Mother's Day Weekend

I did not do any cooking this past weekend. It was Mother's Day and we stayed at a beautiful hotel near Disney for the weekend. We ate at some wonderful restaurants featuring different ethnic cuisines. It all really started on Friday, April 30, with my birthday dinner at a Korean restaurant. My family enjoyed cooking on on the griddle set in the middle of the table. My favorite part was the dozen or so little pickles and kimchis that are served with the meal. The food is so healthy too. The meat is grilled and then wrapped in lettuce leaves along with some of the pickles for garnish. Very delicious!

On Saturday, May 8, my choice for lunch was a Chinese dim sum restaurant. If you have never had dim sum you really should try it. These are little plates of both savory and sweet dishes. You can try so many different things because it is not one big helping of something. The more people you have in your party the more little dishes you can get to try and share. Our family of four had 8 little dishes. My personal favorites include the sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaf and the turnip cake which is made with daikon radish, not turnips as the name would suggest. I also love the squid in curry sauce and would have drank the sauce left in the dish if the waitress had not so promptly removed it from the table once the squid was gone! Adventurous types can choose duck feet and beef tendons among other things!

On Saturday night we ventured out to an Ethiopian restaurant for dinner. The fun part about this dinner is that you eat with your hands. The food is served on a big pancake called injera. Additional pancakes are provided on the side. You tear off pieces of the pancake and use them to pick up your food and eat it. We must have looked like we knew what we were doing because the servers never asked if we had eaten at an Ethiopian restaurant before. They just put the food on the table with the basket of extra pancakes and said enjoy. It was my husband's first time and he said it was a good thing I knew what to do because he would have been asking where the forks, knives and plates were! The food was delicious. It included two highly seasoned meat dishes, collard greens, fresh green salad and a lentil dish. This was all arranged on one large pancake. The juices from the different dishes soaked into the pancake. It was served with a glass of Ethiopian honey wine. The wine was sweet but refreshing.

In between our dim sum lunch and Ethiopian dinner we stopped by Epcot to see Davey Jones play. He puts on a fun show. Even our 8 year old daughters enjoyed it, sort of. We had played the music for them ahead of time. Knowing the words makes a huge difference in their appreciation of the entertainment.

We decided to go for Latin American cuisine on Sunday for brunch. We had a beef empanada and a plate of chorizo sausage. The dinners, one chicken and one steak, were well seasoned and served with rice and beans and plantain or yucca fries. Although it was early in the day it was Mother's Day and therefore called for a glass of the sangria. Everything was wonderful.

By now I was craving some sugar and chocolate so we headed over to my favorite grocery store, Whole Foods Market. We went to the pastry case and picked put a chocolate cup filled with espresso mousse and another filled with chocolate mousse. We sat in the dining area and enjoyed our sugar fix.

After this we went back to Epcot for the rest of the day. We did a few new things and some of our standard favorites then ended the trip with a second dose of Davey Jones. We were finally getting our appetites back after having eaten so well earlier so we stopped and got a couple of orders of sushi at the Japanese Pavilion.

I am now motivated to hit the kitchen to try to create some new and wonderful flavors to serve to family and friends.

I love to eat, don't you?!