Top Secret Restaurant Recipes

Last Friday, my husband and I decided to take a trip to one of our favorite local restaurants. I had forgotten how delicious their homemade house dressing tastes. It’s a clear garlic dressing with bleu cheese crumbles. I don’t like food that is overly garlic, and bleu cheese is not my favorite. But the combination of the two, at least how The Strongbow Inn prepares it, is phenomenal. So much so, that I have now made it my mission to recreate the dressing at home.

Copycat recipes are kind of my “thing.” For instance, a few posts back, I made a fabulous rendition of The Cheesecake Factory’s Sweet Corn Tamale Cakes. And then, a reader turned me on to a book that he loves, which has dozens and dozens and dozens of copycat restaurant recipes.

So, I bought America’s Most Wanted Recipes, by Ron Douglas. There are Outback recipes, Applebee’s recipes, Red Lobster recipes, and pretty much every other copycat restaurant recipe you can think of.

I used to work at Outback Steakhouse, and I learned a few recipes from my time there. The Outback recipes in this book are spot on, so I am certain the rest are the same. I’ll be trying out a bunch of them over the next few weeks. The best part, though, is that it comes with eight bonus cookbooks, and the restaurant recipes are all in electronic form. I like this because I like to keep my favorite recipes in a three ring binder. With this book, I can just print off what I want, or search through the computer for what I want.