
This is what I went with again. Angel surprised us by going off script and getting the crab cakes. Adam put us back on course, choosing the chicken tenders. He doesn't do the salad bar. No appetizer this day.

Katy took our order and was nearly washed away by the slipstream we left in our rush to the salad bar. We have salads at home frequently, but keeping everything fresh is a problem. We rarely have everything we want at the same time as we want it. This is what makes RT's bar perfect. it has everything and it is all fresh. We don't have to buy heads of lettuce, pounds of mushrooms, etc. just to let them mostly spoil in or chill box.
What did I pick for my salad this time? Well, 'everything' is probably the best way to sum it up. I topped it with two dressings, blue cheese and Italian. I should point out that the photo makes it look massive, but that is not a full sized plate. Besides, this was the main course, the meat and potatoes were just side dishes.
We finished off our salads as well as the complimentary cheesy biscuits. Had we stopped then and
there this would be a completely positive review.
Katy brought the main courses a few minutes after we were finishing the salads, perfect timing. The plates looked rather sparse, nothing on them other than precisely what we ordered.
Right away I wished I had stopped with the salad. The steak was overcooked. I don't send things back, it takes too long. I ate about half of it, but was fortunately already sated by the voluptuous salad. I didn't finish the potatoes either, they were too salty. The steak also seemed too salty, something I was hard pressed to explain. It's a steak, you don't need more than a pinch of anything added to it. To over-salt steak is nothing short of criminal.

When I mentioned this to the family, Angel chimed in. "Well I wasn't going to say anything, but the crab cakes were too salty. I thought it might just be me."
No dear, it wasn't. The chef was heavy handed, we've seen it before. Jilly's has been serving food laden with an oceans' worth of the mineral for several years.
Adam said his meal was "good". That's all. He doesn't talk a lot.
Adam and Angel decided to order some dessert to take home. RT was pushing a Pumpkin Spice Cheesecake. That's what they both went with. To me, pumpkin is an Autumn decoration, not a flavor. I don't eat or drink anything with the word 'pumpkin' in it. Besides, my tolerance for sugar is way down, so I rarely have a full dessert anymore.
Summary:
We were not really disappointed, the salad bar was great and our expectations for the other stuff was not very high. It is a shame that they managed to ruin a perfectly good cut of meat though, again. Katy did a spectacular job, her timing and attentiveness were excellent, no complaints there. Since we lived in Maryland for five years, our expectations for a crab cake anywhere else are considerably lowered. Nobody out here gets them right.
The real sore point with Ruby Tuesday is that we only occasionally get it all right, yet it still costs more than most other places we go, the tab this time was over sixty dollars. That's a lot to pay for a salad and small, incorrectly cooked sides.
Yeah, we'll go back, for the salad, but maybe only the salad.

Home Shrimp

Once again, not a restaurant. Once again, winter weather and on-call. But we decided to make it count. Angel's birthday was coming up, this meal is something we've celebrated things like that for many years. Simple, easy, awfully decadent and satisfying.

We'd planned ahead, the only thing I needed to pick up this weekend was the dessert, which we'd just decided on.

I made the meal.

There was a steak on standby for when Adam got home from work, he doesn't like seafood.

The Food:

Shrimp, salad, garlic toast. Simple.

Of course the shrimp was frozen, this is middle America after all. Fortunately freezing shrimp does not change its taste and texture much. We get the de-veined (it's not really a vein) and shell-on. We picked up a big pot with a strainer and steamer basket a few years ago, this is pretty much the only thing we use it for. We'd let the sea bugs thaw in the lower part of the fridge most of the afternoon, it was thawed nicely by dinnertime.

Step one, turn on the oven and start the pot of water. Into the water I added salt and a heaping helping of Old Bay seasoning. While waiting, not watching, the water to boil, I prepped the toast. A loaf of fresh French bread from our local bakery (Walmart). I sliced half of it in about 3/4 inch slices and laid them out on the sheet pan that had been rubbed down with olive oil. This, I recently found, adds a subtle flavor kick to the finished toast. Using my press, I smashed a few cloves of garlic, sliced a stick of butter and set that in the microwave just long enough for the butter to melt completely. I let it set for a bit to soak up the garlic. This garlic/butter mix serves two purposes.

The first is to butter the bread. applied with a basting brush. Not too much, just a shiny sheen's worth.

The water was starting to boil so I set the steamer basket full of shrimp, which I'd salted and Old Bay'd as well, into it and covered it. The seasoning doesn't actually add a lot of flavor to the shell covered shrimp, but man, does it make the house smell good!

Time to prep the salad. 

The salad bar.

We rarely make family salads, rather we make our own mini salad bar. I chopped, sliced, washed and shaved red bell pepper, onion, cucumber, tomato and carrot. The greens, Romaine lettuce and spinach were chopped, washed and spun in our big salad spinner that we picked up at some sort of kitchen outlet store in southeastern Missouri, while on a drive back from Kentucky.

By this time The shrimp was pinking up nicely. I reduced the heat and let the residual steam finish it off.

The toast went into the oven, I spread the newspaper.

What?

Peeling shrimp is messy, let's not pretend otherwise. Sure, we use plates, but the peels go into a pile on laid out newspaper, it's just the way we've always done it.

I made sure Angel would be done with the current round of dog needs and noticed that this snowfall was piling up heavier than I'd thought it would. the boy was on the road by then. Angel had texted him and let him know that the roads and driveway were starting to get covered, He was driving home from Arnold, it would be a while.

Angel came in, removed about five layers of coats, gloves, scarves and hoodies, took off her fur lined boots while I prepared my plate.

I set the whole pot on a big cork coaster on the table, reheated the garlic butter just a bit and assembled my salad.

She followed soon, doing the same. Yeah, I'd made myself some fresh tea, one Luzianne teabag into my one cup coffee maker filled with bottled water (our tap water is highly mineral rich and clogs coffee makers in just a few months). Fill a big glass with ice and pour the hot brew over the top, done. Dark, tasty, fresh. If you don't make your tea this way, you are doing it wrong.

Then the wonderful messy part. The shrimp in the pot was almost too hot to handle, but we were really ready to start eating so we suffered thought peeling a bunch. I dropped my denuded bugs one at a time into the garlic butter. 

If your mouth is not watering heavily at this point then you are just an ignorant America-hater.

I'll admit that the toast had stayed in the oven for maybe a minute longer than it should have, a little crispier than I'd intended. That was Angel's fault though, she took too long coming in from outside.

It was still delicious though. Not drowning in butter or garlic or olive oil, but a pleasant, aromatic blend of the flavors. I'd topped my salad with a slightly sweet poppy seed dressing, to compliment the buttery, savory shrimp and toast.

We absolutely stuffed ourselves. There was certainly some shrimp left, but we could use that in the upcoming meals, on lighter salad days.

The taste, as you can imagine, was heavenly. 

The pile of shells had Rudy's undivided attention. he didn't get any. I do think he got a little steak later when Adam got home. Whenever he's upstairs and we're preparing a meal he can be found underfoot. He's discovered that Angel and I are somewhat clumsy and tend to drop things. He's an opportunist.

I post a lot of pictures of Rudy on the social media. He's quite expressive and comical. People ask me what kind of dog he is. I'm tired of saying 'it's complicated' or 'I don't know'. He's a mutt, a mix of unknown lineage. He doesn't really look like any one breed, which is fine with us since 'breed' is not a scientific term anyhow, it's just a set of standards voted on by kennel clubs so they can be on a register and can be inbred for a high price. But don't get me started on that soap box. I've decided that he's a Kasehund. Which is, roughly, German for 'cheese hound'. Friends and followers of him on social media will get the cheese reference for Rudy. Why German? Because Queso Pero (Spanish) and Fromage Chien (French) just didn't sound right. 

Dessert:

We didn't have dessert with the meal, that would be for later, after another round of dog stuff. I'd

picked up a pre-made New York cheesecake while at the local bakery (Walmart) earlier. I don't have the patience to learn how to make a consistently good cheesecake at home. Plus there's no real reason to. The ingredients cost nearly as much as a pre-made cake. 

For the topping, I'd also picked up a bag of frozen whole blueberries. This I could do. Put a little butter in a small skillet, toss in blueberries, add just a little sugar, let heat, then smash with a spatula. Done. Serve with a fresh cup of coffee. . .Mmm, mmm good! 

There is very little in this world I love more than blueberry cheesecake. Not even Angel rises to this level. It's okay, Angel's always known this. It gives her a goal. A standard to try to live up to. 

Happy Birthday Dear!