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This 20-day blogging challenge that I have set upon is going to be harder than I thought. I didn’t have time to write today and here it is 9pm and I’m really tired because I woke up at 3:30am this morning (insomnia). So, what am I to do? Cheat, of course. I’m going to have to go to my bag of tricks. You see, even though I haven’t published anything in six months, I actually did work on a few things. Here is a review that I wrote months ago. It isn’t polished or even finished, but it will have to do:

I had to take my car in to the dealer for service several weeks ago and I was given a loaner car - a brand new 2006 A4 2.0t quattro Tiptronic (Q-Tip).  This is the latest version of Audi’s best selling car.  Although the factory codes the car as a B7, most will recognize this (or maybe not) as the third generation of the A4.  I say maybe not because as the reviewer for Car and Driver recently commented, you will need the blueprints to tell this car from its predecessor.  Well, not quite.

First of all, the exterior of the new A4 has been reskinned and as long as you like the new corporate snout (and I do), it is gorgeous.  The A4 is once again an elegant, understated beauty.  Along with the new nose, the A4 has “angrier” headlights, which combine with the gaping grille to create an intimidating face in the rearview mirror of those unfortunate to be caught dawdling in the left hand lane.  The overhangs front and rear have been extended and there is no longer an unpainted lower valance, which makes the new car less stubby looking than before.  The new A4 retains its contemporary high waistline, which I also like.

The newly redesigned A8 and A6 both have brand new interior designs, which reflect a fresh and even daring new corporate vision.  The exciting new designs reinforce Audi’s position as having the best automobile interiors in the industry.  I couldn’t wait to see what they had done with the A4.  A newly designed key fob hinted at the attention to detail that Audi had paid to every detail of the new car.  I unlocked the car, opened the door, and climbed in.  Immediately, I was greeted by a lovely new three-spoke, multi-function steering wheel which reflects the trapezoidal design influences on the new Audis.  Similar steering wheels can be found on the new A8 and A6.  The multi-function controls are better than on my ‘00 A6, with two sets of two buttons being replaced with two thumb operated scroll wheels, which control track/station functions and volume on the stereo.  A note to the Car and Driver reviewer who complained that the station wheel only scrolled through the presets: the wheels are also buttons (just like the scroll wheels on mice) and by pressing on the wheel, the radio will scan all stations.  Interestingly, the right scroll button didn’t do anything discernable, though muting the stereo would be the most logical choice.  Being a lower level A4, the steering wheel was covered in…not leather and it felt just slightly thin and hard.  Still, it’s an improvement over the old four-spoke, multi-function wheel.  Let’s see what else is new.

Um, well…nothing.  Nothing is new.  Not much anyway.  The new cup holders are better.  I think that’s it.  Except for the steering wheel, there is hardly any difference that I could tell between the interior of this car and its predecessor.  That’s not bad per se.  As I said, Audi makes the best interiors in the business and the A4 interior is no exception.  Still, is it too much to ask that a new car, with beautiful new sheetmetal and a brand new motor, also have a new interior?  So, my previous complaints remain: a manual adjust seat for the passenger is silly, when the driver has a power seat. Also, the center tunnel intrudes just enough to cause my leg pain from rubbing against it (though not quite as much as before.)  The range in miles indicator now comes with a fuel pump icon, which is exactly the same as the low fuel indicator icon.  So, there is always a glowing red fuel pump icon on display at all times making me think I am low on fuel at all times.  I could live without that.  Speaking of fuel, there is something brand new.  Something that is absolutely new for Audi - a fuel door release button.  I have owned Audis from 1983, 1990, 1993, and 2000 and none of them had this feature.  And why should they?  When you locked the car, the fuel door locked and when you unlocked the car, the fuel door unlocked.  Simple.  Unless you are afraid of someone siphoning gas from you while running alongside your unlocked car, I don’t understand why you would need this additional security measure.  Let me explain why this bothers me so much, the fuel door release button is located…I’m not kidding…INSIDE the door map pocket (along with a couple of other buttons which I couldn’t contort myself low enough to see.)  So, if you have anything inside the door pocket, you have to take it out in order to unlock your fuel door.  Audi, I know the new engineer needed a job, but I have a long, long list of suggestions before sending him off designing silly release catches we don’t need.  For starters, he can work on a new range-in-miles icon, like maybe the word “Range.”

So, what’s it like to drive? Well, the new 2.0 liter turbo four-banger with FSI makes 200 horsepower, which is 30 horsepower better than the 1.8 turbo motor that it replaces. Unfortunately, the increased girth of the A4 has outpaced the increased horsepower, so the new A4 is slower than earlier models. Still, like all A4s, it handles better than my A6, so despite the offputting and miserable Tiptronic gearbox, I always enjoy driving an A4. I just wouldn’t spend my money on one, unless it were perfectly optioned…like with a V8…and a manual gearbox…and S4 badges.

Here are some other Audi A4 comments/reviews that I have published on another site:

• ‘04 Audi A4 1.8t Q-Tip (09.04)
• ‘03 Audi A4 1.8t Q-Tip (more) (09.04)
• ‘03 Audi A4 1.8t Sport Q-Tip (02.03)

And now, back to the usual boring housekeeping. Today I did manage to fix some navigation problems within the site and some very basic information has crept onto the eS2 page.

Today’s Workout: 30 minutes on the home treadmill.

jimmy   

“Do bears bear? Do bees be?”
- David Addison

On Sunday, I set my personal record for non-stop viewing of a single show. My wife and I watched the first 13 episodes of Moonlighting, including the two-hour pilot episode, in one stretch. Assuming about 49 minutes of content per hour-long show (down to about 44 minutes, these days) and 93 minutes of content for the pilot episode, we watched Moonlighting for 681 minutes! The extended editions of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, strung together (which I also plan to do someday), clocks-in at 682 minutes. So, this was just practice for a future record-setting attempt.

My purchase of the Moonlighting: Seasons 1 & 2 DVD collection was an unexpected surprise. I took a week off of work earlier this month to get some work done on my track car. One day, while out running errands, I remembered that I had a $10 gift card from Target, left over from my birthday. So, I decided to go to Target and get myself a present. To me, $10 means a DVD, so I spent the next hour perusing DVD titles. After awhile, I came across the Moonlighting set and noticed that it was marked with a ludicrously low price (less than $10.) I couldn’t figure out why the set was marked so low, so I decided to see if it would fly at the checkout. I handed the set over to the clerk and he swiped it across the scanner.

*beep* “$40,” he said.

“Whoa! I’m sorry (now feeling embarassed), but I thought I saw it marked at a lower price,” I said.

“How much?” he asked.

“Seven or eight bucks,” I said.

He indicated that it was no problem and he called over a manager. She used her headset to call for a price check. While we waited, she looked over the box and mentioned that she loved the show. Then the female security officer wandered over and mentioned that she loved the show. Fact: women love Moonlighting. After a minute, the manager started talking into her headset again. She wrote down some numbers and talked to the clerk. Then she turned to me and said, “You are going to love us - it’s priced at $5.99.” Wow! It was obviously a mistake, but they honored it and I got a very nice birthday present.

Does Moonlighting hold up? Do ducks duck? The truth is that Moonlighting never really held-up well in the first place. There were flashes of brilliance for sure, like the film noir flashback episode (famously introduced by Orson Wells only a week prior to his death.) But after watching an extended foot chase scene in one episode in which three characters are disguised in the exact same dress and another scene where an attempted assasination denegrates into a food fight, I was reminded that sometimes Moonlighting was little better than an episode of Scooby-Doo. The difference, of course, was David and Maddie. The charisma and chemistry between these two characters was the blue moon that shown brightly in the black sky of this troubled series. We watch the show to see David’s wisecracking “hip-hop jive talk,” Maddie’s soft-focus glare, and the slow burning embers of a smoldering passion between these two people who only have each other in the whole world. We watch to see these embers being stirred, hissing and popping at one another. Moonlighting isn’t about rhyming receptionists or an exceptional Motown soundtrack. It’s about a man and a woman - nothing else. And in this case, that is good enough.

Recently, my friend Rob brought-up the subject of Night Hawk dinners on his blog. Matt weighed-in with his review and the whole subject has sparked some nostalgic interest in me. For those that don’t know, Night Hawk was a steak house chain in Austin, Texas from 1939 through 1994. However, I never ate a meal at one of those retaurants. Instead, I ate Night Hawk TV dinners, which are still available today. I must have eaten 1000 of them. I just confirmed with my mother that we would bring them home ten at a time from the grocery store. My father specifically requested them because he thought that even though they cost a little more than their competitors, they tasted better and were worth the extra expense. He liked the Night Hawk Taste of Texas, which was the standard Night Hawk charbroiled chopped beef patty, with ranch style beans and cornbread. My brother and I didn’t like the cornbread, so we chose from our deep freezer full of Steak ‘n Corn and Steak ‘n Taters, which according to the Night Hawk website, is one of the company’s signature items. So, after not having eaten one of these dinners in close to 20 years, I decided to pick up a Steak ‘n Taters to see if it was as I remembered it.

Night Hawk dinners are widely available here in Central Texas, so there was no problem finding one at a local HEB grocery store. I didn’t think to note the exact price (though it was under $2), nor did I think to compare the price to similar dinners of other brands. Since the sales volume of Night Hawk is much smaller than say a Swanson, I expect the price would be a little higher.

The box has changed over the years, but it is very similar to the way I remember it. The overall design and color scheme, which is handsome and does a good job of invoking a steak house feel, has stayed consistent, which I appreciate. The most obvious change in the design is the Night Hawk logo. Along with the words Night Hawk, there is a flame graphic all over the packaging. Conspicuously absent is the great old Night Hawk logo of…a night hawk! Did the mascot retire? Was there a bitter lawsuit? Did some young, overpriced consultant convince them that the mascot should be thrown into the fire, so to speak? I don’t know, but it’s wrong. Bring back the Hawk! The only other thing that I really notice about the box is that the photo of the dinner used to completely fit on the front, but has grown to be optimistically large (more on that later). The photo also shows a “side salad” of lettuce and tomatos. Fine print tells us that this is a suggested serving. I agree that a side salad probably would be a good thing to serve with this dinner, but taken at its true scale, the photo shows a salad of a pickle-slice sized piece of lettuce and half of a cherry tomato. I think the old box just had a sprig of parsely and was perhaps more honest.

I opened the box and discovered some other changes since I had last had one of these. The old meals came in an aluminum tray covered with a thin piece of waxed cardboard, which was removed before cooking. The new meal comes in a plastic tray, covered with a clear piece of thin plastic film, which is cut before cooking. This new packaging allows the meal to be cooked in a microwave. An even bigger difference is the steak sauce, which now comes in a small condiment packet. The steak sauce used to already be on the steak. In fact, I would scrape any frozen steak sauce which had stuck to the back of the cardboard cover, back onto the steak. Like the suggested side salad, the optional steak sauce is a nod towards healthy eating and I think it was the right thing to do (though really, if you have any kind of dietary restrictions or concerns, you shouldn’t even be looking at one of these things).

I cooked the dinner in the oven, according to the instructions. Now, I would swear that I remembered that the old instructions gave different times for the desired wellness of the meat, but I admit that this could be a false memory. What is not a false memory is that I used to eat these steaks pink in the middle, or medium-rare. So, I pulled this steak out early, hoping for medium-rare, but the steak was still cold. I put it back in for just a couple of more minutes and everything came out hot enough to eat. However, the steak was cooked all the way through. No pink at all. In other words, the steak comes pre-cooked to medium. This wasn’t really that much of a surprise - such are the wimpy times in which we live. I recognize that this is chopped beef and any kind of chopped beef should be cooked more thoroughly than a cut steak, but I’m only asking for things to be the way they were.

I wouldn’t normally plate a TV dinner, but it is more difficult to cut a steak in a tray and besides, the cover photo shows the dinner on a platter (suggested serving). A normal-sized plate really shows off how diminutive this meal really is. Undeterred, I poured the entire contents of the steak sauce packet onto the steak. Yes, it’s true that the sauce is mostly margarine, but for the record, it also contains: salt, mustard powder, lemon juice powder, and garlic powder. It isn’t very good steak sauce, but some people like butter on their steaks, and I used the sauce because that is always how I had my Night Hawk steaks.

The verdict? Except for being over-cooked from the factory, it was exactly as I remembered it, which is to say - pretty good. The steak’s flavor is mostly drowned-out by the sauce, but the charbroiled flavor does come through and matched with a proper steak sauce (or with good dry seasonings), this would be a fine chopped steak. Better still are the tator tots, which could hold their own against any tot in the biz. They have a perfectly-cooked, crispy outside and good potato flavor inside, with just a hint of a meat note from being packaged with the steak. Good God, did I just say meat note? Anyway, after so many years, I was pleased that Night Hawk has mostly stuck to their guns and delivered the same locally-produced, quality experience that I remember from my youth. I could make a better chopped steak of course, but if Night Hawk sold bags of tots, I would buy them. First rate.

Since part of this excercise is about contemplating what I used to eat vs. what I currently eat, I decided to grab a TV dinner from my current stock and compare the two. So, I selected a Lean Cuisine Beef Peppercorn, which is peppercorn sauce over beef steak tips, with green beans, red peppers, and skin potatos. In other words, steak ‘n taters. Now originally, I was going to have a little fun by comparing the nutritional values of these two meals, but that isn’t what ended-up interesting me. The Lean Cuisine, despite my preconceived notions of their portion-control sizes, and despite being packaged in a smaller box, actually contains more food than the Night Hawk steak dinner! The Night Hawk Steak ‘n Taters dinner is 172g, while the Lean Cuisine is a whopping 248g! That’s almost 32% more food and it’s not even a Lean Cuisine “dinner portion” meal. In a market where Swanson boasts of having Hungry-Man dinners with a pound of food, this is interesting.

It was fun revisiting the Night Hawk dinner, so I plan on continuing with a series of articles soon exploring other foods that time forgot…I mean, that I used to eat.

Update 07.26.05: I corrected my article, because I kept saying Swanson’s instead of Swanson. Also, on July 20, amidst this burst of discussion about the TV dinner with my friends and presumably unbeknownst to us, Gerry Thomas, father of the TV dinner, died at the age of 83.

Happy Birthday to me! My wife took me to one of my favorite local restaurants for dinner last night. Carmelo’s is a traditional Italian restaurant with a casual atmosphere (typical of Austin), yet set apart by fine-dining levels of service. Carmelo’s is only a few blocks from my office and we left directly after work, so we were the first dinner customers and had even more undivided attention from the wait staff. We sat Hollywood style in one of the booths in the main dining room, so we could see and be seen, of course. We began dinner with the customary hot bread and olive oil with Parmesan cheese and chunks of garlic. The waiter then helped us select a nice, dry Chianti - Banfi 2001 Chianti Classico Riserva.

This is what Wine.com has to say about it:

“This Chianti Classico exemplifies a modern approach to making this very traditional wine. It’s a satisfying middleweight with good flavor intensity and well-balanced structure, wrapping classic flavors in a sleek package. It has enticing aromas of tart red cherries, saddle leather and a hint of pungent dried herbs. In the mouth, it delivers bright flavors of dried red cherries against the classic Tuscan background of leather and oriental spice. The finish is long and aromatic, with crisp acidity supporting the lingering flavor of red Michigan pie cherries. There’s enough silky tannin and firm acid to warrant cellaring for five or six years. Time in the cellar will soften the wine’s sharp edges and enhance its aromatic breadth and intensity, transforming the coltish charmer into a soft, sumptuous seductress.”

What do I have to say about it? The wine was good. It tasted like grape juice, but with a kick. I liked it!™

After we were served the wine, it was time for the whole raison d’être for any visit to Carmelo’s - the Lobster Bisque. This silky ambrosia tastes almost perfect to my palate, blending lobster and tomato flavors without too much salt, and a hint of fresh cracked black pepper. My only complaint is that the smooth cream was broken-up by only two small chunks of lobster. I wished for more.

In fact, it was my insatiable lust for the Lobster Bisque that caused me to mistakenly order the Lobster Ravioli as my entrée. Normally, I would have ventured into different culinary territory by ordering something like steak or veal. Instead, I simply ordered a variation of what I had just eaten. I was disappointed in myself. Worse, I was disappointed with the entree. It was inconsistant, with some bites being flavorful and others being quite bland, even tasteless. I only ate half. My wife enjoyed the Insalata Carmelo (fresh lump crab meat, shrimp, walnuts, mushrooms and artichokes on a bed of fresh spinach.)

We finished the meal with coffee and Bananas Foster for two, prepared table-side. The dessert was delicious, but not prepared with the flair with which I was trained to prepare them, back when I worked for the Old San Francisco Steak House. Unlike Carmelo’s, I used to cut the bananas at the table (rather than using pre-cut and undoubtedly chilled slices), which added more flair by way of fancy knife work. More importantly, rather than using brandy as the flammable agent, with it’s resulting pilot-light sized flames, I would use 151 proof dark rum in judicious quantities. Flames would shoot three feet into the air and I would have to pull back to save the hair on my face. Whoosh! The customers would enjoy their dessert with their hearts still racing and the flambé orders would pour in.

All in all, it was a very nice birthday dinner. Carmelo’s has a cozy and romantic atmosphere, outstanding service, and good food for higher than average prices, which shouldn’t deter you, if you are seeking an excellent dining experience. At the end of our evening, an accordian player began playing music for the diners. His second song was the theme from The Godfather. Consigliere was pleased.

Reader Feedback

I have to say, though, your picture scares me a little. - Beth

Scary photo of ya though…. - Darin

Regarding the photo of myself on the home page, I was going for a look of “stern determination,” but somehow I came out with a look of “I’m a psychopath.” Look for a revision, soon.