Meat and whiskey! Thats all you need to know about Char No.4. Oh and I guess their shrimp and grits are pretty good too oh and fried cheese curds. And that pretty much the reasons what brought me, Howard, Matt and Anh to Char No.4 or at least for me. I have heard many good things about their shrimp and grits but what I really wanted was MEAT. Howard showed interest when he found out they served fried cheese curds. He had some amazing ones in his Wisconsin trip.

So we went on a Thursday night and surprisingly we were all on time! Really rare that happens, eh I guess I’m always 30mins late to everything. We went in and got seated right away. The waiter quickly told us that they were out of the smoked half chicken and it was only 8:15pm. I took a lot longer than usual to finally decide what I wanted. But here’s what we all got.

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For pure research and to blog more for Drink To Blog, Matt, Phae and I went to a beer tasting at the Beer Table recently. The guest talker was Chris Munsey of Murray’s Cheese. You can read about the stout tasting here.

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Besides the Buttermilk Truck, another truck I just had to go was the Gastrobus. Yes I have been to the Gastrobus twice (here and here) but well Antonio and Lana are just such great people. I just had to give them a visit and so should everyone! I wanted my whole family to try so I brought them along. Which also mean I would be able to try a lot of the dishes that day heehee.

It was their organic Sunday menu so they were parked at the Los Feliz farmers market at the post office parking lot. Last time I saw Antonio and Lana it was in September so I was glad that they still remembered me when I arrived at the truck. Lana and I chatted a bit before I placed my order. Well I pretty much ordered everything off the menu, like I said I wanted to try them all!

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Oh Thanksgiving oh Thanksgiving. Why did you have to be over so soon. For the past 2-3 years I have spent my Thanksgiving vacation down in Virginia at my friend’s parent’s place. It felt like an actual vacation. But this year I stayed in NYC and went to a little Thanksgiving dinner my 2 friends were having. It was fun and all but it went by too quickly. Another thing I did different this year was that I made something for Thanksgiving dinner. Since I wasn’t at my friend’s parent’s place I emailed his mom to get her recipes for the apple pie and candied yams. To bring a little bit of what I was missing about Thanksgiving to this dinner.
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In my effort to clean out the fridge, I had to get creative with what I got. Actually I didn’t have to get too crazy since I had leftover stuff from making the pasta dish for Jamie Oliver’s Huntington 1000 and 2 week old spinach from my hot pot dinner and a tin of spam my friend, Phae, brought over. It’s basically the same recipe as the recipe I did for Huntington 1000 but instead of peas I used spinach. Also this time I didn’t use any oil or butter and added spam to it. I didn’t really add any salt to this since the spam is salty enough. In the end this was quick, easy and pretty good.

As I noted here that I was going to participate in Jamie’s Huntington 1000. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to cook at first but I knew I wanted something quick, easy and cheap. Luckily on Jamie Oliver’s site he has a “Budget Meal” section that was perfect for me!
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