Triple Grilled Cheese w/ Hash Browns
Before the trip we picked up Jane and Michael Stern's Road Food, but 4000 miles in we had yet to cross paths with one of the recommended restaurants. We had high hopes for the Noon Break in Cody, Wyoming but arrived at 7:30pm to find it closed for the day. We had failed to notice the critical code in which "B/L" stands for breakfast and lunch only. We turned to a local for a recommendation and ended up waiting over an hour for a decidedly uninspired meal. We redoubled our commitment to the Sterns' recommendations and found that Bob's, in Sioux Falls, offers much to write home about. The food was incredibly cheap, tasty, and a flawless execution of its genre. Emily had the above grilled cheese and hash browns and Phil ate a burger and fries. The waitress's incredulous, "Did you just take a picture of the food?," led to our exposure as road trippers. She had us sign their Road Food registry--a composition notebook a quarter filled with lines of names and comments--and told us that they didn't even realize they had gotten a glowing review in the book until a customer showed them several months after its publication. She also suggested that we share an ear of corn for dessert. Apparently one of the cooks went out to a friend's field late after work and collected bushels of their excess harvest. Back at the diner, they douse the corn in butter, wrap it in foil, and toss it in the "broaster" (this combination fryer/pressure cooker is the reputed source of their claim to fame). The final product was sweet, juicy, and the perfect substitute for the cookie we had been contemplating.