A Trip to Chapel Hill

Last week, I went on another fun trip to the triangle area.  The main reason for going to was to take the intro level sommelier exam in Raleigh through the Court of Master Sommeliers.  My friend, Morgan, who works at McCrady's, also took the test.  It involved a pretty intensive two-day seminar prior to the exam, and I was happy to have a friend there with me.  There was a lot of information to absorb, and I think I might have felt a bit more overwhelmed had I gone by myself.

Morgan and I just before taking the exam

I couldn't help but to be a little nervous about the exam, even though I was overall fairly confident about it. Much to our relief, however, we both passed!

So that was pretty exciting. I've been pretty stressed out about the whole thing, and I'm glad to have one less thing looming over my head right now.

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The other purpose of the trip was to celebrate my birthday!  Tuesday was my actual birthday, but I didn't want to party too hard because the wine exam was the next day.  But, you better believe, on Wednesday after I found out I passed, it was on. 

We finally had dinner at Lantern, after having drinks there my last two visits.  My sister and I asked the bartender to just pick dinner for us because, truly, I would have been happy with any single item on the menu.  He happily obliged us, and I loved every bite.

To start, I got Chaat, which is kind of like a warm salad with roasted chickpeas and cauliflower, crispy potatoes, pickled red onion and a nice, refreshing herbed/minty chutney.  I absolutely adore both chickpeas and cauliflower, and I thought this dish was delicious and certainly unique, with lots of fun texture.

For dinner, I had the steamed wild striped bass, which was served with lots of herbs, crispy ginger, a fermented black bean-type broth, baby bok choy, and rice.  This was excellent as well, along with Margaret's lacquered pork tenderloin lettuce wraps, and Sam's crispy duck noodle soup.  Gotta say, though, I did enjoy mine the best.

The dessert was rave-worthy.  Roasted banana ice-cream with peanut brittle, caramel, and whipped cream. To.die.for.  And I'm really not even the kind of person who just raves over dessert.

Here's one of the sis and me at Lantern.  Sissy bought me the dress for my birthday :)

And one of the sis and her hunky boyfriend, Sam, whom I got to officially meet.

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So that's about all I have to share with you, except for a couple gem photos from our hungover trip to the Maple View Dairy Ice Cream Store in Carrboro the next day.

*mmm...*

Don't be jealous of the fact that I ate really delicious ice cream two days in a row.