This Saturday I took a really fun trip up to Atlanta with W and his parents to shop at the huge international farmers’ market as well as a big Latin mall. It was quite the adventure!

I was excited to get the chance to roam the aisles of a huge international market, looking for interesting foods and drinks to take home. Grocery shopping in Auburn has significantly improved ever since we got an Earth Fare a year or two ago (it’s essentially a smaller Whole Foods-style store), but we don’t really have any international markets. I knew I could find all kinds of cool things in Atlanta that can’t be had here.

Before we hit the market, though, we checked out the all-Latin mall and grocery store nearby, browsing around and perusing the various shops. I saw some amazing cowboy boots and W got a new wallet (with Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe on it, love it) and we had an excellent lunch at a little lunch counter there.

Some delicious enchiladas (but a dauntingly huge plate — I only ate half and still felt stuffed). I also tried some cactus from W’s mom’s plate, which was really good. Next time I will definitely order some for myself.

At the market, I found myself amazed by the unusual produce first of all: Look at all these spiky fruits!

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That’s Jack fruit, chayote, and durian. I snapped plenty of pictures of the more exotic looking items, but wound up buying other things instead (heirloom tomatoes, jicama, yuca, sun-dried tomatoes, medjool dates, among others). Maybe next time I will get more adventurous.

I found some frozen udon noodles, miso, and some needed sushi things. I’m planning on a sushi and soup night sometime soon. Hopefully I can get W to try making the sushi rolls with me. His mom, who is from Mexico, also helped me find some things to make mole sauce (the rich, chocolatey kind) and explained how to do it, so enchiladas de mole are in the works some time, too.

Along the way, I also found some interesting drinks, including a cucumber soda of some kind and a (non-alcoholic) pineapple cider. I don’t know, either. I will surely post to flickr when I try them. At our new Publix store in Auburn, I had just recently made a build-your-own six-pack of different beers to try, so I picked up a seventh new beer at the market in Atlanta, planning to try a different beer every day for seven days.

Sunday night’s beer was Leinenkugel’s Berry Weiss (a Publix pick). I cannot recommend this beer, unless you are someone who typically does not like beer at all and prefers a fruity cocktail. If that’s the case (B, I am looking at you!), you might like this. It was way too sweet for me, though, and I am in fact someone who does not usually shy away from fruity beers (e.g. Bell’s Cherry Stout, Abita’s Purple Haze and Satsuma Wit, Magic Hat’s Number 9 and Wacko, even Samuel Adams Blackberry Witbier).

Tonight’s beer was St. Peter’s Organic English Ale, which I found at the international market and admittedly chose based on its whiskey-bottle shape and nice label design. I thoroughly enjoyed this — all 16 ounces. Full-bodied and bitter, but very “drinkable.” Wished I’d had more, but I’m on a one beer per day limit at the moment (thank’s for nothing, lingering holiday flab).

At the store, I also took a few snaps for what I have decided to call the Gallery of Horrors. Would you like a peek? Of course you would.

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What you see here, from left to right, is:

1) Extra-Lean Celebrity (all well and good, but which celebrity is it???).

2) Sali-Kritz, aka Salz Lakritz, aka The Devil’s Candy, aka the candy that haunted me night and day when I lived in Germany junior year of college. It’s extremely pungent, salty black licorice covered in a friendly-looking pastel candy coating. Dumb Americans such as myself will be inclined to assume this is chocolate with a candy coating, but upon taking a bite will soon begin praying for death. Of course, the black packaging suggests this candy’s evil nature, but I always saw it in bowls and hence was very often fooled.

3) Chelada, an adult beverage consisting of Budweiser and Clamato. CLAMATO. CLAM AND TOMATO JUICE. THIS HAS CLAM IN IT. SWEET MOTHER OF DOG.

Well then. Just be glad you did not opt for the smell-o-vision hardware package when you bought that computer. Oh my god, you didn’t did you?

I’ve been a busy bee lately, with my classes’ first big essay going on and some committee work I’ve been doing, so I feel like I’ve barely been keeping up with writing here. Please allow me to recap some of the recent excitement:

First of all, W. and I decided we needed a night of tequila drinking in our lives. He is a real tequila connoisseur (definitely not something I can claim about myself), whereas I have been laboring under the illusion that I do not care for tequila after having sampled, oh, maybe only one kind of it. I needed to try some of the good stuff, with someone who actually knows what that means.

Of course, along with tequila we needed tacos, and along with tacos we needed friends. So tacos and tequila night took place. W. made puerco pibil, a slow-cooked pork butt with amazing seasoning — and then he made my seitan with the same seasoning so I could enjoy the deliciousness, too. I made some guacamole, which basically everyone said they loved, but I think they must all be fools (FOOLS, I TELL YOU) because half way through the night I realized I had forgotten the second-most crucial ingredient: cilantro. I am an idiot.

My sadly cilantro-free guacamole did not ruin the party, however, and much fun was had. Of course! There was tequila! I also have to admit that I tasted a bite of the pibil and it was quite tasty indeed — but not so much better than my seitan that I felt I was missing out. I never really feel as if I am missing out as a vegetarian, you know?

This week was of course Valentine’s Day, and however cynical your feelings about this alleged holiday might be, I am going to tell you that I was quite excited by it. It is the first time since 2002 that I haven’t been single on the day, so of course I was looking forward to it!

We decided we didn’t want to deal with the crowds and the overpriced “special” menus, so we decided to do our own thing for dinner (W. said he’d surprise me), and planned to keep it low key and exchange cards but not gifts. This is exactly my kind of thing: I just adore cards, postcards, letters, et cetera (and he gave me three cards, one of which was hand-made) — moreover, I am a terrible gift giver, so there was no chance to expose my faults in that regard.

In addition to tacos, W. and I have recently found ourselves obsessed with Indian food and have been getting dinner from our one local Indian restaurant pretty frequently. We’ve also been indulging in all of the Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern India episodes and even watched the entire Story of India BBC miniseries. Conveniently at the same time I was teaching Indian epics in class. India overload? Definitely not! Not only is the restaurant great and the food delicious and vegetarian friendly, but it was also the location of our first date. (Aw.)

So anyway, W. brought over takeout from there for dinner and he even remembered the dish I had mentioned wanting to try when we were watching one of the travel shows. (I always appreciate it when someone remembers the little things like this that I say.)

So we had a very cozy night in, finishing with some pink champagne (because you know how I feel about champagne) and these red velvet cake truffles I had spent the morning making.

Notes on that:

1) I have decided to call them “cake truffles” instead of “cake poppers” or “cake balls” because “poppers” sounds, to me, like a deep-fried bar food. And, well, “balls.”

2) I at first got very frustrated with the whole process of dipping them in the candy coating, and the first half of the batch was quite messy and lumpy and stuck to the surface I had set them on, breaking apart when I tried to lift them off. The second half of the batch went much better as I tried to improve my technique. Miss Zoot has a good tutorial on her site, which I followed, but it just took a lot of practice. This is easily a frustrating task!

3) To top that off, I kept licking the candy coating and eating bits of the broken truffles, and by the time I was finished I had made myself feel really sick. The melted candy is SUPER sweet, and really should only be eaten as a thin coating and not as a big blob stuck to your dipping fork. Heed my advice!

Nonetheless, the red velvet cake truffles turned out well in the end and were appreciated! The recipe makes about 50-60 and I was able to give some away not only to my boyfriend but also to my sweet upstairs neighbors and to my friends S & P and B & her mom. LOTS of cake truffles. I still have a dozen or so at home!

So anyway. I guess this post turned out to be about tacos, tequila, and truffles. I was going to tell you a little story about typing, but maybe I can do that tomorrow. I also really need to tell you about a certain adventure I had with Oliver the dog and the upstairs neighbor mom. Damn. I am behind on blogging! More soon then! How are y’all doing?