Our Sunday started out great. I spent the morning in the kitchen preparing a full Sri Lankan spread. It doesn't look like much, but each of those glass bowls contained about 17 ingredients that had to be chopped and fried in some fashion. Our spread included seeni sambol, coconut sambol, appa (fermented rice hoppers) with a steamed egg and pineapple curry.
This much cooking certainly penetrates a little apartment. The seeni sambol uses a large quantity of dried (and pungent) maldive fish. After tempering some strong spices (including a lot of red chili powder) in mustard oil (everyone's eyes were burning), Henry runs into the kitchen and yells "I know you have the spirit of India, but you CANNOT just cook spices however you want!" Such is the suffering of our children.
Luckily for Henry, it's not all pain and suffering. Our friend Sara came to eat our Sri Lankan meal with us and Henry and I drove her back into the city. We decided to stay and spend the night at her apartment. Sara lives very close to Meridian Hill Park, so we decided to venture over here at dusk. We were taking pictures with Brandon's tiny samsung, so they didn't turn out great.
But if they had, you'd be able to see the Capitol on the left and the Washington Monument on the right. We're looking down on a 13 basin cascading waterfall that was, for the season, turned off. We're going ot have to make sure to head back there in the spring.
Since this was our night, I told Henry he could go anywhere for supper. Terrible idea, as he chose McDonalds.
I was hoping he'd chose Ben's Chili Bowl. As it turns out, McDonalds was a wise choice as Ben's had a line out the door and around the block. It was the day before MLK Day and the Inauguration. So really, it should have been no surprise the line was that long. We've heard that the line is always out the door. I guess we were really lucky when we headed down there right after Hurricane Sandy and slipped in with no line.
If Henry is predictable with McDonald's, I'm no better. Whenever I'm close to Sara's, we always eat at one place: Restaurant Judy's- a Salvadorian place just around the corner that serves excellent papusas.
Before we headed in for the night, we realized Henry had no hat. We remedied that quickly by stopping at a temporary souvenir shop on U Street. There we pitted kitsch dealers against each other and talked them down from from $15 to $8 for this fetching Obama scarf and hat set. A night does not get any better than that- fried cheese and bargaining on the side of the street.
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