Going out for Ethiopian food January 13, 2008

My boyfriend and I have restarted a tradition of going out to eat once a week. It’s fun to go out on dates, what can I say? We’d seen an Ethiopian restaurant and figured we should check it out.

We headed over to Addis Red Sea near Porter Square. The website is actually for another location, but the menu listed is pretty much the same, so I think the site applies for both locations.

We shared the Addis Red Sea Special Combo, which had Doro Wot, Doro Alcha, Lega Tibs, Zenge (Exotic Beef Stew), House Salad, and Gomen Wot (collard greens). They were all served on top of inerja. The links point to the menu pages that describe the different dishes (check out this wikibook or the menu for more information about what we had). We also ordered the lentil sambusa for an appetizer and shared a glass of Axum, Ethiopian honey wine.

The food was very tasty. Some flavors were a bit too spicy for me (I’m a bit weak when it comes to spice!) Total for the dinner for 2 plus appetizer and wine came out to $49. It was my turn to pay (we trade off for dinners out). This actually helped me save money and eat healthily the rest of the week because I didn’t want to spend any more money! So, sometimes dining out can save you money (if guilt works for you!)

A Matter of Taste: An evening of Fine Wine and Fine Art December 18, 2007

A while back (I forgot to post this!), I went to a wine tasting event at The Danforth Museum of Art. The weird part is that I don’t really like wine. It was really a bit of peer pressure. Well, one of our friends works there, and she told us all we should come (and that if enough of us went, we could get a discount!) I originally wasn’t going to go because it was going to be pricey ($45 with the group discount), and I wasn’t really interested in paying to eat just the wine accompaniments. I think it helped that my friends mentioned that there was going to be dessert from Finale Desserts!

So, we all got dressed up and headed to the museum for A Matter of Taste: An evening of Fine Wine and Fine Art.

The food was all very tasty, with a Mediterranean collection of food, a Greek collection food, and some fantastic cheeses. I tried different wines in the different rooms. My favorite room, of course, was the dessert room! They did a wine and dessert pairing: Quady Essensia, California with White Chocolate Mousse, Starbord Port “Batch 88″ with Milk Chocolate Mousse, and 2003 Schmitt Söhne Beerenauslese with Coconut Cream Tartlet. They also had Toad Hollow Risque sparkling wine(love the top on it!) and Quady Elysium to try.

I thought all the dessert wines they offered were really tasty, and I was impressed at the pairings they made. The only wine I found outside of the dessert room that was as sweet as the dessert wines was in the International Room: Banfi Vigne Regali Rosa Sparkling Red. I’m sorry to admit that I still haven’t quite acquired the taste for wine, so I was drawn to all the sweet wines. I don’t mind other, not so sweet wines, but I’m still working on finding non-dessert wines that I’d be willing to have more than a few sips of.

Anyway, I figure, if anyone out there is looking for a few sweet dessert wines, they can at least start here and try them. I would have no idea how to figure out what to buy. So maybe it was a good idea to go to the wine tasting, after all!

Oh, and the art?  Very neat!  Some stuff is moved in and out, some is more permanent.  One temporary exhibition was Andrew Stevovich:  Solitary Demons.  I liked how there was an array of different levels of work, that is, there was a pencil sketch, then a more detailed illustration, and then a final work.  One of the paintings on display was Subway Station.    I also really liked Pearce’s A Village Funeral in Brittany, 1891.  I also really liked Rani Matar‘s collection, in particular, Barbie Girl (found in the Aftermath of War collection).

My Trip to Nicaragua: Day 2: Masaya November 2, 2007

Tuesday:

Like I mentioned in my last post about my trip, the hotel came with a complimentary breakfast! We could choose among a list of meals (some were more “American” than others, since the hotel is popular with business travelers). We all picked the Nicaraguan Breakfast (red beans, rice, scrambled eggs, cheese, corn tortilla, fruit juice, coffee). We checked out of the hotel, and off to a pharmacy to look for some aloe, as well as some more sunscreen. Due to our not-perfect Spanish, we ended up getting some diaper rash lotion that contained aloe. Close enough, eh?

Took a cab to get to the bus going to Masaya. At a couple of the stoplights, people came up to our cars, trying to sell us bananas, cell phones, birds, and baby turtles, among other interesting objects.

The bus (well, it was more like a van) to Masaya was a bit crowded, but we all fit in there pretty well.

We found a great hotel, Hotel Monte Carlo, which had rooms for $10 US per night! (You could splurge and get air conditioning for an extra $10)  The woman running the hotel was super friendly. She hailed a cab and made a deal with the driver for a trip up to Masaya Volcano National Park.

The volcano was AMAZING!!! It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The park rangers handed us gas masks because there was sulfur emitting from the active crater. I definitely coughed quite a bit before we put those on! We went all the way up to La Cruz de Bobadilla (The Cross of Bobadilla)…though I think there was a sign saying not to go up there! We read in a guide book that there were demon parakeets that lived in the volcano…they were able to survive even with the toxic sulfur gas, an interesting adaptation. There was also a dormant volcano that had been so for centuries. It looked very different: instead of brown and gray rockiness, it was green, grassy, full of trees and flowers.

Back to the city for a tasty buffet for only 38 Córdoba, which is about $2 US!

We wandered around the market for a while. I obsessed about what to buy. I knew I wanted a hammock and an ornament (or something I can turn into an ornament). Now before you think I’m some silly tourist, let me explain the ornament thing. I realized that a big part of decorating the tree at Christmas is remembering where all the ornaments came from. And since I also don’t have any ornaments up here (they’re all at my parents’ place), I figured this would be a good way to start.  I’m pretty sure we all bought hammocks.  M bought a few paintings as well.   We also grabbed some ice cream before heading out!

We relaxed for a bit at our hotel, and then ventured out to Lake Masaya, to see the sunset. It was beautiful to see the sunset over the volcano and lake.

We had a late dinner at a nearby restaurant. We were the only people there, and by the end, the guys working there had gotten ridiculously drunk and giggly, which was fun, cause some of us were getting giggly too!

M and L headed to an internet cafe to check on some things, and A and I headed back to our hotel to get a good nights sleep.