One of the highlights of visiting a grandparent in Florida is the Sunday night buffet. How often do you get salad, fried chicken, cornbread, mashed potatoes, steak, shrimp, carrots, broccoli, pot roast, and a brownie fudge sundae all in the same meal? I was actually pleasantly surprised by the quality of the food at the golden corral. A lot of the meats we freshly carved, and the place was so packed that nothing sat around for very long.
Tonight, due to an onion that got lost on the way home from the store, I had to do some improvising. The original plan was chicken stroganoff, so I had chicken, mushrooms, sour cream as my base. I ended up going with a curry sauce and added some diced potatoes. It was a touch too spicy, but that is a mistake easily forgiven in this household. I should improvise more often, it was actually pretty fun once I got over being annoyed about the missing onion.
We got some mini halloween themed cupcakes to go with dinner tonight. there is something awesome about being able to eat a whole cupcake in one bite.
My cell phone finally died, so I had to get a new one. I ended up with the Mogul by HTC. It's pretty sweet and I can now blog right from the phone. Here's a picture of our dog as a test.
I finally made some hot sauce out of my hot pepper mash. After some discussions on this thread over at DiscussCooking, I decided to boil the mash for a bit to be on the safe side. Then I added some vinegar and let it sit. I consider it a success and a failure. The success is that I really like what the aging process did. I got some of that rich flavor that you expect in a hot sauce that was missing from my previous attempt. The failure is that it still wasn't spicy enough. Maybe I didn't add enough habanero, or maybe I just need to find a better source for peppers, but after the aging, it just wasn't nearly as spicy as I had hoped it would be.
Although it's not technically in Pittsburgh, this is one of my favorite restaurants, and well worth the little bit of driving to get there. It is truly authentic South Indian Cuisine. The Mysore Masala Dosa is just like the one I ate in the town of Mysore in India. They are completely unpretentious, located in the middle of nowhere, and the silverware is plastic, but that's half of the charm. The other half is the awesome food.
I start every meal there with a plate of Idli with Sambar. I have mentioned this before as one of my five favorite foods. The Idli is like a little rice flour sponge that soaks up the Sambar, which is a delicious spiced soup. (I think technically it's more of a condiment, but by calling it a soup, I don't feel silly grabbing a spoon and finishing off any that is left over.
Then I usually order some of the South Indian standard dishes, like Uthappam or Dosa. They also make a very good Malai Kofta, which is not technically South Indian, but all I care is that it tastes good.
This is hands down one of my favorite restaurants in the whole Pittsburgh area.
So I've been doing some serious thinking about this blog. It has been a lot of fun writing a food blog. I think it has gotten me to experiment more with my cooking and has been a fun time all around. But I think it is too narrow. I love food, but it is not my main interest in life, and it seems very artificial to restrict what I blog about to food. So I think I'm going to expand the scope here somewhat. For example, I just got back from a three week trip to Peru during which I saw Machu Picchu and climbed four big mountains. It seems really lame that the only part of that I'd blog about is the food.
I haven't figured out exactly what the theme of this blog is going to be. I love food, traveling, climbing, technology and lots more, I don't know if all of it will make it onto the blog, but certainly some of it will. In the short term, I kept a bit of a travel log while in Peru, and I'm going to start turning that into posts, along with some of my pictures. We'll see where it goes from there. I don't know if I'd still qualify as a "food blog", but there will still be a strong food focus, after all I still gotta eat!
It has been a very hectic summer for me. I posted a few pictures of my trip to Canada, but that was just a warmup for the mountains of Peru. In all the chaos of getting ready for the trip, and moving at the same time(more on that some other time), I completely forgot about the blog. Oops.
I´ve been in Peru for a week now, and have some great pictures (even some of food) to post when I get back. This will be brief because I´m in an internet cafe, and then tomorrow I head up into the mountains for 2 weeks. So for those few loyal readers I have, the blog isn´t dead, it´s just resting!
So what do you do after a week of hard climbing? Well after taking a shower, you go out for a real meal. And if you happen to be in Canmore, Alberta, you'll find that they are very proud of their Alberta Beef out there. So why fight it? You go out and order a slow cooked prime rib with potatoes, broccoli, and beets and polish it off. You drain it down with some beer, probably a local brew, and polish it all of with some mango cheesecake.
In all seriousness, after a week like this I can eat amounts that would normally make me nauseous and still be hungry. This was incredibly satisfying, and it sure was some good beef!
Well, my trip for Canada wiped me out for about a week, and since then I've been playing catch up and trying to move. But rather than make excuses, I figured I'd distract you with a few of my climbing pictures and try to get back to posting next week!
Here's a picture of the Skyladder Route on Mt. Andromeda. The route goes up the prominent snow/ice slope on the right. Then you travel along the ridge off the left edge of the picture to the summit.
Here's me at the summit of Mt. Andromeda. You can see Mt. Athabasca off in the background.
The North Face of Mt. Athabasca. Our route took us straight up the North Face, towards the narrow point in the rock band and then up a gully to the summit.
It's harder than it looks! Here is me at one of my most tired moments, 17 hours on the go from the car to the summit of Mt. Athabasca. But the views are really worth it. I'll try to post a picture of our victory meal tomorrow to vaguely tie this in as a food-related post :)
