Once again another year has passed without trying Fright Dome or any of the tens of major haunted houses around the city. Like any old crustyteer, just having the day off and doing a bit of tooling around town is fun enough. (Besides, if I see one more person in their Renaissance fair garb trying to pull double-duty... Not you, R****. You're cool. But everyone else needs to remember that it's only been two weeks. It's too soon for doublets.)
Our only set mission of the day was to go to Sunset Station and do their "pumpkin cash giveaway." It's much like the cows. Remember the "cash cows"?
Two piggy banks... much like the pigs. Remember the pigs?
The deal is that you go to a Station casino, pick a slip of paper, and receive either a ceramic pumpkin bank or... CASH! (And a ceramic pumpkin bank.)
I believe this giveaway is open to anyone with a slot club card (which is free), so if you're reading this and you're near a Station casino and it's not 8pm yet, and you have no other adventures planned... there you go.
Obviously a meal out was in order. Last weekend (and most of this past week) we were fed on leftovers from the Holocaust Conference. No, seriously:
Now imagine a container just like the one above, but full of muffins. That was what I brought home the second day. Seriously. I know there are stereotypes about Jewish mothers wanting people to be well-fed, but... wow. And it wasn't just me - some people were making multiple trips to their car. (The raid on the cream cheese station is burned into my memory.)
We opened the Entertainment website to find a coupon. Hmmm. How about Coyote's Cantina? It's at Sunset and GV Parkway, on the way, and just around the corner from Viva Michoacan.
When you're a coupon-user, you learn to appreciate the difference between "Two for One ENTREE" and "Two for One MENU ITEM." Ours was the latter, which was perfect, because Mike's favourite thing to get at a Mexican restaurant is nachos.
Rare is the time you can say the mountain came to you, but:
Goodness! I got the "Enchiladas Real," not just my usual cheese enchiladas, but cheese enchiladas with the onions cooked right inside. Bliss!
You cannot underestimate my love of chopped onions. Sure, the plate looks very orangey and gooey and like everything I spoke against in the VM review, but little bits of white onion make me happy. They are my tiny bubbles.
I think I may like Coyote's chips best of any restaurant in town so far. Mike says they're a touch too oily for him, but I don't mind if the result is a light, bubbly chip.
I got one enchilada in my chip-lined gullet before having to say yes to a to-go box. I couldn't even see where Mike had made a dent in the nachos. Good food. Not unusual or spectacular, but solid fare. Another thumbs-up to the Entertainment book for getting us to go someplace we never would've tried (or even noticed) before.
Of course, later on, the second enchilada disappeared in under five minutes. Leftovers just aren't the same experience.
Here's a flame war the Internet has somehow missed: Should to-go boxes be compartmentalized? I say no - the compartments are never the right size, and I don't care if the food touches. I mean, I don't care, but if restaurants are spending extra buy sectioned boxes, perhaps a survey is in order.
Something I learned last week while reading Clotilde's book about eating in Paris: Parisian restaurants tend not to provide to-go boxes. Not even if you go back to the 1950s premise of needing a doggy bag. Mike was all, "DUH, it's Paris," and I was all, "Pft! They have McDonald's!"
If anything, I thought they'd do something extra-fabulous, like not just provide a swan-shaped foil wrap for the leftovers, but make it a swan-shaped foil wrap with a series of amuse bouches arranged around the swan as little cygnets. Oh, and a seasonal flower tucked behind the swan's wing. Now I think I may have to go on record as the only person disappointed by Paris. Someone please fix this.
The line at Sunset Station was huuuuuuuge but moved quickly. I drew my slip of paper first, to "burn off the bad luck," but - wheee! - I won five dollars! I thought this meant my ceramic pumpkin piggy bank would have dollar signs for eyes, as shown on the promotional material. Nope. Still, I think it's clear which pumpkin looks the happiest:
215 eastbound was at a standstill even on the way over, so we decided to drive back to our part of town via surface streets, with a stop in at International Marketplace.
(We did take a detour to the closing Linens-n-Things by the Galleria. I just want to say that if everything really "must go," and you are entertaining "best offers" on the store fixtures, then maybe you could be more flexible about the price of a Calphalon 10-piece set with two pieces missing. As in, maybe you could not charge the same price as if it were the full scratchy floor model set. Yes, it's marked down 40%, but so is all of the intact merchandise. In fact, most of it is marked down more. Or maybe you could at least just sell me the frying pan at prorated price? C'mon. Floor model? Scratchy? Missing two pieces? Everything must go? No? Fine. I'm glad you're going out of business. Huff!)
We took Sunset home - it has the bonus of being parallel to the main runways at McCarran. Not everyone would agree that this is a good thing, but I love that our international airport is just smack dab in the middle of stuff and surprisingly easy to access.
Huh, why is Mike speechlessly thumping my arm? Look at what? What?
One of the best sightings ever! (The best being the first one, when our plane passed it on the runway on the way to DFW, but this was almost as close)
Terrible picture, alas. By the time I got the cell phone out of my pocket and tossed it to Mike, the Janet was slipping toward her home at the EG&G terminal. That's so Janet. (If you can't see the plane at all, click the photo.)
Blurry photos aside, "running with the Janet" as she landed was great fun.
Traffic on the south strip wasn't bad at all, but it was a mess at Tropicana and Decatur. A few creative overshots and U-turns later, we made it to International Marketplace. Hey, they changed the logo.
OLD:
NEW:
Mike wanted some Australian sausages. I was hoping they'd have paneer. Yesterday I tried the trick with baking ricotta (see last post), and it was decent, but it doesn't yield a lot of cheese. I got some milk and yogurt to try making my own again, but wouldn't it be nice to try some store-bought stuff? Support the economy and all that?
I swear, there were five kinds of Bulgarian cheese, and every kind of feta that has ever been made, ever, but no paneer. Mike could've taken a moment to be sad with me, but he was too giddy about this:
And how could I begrudge him, when I found this?
It's a korma-off!
Sure, homemade would be better, but I happen to have discovered that there are nights when neither of us wants to cook. Anything. Ever. And we will eat the salty crumbs of a crouton bag for dinner to prove it. Has anyone else ever felt this way? Nah, probably not. One of the things I like to bring up when berating myself is that everyone else is eating a home-cooked meal of more than one ingredient, on a plate and a table.
But if you ever do find yourself in my situation, you might check out certain sections of the grocery store where the food comes in "jars" and "cans" (or, if you're shopping at International Marketplace, "tins").
I can't wait to find out which is best. But what about the paneer?
We drove a bit past home in order to go to the Indian grocer around the cor--- whoa. Where'd they go?
Our Indian minimarket is gone! But we still have the one boring Indian restaurant (well, I call them that because they don't have a buffet, and when they did, it was a lame six-item festival of okra), and we still have the Bollywood (that's their name) salon, which I refuse to patronize since the time the owner came into the grocery and went on and on about how she could fix up my eyebrows. (That I also don't patronize it because I don't patronize any beauty salons is beside the point. Huff huff!)
Why do the gods hate us? Why did they remove the one local Indian retail establishment that I liked? Is it because of that one verse in the ABBA song?
Grief-stricken in our imitable pedestrian way, we went up Fort Apache to the next closest Indian grocery. Four pounds of paneer for $22 later, I now need to wash my hair because the incense? Whoa. I'm not kidding. I'm a wet mess of sneezy snotrags. Every time I even touch something we bought there, I sneeze. Just for that, I'm not going to defend them the next time Mike gets upset over how they spell their name. (I'll leave it to a really bored local, perhaps someone in an iron lung who accidentally drank an immortality potion, to sort out which grocer I'm talking about.)
Still, hooray for the spoils. Paneer korma, you cannot hide from me much longer.
(Behind the paneer you can see the potato dish I made last night. That's right - I cooked two things on the same day. That's gonna mean something like eleven new scrapbook pages.)
(Also behind the paneer you can see a bottle of water on its side. That actually has a special code in our home. But I can't tell you what it is. Because it's not interesting.)
(Okay, I'll tell you. If you see a bottle of water on its side, and it's on the second shelf, that means it's mine. Don't drink it.)
(Wouldn't you rather have a spicy ginger beer, anyway?)
Bill Maher is on - gotta run! (Gosh, sorry for taking so long. I guess it's too late for anyone to go get their cash pumpkins. But, isn't it cute when I assume that someone local is actually reading? Just in case: HAPPY NEVADA DAY!)
IT DOES EXIST!!!
When I lived in london, I used to buy the Uncle Ben's korma sauce... I'd bake chicken(sorry), pineapples, and bananas in it. No, wait. Was it Uncle Ben's tikka sauce? Crud, now I don't remember. Serve over basmati.
I have NEVER seen Uncle Ben's Indian ANYTHING stateside. Wow! I was beginning to think maybe I had hallucinated it all....
Let me know if it's as yummy as I remember!
Posted by: Heather in Pa | 01 November 2008 at 10:56 AM