IHOP Restaurant®

"Blackbirds fly from my rain soaked roof.
Red-shouldered hawk surveys the scene,
Ready to rock and yet quite still.
Mystery mist gives me a chill.

And then comes the rain again and again,
And the sweet rose blooms in the darkness.
Dove family sits on the telephone line
Just hanging out be it rain or shine."
~ Skip Way, 01/14/1995

(I provided a photo just in case no one has ever seen an actual IHOP Restaurant® before.)

http://www.ihop.com/


Place: IHOP Restaurant®  
Location: 2299 Lombard Street (on the corner of Pierce Street)
Hours: open at 7am Sunday through Thursday; open 24 hours Friday & Saturday (I am not sure if that means they are open exactly one minute after 11:59pm on Thursday night and close precisely at Midnight on Saturday evening)
Meal: New! Blueberry Cannoli[1] Cream Pancakes (Regular Combo) ~ 2 pancakes, 2 strips of bacon or 2 links of sausages, 2 eggs, & hashbrowns; and a large glass of orange juice

(Today's first EweToobular juxtaselection goes along with the opening quote above. The second song is just because Katie Melua is way hot.)


For my past four birthdays it has become a tradition to get a free breakfast from IHOP Restaurant®, and who am I to break with tradition (and pass up a free meal)? It's really no big deal, anyone can sign up to get one from them, all you have to do is register with their web-site (and subsequently get spammed with e-mails from them about once a month, which really isn't that bad) and then you will receive a coupon for a free order of Rooty Tooty Fresh 'N Fruity (or the equivalent amount, in this case it was $9.99), which is good for use within a two-week period of your birthday. 

My back-up pancakey ideas would have been either the Raspberry-Peach Pancakes (also New! off the Summer Signature Pancakes specials menu ~ buttermilk pancakes topped with plump peaches, then drizzled with a sweet raspberry sauce) or Jelly Donut Pancakes (buttermilk pancakes, layered with raspberry jelly and topped with a real donut glaze). Only after I had already ordered, I noticed that there were a few interesting Summer beverage specials, too: Orange-Tangerine Ice Tea Lemonade and Cherry-Blackberry Lemonade; I know that I would have really liked the latter drink... maybe next year.

I had my eggs over-medium. I skipped both of either the dead, decaying pork-belly strips or the links of dead, decaying ground-up porky offal; they offered to substitute some toast, but the extra-added carbohydration wasn't really necessary. I ate the pancakes last as a sort of breakfastary dessert. These were pretty good and as described officially on their website: "An Italian favorite with an IHOP ® twist. Our fluffy, classic buttermilk pancakes topped with a lush blueberry compote and perfectly sweetened Ricotta cheese. An amazingly unique flavor combination heightened by berries." I can only assume that IHOP ® employs Herr Doktor Mengele as their dietician. 

IHOP ® offers both Tabasco® Brand Pepper Sauce (the standard red) and Cholula® Hot Sauce for condimentary supplementation. And, of course, their "usual suspects" syrup selection: Old Fashioned, Butter Pecan, Blueberry, or Strawberry; none of which I really needed to pour atop my pancakes as they were more than sufficiently blueberried and cannoli-creamed. 

I had just received three new hot sauces last week as a gift (Thanks, Cindy & Greg!) and didn't really get the chance to try any of them with breakfast last weekend as I knew that I was going to be out all day long and these are the kind that state "Refrigerate After Opening". I think they just do that to scare you and make sure that you use it up quickly to buy more of their product. As far as I can tell, most of the ones that state that are made with most of the same ingredients (chilli peppers of some kind, water, vinegar, and salt) as Tabasco® and other kinds of hot sauces, and you normally see bottles of those sitting out on restaurant tables all day long, all week long, all month long, all… well, you get the idea. But just to be on the safe side, I didn't want to bring any of my new ones with me last weekend. And just when I thought that my collection was getting almost small again (I am back to eighteen bottles in my refrigerator ~ of which, there are at least three to four that are so hot that they will take a lifetime to use up); I was waiting until I got it back under a dozen or so before I purchased a new bottle of Palo Alto Firefighters Pepper Sauce ~ well, it looks like I will have to wait another three or four months now.

Anyway, I did get the chance to use two of the new ones with breakfast this morning: Fat Cat® Surprisingly Mild Guajillo[2] Ghost on the hashbrowns and Fat Cat® Strawberry Serrano Hot Sauce on the eggs. Both of them are very tasty, and not overpoweringly spicy. Of the two, I liked the SMGG the best; it really is surprisingly mild for a hot sauce with Ghost Peppers in it and I could use it liberally without fear of death.

http://fatcatfoods.com/

The last new one that I didn't get to use today was Fat Cat® Chairman Meow's Revenge (Scorpion Pepper[3] Sauce). I did try a little toothpick amount ("Fool me once…" ~ see 'blog-entry from Eddie's Cafe on January 7th, 2012) as soon as I opened it up and it literally gave me a five-minute sneezing fit ~ all from the smallest amount; yeah, I see that this is gonna be another fun one, folks. It is another one of those completely ridiculously hot hot sauces that I will probably have it in my refrigerator until Hell freezes over, and, if that ever happens, believe me, this stuff will help melt it. The worst part is that the opening of the bottle is normal-sized and allows for way to much to be poured out at one time if you are not careful (imagine trying to transport unstable TNT… over gravel roads… in a car that needs new shocks… and you have the hiccups); it really should have some kind of pouring regulator/dripper at the top (and I really can't afford any more Wrongful Death lawsuits from Korean waiters' families ~ again, see 'blog-entry from January 7th, 2012).

I purposely (purposefully?) skipped ordering any Coffee with my breakfast because I planned on getting a nice cuppa over at the new "flagship" (hey, it's their actual terminology for the new store, not mine) Peet's Coffee & Tea® on Chestnut Street. I had a free cuppa their House Roast ~ this was not from another free birthday gift coupon, they just offer a free cuppa whenever you buy some of their Coffee beans, and I picked up a half-pound of their new Limited Edition Alta de Dota[4]. 

http://www.peets.com/alta-de-dota.html

the Wild Parrots of San Francisco Interlude

After breakfast, as it was far from a lugubrious morning, I took my cuppa Coffee and parked over by the Lombard Gate of the Presidio to walk off some of the breakfast. I only saw a pair (What do you call a small "company of parrots"? A "branch of parrots"? A "subsidiary of parrots"?) of the Wild Parrots flying around; I heard a few more of them high up in the tall trees near the gate, but really couldn't see them. I did come across a momma duck and her brand new batch of tiny ducklings (there were ten in all) as I was walking around the Letterman Digital Arts Center Recycled Water Pond at Lucas (Thanks, Jim & Mary, for showing that spot to me!). Of course, I felt it absolutely necessary to name all of them, too; there were: Quack, Jack, Mack, Zach, Aflac®, Back, Pack, Sack, Attack, and George.

Carpe Syrupum!


Glen Bacon Scale Rating: New! Blueberry Cannoli Cream Pancakes (Regular Combo) ~ 6.3 (actually, it was really probably just a 6.1 or a 6.2, but I am giving it extra points for the freebiocity of it all); Surprisingly Mild Guajillo Ghost ~ 7.4; Strawberry Serrano Hot Sauce ~ 7.0; Peet's® House Roast ~ 6.8 (no extra points were given here, even though it was also gratis)


1. Seriously?! Billy-boy and his gaggle of goose-stepping spell-check Nazis don't even recognize una delle specialità più conosciute della pasticceria siciliana. There really is no hope for these bastardi marrone-camicie if they can't even recognize a common word from one of their own Axis partners.

2. Guajillo chillies are relatively mild and pack about the same picanteness as Jalapeño chillies. They have a rating of 2,500 to 5,000 on the Scoville Scale.

3. Now, the stupid Trinidad Moruga Scorpion chilli is one of the hottest chillies in the World. Up until just last year it was THE hottest ~ with a mean heat of more than 1.2 million Scoville Heat Units (and some plants are more than 2 million). It has been surpassed by the current record holder, the Carolina Reaper ~ 1.569 million on the Scoville Scale (with peak levels of over 2.2 million). Cindy & Greg, please do not send me any bottles of hot sauce that are made from the Carolina Reaper chillies… not unless it comes with its own waiver for unsuspecting people to sign or an O.J.-type legal team.

4. Stupid, useless cunning linguist pointer of the day:

This translates from Spanish as "Highest Dot" as far as I can tell. I don't think it is a reference to Carol de Dota's peaks.