The Leftover Hot Dog Challenge

It's always a challenge to use up leftover ingredients before heading out on vacation. I still have a few days left to go, but today I wanted to finish up some hot dogs (yes I know those things last forever, but still), cabbage, a green pepper and cooked rice.

My immediate thought was to cook fried rice, but there's a fine balance to be had here. Since hot dogs have a very distinctive flavor, it's a matter of figuring out how you get the dish to be fried rice with hot dogs as opposed to hot dogs with friend rice.

I must admit that the dish turned out fairly decent, or as decent as a dish can be that contains hot dogs. I ended up chopping up the dogs into small chunks, stir-frying it with the cabbage and green pepper and seasoning the mix with salt and freshly ground pepper. I plated that, fried up an egg and laid it on top. And finally the kicker, I fried up the rice with cumin seeds and cinnamon, ala an Indian rice dish that a friend showed me how to cook.

Not exactly stuff for a king, but it was good enough for me and it got rid of my damn hot dogs.

($Cooking, $Indian)

Vietnamese restaurants near work

I can always go for Pho. There are a couple of decent and relatively cheap ones near work. I'm not sure if I've tried enough Vietnames restaurants to be able to say how these hold up in terms of quality, but they definitely hit the spot when taking a break from work.

Thanh Thanh
475 Chelmsford St
Lowell, MA 01851

Pho 88
1270 Westford St
Lowell, MA 01851

//Category-Rest, Category-Work

Warren's Lobster House

This was my second time here and it again came off as a tourist trap. I got their boiled lobster and while it was alright, I think Warren's definitely relies on the fact that they are so close to the Kittery Outlets to make a name for itself.

Unfortunately, the only lobster shack that I remember that does lobster well was one on the way to Acadia (which is much much farther away from Boston). But my guess is that if you want the real deal for lobsters and you're in the Kittery area, ask one of the locals for recommendations instead of going to Warren's.

International exchange website

I received a friendly email telling me about the GimmeyourStuff website. Basically it's a website in which you can exchange food and other stuff with people in other countries.

I must admit that I can't foresee myself particpating because my plate is already pretty full these days, but it looks promising to peruse and learn about food from other cultures.


PS. The website reminded me of a particular dessert that my old Peruvian college roomate used to get in the mail on his birthday. It's called Turron de Dona Pepa (Sorry the recipe is in Spanish) and it's pretty damn good.

PPS. Actually, I was really pleasantly surprised by the breadth of Peruvian food in general. (Oh man, these photos make me hungry) I had incorrectly assumed that cultures with a strong emphasis on food were fairly well represented by restaurants in the US. But that's not the case with Peruvian food, which is too bad, because there's some really interesting and tasty dishes down there.