Pierogilishous

Last weekend, James and I went to Warsaw!

Since my first meal of the day before our flight had been kind of a disaster despite my carefully transporting my granola and yogurt from The Kitchen to LHR, and I had no desire to eat BA's chicken sandwich, I was pretty hungry by the time we were getting ready to head to the ballet -- and dinner wasn't until 10pm afterwards! But this beef carpaccio, sundried tomatoes and parmesan starter at the +One bar at the Intercontinental definitely tided me over (The Caribbean cocktail, however, was not delicious). The meat was paper-thin and melt-in-your-mouth and the combination with the tomatoes and parm was really yums!

We booked our two nights' dinners based on the TripAdvisor rankings for Polish food in Warsaw. Friday night, was the #3 spot, Dom Polski. We had booked din for 10pm since we knew the ballet would end a bit late, but since we arrived so late, the vibe wasn't great. The restaurant was kind of emptying out. We had pierogi starters and James had a pork tenderloin main, while I had guinea fowl. I didn't really love mine, but I think it might be because I now know that I don't love guinea fowl...I did really enjoy the meat pierogis though.

 The next day, we had breakfast at our hotel, followed later in the day by a bit of mulled wine at the ice rink/it's-still-Christmas-in-the-Warsaw-Old-Town-Square part of town and then lunch at Podwale

Chi³

I don't know what it is lately, but I just don't really feel like making the effort to cook. But tonight I decided to force myself, and I'm really glad I did:

Even though I was unsure about this so-called "30-minute easy Chipotle chicken chili" recipe, I went ahead and made it for a few reasons:
1) It seemed easy
2) It seemed Tex-Mexy and as I've said, I miss that sometimes
3) I thought I could cop out easily because I would never find the chipotle chilis in adobo sauce ingredient, but amazingly, as I lamented about this to Sarah (to prove to myself that I really tried?), she told me she'd actually found some and bought them over the weekend for another recipe she wanted to try!(RostS is a serious cooking machine these days) (I guess that would make her a food processrost?)
4) Porterford Butchers near our office not only has good cooked lunch options, but raw options to use for dinner as well. And not only do they seem to be good quality, but they're reasonably priced too! £1.84 for 235g of flank steak

Andina

Sharry and I met at Andina for brunch and after remembering that it was National Pisco Sour Day, thanks to Mr Hyde, ordered one each:

 

I should tell you -- Andina has a LOT of quinoa-based dishes on their menu. Of course, I realize that quinoa has roots in Peru (ha. yes, I know it's a seed), but I didn't realize that it would be so ubiquitous on this menu! So if you love quinoa, you're in luck. But if you don't, then your options are more limited, but those options did look good as well. For our mains, Sharry had the quinoa burger (which I did actually kind of like) and I had the Scallop and wild mushroom omelette with sourdough toast:

Omelet de Conchas y Setas

I liked the omelette and the cheese inside with