Eat-Expensive-for-Cheap-Week!

Restaurant week is upon us!!!

Join us this January when some of Washington, DC's finest restaurants offer awe-inspiring, multi-course meals prepared especially for this gourmet event. The Washington, DC Convention & Tourism Corporation and the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington are proud to present the 12th Washington, DC Restaurant Week from January 14-20. [Washington.org]

Here's what I'll be trying to hit up:

• Rasika
• Zengo (I went here last Restaurant Week, and it was great)
• Firefly
• Lima Restaurant
• Oyamel Cocina Mexicana

Check out the Restaurant Week page for a full listing of participating restaurants.

Dinner just friended me on Facebook!

Social networking site, Facebook, is full of handy applications to help you navigate through life a little bit easier.

One application I've found to enjoy is Local Picks, offered and moderated by Trip Advisor. It allows you to search through a series of eateries in your area and rate them (5 star system), while comparing with friends and sharing commentary. It also allows you to submit new entries to ensure all the restaurants you visit are listed and recorded in its database.

There are over 200,000 restaurants to select from, including top restaurants in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, France, and more!

[Local Picks]

Deceive your taste buds

A new freeze-drying technique is being used to trade flavors and nutrients in fruits. Labs in Japan work hard every day to make our taste buds happy and our bodies healthier. Dorito flavored turnips?!

In the future, no natural food will taste as you remember it now. Because face it: fruits and vegetables are great. But if turnips tasted like Doritos, America wouldn't be so fat that our continent occasionally dips into the ocean, like arm floaties on a grown man. Tokyo company FCOM is learning how change food as we know it. Instead of using genetic modification, they're utilizing techniques from other industrial processes. Through freeze-drying fruit, FCOM is then able to replace with water with flavor (or in the case of strawberries, water with white chocolate) [Gizmodo]

Wait. Dorito's make you fat?!! Who knew?!

Guilty pleasure

I'm not one to go around buying potato chips or junk food to just keep in the house, however, I left work on Monday night and was starving. I arrived at the gas station to refuel and while I stood in line to pay, my eyes caught sight of what seemed to yell delicious at me.

I picked up a bag and opened it in the car and inhaled it's contents. It was a bag of Fiery Habanero Doritos. Glorious. That was, at least, until I finished them, flipped the bag over, and read the contents. Feeling sluggish and slight indigestion shortly followed.

There's just something about MSG-packed food that reminds me of Mexico and makes me feel fuzzy feelings inside.

(In a streak of counterproductiveness, I ate another bag last night after the gym. I must be stopped)

Hilarity ensues

Google's keyword advertising engine has a knack for doing silly things. Today it did one reminiscent of the time where a Verizon cell phone ad was placed inside an AP story of an exploding phone killing a man.

I found this today while cleaning up the blog. Right as I'm posting about the greasiest, hangover lunch ever, it triggers something where it appears to be telling me either that the machine missed a connection relating the blog entry to the ad, or Google has smartened up to tell people they need to slim down. Healthy Food Franchising?! Five Guys? Really?!

LOLz!!!!11

Another one bites the dust...

Ok. So I finally found a spot I like to hang out in, outside of Virginia, that doesn't include a teenage angst ridden environment. Much to my duismay and by strike of luck or Murphy's Law, I cannot go there anymore. At least not without packing and wearing my colors.

...police and DC Fire Department emergency medical personnel responded to an apartment building located at 3500 14th Street, NW to investigate the report of a shooting. Upon arrival, they located an adult male suffering from multiple gunshot wounds lying in the vestibule. [DC Gov't]

This all blocks from the Red Derby. I was there only a few hours after, picking fight brawls with the locals. True story.

Apparently I wasn't the only drunk one this New Year's Eve

Just a quick note on this I found with all about hangover cures.

With hangover cures, an online blood alcohol content calculator, drink recipes and other wasted fun. A little late for the New Year's hangover, but still a good site. [YesButNoButYes]

The site includes a breathalyzer test?

Hangover cure a-la-Mexicana

I blogged about being hungover a few days ago after drinking with a friend. Well, the day after that, being New Year's Eve, I continued on my binge and woke up on New Year's feeling a step up from defeated. At my friend's house I discovered that I had brought him, from my last trip to Mexico, a box of machaca.

Chihuahua Country machaca is by far the best dried, cured beef in the market. I grew up with it, and it's definitely high-end stuff (not just any machaca will taste as good and/or do the trick as this one does). Feeling like my innards would dissolve if I didn't stuff them with something fast enough, I cooked it up for the house that morning. I was out of it enough to feel like it all needed to be documented step by step.

Machaca!

Fried up some onions

Busted out the Mama Lycha

How many eggs will that be?

Whipped up some eggs

Threw down the beans and refried them

Machaca in the pan, searing with onions before the eggs.

Threw in the eggs and some tomatoes

And voila! Huevos y Machaca a la Mexicana
Sprinkle some citrus on that and eat with some fresh jalapeños and you're set to take on any kind of malnourishment from the night before. Definitely a must after drinking a bottle of tequila.

So good I forgot to eat

For as long as I can remember, I've enjoyed reading. Sometimes it takes me a while to finish a book. Sometimes I fly through them.

One thing I have noticed in my years of reading is that there are writers out there that like to include meals in their books. Vivid imagery of dinners past. Detailing into even the spices and herbs on plates. food you can smell and taste just off the text.

My most vivid memory of a book's food description would have to be Diego El Rojo, a coming of age, biographical story of a young Diego Rivera (my favorite Mexican muralist, for more reasons than just his art) and his rise to fame and communist idealism. Written by his daughter, Guadalupe Rivera Marin.

She delves into details of Mexican family breakfasts and European meals revolving around bottles of wine. Describes even what seems to be the texture of the cheeses sprinkled on top of the beans and the green enchiladas. Until this point, I had not read anything, I don't think, that talked so much (and so well) about aliments.

I have now finished reading another book, given to me by a friend for my birthday, which reminded me quite a bit of Diego El Rojo. Not by characters nor story-line, but by the foods consumed by the characters.

Catfish and Mandala takes you in a journey through both time and continents. Retelling the story of the author, Andrew X. Pham. Part autobiography, part memoir, part journal. Andrew travels from Vietnam to the United States with his parents after the fall of Saigon in 75, coming to the States as a young immingrant (something I immediately felt akin to), not even knowing how to speak the language. He tells his tales of displaced childhood in a country of strangers.

He also recounts his travels trying to find his roots, biking from California to Washington. Biking Japan and Vietnam, in search of himself and his background. His adventures and realizations of his home country transcend him, his take on life, and Vietnam as a whole.

Through the entire book, Pham describes meals eaten through out his whole trip, from campfire meals in the desert of Mexico to Vietnamese style feasts at family reunions in California to rice cakes and beating cobra hearts in Vietnam.

There's a part in the book, which made me laugh a little to myself as well as take me back to growing up, visiting friend's houses, and roaming through their refrigerators (as well as my fridge in Austin).

Cu-Den banged us a skillet of scrambled eggs, fried Spam, and steamed rice. It was all we could rake out of Cu-Den's sorriest-looking fridge on the planet. The thing was loaded with relish, horseradish, salad dressing, teriyaki sauce, mayonaisse, ketchup, mustard, and not a damn thing to slather the condiment galore on. We doused Cu-Den's special rice with fishsauce and chili paste and gobbled it up. We were going to need full stomachs to fight the Mexican homeboys who were a lot tougher than the redneck football players. [Catfish and Mandala]

The book is no less than a masterpiece. Such a human take it on it all that you can't help but relate to his stories, whether or not you're Vietnamese. So well written, you'll fly through the pages like a hot knife through butter. I feel like I've been to Vietnam and back. Pick it up if you get a chance.

Belated New Years

It took me a second to get this entry in due to some personal technical difficulties, which still withstand, but will work themselves out as things usually do.

Well, here we are again. The end of one year and at the beginning of another. We've crossed the path almost reaching 2010. Which begins to sound even more like the future. Flying cars and things of the sort.

I hear people talking about resolutions and changes and everything they want to leave behind. Almost like the year before was the worst. Thick on the bad connotation of 2007.

I would like to be the first to say that 2007 for me was not a bad one in the least. (for once?). It was actually one where I had set goals to take on that I had failed to accomplish in 2006.

I cooked a lot more, like, a lot more! I quit smoking (although a little late in the year). Maintaining a steady gym routine (although losing routine a bit into the year, but going even if out of schedule). Took classes throughout the year. Read a whole lot more. Last, but not least, getting my finances back in order.

Getting the money on track has been a resolution probably since I first left El Paso, and through a series of life lessons, numerous written sources, a few role models, and a handful of encouraging peers, I did it! I'm months away now (months I can count with one hand) from atonement.

Which in the long run, will be the first step of a new track and a continuance 5-year plan to reaching the my goals.

This coming up year I don't have very many goals, much further than keeping up with what I've been doing.

The only new ones, which some I've set in motion in December, are:

• Keep piling up the cash into the ING savings accounts. (I've opened 3)
• Finish up the draft of my business plan. (Got the software and the sources)
  
• Keep up with this blog - for once. (Trying!)
  
• Take writing, art, and culinary courses. (Signed up last night)
  
• Finalize debt. (Mid-April)
  
• Go visit my friends on the West Coast and abroad. (Waiting for my passport!)
  
• Get started on getting myself a car that isn't a Ford Probe. (No. Seriously. I don't want a Probe.)
  

That's it. That's all I want. Considering how far I've gotten thus far, I see no problem getting there by 2009.

Happy New Year's everyone! The best is yet to come!