A blogger named YAR who runs the Carpe Jackson food blog told us about La Morena in the comments section of my post about Omonia, so of course we had to try it out a few weeks ago. It’s hidden away in a little nook of a strip mall just off Old Canton Road that looks to be populated mostly by Mexican or Latin American businesses. The storefronts aren’t visible from the street, so you can be excused for not even knowing it was there. I didn’t know until YAR told me, so thanks for the tip. There are only 4 tables, but the bar space makes up for that somewhat. It wasn’t a busy night, so we were able to sit down right away.
As an aside, when it snowed in December we were coming back from a Mexican restaurant. This time when we got out of our car to walk to La Morena we had some snow flurries fall on us. It’s a sign! » Continue Reading…
Sofia managed to get a pair of socks she had worn to stand up on their own, and placed them neatly next to each other in the hallway by the front door where we leave our shoes. She figured this out all by herself.
Neither I nor Denise know much about Indian cooking. We love eating Indian food, but we haven’t had a go at cooking our own. With that qualifier out of the way, let me plug this grocery store anyway. Patel Grocery is an Indian grocery store just north of the new Ding How. I don’t think it’s in the same continuous strip mall, but the parking lots are connected. We went in there after having dim sum at Ding How, having just then spotted it for the first time.
Perusing the wares
I think they had 4-5 aisles full of wonderful stuff. Raw spices (whole, unchopped, unground spices), spice mixes, 1001 varieties of rice, heat-and-eat breads like naan, canned ingredients, fresh produce, etc. If you have any interest in Indian food you should at least go in there and look around. I don’t cook much these days since Denise is so good at it and I’m lazy besides, but even I felt somewhat motivated to try cooking some of my own after walking through Patel Grocery (or at least getting Denise to). And if you ever seriously considered cooking some Indian cuisine but didn’t think you could find the ingredients, now you know where to go. Simply. Awesome. Jackson is just full of surprises. Just when I think I’ve seen it all, something new pops up.
Patel Groceries
6800 Old Canton Road STE # 102
Ridgeland, MS-39157
601.952.0332
Google Maps is more or less the de facto standard for Internet maps nowadays. Mapquest had its heyday, but has long been surpassed. Now Bing Maps is making a push to be the next big thing in maps. Already they’ve got this “Bird’s Eye” view that shows buildings, etc. from an angle instead of directly overhead. It puts Google Maps’s satellite view to shame. I think the feature might still officially be in beta, but Gmail was “beta” for the longest time even with millions of people using it, so that label doesn’t have as much meaning as it used to.
But beyond that it looks like Bing Maps will get even more interesting in the near future. I came across this demonstration of how they plan to pull in more “augmented reality” types of features into Bing Maps. I won’t spoil it for you; just watch the video below. It starts getting nuts at about 5 minutes in, but don’t skip ahead. It’s better to have the full context of what they’ve already done and where they’re trying to go before you see the really mind-blowing stuff they’ve implemented recently.
A few weekends ago we revisited Ding How for another round of dim sum. First time around was good if slightly frantic in terms of service, which was understandable considering it was their first weekend of serving dim sum. The manager was so frazzled after that first weekend she considered abandoning the menu system and going to dim sum carts, which I was glad to discover they didn’t end up doing after all. With a large, high-traffic restaurant the cart system works great, but not so much with a cozier layout like Ding How where food might sit on the carts for a long time after cooking. They did, however, trim the menu a bit to make it more manageable, and items are now ordered by relative portion size and price. It’s a lot easier to sift through. » Continue Reading…
