OK, it’s not my new iMac… it isn’t mine… it isn’t even a Mac… come to think of it, it isn’t even a computer.
We were looking at model homes today and this was one of the props used to show how modern and computer-friendly the house was.
Too bad there was no actual place to plug one in anywhere nearby.
For several months I’ve been noticing the Red Brick Pizza on Camelback, but, with just a glimpse inside, I’ve had the impression it’s really too trendy to be a place to take the family, so I’ve avoided hauling the Glover clan in for a review.
Tonight, Irene and the kids were out and I decided this was the time to try them. How bad could a guy look eating a pizza alone on a Friday night?
My previous impressions were mostly dispelled when I walked in, it’s more of a fast-food place and there’s certainly no reason to believe it might not be “kid friendly”.
Red Brick Pizza has about 7 locations in the Phoenix area. I remember reading about them in the past because of “technological innovations” in pizza preparation technology.
Their menu proclaims that their 1000º pizza oven produces “…a perfect thin, crisp crust center with a golden brown crust.” It also claims it will be “…fresh, fabulous in just 3 minutes” with the disclaimer that 3 minutes is the “approximate bake time.”
When it comes to pizza, I’m not a fan of “fast”, but at the same time, I do not discount that technology might be developed that could compensate for good old fashioned preparation.
For starters, the 3 minutes claim was bunk. When I came in, there were 2 guys sitting at a table without pizza. I ordered my pizza, got my drink, sat down and waited 6-10 minutes reading the menu. That’s when I discovered the 3 minute claim. By this point it was far past 3 minutes and when a pizza came out and was brought out, I thought, “10 minutes isn’t that bad.” That’s when I discovered it was for the guys who’d been waiting. My pizza came another 6 minutes later. Total time, estimated, somewhere between 12 and 16 minutes.
I had a plain crust, although several “gourmet” crusts are also available. If the plain crust isn’t good to begin with, tarting it up with parmesan, sun-dried tomato basil, chipotle or roasted red peppers isn’t going to help. The picture accompanying this review is a bit deceptive. The pizza is not as thick as it appears here and can truly be considered a thin crust pizza. The maximum crust width was about 0.25″ at the outer edge.
While it was browned all across the bottom, it certainly was not “crisp” and flopped unless folded. It was so thin that it really didn’t have any noticeable flavor until I reached the outer edge, which was dry and flavorless, luckily there wasn’t much of it. I found myself eating the outer crust first so that I would have crustless pizza for my last bites.
They also make a big deal about their “healthier” toppings, including leaner meats and cholesterol free olive oil.
I quite liked the sauce, but it was very reminiscent of some other pizza sauce I’ve had. It took me an hour or so to remember where I’d tasted it before: Village Inn Pizza, which pretty much closed down 25-30 years ago in Arizona. My memory might not be perfect on that recollection. (Although I did stumble across a Village Inn Pizza a few years ago and the flavor was exactly as I remembered it.)
The cheese was fine, although if I had to guess, I’d say it was part-skim instead of whole milk mozzarella.
I was on the last piece before I realized I hadn’t even noticed the pepperoni. Not only did it have no discernible flavor, it was so soft that it had no textural difference from the sauce and cheese.
Apart from the outer crust, this wasn’t an offensive pizza and if they could really cook and serve it in 3 minutes, it would be a great lunchtime burger alternative.
I had the 9″ pizza, which cost $6.25 without beverage (although the printed menu and the board menu differ in 3 places). The #2 combo which includes a drink at $6.50 is a better deal.
Using the $6.25 cost, the pizza is about $0.10 per square inch.
Neutral rating
Red Brick Pizza
1650 E Camelback Rd, Suite 180
Phoenix, AZ
602.212.1400
Update 01/08/2006, read my follow-up review here
Technorati Tags: Blog, Food, Pizza, Restaurant, Review
Every time we go to my father’s house, my daughter wants to toss the balls around on my dad’s pool table.
So, my dad decided to get her a mini pool table for Christmas.
There’s a far distance from tossing the balls around by hand and actually putting a cue in the hands of a three year-old, as witness by the picture of Michelle attempting to put my dad’s eye out.
(Actually, she’d trying to hit the balls on the table behind her, but she just hasn’t got the hang of it.)
I’m going to hide the cues for a few years. In the meantime, it’s pretty cute that she calls it a “ping pool” table after something she saw on my Buck Rogers DVDs 6 months or more ago.
Before James was born, I got an iSight camera. I was testing it and the video conferencing (using Macs and iChat AV) was the best I’ve every seen, this side of dedicated hardware and network.
We’d been using MSN messenger to video chat with my in-laws on a PC for months and the experience was painful on the best of days.
While my father-in-law was here, I demonstrated how it worked and he was so impressed that he bought a Mac Mini and an iSight so they could stay in touch.
Before I purchased the computer for him, I located a couple people in Taiwan and tested video chatting and it worked just as well. (I also tested it with people in Vermont, Germany, England, Australia and New Zealand with similar results.)
But when my in-laws got back to Taiwan, the experience, although not as painful as MSN, just wasn’t very good.
So when I went to Taiwan in September, I brought along everything I needed to try to figure out why the experience was so bad. It didn’t require much diagnostics, my father-in-law’s high speed cable connection operated at a blistering 24k. He’d switched internet providers since our last trip and was paying for a connection that was frequently slower than a modem.
However, I had the darndest time convincing them that their connection was the problem.
Finally, Johnny (my brother-in-law), who likes to do online gaming, convinced his father to install an ADSL line, and now we great full screen chats and my wife’s parents can watch their grandchildren grow up even when they’re half a world away.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Blog, Computer, Family, Gadgets, Kids, Mac, OSX
At last, our Ikea sofa set arrived today, and after hours of assembly (I’ll never remove those covers for cleaning) it was finally done.
While Irene is happy with the sofa (and I’m not displeased) the path to happiness wasn’t smooth.
Here’s the story of the Ikea fiasco associated with this sofa.
I was hoping to purchase and have the sofa delivered before Christmas as Irene’s present. For some months she’s been trying to get me to purchase a sofa set, and I’ve been putting it off with the idea of surprising her for Christmas.
There’s no way I could surprise her if I had to arrange for one of our friends to help me purchase and move the sofa, so I decided to bite the bullet and pay Ikea’s delivery charges.
I went to their website on about November 30th and was pleased to learn that if you buy from “Ikea Online” within the next three days you received a 10% discount. (On $1,400 worth of sofa, that’s nothing to sneeze at.) A coupon code was provided to get the 10%.
I went through the entire online order process with reasonable ease until I reached the end. At each step of the process, I expected an opportunity to use to coupon code, but it never materialized.
When I received the e-mail confirmation, no discount had been applied, and so for $140 I was willing to get on the phone and call.
After 45 minutes on hold (Is there a better argument for ordering online?) I got through to a very helpful operator who informed me that the 10% discount only applied to Ikea Online when you call on the phone. Their online ordering system can’t handle discounts.
They were at a critical juncture at this point and could have failed miserably when I said, “I’m on the phone to you now.”
And, sure enough, they gave me the discount; however, they had to cancel my old order and place the order again.
One minor snag, my order hadn’t shown up in the computer yet, (another shortcoming of their computer system) so they told me not to worry, just ignore any e-mail I might get about the first order. That wasn’t too comforting and visions of 2 sofa sets on Christmas morning were dancing through my head.
When the order was complete, I was given an estimated delivery date of December 21. I figured if they showed up on the 21st, it would be a bit early, but Irene would be able to show off for the party she was holding on the 24th.
Unfortunately, Irene finally decided that we just had to purchase the sofa before her party and I had to spill the beans. The secret wouldn’t have lasted because the bill showed up on the credit card statement long before the 21st.
The 21st came and went and the sofa set didn’t arrive. Irene, impatient, called Ikea only to find out that our order had been cancelled.
Why? Because we hadn’t paid.
When Irene pointed out that our credit card had been charged, they said, “Oh, yeah, that happens sometimes with our order system. I’ll put the order back in for you.”
Why do they bother to even have a computer system? It’s certainly not to reduce the amount of work their staff has to do, or that we had to do for that matter.
There was no way we’d get it before Christmas, but they did credit us back the delivery charges and “expedited” the order so we’d get it in about 1 week.
Needless to say, that was 2 weeks ago, but it did finally arrive today. The order was right, we ultimately paid less than we’d have paid at the Ikea store and delivery was free.
Despite all that, the best part is that both sections are big enough that I can stretch out. Ahhhhhhh.
I’d like to try to tell you that I caught James’ very first time standing, but these things don’t happen when you’re holding a camera, and it doesn’t last long.
Sometime about 2 weeks ago, James began standing for sometimes up to 5 seconds without assistance, but yesterday he managed to stand for 20-30 seconds and I was able to get the camera a snap this picture.
30 minutes after the first pizza, I was back at the table with this pizza.
Cooling the oven failed to have the correct results, the stone didn’t loose temperature, but the ambient temperature apparently dropped. The second pizza was still burnt on the bottom, but the toppings failed to cook.
Another thing I noticed, the second dough was actually harder to work than the first, exactly the opposite of what I was lead to expect.
All-in-all a disappointing pizza year-end experience.
2006 will be the year where I perfect this!
And on that note, I wish you all a Happy New Year and many good pizzas!
No life-long search for the ultimate pizza could be complete without attempting to take matters into one’s own hands and create it oneself.
I have spent years looking for pizza crust recipes, and no matter how many I find and try, I’m amazed at one salient point: There is so very little variation in the recipes as to be almost meaningless.
So from where does the variation come from? Is it the flour, the oven, the yeast or what?
I’ve tried every variation imaginable and have been unable to find a consistently good-tasting and properly-textured pizza crust.
I was pleasantly surprised when I recently saw an old episode of Good Eats explaining the bread-making aspects of pizza dough.
It delved into the importance of the gluten content (I knew that), but more importantly, it explained how working the dough in the correct fashion directly altered the texture and the flavor of the finished product.
And so, yesterday, just in time for New Year’s Eve, I implemented version 1.0 of this pizza dough.
To really make the whole thing really experimental, I went ahead and make the Good Eats version of a red sauce to use on it also. The whole process took 24 hours and you can see the picture of the first pizza here.
In the interests of fairness, I think I should review my own pizza efforts, so here goes:
If I’d received this pizza in a restaurant, I’d have sent it back.
Although it looks nice on top, the bottom is burnt black, clearly I had a temperature control failure with the pizza stone, it was simply too hot and burned the bottom before the toppings could finish cooking.
Other problems, the sauce was too sweet and had a carroty flavor. (The sauce does have a small amount of carrot in it, but the flavor was too dominant in the final sauce.)
The flavor of the crust was, where possible to tell, not bad, but the texture was still wrong, being too fine (more like a loaf of bread rather than a crust.) There were some good pockets of air, leading me to believe I’m on the right path.
The cheese was good, but I’ve been using the same personally-developed mixture of whole-milk mozzarella, white cheddar and provolone for several years. I think it works quite nicely when I’m not just using mozzarella.
One of the issues while working the dough was that it was too elastic, pulling back too much as I worked the dough out to shape. Supposedly, that eases up if you leave the dough out longer (say, 30 minutes.)
Luckily, the recipe created two pizza doughs, and so while I ate this pizza, I let the other rest in the hopes of a superior product on the second try. I also let the oven temperature lower.
Review of Version 1.1 to follow.
My wife maintains a family website/blog on Baby Home which is based in Taiwan (and therefore in Chinese). It’s primarily about the kids growing up.
One of the unintended side effects is that several Taiwanese mothers located in Arizona have “found” each other and formed a sort of offline group of acquaintances (I believe the old-world term was “circle of friends”.)
They, their kids and husbands get together roughly once a month and eat (a lot.) I generally avoid them because, being predominantly a Taiwanese gathering, it’s just like being in Taiwan at one of those awkward social gatherings where everyone speaks Chinese and occasionally tries to throw me a bone by speaking English.
I like to think of this as Irene’s time to spend with other Taiwanese unfettered by English and the kids’ opportunity to play and absorb their second language.
I can’t always avoid the gatherings and on the 24th we had one at our house.
15 years ago I had a Honeybaked Ham at a work Christmas party and it was the best ham I ever ate. Since then I’ve been looking for an opportunity/excuse to buy one. This seemed like the perfect opportunity!
Never having purchased one, i didn’t know what to expect, and, nothing could have prepared me.
When I arrived with, what I thought, was plenty of time to stand in line and pick up the ham before the gathering, I was stunned to find a line of over 400 people winding around and around the store and the parking lot. They even had Sheriff’s Deputies out acting as crowd control.
Luckily the line moved fairly quickly, and I was 12.5 pound ham-laden in only about an hour and a half.
It was exceptionally good, but the Taiwanese people also brought enough food to feed themselves three times over and we only made a small dent in the ham at the gathering, despite the fact that I had three plates full.
We’ve been having ham for days, but finally the ham-bone has been exposed and I’m going to have some happy puppies this weekend, once I can figure how to split it in two pieces for them.
HoneyBaked Ham: Really, Really good.
Technorati Tags: Blog, Commentary, Food, Restaurant, Review
I had to go to DMV the other day to transfer title on a new car and get my drivers’ license photo updated. As you can imagine, I had a while to enjoy the ambiance of the west side DMV.
One of the things they added sometime prior to 1998 (the last time I was at DMV) is a news-ticker in the lobby. Not only does it show headline news, but it also boasts about being part of some interstate DMV news network, connecting (I believe) 8 states. Why such a dedicated DMV newswire is needed as opposed to just a plain, ordinary newswire is not immediately clear.
Perhaps it is because the DMV network censors their news?!
Yes indeed, it’s true, and thank goodness, too. They protected me and my innocent children from seeing the name “Dick” used, in context, as a person’s name.
According to the DMV newswire, the top three movies last weekend were:
Just to make sure I hadn’t missed some clever piece of marketing, I double-checked the Fun With Dick and Jane website to verify that there’s no punctuation or substitution for the name Dick. There isn’t.
I wonder in the Bureau of Vital Records ****s out the name Dick on children’s birth certificates these days?
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