Beginning 2013

We haven't been to eat anywhere new since International Food, but I thought I'd go ahead and document what we have done in the first few days of 2013.  

New Year's Eve was spent in a drizzle downtown at the Kid Friendly NYE celebration:




New Year's Day was spent mostly in our PJ's till Eric got the AWESOME idea to check out the nearby roller rink.  




January 2nd brought us a meet up with Tania, Humberto, Natalia, and Gabby:




Thursday I took absolutely zero worthwhile photos, so I'm already dropping the ball on the whole photo a day thing.  I did try to repeat the roller rink alone, but that was a mistake. Esther apparently wanted the bouncy house and decided to be an asshole about it.
Then today I swung by daycare early to view Show-and-tell (thrilling) and took the kids out for hot chocolate and sweets.  There was a long conversation clarifying the terms hot chocolate and hot cocoa.  If being a math person wasn't enough to teach me precision and consistency of language, child rearing definitely will.

International Food Market

So something had to be the first place we went, and in fact this first place was actually the last place we went in 2012.  But like I said, the rules of this thing are in flux.  So here's a little recap of International Food Market at the intersection of Braker and North Lamar.  This is actually a market with a little grill in the back.  They sell mostly ingredients for Pakistani cooking...I think....there's Arabic all over the store and some awesome products... like neon purple pickled turnips for instance:




 And there's a spice aisle to rival Central Market's:


 

The reason I had time to explore all this is because it took for freaking even for my food to get cooked.  This is definitely not the best choice for food when your husband and kiddos are waiting in the car, but at least I had time to google Turkish Delight and finally figure out what it actually is.  Here's a shot I took of the menu.  They don't go out for style at this place:




Anyway, it was pretty good and it helped satisfy our craving for Middle Eastern style food.  There used to be this badass Lebanese place north of here called Byblos and pretty much nothing is ever going to compare, but for the price we liked this place alright, and everything was certainly cooked fresh to order.  By one woman.  At the pace of I-don't-have-kids.  The hummus (humas? why does that sound grosser?) had this odd tang to it, but no one got sick so I think it was supposed to taste that way.  The gals wolfed it down.  The chicken shawarma was very good, but I think they need to invest in better take out containers, because nothing was hot when we got it back to the house.  Eric had the lamb kabob and he seemed to think it was alright.  That's about as much description as you get out of Eric.  I also picked up these meat filled samosas that were on the counter on the way out and those ended up being the best buy.  They were familiar as samosas but at the same time the filling had some deep unusual spices to it.  So freaking good.  I bet they would have been even better fresh (not that they were stale, but samosas are the type of food that lose awesomeness quickly).  I'm kind of kicking myself for not ordering from the handwritten SPecial menu.  What was I thinking?  

Anyway, we'll probably go back.  Yay!  One place down, a bazillion to go!