Cinco de Mayo! Woo Hoo! I always like to have a margarita and celebrate in some small way this holiday of Mexican culture. So, I took both Julie (of the blog title) and her big sister MJ to a local favorite of ours, the Cactus Grill at 11 Raymond Street, Potsdam, NY. It was Clarkson College's graduation weekend and all the restaurants downtown were a buzz so it was no surprise that there were no particular Cinco de Mayo specials. Fair enough... we decided to go for drinks and desserts.
I only very rarely order a dessert at any restaurant, so I was pleased to finally have the opportunity to order a cultural specialty in honor of the day: Flan. I once read a novel by that title (written by the seriously twisted artist known as Dogbowl, aka Stephen Tunney), but had never actually eaten the culinary concoction. It was a wonderful vanilla flavored pudding and I am too much of a dork to know what the difference between Flan and standard vanilla pudding is. It was obviously freshly cooked and still slightly warm, but I have had pudding in that form before. MJ ordered the fried ice cream which I have personally seen before in various forms. Here it was vanilla ice cream served in a fried tortilla "dish" with a syrup granola topping. Julie got a giant brownie... which is pretty much self-explanatory except that it was topped with a huge amount of ice cream. She ate the ice cream and was too full to eat the brownie which I brought home in a box, put in the refrigerator and it disappeared by the next evening.
I got my margarita (ok, two, we were walking) on the rocks PLEASE and definitely with salted rim. The girls got raspberry ice tea. We ate our complimentary chips (warmed) and the very good salsa fresca with an added order of guacamole to augment the sizable amount of chips.
It was a successful venture and I took several pictures of our food and the neat mural paintings of cactus and such on the walls of the interior of the converted old industrial building. You see none of these here because I somehow managed to lose my camera a couple of weeks later before I downloaded the pictures.
In fact, the only goal of this Julie/Mom Project blog is to write regularly and I/We have been remiss in that duty. We have a fair excuse in that we are in a state of transition of residences and do not have consistent internet access among other confounders. We have not been remiss in knocking off places in the North Country This Week Spring Restaurant Guide, however, and have a backlog of notes to catch up on with blog entries. Five more coming up, all unfortunately without pictures. Oh well. It's an exercise in writing, not photography. A picture may say a thousand words, but one picture does not say the same words I put down here.
