Rachel-tastic
This was written on the plane, but I just now got it off of my Treo, so the tense may be a bit off. Deal with it.
Another visit to Rachel and Minnesota come and gone. Too quick, as always. We did manage to pack it full of cooking, eating, concerts, a dancing toddler, furniture shopping, exercise at the gym across the street, Peru planning, and great conversation, so I have a hard time complaining too much.
The cooking theme for the weekend was Mexican, so we made three types of tamales (garlic, mushroom & spinach; adobo; raisins, capers, olives, and salsa), red mole, a salad with jicama and orange and chiles, lentil soup with pineapple and plantain, and cilantro rice. All were quite excellent, but their limelight will stolen by the glory that is the Three Amigos bar. We made nougat (which I dare say was a dead ringer for Three Musketeers nougat), and then dipped them in dark chocolate flavored with chile, cayenne, and cinnamon. The best compliment of their amazing goodness was Mel’s disbelief that we had actually made them (I think she still thinks we are tricking her somehow) when we went over to Rachel’s parents’ house. Speaking of which, Alex is definitely in the running for Cutest Child Ever. He has some extremely cute dance moves, and is just such a happy, content child. I want a nephew to play with (Kylli and Blake, I’m looking at you).
Because we can’t limit ourselves to just eating leftovers for the meals where we don’t have something planned, we also ate out a few times. When I got in, we stopped at Al’s breakfast where I had the best omelet I’ve ever eaten. I don’t know what they did, but the eggs were just amazing. We also did breakfast out at Hell’s Kitchen. I was actually thrilled to find out that Hell serves lemon-ricotta hotcakes, porridge, and homemade peanut butter. After the bible-autographing incident, I am set for an eternity of good eats. Before the show on Saturday, we had yummy Thai food that made my lips feel like they were going to burn off, but in a good way. Sunday night, we had Indian. When we couldn’t decide which chickpea dish to get, they combined two for us, which was entirely delicious. We also learned an important lesson about parking meters. Namely, check them before assuming you don’t need to use them on Sundays. When we saw the meter… (Um, what’s the male version of “meter maid”? Oh, I know…) butler, and I ran outside into the cold without my coat to try to get to ours before he did. By our good fortune, our meter had had 1 min left on it when he checked it, so we had escaped. He then told me about when he had waited out a meter with one min and gave a ticket and thus made an old lady sad. Just in case his story was a trick to get our meter to expire, I put a quarter in while he was talking. 
Keeping with our theme of greatness, we managed to get two great concerts in. On Saturday, we saw Will Hoge at the 400 Bar (and also saw a good percentage downtown Minneapolis as part of an impromptu tour, thanks to my excellent navigating skills). I missed him when he was in CA, so I had been really excited to see that he was in MN at the same time I was.He put on a great show, and he and his band really fed off of the crowd energy in the way that makes a concert reach the next level. On Sunday, we saw The Decemberists at 1st Ave. It was a really nice venue (and bigger than I had expected), and we even got to watch an episode of the old Batman TV show before the concert, so double bonus. The opener, Alasdair Roberts, was a Scottish guy whose songs were Celtic-y and really nice to listen to. The Decemberists were just amazing. Three of the band members played an incredible array of instruments, including keyboards, violins, guitars, accordions, a pedal steel guitar, a banjo, and a hurdy gurdy. The bass player alternated between an electric bass, an upright double bass and a cello. Even the drummer moved over to keyboards for one song. Lead singer Colin Meloy apologized and said he was ill early in the show, but I wouldn’t have guessed had he not said anything. At one point, he rushed off stage at the end of a song, and the band filled time playing “You Are My Sunshine” and a tango until he returned and kept on with the same caliber of show. I think they cut some songs (especially from the encore), but I didn’t feel disappointed by the performance in any way.
The nice thing is that as the visits come in greater frequency, leaving is becoming less tragic. This was made evident by the fact that despite my flight being delayed by over an hour and being currently engaged in a passive-agressive armrest war with the person sleeping next to me, I have been tapping my foot and dancing in my seat (like Alex, only less coordinated) to a shuffle of Will Hoge tracks. I can deal with this.
May 10th, 2010 at 8:08 am
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