East Side Foodies

There’s a ton of foodie hype that sweeps through Austin – a food trailer featured in this magazine, a restaurant featured on that TV show. Once this happens, the place becomes a foodie mecca, turning to complete and total madness. Lines stretch for miles and miles, wait times span into years… As waiting in line for food is something I can’t bring myself to do – absolutely not worth it – I do my best to avoid these places during the insanity.

With this said, there’s a super popular hole in the wall Mexican restaurant in East Austin called “Juan In A Million“. It’s been featured on Man vs. Food, so as you can imagine, this place is generally a mad house. I had been wanting to try it at some point, but figured I’d wait for the madness to die down.

Welllll…a few weeks back, one thing led to another and I found myself there. Wait time was less than 5 minutes. A Christmas miracle!

Insanely large portions of  delicious, cheap, greasy, authentic Mexican food is what you’ll find at Juan In A Million. I’m fairly confident my arteries began to cry when my plate was set before me, but let’s be real, I didn’t go there for a healthy meal!

Here’s my plate:

I think I was able to consume about 1/16th of what you see in the picture. I also think I might have offended the waiter when I asked for a box after my plate looked like it had barely been touched. “I do like it.” I told him. “I just can’t eat my weight in nachos this morning. The leftovers will make for a great lunch, snack, dinner, 2nd breakfast, 2nd snack, 2nd lunch and 2nd dinner!”

Here’s the famous Don Juan taco:

The horchata is not pictured, but is some of the best I’ve had.

The wait staff also reminded me why I’m not in the food service industry. If I had that many people packed into a small space that I had to serve every day…well, I’m fairly confident it’d be an epic fail for all involved. (: On the contratry, the JIAM staff were great – friendly, attentive, happy, chipper…you know…all the great characteristics of awesome waiters/waitresses.

The Last Few Weeks

Driving through town the other day I came across this complete random and out of place ugly sweater sidewalk sale. Aside from the general weirdness I thought was so great, I most appreciated the unnaturally massive stuffed barney advertising the sale.

I really love reading. However, with so many life distractions, I’ve unfortunately put reading on the back burner more often than I’d like to admit. However, I’ve made it a goal to spend more time reading. Actually I’ve made it a goal to spend more time doing stuff sans technology. I will be the first to say how much I do love my technology…but I do love my IRL hobbies as well. I’m in the midst of reading 4 Hour Workweek. Perhaps this book will give me tips so I can be more efficient both on and offline.

Only in Texas. Need I say more?

When I worked at Old Navy 4 years ago, I could fit into a size small. I am more or less the same size now; however, now I can’t fit into any women’s sizes as sizing has increased so drastically. The small, medium and large tags stayed the same…the clothes are just bigger now. I’d say an Old Navy small today is probably the size of an Old Navy large cerca 2008.

Aside from the feeling of annoyance for having to shop in the kids section if I want to shop at Old Navy…I really just feel sad. If you gain weight, you get bigger clothes, if you lose weight, you get smaller clothes. Clothing companies shouldn’t make clothes bigger without changing the label. I presume this is done so people will have false hope that the bathroom scale is wrong and they actually didn’t gain those extra 20 pounds…impossible if they haven’t gone up a size at Old Navy!

Lame.

I tried this dress on at Old Navy. It’s a size small but it looked like I had tried on a garbage bag with head and arm cutouts. I put the hanger in the pic for size reference. Fail.

So speaking of gaining weight, I made some sweet treats that WON’T make you gain wait, if consumed in moderation. 85% dark chocolate topped with either banana, peanut butter, or died cranberries.

The end.

And Then There Were 21,000

I really really really really really hate running. I’ve never liked running. I don’t get any pleasure out of running. It’s bad for knees. It’s bad for joints. It makes me get out of breath. I feel like I’m wasting time…I could be salsa dancing instead! Being sweaty grosses me out. It’s not something I can do past age 40, if I haven’t already blown out my knees before that point.

So, then why in god’s green earth did I run a 5 mile race a few weeks back?

Well, the idea popped into my head about a month before the race and went something like this: “Hmmm. I should do something that’s A. out of my comfort zone and B. something I don’t think I can do, just to prove myself wrong.”

As I was not able to go home for Thanksgiving ($600 plane ticket home? Sadly, not in the budget!), why not run 5 miles instead? And no, not a 5K. 5 miles. At this point, I don’t think I had run more than 5 miles combined in my 24 years of life. I knew this would be an interesting race.

So I trained almost every day for the next month. I did not enjoy the running but I did enjoy knowing I would be tackling a challenge. Meeting a goal.

Most runners set distance or time goals. My first goal was to finish. My second goal was to complete the race without getting a side stitch, “an intense, stabbing pain under the lower edge of the ribcage.” Side stitches are most likely caused by stretched ligaments between the diaphragm and liver. Makes sense, as the impact and jolting of internal organs from running is far more intense than from walking. One way to overcome side stitches is to establish a certain breathing pattern – there’s quite a strategy to it! (Strategy? One of my favorite things! Maybe running isn’t so bad…). To spare you the details, let’s just say I spent most of the race coordinating breathing with my strides. (This actually takes far more coordination that expected). The happy news is…I finished the 5 miles sans side stitch.

Playlists. Intended for runners to get pumped up, motivation, keep the adrenalin going, etc. I presume the type of music in runner playlists usually looks something like: Black Eyed Peas, OutKast, Queen, Rihanna.

My playlist? Not so traditional, but def. got me pumped up and adrenalin was flowing. I’d say my playlist theme was something along the lines of “Classical & 90′s pop”. A sampling:

Lalo, Symphony Espanole

Bach, Allegro Assai III

Ari Hest, Caught Up In Your Love

Warlock, Pavane Capriol Suite

Gavin DeGraw, Chariot

Bloch, Concert Grosso No. 1

Portugal The Man, The Dead Dog

Evita, High Flying Adored

Houston County, I Can’t Make It Rain

Skee-Low, I Wish

Shai 360, One Love

Salt N Pepa, Shoop

LFO, Summer Girls

Stuck In The Middle, Can’t Help Falling In Love With You

So there you go. And now some visuals from the event.

Pre-starting line. Took us more than 10 minutes to make it past the starting line once the race began!

Lots of people dress up for the TT:

I love this sea of people!

5 miles of barefoot running? Holy cow.

Wouldn’t be a true Austin event without a live band. Not sure if these kids were an official Turkey Trot act though…

Perhaps more recycling bins would be good next year!

Finishing! The clock says 1:22:55 but I finished more near the 1:10 mark. As there were 21,000 runners, I wasn’t able to pass the start line until a little more than 10 minutes into the race!

Once Upon An Adventure To Boerne, Texas

After just being in Reno for a week, anything involving fresh air and natural light sounded good in my book. Plus it was David’s birthday…what better way to celebrate but submerge ourselves into the earth?

There are a number of cavern tours around central Texas – I decided on Cascade Caverns. The other ones seemed a bit more commercialized, whereas this one seemed most down to earth (I am so punny).

On the way there, guess what we passed?

If you guessed “a Greek monastery!” welp, you are correct!  I have absolutely no idea how there is a Greek monastery in the middle of nowhere Texas, but there is. And here’s proof:

η αγάπη ζει Ελλάδα!

After our quick Greek monastery detour, we arrived:

Watch out, he’ll getcha:

The tour was great and we really lucked out – the tour before us had about 10 people and the tour after had about 246 boyscouts. Our tour had David and me. FTW!

See that cement looking hole in the middle of the picture below? That is a hole leading down to another cave. They offer a tour in which you must SWIM out to that hole, then lower yourself down the hole to cave. Did I mention the water is freezing? (Obviously I am not the target audience for this escapade).

Y ya! One our later and we surfaced from the cave (the tour was awesome!). This was the first thing we saw when exiting the cave. I wonder how old this sign is? If I owned that sign, I might consider taking it on Antiques Roadshow.

Part 2 of the day involved eating a burger. Something you might or might not know about me is that I love hamburgers. Luckily, David also loves hamburgers. After much Texas hamburger research, I found the perfect place to go. It’s a little cafe, literally in the middle of nowhere, called Alamo Springs Cafe:

Here’s what I ordered:

Ha. Totes kidding. As much as I love burgers and as much as I love challenges, I just can’t be ok with eating my weight in / vomiting my weight in hamburgers. Gross? Perhaps. True? Absolutely.

So we settled with this bad boy:

I would not consider myself a foodie/food snob, but I’ve got to say, this burger was pretty out of this world. Out of all the burgers I’ve consumed, this one makes the top 5 list. In fact, I am getting hungry, right now at 4:14 am, for one of these burgers. They are that good.

Back to Austin we went – time for the grand finale – birthday cake! And by birthday cake, I mean peanut butter mint paradise bakery cookie ice cream cake.

Interlude: David’s favorite cookies in the entire world are from Paradise Bakery. Unfortunately, there are no PB locations in Texas. Fortunately, I was in Phoenix the day before. There is a PB in the Phoenix airport. I had exactly one hour between flights to make it through the terminal, find PB, get the cookies, go back through security, back through the terminal and to my gate. Let’s just say I amazing raced my way through Sky Harbor. Success ensued. 

Back to the cake. Here is it! Sadly, I forgot to grab a picture before digging in. Thankfully, it was because the cake turned out so well, we couldn’t wait to dig in!

Dock & Roll

Texas summer heat can be a bit much – especially when we’ve hit the 100th day of 100+ temps. However, nothing can beat this beautiful Texas fall. Sunny skies, upper 70s/low 80s. Couldn’t ask for nicer weather.

I usually don’t take lunch, but this weather was too beautiful to not take a mid-day sun break. So, I decided to kill 2 birds with one stone – get some sun and continue on my Austin food trailer quest.

I went to Dock & Roll - ordered a lemonade with a splash of orange, homemade tater tots & a house salad. The tater tots were by far my favorite of the three.

Something else I really appreciated about D & R - terrific customer service. The guy at the window was so friendly, upbeat, helpful and well…just made me want to come back. And made me (even more) happy to support local food vendors.