culinary excursions

This weekend was quite eventful in the culinary arena.  First, I had Ethiopian food for the first time in my life at Abay here in good ol' Pittsburgh.  It. was. delicious!!  My friend Pallas and I split a combination of entrees which are served up on this spongy bread.  Yeah.  Like four (generous) plops of entrees on a pizza size dish of spongy bread.  And they give you an additional pizza size spongy bread rolled up and that's what you use to eat with.  No utensils or plates required.  I loved it!  I don't think I would've thought "hmm we should totally try out this Ethiopian place" on my own and I'm very glad she suggested it.  So, for any of ya'll coming to visit that have adventurous taste buds, this is where we're going.  Get ready :)

Then, I came across a recipe for homemade granola bars and decided that I must make them.  Because John loves granola bars and everything is better homemade, right?  They turned out beautifully!  Like really, really delicious!  I take a bite and it kinda tastes like dessert, which is nice since it's supposed to be breakfasty.  So here's the recipe and I would bet that you probably already have everything you need to make them right there in your kitchen.  I decided to make mine with chocolate chips and craisins (probably why it tasted like dessert).  Side note: I had to buy a 3 lb. jar of applesauce (that's all Target had) to make these so I decided to have some tonight and have ya'll tried applesauce since you were like like 2?!  Because this stuff is good!  Man, I'm glad I have a solid 2.8 lbs to go through now :)

photo and recipe cred to:  skinnytaste.com

And lastly, there was a little chill in the air recently (for like a second) so I decided it was high time to make some chili.  After pouring through recipes, and quite honestly shocked that I don't have a go-to chili recipe, I came across this one: Flatlander Chili.  And here are the reasons it appealed to me:

1. Flatlander is in the title.  I'm not quite sure what it's supposed to mean but I'm from flatlands so I went with that and decided I would honor my people by making it.
2. It has tomato-y stuff in it like tomato juice and sauce but no chunks of tomatoes.  Because I'm married to a man-child who's scared of tomato chunks.  I think he was pleased.  The only things left over after he devoured his bowl were little bits of that mysterious green stuff (read: bell peppers).

OK, so as I read over this post I really didn't do anything "excursion" worthy but it was exciting for me, so just go with :)