Long Awaited Update

The last few weeks have been really busy -- 3 weddings in the last 5 weeks, and 4 of the last 5 weekends have been spent traveling or out of town. The one week we were in town, we had a friend visiting us, so while it was really fun, we got no work done.

I'm really looking forward to having a weekend at home where I can relax, blog, catch up on TV, and work on business school applications.

So a fun story from one of the weddings: it was in New York, so the husband and I got dinner with one of my best friends from college. We went to this fancy Indian-Latin restaurant called Vermilion. The husband and I love Food Network, and the chef at Vermilion (Maneet Chaudry) was on The Next Iron Chef and is now a judge on Chopped. So I was really excited to go to her restaurant and made a reservation right after I booked plane tickets.

Friday morning in NYC, we're in the cab going from Penn Station to the hotel, and the husband is distracted by hunger and the traffic, so I'm trying to keep myself amused. I check Groupon for New York, just to see if there's anything interesting, and lo and behold, there is a Groupon for Vermilion. I get really excited, but I call both the restaurant and Groupon to make sure I can redeem it the same day I purchase it. The restaurant says sure, but Groupon says I can't officially use it until the deal closes. Basically, if the groupon shows up in my inbox, the restaurant will honor it. I take a chance and buy it.

We get to the restaurant and I check my email. No Groupon yet. We're sitting waiting for our appetizers, looking around, when suddenly I see Maneet Chaudry walk over to the kitchen and start working on the register. The husband and my friend suggest that I go over and I say hi. After feeling awkward for like 2 seconds, I run over there to introduce myself and tell her what I huge fan of hers I am, etc, etc. I come back to my table to see if the Groupon came, and no luck.

Anyway, dinner was really good. My friend ordered these amazing mushrooms and I had some spicy tamarind eggplant that was tasty and very unique. The food was definitely Indian but some spices were tweaked so there was definitely something very different - but tasty - about it. And of course, the chef was nice enough to give us free mango flan (I'm not a fan of flan so I thought it was sort of gross). The other dessert we got -- flourless chocolate cake with spiced orange and blueberry sorbet was amazing, as evidenced by the picture below.

And then the check comes, and I decide to check my phone one last time for the Groupon. There it was! It was like fate wanted me to save money at the restaurant :)

Anyway, that's my fun story from New York. More stories to come!

And here was my outfit from dinner. Sort of LA with the white dress, but class-ed up a bit with the metallic belt and a gray cardigan (not shown). I think I wore black flats. I apologize for the horrendous lighting in the hotel room.

Yay for food

In my usual Groupon-ing glory, I bought a deal for a 6 course tasting menu at XIV, one of Michael Mina's restaurants in LA. The husband and I went for Dine LA, but I wasn't impressed. But this meal was amazing. There were like 10 dishes and a trio of desserts to share. My favorite dishes were a mushroom and truffle tart that was so savory and tasty and a passionfruit mousse. That passionfruit mousse was probably the best thing I have ever eaten.

The husband and I found our love for passionfruit in Hawaii. We were driving around in Kauai to get to our hotel from the airport and we were hungry, so we stopped by a roadside stand to get some guavas. The fruitseller gave us a free sample of passionfruit, and from that taste, we were hooked. We bought four or five passionfruit which we ate immediately afterwards in the car.

We bought several more passionfruits in the stores around the hotel where we were staying, but none of them were nearly as good as the first ones we had -- actually most of them were overly sour and too seedy to be tasty. It was rather disappointing.

Anyway, I apologize for being very flaky in my posting and I will have a new post soon, I promise.

Weekend with the sister

So I promised a post about the weekend when my sister came to visit. So here are some highlights from the weekend (and some even come with illustrations).

1. Drop Dead Diva - While working from home together (she had reports to send out for work and a paper to write for a class, and I had, well, work), we turned on the TV to find some background nice. We stumbled upon Drop Dead Diva in the Netflix recommendations, and decided, "How bad could it be?" Answer: Not bad at all. It's basically about this thin blonde aspiring model who dies and tries to return to earth, but instead her soul ends up in the body of an overweight lawyer who just took a bullet for her boss. So basically she has her own memories, but the intelligence and knowledge of the lawyer. And so it's somewhat Legally Blonde-esque, in which she uses her modeling and beauty knowledge from her past life and her legal knowledge from her current life to solve and argue cases. The first season ended with a cliffhanger, but Netflix in all its evil glory, does not have the second season available for streaming. And the husband would not appreciate having to give up a disc of Glee for this show.

2. Food Trucks - I have never eaten at a food truck. Well, no, I suppose I ate at one in Seattle, but the only vegetarian option they had left when I got there was poutin - french fries and cheese - so it wasn't much of a meal. There's a ton that congregate around the husband's office, so I even left work super-early the day before Thanksgiving to head over to his office to get lunch with him, but no food trucks showed. Sad. So when my sister was here, the husband brought home a Banh Mi sandwich from the Nom Nom truck, which is supposed to be one of THE BEST TRUCKS EVER. My sister and I reheated it in the oven, and it was good. Yumm. And then the next day, we drove over to his office for lunch and got food fresh from some other food trucks. Not as good as the Nom Nom truck but pretty solid Korean-Mexican fusion food.

3. Carrot Cake - Thanks to Elizabeth, I learned that SuzieCakes has the best carrot cake ever. And it does. I usually don't like nuts or raisins in my cakes, but in this cake, it really works. The icing is perfectly sweet and creamy, and you can see the long strands of carrot weaving through the cake. Since my sister is a huge fan, we went to get a piece for dessert, and life was good.

4. The Beach - Unfortunately, my sister decided to come during the one weekend it was warm and sunny in Atlanta and it was cold and rainy in LA. Well, one of the many weekends that has been happening recently. So we couldn't go the beach, but we got to an overlook in Santa Monica so we were able to look out over the water on that sad, cloudy day. But it was my first time seeing the LA beach (does Malibu count?)

5. Sweet Harts - Last and definitely least, our visit to Melissa Joan Hart's ice cream and dessert shop was very disappointing. Clarissa Explains It All and Sabrina the Teenage Witch were awesome shows, so we expected that her attempt at a dessert shop would be awesome. Nope. It was in a sad area of Sherman Oaks (a suburb of greater LA) and the inside was sort of dirty, as if it was just overused and undercleaned. And the fro-yo wasn't that great. Sigh.

Anyway, it was fun just hanging out and playing board games and watching TV and eating food. All things we do well.

Stressful weekend

So I'm looking forward to a relaxing week after a harrowing weekend. It started out well -- a long run on Saturday morning for the first time in weeks, lunch at Pink Taco at the mall, a movie (The Lincoln Lawyer - highly recommend), some shopping, and then hanging out at home with some episodes of The Office.

And then it went downhill. We went to an Italian restaurant for dinner -- La Botte. The reviews were positive and it got a Michelin star in 2009, the last year the LA restaurants were rated. So we expected something great. Instead, we had an awkward waiter who just stood there waiting for us to give us his drink, appetizer, and entree orders instead of asking what we wanted. And we were waiting forever for the waiter to take the order and then to bring the check. And the worst part was that the food just wasn't worth it. =(

Anyway, we were excited because after that we were going to a party hosted by one of my coworkers who lives down the street from us. It was going to be easy -- go there, hang out, have a few drinks, and walk back. Except that we locked ourselves out of the apartment. After calling a locksmith who failed to open the door (apparently we have a special un-pickable lock), we walked over to the party where the host was gracious enough to let us crash with him and then drive us to the management office to get a spare key in the morning.

On Sunday morning, we avoided the street closures from the LA marathon and drove through the rain to get our key and go home.

But unfortunately, after getting home and taking a nap and cooking dinner, we went back into crisis mode. A friend had relationship issues and the friend who let us crash with him needed a jump -- both at the same time. So after running around for a bit trying to help, we had a chance to take a deep breath and eat some semi-yummy Indian food for dinner. (It's always a risk when we make two new dishes for dinner but luckily they both turn out okay.)

And you may be wondering, why is this week relaxing? Well things are in good shape at work and my sister is coming into town on Wednesday night. It should be a good time =D

DineLA Restaurant Week

DineLA restaurant week is coming up and I am really excited. When I moved to LA, I just missed the last restaurant week so I am looking forward to finally trying some of the famous restaurants I've heard about. Here's where I have reservations so far... we'll see how many I actually make it to before I get sick of eating out.

• Spago - Wolfgang Puck's restaurant - It's supposed to be good; all I'm hoping is that it's better than his airport restaurants.
• XIV by Michael Mina - Michael Mina is a little overrated, but I'm willing to go there for restaurant week.
• Nobu - I keep hearing about it on TV so I really want to go... it's not really vegetarian friendly but I'll find something to eat.
• Gordon Ramsay West Hollywood - I don't know anything about him as a chef, but I love Hell's Kitchen (and I think the food quality here would be more consistent than if I tried to eat at Hell's Kitchen during filming).
• Katsuya - I've already been here (see post here) but I hope to redeem myself by dressing appropriately this time. And it's down the street, so...

And then there's Mr. Chow, which I also keep hearing about on TV. I am hoping to go there for Valentine's Day to cross that off the list too.

Given all this eating out, by the middle of February I think I will be craving spaghetti with Trader Joe's marinara sauce. Or plain white rice.