i am a neglegent blogger and am only updating now because i've mentioned this thing to two people recently and feel obligated to put something up, should they journey here. i still have to post about my trip to chicago and to Green Zebra, the new upscale vegetarian restaurant there. i have the menu buried somewhere in the piles of unpacked, yet not put away materials that i will post eventually.

in the meantime, i just got back from a weekend trip to new york city where i had the most divine indian food at Bombay House, amidst screaming children and pounding top 40 music (including the "It's Getting Hot In Here" song twice in a row! what bliss!). really, the food was absolutely fantastic and puts Priya, eugene's best indian restaurant, to shame. but 2/3 of the restaurant was occupied by a large birthday party that had very non-supervised children running amok. one bumped in to me and for the rest of dinner, i couldn't get out of my head the vision of a young child slamming into me as i put a forkfull of food into my mouth, thus slamming the fork into the back of my throat. ew.

courtney also took me to an ethiopian place by her house. there are no ethiopian restaurants in eugene. probably because there are no ethiopians in eugene. it was a quite, sort of classy new york restaurant, and didn't have the feel of ethiopian diamond, the giant casual restaurant in chicago featuring the one man musical wonder, but it was quite tasty, especially after a long and failed evening trying to depart through laguardia. it's so delightful to see a huge piece of injera piled high with spinach, lentils, potatoes, carrots and cabbage coming my way. and we followed this with a late night glass of wine and split panna cotta at a lovely wine bar down the street. god i love new york.

other restaurants hit while in the city: Pink Teacup, a soul food restaurant in the (west?) village that featured the most phallic pork sausage i've ever laid eyes on. i had to cut it into slices rather than leaving it on my plate and these things tend not to phase me.

but now i'm back in eugene. i had the pleasure of dining at locomotive last night, eugene's best about-to-close vegetarian restaurant. it was eugene best vegetarian restaurant before it became about-to-close. my entree last night, though, was not the best i've had there. two poached eggs swimming in (as the server told us the recipe calls for) a "butt-load" of garlic and "two butt-loads" of tomatoes. whew. i'm safe from vampires for a good while. the peach plum cobbler with plum ice cream, however, was wonderful and i was happy that both emily and jane preferred the chocolate cake, since i pretty much had the cobbler to myself. i love to share, but i prefer to share when the other person loses interest in the shared item.