The Creative Salad Company

If you work near Farragut North or Dupont Circle you’re in for a treat today.

Chop T opens its newest DC location and the Creative Salad Company is celebrating with its trademark pre-opening “training day”.  Hungry Washingtonians  can enjoy salads and salad sandwiches free of charge from 11:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m., or until the last bit of lettuce is gone.

So walk on over to the new location at 1105½ 19th St. NW (L and 19th Streets) for the “on-the-house” festivities. Nearest metro stops are Farragut North or Dupont Circle.

This morning during my perusal of the Post, I saw an article about Chili, and its relationship to the Super Bowl, which I’m told is on Sunday. Only now, at just after dinner time, have I calmed down enough to write about it. In their article, they mention a multiplicity of types of Chili, and that I can certainly get behind, but for the Post to claim that anyone in their right mind can include carrots and celery in their chili, they must have clearly slipped.

Chili, in its many forms, requires a tomato base, and the presence of beans, and is cooked low and slow, barely reaching much more than a simmer. Meat tends to be what defines the chili, either through its presence or absence, but really, mirepoix has no business belonging in a chili.

Post, listen well, and please find my very own native California chili below the cut.
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Guys, you can feel free to skip right over this entry, unless your female friends need a recommendation about where to get a good haircut. Otherwise, this probably won’t interest you, and there are a number of excellent posts up this week which will entertain you more. Okay?

I’m a girl who has a difficult time finding a good haircut. This is in large degree my own fault- I’ve never been particularly daring with the hairstyle and have been essentially wearing variations of the same thing since I was about 14. Not so good for my yuppie-hipster lifestyle.

But part of the problem has been that no matter how specific I try to be about what I’m looking for, no one ever seems to get it exactly right. I got a haircut once that was so bad I cried, and months later when it had finally grown out enough that I could chop it all off to my chin to get it fixed, the new hairdresser said, “So, was he trying to give you a mullet?”

So I’m a little gunshy about the haircuts, so out of that problem, and out of general busy-ness, I had let my hair grow all the way down my back. I decided it was time to cut it really short and donate it to Locks of Love. I wanted to do something different with it this time, but had no idea what that might be.
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The last round of car thefts in Prince Georges County happened in Clinton, Maryland – only about a mile away from my home in Brandywine. The most publicized of the 4 recent cases in Clinton and Brandywine involved thieves driving away in a car with a 3 year old girl inside. Of course, they did stop as they were speeding down the road to let the girl out. Nice, car thieves with half a heart.

Car theft has become such a problem in Prince Georges County that we even get the honor of being called out in a Wikipedia entry on auto theft, which can be categorized as either carjacking and joyriding (since we need to classify things). According to statistics published by Prince Georges County, 2/3 of the auto thefts in Prince Georges County are joyriding incidents, with cars often recovered quickly and the other 1/3 are categorized in the carjacking category, with cars being sent to a chop shop for parts. A friend of mine has had his car stolen 2 times, both times at the Greenbelt Metro station - in each case, it was a joyriding incident. I drove him out to pick up his car from a Hyattsville impound lot on his second theft - they stole the stereo and there were several empty bottles of Courvoisier in the back seat of the car. Prince Georges County has taken steps to reduce the number of car thefts (such as bait cars, etc…) and have resulted in a 10% reduction in auto thefts in 2005, but we still have a lot of work to do.

I love to cook, but every time I’m faced with having to attack an onion, I freeze.

How the hell do you do it without collapsing into a blubbering pile of red-faced sneezy goo?
(Appetizing, I know…)
Not to mention the delicious yet messy mango, the prickly pineapple, or the wily chicken.

So, armed with a gift certificate to L’Academie de Cuisine, I set out to conquer the mysteries of kitchen knives Saturday afternoon.
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