Spice up Your Life

I went through a phase the last few weeks where I was craving spicy food. Hence, going to Indian restaurants on two separate occasions. First, Cashew and I had a coupon for Mirch Masala and we went there one Saturday night. It turned out that the coupon is valid only Monday through Friday :( Well, we decided to stay and try their buffet. I tried pretty much everything they offered: chicken curry, goat curry, vegetable curry, some kind of sticky orange rice, a lentils dal and a chickpeas dish. Some of the things were really spicy, others were rather plain. I think my favorite was the lentils dal because it was also one of the spiciest :) Again, I have limited experience with Indian food, but everything seemed authentic. Cashew also confirmed that. The only negative was the very rude server we had!

Just a few short days later, Pumpkin was visiting Atlanta, and we went to Chat Pati. This is an all-vegetarian restaurant that serves Indian fast food items. Fast food or not, I love that place! They have a laaarge selection of chaat, or snack-like foods. My favorites are the puri dishes: hollow fried dough balls that are then stuffed with a bunch of things like potatoes, chickpeas, etc. This time we got the dahi sev puri.

We also ordered a mixed appetizer platter so that Pumpkin could get to try a bunch of things. I don't even remember all the things on it... I just remember everything being really tasty (and mostly spicy). The only thing I didn't like was the fried ball in some kind of super sweet sauce.

We also had methi gota balls (chickpeas with herbs). Because we weren't sure this would be enough (we all eat a lot...), we ordered the aloo tikki plate that had potatoes and chickpeas. I seriously like all the savory things at this place. I've also had the dosas before; they're also delicious.

So what does one do after consuming exorbitant amounts of Indian food? Go get gelato, of course! We drove to Paolo's gelato in the Highlands on a nice warm night. I had the coconut, kiwi and lemon. The lemon flavor was especially good. It was tart, but not too tart to make it unpleasant. By the way, I'm usually not a fan of gimmicks, but I do love the wafer they give you with your gelato :)