Hillary and I used to go to La Taza every now and again for weekend out-of-the-apartment studying, but we haven’t been there in maybe a year.  Today we had planned to go to Feast for lunch, but after seeing that their parking lot was overflowing with cars , I remembered cozy ‘ol La Taza and we decided to detour over there.  We’re definitely glad we did.

The first item on their menu caught my eye and I went with it, the Cuban Sandwich, and a Guava Jarritos soda.  Hillary had several items she was deciding between, and went with the Pollo Burrito.  My sandwich was oozing melted cheese and every bite included a little bit of sour pickle.  It was great.  We were both very happy with our dishes and will be going back to La Taza for lunch.

Kate B. is back in town for the weekend, so Bart wanted to surprise her with a dinner out. He planned this elaborate deception and surprised Kate with a bunch of her friends at Charlie’s Smokehouse in Crozet. A High School band was playing there, I don’t know their name. I tracked down the twins who play guitar and drums as Thomas and Andrew Fickley, but google didn’t come up with a band myspace page for them. The band’s music was good, covering some Dead, Counting Crows, and Wilco, and playing lots of their own Phish-style jam-band music. They sounded really good. The keyboard player could loosen up a little though. Everyone else in the band was moving and grooving to the music while the keyboardist stood in the back all stiff.

On to the food. I ordered the 1/2 rack of rib with a jerk rub. It came with two sides, so I chose the slaw and baked beans. The food was good. Not knock your socks off good, but if I were in the area for something, or wanted to hear a band there, I’d check out some other things on the menu.

Update: The band is named Help On The Way.

I grabbed some carry-out from Asian Express tonight. I’ve never been there before and was quite happy with the food. The crispy chicken caught my eye, so I got that along with a spring roll.

Hillary and I were feeling lazy tonight so we decided to order pizza.  There are a good number of pizza places in Charlottesville that we haven’t yet visited.  Anna’s Pizza is located near us, but we’ve eyed-up the Brick Oven a number of times when we’ve visited Lime Leaf Thai.  We settled on Brick Oven for no particular reason and ordered their veterinarian Christina’s Crusher pizza.  We both loved it and would definitely order from them again.

After I mentioned to Brian that I thought Spry’s had pretty good Q, he said that we had to go to Jinx’s for lunch.  Who-hoo - BBQ two days in a row!  Jinx’s has very random hours, so our backup was Belmont BBQ but we needn’t have bothered since, surprisingly, Jinx’s was open.  There are just two booths and a small counter in the restaurant, so the fact that two gentlemen were eating lunch when we arrived meant that it was pretty crowded.  The restaurant had an amazing hickory smell.  We both ordered a BBQ samwich and fries but he only had one order of fries left and asked if we’d be okay with splitting it or have some baked beans in addition.  We went with the beans.  The Q is served on toasted white bread and the smallest amount of sauce.  It was really good.  The smoke came through and it had an amazing pork flavor.  The oil that the fries are cooked in has been seasoned from all the frying so, even though they seemed to be frozen fries, they had a wonderful flavor.  The beans were even great.  I’m definitely going back to Jinx’s again for a sandwich, and maybe a rib.

I haven’t been to a new restaurant in a while, so I decided to take a long lunch-hour walk over to Spry’s BBQ. Spry’s opened about two months ago on the east end of the Corner neighborhood, where Northern Exposure stood for many years. I’m not a huge fan of food that focuses on meat, so when I heard that a new BBQ joint was opening, I didn’t even consider visiting it. When I read in one of the local weeklies that this place was the real deal, I added it back to my list of restaurants to visit. I’m glad I did. At lunch, they serve a buffet that includes their Carolina BBQ. It was so much better than Big Jim’s that I can’t describe it. I won’t say that this is the greatest thing I’ve eaten, but I can say that there is good Q in Charlottesville.

On Friday, while Hillary was at a halloween costume party, I started a food project that I have wanted to do for a few months. I wanted to make great homemade corn tortillas. Ever since I ate at a Panchero’s restaurant with their “tortillas while-you-wait” I’ve wanted to know how to make this delicious food item.

My firt try wasn’t too successful. We bought a tortilla press from Sur la Table in Richmond a while back, and made a batch of cornflour and water tortillas soon thereafter. They were dreadful. They were stiff, didn’t bend, but most importantly, they tasted wrong. They tasted like badly cooked unleavened bread. Our diner that night was very bad tacos.

Finally, few weeks ago, I found the answer - Nixtamalization. The procedure is to cook the dried corn kernels in slaked lime and water very slowly and then let it sit overnight. The next morning, you rinse the corn and purée it into a dough. I received this kernel of wisdom from my favourite TV personality, the Bill Nye of food, Alton Brown. We made breakfast tacos (small breakfast burritos) for breakfast both yesterday and today and, needless to say, they were delicious. Hillary said that they were on par with my Neapolitan ragù. The dough was easy to work with this morning after being in the fridge for a day.

We will be making this recipe again for sure.

Wow. This is a great idea. You take a lot of cornstarch, make a number of small wells in it, dump in some sweetened vodka, and cap it off with more cornstarch, and you have vodka pills. I’ll have to think of a way to tweak this into a Halloween theme.

I’ve never been very good at making bread. I tried a few times when I lived at the K-house, but I never had any success. Claire would always make the best bread. It looked silky before it went in the oven, and it came out smelling and tasting wonderfuly.

The other day, on a whim, I bought The Panera Bread Cookbook, still dreaming of being able to make good bread. My first attempt goes into the oven in 15 minutes…