Consider this story an addendum to my earlier review of Wakame.

The Lambert family birthday tradition is that whosoever's birthday it is picks the restaurant. And I picked Wakame, because I haven't managed to get back there since the first time, and it'd been far, far too long since I'd had the Annie's Ika squid appetizer.

So a magical thing happened to the straight-up corned beef after it spent the night in the fridge. It firmed up and, after a bit of slicing, proved to be even better than it was straight out of the pot.

So, it's official. I won't be with Rock Spring Farms for my third year of CSA vegetables. Nothing against them, honestly - they were great, and I will miss things like, oh, their taking Paypal. 

But they raised their prices to $560 for 16 weeks, which seemed a bit on the high side. Also, when I first went CSA-shopping, I ignored all the ones with Linden Hills dropoffs because I didn't realize I lived near Linden Hills. So I had more options than I thought I did, and spent a couple of days doing some comparisons.

In my eternal quest to find new and exciting combinations of old familiar ingredients to top tacos with, Since I'm making a big-ass batch of green chile chicken tacos tomorrow for the gaming crowd, I thought I'd try something to go with it - and since Rainbow had both tomatillos and, somehow, RIPE avocados on the shelf today, that was gonna be my basis. You'll need:

Pasta in a cream sauce with cajun chicken.

Before I go into further details, let me mention that I went to Jake's City Grille in Eden Prairie with my parents for my dad's birthday, and they like it, and it's not what I would call bad food. As such.

But there's something about a place like Jake's, a place that's still serving cajun chicken pasta in 2010, that makes me want to scream. A place that puts their name on things (Jakesauce, Jakewings, Jakefries) when, at least in the case of the Jakefries, clearly came frozen off the back of a truck.

When Burger Jones opened, I told myself that one of these times, I was gonna order the short rib chili. It sounded awesome - chili, made with beef short ribs.

This recipe came to us via Cathy's mom, from a newspaper article, from a Sacramento restaurant called "SooHoo's". You can buy the pork from a Chinese market or deli, or use my recipe and make your own if you wanna show off. You'll need:

Dough:

• 1 envelope dry yeast
• 1/3 C sugar
• 1 C milk (105 - 110 degrees F)
• 4 T shortening
• 1/4 t salt
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 6 C all-purpose flour

Char Su filling:

Pollanation (n); Pollanate (v): The process by which products Michael Pollan would consider "edible food-like substances" are deliberately marketed as what Michael Pollan would call "food", so as to avoid increasingly negative reaction to fast and processed foods as a result of health concerns, the slow food movement, the organic movement, the locavore movement, and Michael Pollan's own work.