In the spirit of Tony Bourdain, food as adventure. Try everything twice in case it was made wrong the first time. Eat without fear or prejudice.
My parents and I love to eat at the Szechuan House in Lutherville, MD. The place caters to white people as well as Chinese customers, but the real secret is the section of the menu called the Country Side Taste. It's where the good stuff is.
Today, we started with an appetizer from their sushi menu, the baby octopus. It's got a nice sauce with sesame seeds, and you just eat up these octopi up whole.
We then got the Ginger Manila Clam soup. It's simple really- clams, onions, and sliced ginger in a soup. The ginger flavor is strong.
This is the Wuu Geng Niou Naan. It's beef with some tendon cooked up in radish and tofu. It comes to the table on a metal elevated tray with a blue fire underneath so it's bubbling hot. The sauce is rich and it's just a tad spicy.
We also got this Sea Bass dish. The fish was nice and fatty, and the sauce- just fantastic with some white rice.
Appetizers:
I arrived a little early, so I ordered with a Singha beer and an appetizer of spicy wok fried cashews that went great with the beer.
I was most looking forward to the pan fried jumbo chive dumplings. The skin was actually made of sticky rice and the dumpling was packed with chives. It was really tasty.
This is the sticky rice with marinated beef strips. It had a nice sweet flavor.
The grilled green curry shrimp satay was next- it was not as sweet as most green curries I've had, but the shrimp was good.
This was followed by the shell sea coconut crab wonton. The sweetness of the coconut tasted good with the crabmeat inside.
I really loved the rice cake with coconut pork sauce. The slight chili flavor in the sauce was really great with the crispy rice cakes.
We ordered the Tod Mon or "fish cakes" which were really delicious. They reminded me of fish balls in texture, but sliced thin and then dipped in a sweet chili sauce.
The Bangkok St. Peking duck roll was just ok. This was probably because the duck was not freshly cooked, nor was the pancake it was wrapped in.
These are the fried sesame plantain bananas. Their flavor was nice and their texture was nice and light.
Our tenth and last dish was the Som Tom crabmeat papaya salad. It was straightforward and yummy- a nice close to the meal.
The theme for our second cooking night was Mexican. I decided to try to make tamales for the first time. I missed this class during my Mexican cooking course, so I was just relying on the recipes we received at the end of the course. I had to start the night before cooking the meat and making the sauces.
I made a red and a green salsa, and had to roast fresh tomatillos and a variety of dried and fresh peppers. Here's a tip: do not attempt to roast jalapenos on your range unless you have a hood and vent. Lazy me, I thought I'd save time and do them on a cast iron skillet on the burner instead of in the oven... five minutes later, I could barely breathe -- my eyes were watering, nose running, coughing -- and I had to open windows in the dead of winter! The tomatillos I did right on the open flame of the gas burner and that seemed to work fine. Once roasted, you peel and dice the tomatillos, and de-stem and de-seed the peppers. Then into the blender -- red salsa was 4 guajillo peppers, 2 tomatillos and 2 cloves garlic; green was 2 tomatillos, 4 jalapenos, 2 cloves garlic, and cilantro.
Then the meat. So based on our teachers calculations, I cooked 3 pounds of meat for 30 tamales. But then the next night, only made masa for 16 tamales... so yep, I had a ton of shredded chicken and pork left over. At any rate, the meat is brought to a boil then slowly simmered over low heat with just some onion, garlic, and whole peppercorns. Then after the simmering, you just let the meat cool in its own broth. I cooked the 1 lb of chicken for about 20 minutes, but I ended up forgetting all about the 2 lbs of pork for about 2 hours, when a friend of mine dropped by. It was supposed to be 40 minutes, but I think it was alright - the meat just fell apart really easily when it came time to pull it apart.
That just left mixing the masa and constructing the tamales for the night of the party. I soaked the corn husks in water, while making the masa dough, mixing 2 cups of the broth from the cooked meat, with 2 cups of the coarser maseca for tamales, and 1 cup of oil.
For each corn husk, hold in your hand narrow end down, spread 2 tablespoons of masa dough in the middle, top with some meat and sauce and then fold the sides in first, then top and bottom. I used the green salsa with the chicken, and the red salsa with the pork. Still operating on the mistaken assumption that my recipe made 30 rather than 16 tamales, I probably made mine on the small side, as I ended up in the middle with 23 tamales total. I still think I made way too much meat, even for 30...
The rest of the meal was equally delicious -- Kim had made guacamole and salsa, Danielle made a beautiful watercress tomato salad with this amazing creamy garlicky shallot dressing (see above), and Marian topped everything off with a wonderful flan.
For entrees, we shared duck ravioli over swiss chard and pear, and a lobster and cauliflower puree and truffle oil. 
Both went down without a fuss. We added french fries and green & white asparagus sides *(asparagus is the french fry of the vegetable world, after all), both eagerly anticipated and finished.
Right in my neighborhood in Baltimore, I wandered into this malt shop and ice cream parlor and grabbed a frosty chocolate mslted milk shake.
In the Hampden neighborhood in Baltimore, there's a great local cafe called Soup's On at Rose's Cookies. You can get great cookies and cupcakes there, but I went there last weekend for lunch. I had a homemade chicken pot pie with a wheatberry salad side. The crust of the pie was flaky and delicious and the filling was nice and chunky.
This may sound gross to some, but it's one of Philly's most beloved foods, behind cheesesteaks of course. Ed Cunningham of WHYY made this video of how to make your own scrapple (albeit with not-so-scary pork products).