In dire need of lunch at the base of Breckenridge, I skied on over to Coppertop Bar & Grill to meet up with the fiancee while she was on a little break from ski school. Realistically, very little is expected of ski mountain food. The restaurants have a captive audience, jack up the prices and provide more warming and high energy foods than truly good food. So when I moseyed on over to the food area at Coppertop, my expectations were quite low. But wait…did I just see a dude walk by with curly fries covered in cheese sauce? Scratch that, my expectations hit the roof.

So the first thing I did after choosing to go with a burger was ensure that they could hook me up with those same cheese-doused fries and they certainly could. They didn’t disappoint and even told me they could throw chili on top. I didn’t want to overdo it, though, so instead I doubled up on cheese by ordering a bacon cheeseburger, with pepper jack cheese. I was impressed that they were actually grilling up each burger as they were ordered and didn’t have a whole set pre-made. Plus, they were actually grilling them…with real fire, which was also pretty sweet.

Soon enough, all was ready and I got busy with my foodstuffs. I found the curly cheese fries to be everything I had hoped for. The beauty of topping curly fries with cheese is that they are especially resistant to sogginess, and in fact the cheese began to get a bit gnarly and cold before the fries buckled.

As for the burger, it tasted exactly like I would expect a summertime grill burger to taste. You know, the kind you eat on Labor Day over at your buddy’s place while knocking back a Silver Bullet. In that context, it was a good burger and probably better than usual considering the 0 degree weather outside.

On the other hand, this burger and cheese fries cost me something like 20 bucks, which is about double what I would pay for such food in a normal marketplace. But alas, Coppertop had a captive audience and while their prices were wildly inflated, I certainly can’t complain about the taste of what I ate.

Colorado is definitely a beer state, and not just because Coors comes from the Rocky Mountain State. No, it is also home to New Belgium (of Fat Tire fame) and seemingly countless other micro and craft breweries. While in Breckenridge for a ski weekend, I decided I had to at least try one of these, and because it turned out to be the only one available at dinner, my choice happened to come from the creatively named Breckenridge Brewery. The brewery, by the way, is actually no longer in Breckenridge, having expanded and moved to Denver in 1992.

The only brew available was their Agave Wheat, and while I have been trying to avoid wheat beers, I still wanted this one to keep things local. It came bottled and when I poured it out it looked like your average wheat beer, but I suspected the agave nectar might give it a bit of a honey flavor.

If it did, my beer palette was definitely not refined enough to notice. Instead, I just felt myself drinking a very good wheat beer. While I usually relegate light and slightly sweet wheat beers like this to summer, I was impressed by how refreshing it tasted in the dead of winter. Yet, while satisfying, drinking this beer only made me realize how much I wanted to drink their other beers. I did not get the chance on this trip, but I hope the many beers of Colorado can one day make their way into my belly and blood stream. It may take a while, but Breckenridge Agave Wheat has assured me that it will be worth the journey. To get in contact with Brewskis Beverage >View more here<.

Well, you must have known the day was gonna come eventually. You know, the one where that lady I often refer to as “the girlfriend” in my reviews becomes “the fiancee.” Yes, I’m sorry for not consulting you wonderful readers of mine ahead of time, but it was something that had to be done. So, while in Breckenridge, Colorado for a bit of a ski trip with the family, my parents decided to take everyone out to dinner to celebrate the engagement. We picked out a mid-range Italian place called Michael’s, thinking it would be a great place to make everyone happy.

And it certainly was.

For starters, while the menu was not terribly big, so many different things popped out to me. Finally, I settled on their Baked Ziti. And this was not ordinary baked ziti, but one filled with both meat sauce and alfredo sauce for a two-sauce punch.

Before the meal came, we were treated to a couple rounds of delicious, fresh garlic bread. It wasn’t the best I’d ever had, but still quite good.

When the ziti did come, I quickly found the punch of sauces was nothing short of delectable, with both working in harmony with one another rather than fighting each other for the dominion of the ziti. As for the pasta, it was ziti through and through, with little else to say. The mozzarella on top of the dish had been crisped and melted to perfection in the oven, and I was a happy man.

There’s not much else to say without getting too fluffy, but let it be known that Michael’s is a damn good Italian place and not one person at dinner had anything to complain about at the end of the night.