Copy Cat

Copy cat recipes, I don’t fully understand them. When I go to a restaurant yes, the food is good. But it is very rarely because I can’t make food as good as they can. It’s because I don’t want to cook. I don’t want to clean. I want to order my food and usually I want to have some nice college kid bring it to my table and keep my glass full of Pepsi. Usually, a copy cat recipe is a truck load of ingredients that I don’t typically keep around the house, so that requires shopping and also spending. And also figuring out what the heck a ripe tomatillo is supposed to look like cuz I’m pretty sure, I chose wrong. Copy cat recipes, in my experience, are usually just lots of work, lots of ingredients, and sometimes, lots of heartache, over something that tastes not quite as good as what I could have gotten for ten bucks and a 15 minute car drive.

I live in a fairly large metropolitan city. One may go so far as to say very large. So there’s not much I can’t get behind the wheel of my car and go get. Maybe that’s one reason I don’t fully understand the allure of the copy cat recipe. Some people LOVE Cracker Barrel’s cheesy potatoes. Personally, I like mine better but that’s beside the point. Once upon a time, the nearest Cracker Barrel was a 4 hour car ride away. Now it’s 20 minutes maybe 30 in traffic. And some mystery cook prepares them where I cannot see them or the mess they’re making and a nice person with gold stars of awesomeness embroidered on their aprons brings them to me from the mystery place and refills my Pepsi and they taste infinitely better because I don’t resent the potatoes for being a lot of work.

Recently, I found myself with a little over a pound of pork shoulder in my freezer and I was trying to think of things to do with it when I remembered this little site I had pinned on Pinterest. Strangely enough, I found this website completely separate of the fact that I know the family responsible for it. We went to the same church, I babysat one of their kids. Isn’t the internet funny like that? I didn’t know they had a blog of deliciousness but there they were. Hi guys!

Anyway, I digress.

I had pork. I needed dinner. I decided to go try copy cat Café Rio pork. In spite of the fact that there is a brand new Café Rio, less than 10 minutes away from my house. It looked easy enough, and I already had the roast! I had to go to the store for almost everything else but that doesn’t matter right?

The night before I was going to wow myself and handsome with this deliciousness, we got pretty absorbed in Lego Lord of the Rings and ended up staying up til like 1 am battling Lego Orc’s and I completely forgot to put the roast in to marinade. So when Pumpkin Pie woke up at 4, strange that infants don’t have an on off switch isn’t it? I fed her, got her back to sleep, and proceeded to throw together my marinade, and clean the kitchen while I was at it. I mean, I was already awake so why not? Actually, I’d had a doozy of a nightmare and wasn’t excited about going back to sleep. So I put a still mostly frozen pork shoulder in a bag with some Pepsi, and brown sugar and went back to bed.

We woke up the next morning, I transferred the roast to the crock pot with some more Pepsi and water and set it on high, and we went to church. When we got home the crock pot was still cold. I don’t know what had happened, either the circuit was tripped, or something was wrong with the switch on the crock pot and it didn’t realize it had a task to fulfill. Anyway, it was no closer to being food than it had been that morning and I was frustrated, and sleep deprived. But Handsome talked me down, I plugged the crock pot into a different outlet and dinner was on again!

Then came the waiting, and the shredding, and the adding more sauce and cooking some more. Remember when I mentioned they were a lot of work? And I didn’t want to stop at pork. I wanted, cilantro lime rice, and genuine Café Rio black beans, and homemade tortillas, and the whole works. By this time I was really tired, and tender from my nightmare (another story entirely) and had another hour or so of cooking in front me but I was determined. I put together my tortilla dough and they turned into basically pie crust. They were nowhere near round, the edges looked tattered and torn and I couldn’t roll them thin enough. So I asked Handsome to get tortillas. I would not be deterred! And then I tossed some crushed garlic into a frying pan and it quickly turned to cinders. That did it for me. I cried at Handsome for awhile then packed up what was supposed to be dinner and walked away from it all.

When we did eat our Faux Café Rio I must admit it was pretty delicious and Handsome said it could go in the favorites box so I’ll be trying it again. I think I’ll skip the marinating and maybe even the slow cooking in the Pepsi part. I’ll just cook the roast, shred it, and add the sauce then let it cook and get all stewed together. In doing things the hard way, I figured out some short cuts so hopefully next time I won’t cry. And next time, I’ll write up everything I do differently so if you don’t want to do the things the tear filled heart broken way, you’ll have another option.

After harping on Copy Cat recipes for an entire post, I feel like I should leave you with a good one. This is easy and tasty and pretty much fool proof. Enjoy.

Tony Roma’s Baked Potato Soup

Soup

2 medium potatoes (about 2 cups chopped)

3 tablespoons butter

1 cup diced white onion

2 tablespoons flour

4 cups chicken stock

2 cups water

1/4 cup cornstarch

1 1/2 cups instant mashed potatoes

1 teaspoon salt

3/4 teaspoon pepper

1/2 teaspoon basil

1/8 teaspoon thyme

l cup half and half

Garnish

1/2 Cup shredded cheddar cheese

1/4 cup crumbled cooked bacon

2 green onions, chopped (qreen part only)

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees and bake the potatoes or 1 hour or until done. When potatoes have Cooked remove them from the oven to cool.

2. As potatoes Cool prepare soup by melting butter in a large saucepan, and sauté onion until light brown. Add the flour to the onions and stir to make a roux.

3. Add stock, water, cornstarch, mashed potatoes, and spices to the pot and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes.

4. Cut potatoes in half lengthwise and scoop out contents with a large spoon. Discard skin. Chop baked potato with a large knife to make chunks that are about ½ inch in size.