Today I finally received my last Christmas present of the 2005 holiday season! If he had waited any longer it would have been my birthday present. Alan got me a gift certificate to Penzeys. Sigh….SIGH!
Time to go shopping!
After I opened my present we all went out to get burritos! After meandering Lake st we settled on Taqueria Poblanito. I got the huerache con pollo y arroz y frijoles, Alan got the sopes con chorizo and David got the burrito con vegetarian (er something). Apparently, I am too sibilant when I say things like ‘sin cebollas’ and ‘carnitas’ (carnitas solamente el sabado y domingo). The huerache was a flattened oblong of masa dough with refried beans inside. it was grilled and then covered in chicken, queso fresca and crema. It was really really good. We’ll go there again.
Man, i have so much ging on this weekend and I keep finding out about more. Damn. Summer begins.
Category Archives: Delicious
if it wasn’t considered bad touch I would hug you right now
Okay, quicklike.
Thursday night started out with the dog park which is not all that exciting except Ghengis has become some sort of mini-celebrity. More that one person came up to me and said “is that Ghengis? I’ve heard about him!”. Now, Ghengis is cute, I’ll grant that, but I’m still not sure where this fame is coming from. The lady from the children’s book store fell in love with him, it was so cute. She owned a lab/shar pei (and possibly mastiff) mix that was 8 months old and so damned cute!
Dog park. I swear to god this is the happiest place on earth.
After the dog park, David and I decided to go out. I decided it was a date, he decided it was going out and having fun. It’s a battle of semantics that I will win, even if I only win in my head.
It was “Dining out for Life” night (which I keep calling “Dining out for AIDS” by accident giving it a completely different meaning) and so we picked a restaurant and headed out figuring we’d do dinner and then catch the 10pm showing ov V for Vendetta as we have not yet seen that.
The restaurant had a wait of over an hour when we got there. I’d been to this place before and it was a weird little run-down hole in the wall kind of place with great latino food. Now it had been completely remodeled and it seems that everyone found out. Damn. The food looked great but we didn’t really want to wait an hour so we considered our options. Pizza Luce was a couple blocks down, but I’m still Luce’d out and we wanted to go somewhere relatively new. So we settled on Crema cafe which has just started dinner service.
I don’t know how long Crema has been doing actual dinner service but it’s obvious they have some kinks to work out of the system. The ordering system was just weird, sit at a table with your menus, pick your stuff, get up and get in line with the ice cream orderers, order your meal, sit down, meal is delivered. The food wasn’t bad but it also wasn’t great. I had the bucatini al bolognese and the sauce was good but the noodles were wrong. The sauce needed flat, wide noodles to hold onto. David’s dinner was okay, the salad was way bland. We also ordered a bottle of wine, a highly recommended Portuguese red. My initial tasting was good so I accepted the bottle but after a few good drinks I realized it was a bad choice. It was all high notes almost to the point of being metallic. It had good body and wasn’t terribly dry, but it was also pretty singular.
But! The lady who took the order forgot to write the bottle of wine on the ticket. When the cashier rung us up later we asked her about it and she didn’t feel like running the card again so she gave us the wine for free.
And we (I) couldn’t leave Crema without ice cream. They had an Olive Oil ice cream (with fleur de sel) which I tried and really disliked. I ended up going with the cardamom/black pepper ice cream. Heavenly.
We ate our dinner out in the little courtyard they have. It was absolutely date-like regardless of what David wants to call it.
The night ended up getting late so instead of going to the movie we headed home for other things.
All in all, a wonderful date night.
And today…
Today I worked on grinding Anna’s soul down even more and then building it back up with Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. I’m good like that. I’ll hurt you, but I will mend you with treats.
String theory
David and I have been trying the different mexican places on Lake st. Last night David brought me a burrito con barbacoa sin cebollas! It was damned tasty, if a bit salty.
Later, we headed over to the lake for a walk. I need to remember to bring my camera. We pondered the ducks, the flowering trees, the bird and fish bones.
I curled up and read Lovecraft and considered how television and media are making us cynical. I’d never read Lovecraft before, I’m reading a collection of short stories and they’re good, but not nearly as scary as I’d hoped.
Later I did dream I was trapped on an island and people we could not see were hunting us, so I guess they do work.
Or maybe it wasn’t the book, maybe it was the burrito! At 2 am I woke up with a terrible rolling and pain in the belly. blergh. I have a theory that when you eat something truly evil it is evil on multiple dimensions and can send out quantum threads and strings and grab previous meals and pull them out of the digested dimensions.
At 2am I lost (in reverse order of being eaten) the evil burrito, french fries and chicken fingers, a large americano, ice cream with chocolate and cookies, lambchop asparagus and cherry cobbler, the #5 mcdonald’s breakfast, another americano, a handful of chips, swedish pancakes and coffee, and a cheeseburger and fries.
Everything I ate this weekend ripped from the cosmos and run in reverse through my system.
I truly wanted to die.
Instead I slept late and did the one thing that really brings me comfort. I got out my mom’s china teapot, made up copious amounts of Earl Grey Tea, put on my velvet fat pants and my goofy white tiger cub t-shirt and curled up on the sofa with the dogs.
I’m cranky and I don’t feel good. Leave me alone.
en la cabeza
I love when David and I hit the little Mexican places for dinner. Not the big, fakey places with chimichanga platters and yucatan combos, but the real places with the little counters and no English spoken. I love watching him order everything in Spanish. He always tells me I should order in spanish, but my spanish is so terribly bad that if I even attempted “mas queso, por favor” they’d give me this weird sideways look, shrug their shoulders and head to the back room. Minutes later they would return with a tortilla covered goat, which they would unceremoniously shove at me while shooing me out the door. “puta!” they’d mutter under their breath as I wandered away.
Anyway, David ordered our food (I had the burrito con puerca en salsa verde con papas) and I looked at the pan of lengua and wondered if the cow’s ghost spent the rest of its eternity tasting peppers and onions.
Afterwards we picked up mexican beer and watched Lost (thanks again, Alex!).
I got my new insurance packet and was checking out the point system for how they determine how much to raise your rates based on your violations. I was not pleased to discover that running a red light would net you more points than any alcohol related violations. Total bullshit. Also, what’s the difference between a fraudulent and a fictitious license? Because the violations are listed seperately.
Speaking of violations, I got an official letter in the mail telling me that since a judge ruled that traffic light cameras were unconstitutional the state was not able to process my ticket at this time. Sorry for the inconvenience. I’m not entirely sure what was unconstitutional, but I don’t really care. Ruling the law unconstitutional is by far the coolest way i can think of to keep my driving record clean. Sexy? Yes! I think this is exactly what the founding fathers had in mind (the founding fathers of Minnesota, mind you, this isn’t a supreme court issue…yet).
I still can’t believe that I would garner fewer points getting busted for having an open container in the car than running that damned red light. I might have to go kick their progressive asses.
Tonight I am the hubbopots and I like that.
follow your dreams
man, this has been a crazy weekend at the stove. Crazy.
Saturday night I finally got over my aversion to spaghetti squash! I sauteed kale, fennel bulb and radicchio in the wok and added about half the spaghetti squash. Then orange juice, lime juice and garlic, cooked until the liquid was gone. Finished with tamari and sesame oil. Much better than I would have expected.
Then I baked up a loaf of honey graham bread and we ate that while watching the seminal 80’s post-nuclear-apocalypse movie, The Day After. What I learned about nuclear war is that within 120 hours after a giant 300 bomb attack on the US everyone will turn into a dirty, mute hippy. Seriously, no doubt, there’s a giant war and everyone suddenly looks like a fithly Cheech or Chong but instead of smokin’ it up and laughing they end up staring dazedly off into the distance and having their skin fall off.
Yeah, so…
Last night I dreamed about making brownies no less than 3 times! 3 times! So, if I know anything it’s that you must always follow your dreams. First thing this morning (after getting coffee then going BACK to the coffee shop so the coffee chica culd meet ghengis) I made brownies with toasted pecans. This is the only brownie recipe I really like, not cakey, gooey and with the crispy top. It’s an old, handwritten recipe, I think it’s my ex’s grandmother’s recipe, I’m not sure. I don’t ever want to lose it even if it does make me a little sad every time I make it.
Also it makes me very happy to eat good brownies.
So yeah, if you dream about brownies, follow that dream. Follow your dreams. However, if you dream about having dirty dirty orgies with co-workers past and present, don’t follow that dream.
It didn’t end with the brownies, though. I had the bread machine whip up a pizza crust which I divided in half and rolled out. Each circle was put in a pie plate, docked and baked for ten minutes. I mixed together spinach, feta, dill, garlic and two eggs and threw that in one pie shell. Then I mixed up zucchini, kale, carrots and broccoli with ricotta, fresh mozzarella, parmesan, herbs and an egg. Tossed that in a shell, covered it in garlicky pasta sauce and fresh mozzarella. Baked them both for about 40 minutes. These were not for dinner, these were for lunches this week.
Then I made a loaf of focaccia.
THEN
(yeah, i kept cooking)
For dinner I batter fried okra for the first time. It turned out pretty well, if I do say so. It needs a little more seasoning (I used curry) but it was not slimy. I also made curried sweet potato latkes and a mixed green salad with a sesame/champaigne vinaigrette.
I’m tired! I was totally crazy for the cooking all day and it felt good to be so productive. Not just productive, but meaningfully so, I have enough food in the fridge to cover lunches for most of the week. Good food, not just sodium laden pre-packaged food. Lunches are made with love!!!
How was your weekend?