This weekend, Amanda and I took a couple days off and spent a loong weekend out by Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland. It’s pretty much as far west in Maryland you can go before hitting West Virginia. Amanda’s mom and stepdad have a cabin out there and were nice enough to take us to some of their favorite food joints in the area!
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Park-N-Dine
Park-N-Dine is a small diner out in Hancock, MD. The diner has a nice cozy feel and the wait staff is very warm and friendly. The menu consists of typical diner fare, though I saw someone order the stuffed cabbage and it looked absolutely amazing! But what we really came here for was their Hot Turkey Sandwich. A favorite of Amanda’s parents and I can definitely see why. The plate comes with thick slices of dark and white turkey meat, no skimping here, between two pieces of white bread and whopping sides of creamy no-skin mashed potatoes and homemade stuffing. The whole plate is covered in gravy, which needed just a scotch of salt+pepper. Typically, I think of turkey as dry and bland, so I avoid it at restaurants but the turkey in this sandwich was a winner! Fresh, juicy and tender – Marc says that the diner makes fresh turkeys daily for their sandwiches. The only downside to our meal were the sodas that we ordered which tasted heavy with syrup and not nearly enough carbonation. Not a problem as the waitress was more than glad to switch out our sodas with some iced tea.
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Katie’s Ice Cream
One of Deep Creek’s local roadside joints. The whole shop is based out of a small trailer parked in the driveway of a house off of Route 219. Katie’s offers a variety of soft serve ice cream flavors but on the suggestion of Amanda’s parents, we went with what they call FlavorBurst cones. This is a still a mystery to us but it seems like there’s two auxilary tubes on either side of the soft serve ice cream tube that pumps out the flavor syrup in unison with the ice cream, creating these ribbons of colorful sweetness along the rims of the ice cream. The best one hands down was the Butter Pecan, which was rich, nutty, salty and sweet, and decadent. If you’ve got a sweet tooth, go for the Strawberry but if you want a subdued berry flavor try the Blueberry.
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Deep Creek Sweets
This shop is located close to the Deep Creek ski resorts. The shop seems to specialize mostly in candies and has a variety of samples by the front door. We tried a raspberry lemonade taffy, tropical mix taffy, caramel popcorn, and chocolate covered sunflower seeds. They also had a fudge counter which featured key lime, tiger butter, German chocolate cake, strawberry, mint, vanilla, and a couple others. My favorite thing from the shop were their freshly made mini doughnuts. When you place an order, they’ll make them on the spot for you: they have a little dough extruder that plops the little rings of dough into a river of hot oil, and as it travels down they flip the little rings to cook the other side. After they pull them out, they dust them with a generous amount of powdered sugar and cinnamon. Personally, I think the doughnuts tasted best on their own but you could also order dipping sauces on the side: banana, strawberry, chocolate, or vanilla. We tried the chocolate and strawberry dipping sauces: the chocolate was a bit thin and definitely needed some more oomph chocolate flavor and the consistency and taste of the strawberry dipping sauce reminded me a lot of strawberry jam. Doughnuts sell for about $6/dozen and small containers of dipping sauce are $0.50 each.
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J G’s Pub
J G’s Pub is a local pub in the Deep Creek Lake area. This is your typical sports-bar, equipped with a long bar, TVs, and Nascar paraphrenelia, but it had been recently renovated so it was actually clean and non-smoky (phew!). The place gets automatic bonus points for being able to make a solid Cherry Coke with Coke and grenadine, though at times they went a little overboard with the grenadine: in and out of refills, the Cherry Coke had a very red tint and at times I felt like I was taking sips of pure grenadine. We ordered the Jalapeno Poppers as an appetizer and I was a little disappointed that the basket only had five itty bitty poppers but man they were goood – crispy deep fried, gooey center of hothothot cheddar cheese, and a dipping sauce of sour cream. The star of the show was the Loaded Cheesesteak with Fries: a huge 2-person affair. The bun was thick, toasted warm, and held up against the meat and toppings without getting soggy. The layers of steak were lean, meaty, and juicy. Veggies, tomato, lettuce, and peppers, were fresh and light and the thin layer of mayo was just right – not overpowering like your typical marinara/tomato cheesesteak sauce. The melted mozzarella, yes mozzarella!, cheese completely covered the top of the cheesesteak, acting as a seal to keep all of the components together in the bun. The fries were thick and crisp and not too salty. Needless to say, we finished off this meal faster than you could say cheesesteak
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