The Cattle Ranch in Sanford, FL

The Cattle Ranch is a restaurant in Sanford in a mostly windowless building. The location is on a stretch of Sanford Avenue with no nearby restaurants in the immediate vicinity. Those two points gave the restaurant a somewhat creepy appearance from the outside, but creepy looking restaurants normally have good food. The Cattle Ranch did indeed have good food...

My meal started out with a salad with the house dressing. This was pretty much what I would have expected from an old-fashioned steakhouse salad. It was nothing exceptional, but it got the job done with iceberg lettuce, onions, tomato, pepper slices, carrot sticks, and croutons.

Even though the Cattle Ranch was a steakhouse, I didn't order any beef. Instead, I went with the coconut shrimp. These large shrimp were butterflied and fried in a coconut batter, then served with a baked potato and apple sauce. I've had coconut shrimp in the past where the coconut flavor was completely absent, but in this case, each shrimp was bursting with coconut! I would gladly get these again.

Also worth noting for all you big eaters out there is The Cattle Ranch's Six Pound Challenge. If you eat a six pound steak, along with all the sides, you get the meal for free and your picture hanging on the wall! Being that I'm not a big beef eater to begin with, I don't think this particular eating challenge is for me...

Food @ the Longwood Arts & Crafts Festival

I went to the Longwood Arts & Crafts Festival on November 22, 2008. It was a good time walking around Downtown Longwood, looking at the old houses and what people were trying to sell. Much of it was actual handmade arts/crafts, while a lot was also mass produced junk made in China that people were trying to pass off as their own. This is a food blog though, and that's why I took lots of pictures of the food stands at the festival. The food always seems to be very photogenic at events like this, and although my visit to the festival involved no actual eating of the food being sold, I'm posting the pictures of the food stands anyway.