The Blessings of the Season

Mainstreet Restaurant wishes you and yours…

 

Feijoada

At Mainstreet Restaurant, we love bringing a little Brazilian flair to the table. One of our favorite dishes to serve is Brazil’s national dish, Feijoada. Feijoada is a black bean, sausage, and pork stew served on jasmine rice with traditional accompaniments of farofa (toasted manioc flour), vinaigrette, orange slices, and sauteed kale. We smoke our meats in house, which ensures superior flavor. Come in for a little taste of Brazil and some hometown atmosphere. We’re betting that once you’ve tasted our Feijoada, you’ll be back for more.

Comfort Food – Maqueca

Comfort food takes many forms. Sometimes we want something absolutely, traditionally American – like mashed potatoes. Other times, we are looking for a “new” comfort with the qualities we desire: creamy, filling, and totally satisfying. If you’re looking for something new on a cold autumn night, come into Mainstreet for Moqueca, a traditional Brazilian seafood stew. Brazilians have been making Moquecas for 300 years. This stew is in a delicious savory coconut cream broth with vegetables, shrimp, calamari, and cod. It’s served on jasmine rice with sauteed kale, a Brazilian salad, and fresh house-made French bread. And, as always, breads are available for purchase by the loaf, so you can take some of that stick-to-your-ribs comfort home with you.

Brazilian Stroganoff

It’s that time of year when we long for comforting food – cheesy or creamy, warm and filling. We want to eat a satisfying meal with friends, and savor the warmth it brings to us in our cold and snowy Rocky Mountains. If you’ve grown tired of the tried and true stand-bys, come in to Mainstreet Restaurant for Stroganoff Brazilian style. It’s a slow simmered beef steak in a rich mushroom cream sauce, that’s served on a bed of jasmine rice, and topped with crispy potato sticks. This yummy meal also comes with sauteed kale, a Brazilian salad (chopped romaine with hearts of palm, bacon and black olives), and fresh homemade French bread. This kind of food makes you feel loved! And remember, the bread we serve is made fresh, from scratch, right here in this restaurant. If you want fresh bread without the fuss of making it yourself, all of our breads are available to take home by the loaf.

Meet Me in Idaho Springs – Connection

Great Aunt Pearl had been a great hit with all of the Halloween Walkers, scaring the children just a bit with the baggy support hosiery around her ankles and the large mole on her chin, and making their parents, the ones who might actually buy jewelry laugh and share stories about female relatives with the same lovable, disheveled persona.  Ricky had marked everything in the store down by her usual Halloween discount of 35% and making deals of earrings thrown in with pendants and toe rings with bracelets.  The “Black Heart” pendant had gone to an out of towner,  who had come up for the festivities, and who ended up purchasing a chocolate diamond and pearl set for his wife for Christmas.  Stanton Christophersen, the Ryan Reynolds guy, came to the shop after his store closed and bought a pin to send to his mom who it turned out lived in Roanoke, Virginia, where Ricky had attended college. Stanton, who sometimes went by Stan, was a geologist and quite knowledgeable about some of the stones Ricky used in her jewelry, which gave them something to talk about without getting too personal, which by Ricky’s estimation, felt quite safe.  When she asked him how a geologist got into the vintage clothing, consignment shop business, he smiled and said, “I think a piece of clothing, just like an old rock, that serves a purpose, or brings joy into someone’s life should be given a chance to do it again.  You and I are really in the same business,” he continued.  “You give rocks a second chance to shine, and I do the same for your grandma’s shoes.”  After that they shared a cinnamon roll at the Main Street Restaurant, and Stanton insisted she take the gooey sweet center roll.  Ricky was starting to like him.

Garlic Mashed Potatoes

The ultimate comfort food – sometimes that’s exactly what we need!

Garlic Mashed Potatoes (recipe courtesy of Paula Deen)

Ingredients

3 medium baking potatoes peeled and coarsely chopped

1 teaspoon salt

4 tablespoons butter, at room temperature

1/4 cup sour cream, at room temperature

1 teaspoon finely minced garlic

1 tablespoon (or more) whole milk, at room temperature or warmed

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

 

Directions

In a medium saucepan, cook the potatoes in salted water until tender, about 15 minutes. Drain the potatoes and return them to the saucepan. Add the butter, sour cream and garlic. Mash the potatoes with a potato masher or the back of a fork until the ingredients are blended. Add the milk, 1 tablespoon at a time, until the potatoes are the desired consistency. Taste and add salt and pepper, if needed.

Regular Saturday Fix

If you’re looking for a real, made from scratch breakfast to start your day, saunter on in to Mainstreet Restaurant. Let me tell you why. The other day I wanted pancakes. You know the kind – they fill up an entire plate and don’t come from a mix. And I didn’t want Aunt Jemima to pour on top – I wanted real butter and authentic maple syrup. Mainstreet has a wonderful variety of pancakes – fruit, sourdough, buttermilk and rye. I chose the sourdough, with it’s delicious tanginess which goes beautifully with the sweet from the syrup. In addition to the griddle favorites, they offer the usual breakfast meat choices along with applewood smoked pork loin. Since they smoke their meats in-house, I felt the pork loin would be the best choice and I was not disappointed. Delicious! Affordable! It’s my regular Saturday fix. Maybe it should become yours.

Satisfaction

My favorite meal to eat out is breakfast. When I eat the food I love, and drink a comforting cup of coffee, it sets my day on the right path. You see, I take care of a lot of people. I’m a mother, I’m a wife, and I’m the chief cook and bottle washer at my home. Sometimes I desire the luxurious feel of someone taking care of me. I want someone to cook my eggs just like I like them, someone to fry my bacon to the perfect state of crispness. The only way to make this happen is to carve out the time, so I do.

On those days when I have that precious time set aside, I head over to Mainstreet Restaurant. Not only do they prepare the eggs and bacon just right, they have this unbelievably delicious house-made bread. They use it to make creamy, custardy french toast, what I like to refer to as ‘french toast perfection’. It’s tasty, it’s decadent, and I look forward to those mornings when I know I get to have such a treat. For a perfectly safisfying breakfast experience in Idaho Springs, I would head no where else ~ not even my own kitchen.

Full Belly, Happy Heart

Sometimes, when I come home from work, I simply do not have what it takes to get a meal on the table. On those nights, my family has choices. The first is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for everyone, but serving these for dinner is an act of utter desperation ~ as is cold cereal and canned soup.

Another choice is to grab fast food somewhere, knowing we are probably sacrificing nutrition for convenience. And fried food gets old very quickly, even for the little ones who really only want the burger and fries because a toy comes with it.

Thankfully, we have a better option. We had a night like this just last week, and we took ourselves to Mainstreet Restaurant for dinner. The atmosphere is comfortable, it’s like eating at a friend’s house, which we love. The dish I had was so wonderful, I had an epiphany while eating it — there is nothing better than a scrumptious home-cooked meal, except for one cooked for you by someone else. I have to comment on what I ate because it was so completely satisfying.

I had a thinly sliced, glazed pork loin. It was perfectly seasoned with a Brazilian rub, a mixture whose ingredients I can only guess at. It was absolutely mouth-watering and was better than anything I could have worked up at home feeling like I was. If you’re near Idaho Springs and don’t have the energy to make dinner, let Mainstreet make it for you. It is such an affordable treat, and you’ll leave with a full belly and happy heart.

Meet Me in Idaho Springs: Best Morning

It was the kind of day that reminds a person of why they live in the mountains, why the winter snow doesn’t seem that big, and the deer gobbling down your flowers every summer becomes unimportant.  It was autumn in the over-achieving, just off the highway, town of Idaho Springs, Colorado, the place you stopped on your way to the resorts to grab a bite to eat, but for Ricky, short for Ericka, this was home, and fall was the season of seasons.  Ricky stepped out onto Main Street and was immediately swept up in the buzz of folks setting up for the Friday Farmer’s Market, the kids carefully choosing their pumpkins for the upcoming carving contest.  Asta, from Java Mountain Roasters was launching her Autumn Gold blend for fall and you could smell the beans coming to perfection from the street.  Two doors down at the Main Street Restaurant, Josh’s “better than mom’s” cinnamon bread was coming out of the oven, ready to slice and slather with butter.  Ricky breathed in deeply and made a decision.  An Autumn Gold Americano with cream was exactly what this October morning called for.