As we prepare for the 2011 Mongol Rally this summer, we’re finding it hard to keep up with our Confined Nomad adventures.  So we just want to let our readers know that while we haven’t abandoned the project, we are putting it on hold until the fall.  Our goal is to finish off the “C” countries by end of the year!

In the meantime, you can follow our great adventure from Europe to Mongolia a few ways!  We’ll be working on a project along the way called The Silk Road in Stereo, which you can read more about on our Kickstarter project fundraiser page (website coming soon).  You can also follow our general progress – border problems, flat tires, sweltering days in a small car with no AC, amazing views, and awesome FOOD – at our official Mongol Rally team website, theunConfinedNomads.com.  Oh, and we’ll also be posting updates to our regular twitter feed: @confinednomad.

Here is our announcement video for the Silk Road in Stereo.  Enjoy!

Most of Patisserie des Ambassades‘ (2200 8th Ave, New York, NY 10026) menu seems more West African than Comorian, and indeed, the African community in Harlem tends to come primarily from Senegal.  So in the end, we didn’t find a Comorian restaurant.  I wouldn’t even necessarily claim that we  found an authentic Comorian dish, but we did find an African restaurant with a nominally Comorian dish.  I’m going to give us a half point.

The Ambassades’ Comoros Curry is a mild, but flavorful Indian-style vegetable curry served with rice.  Comoros’ location in the Mozambique Channel meant it was an important stopping point for sea merchants making their way to and from India, and Indian influenced cuisine is prevalent there.  We ordered one curry between the three of us, and it was a nice side to our main dishes. read more »

There are apparently 33 countries with smaller populations than Comoros.  Many of them are still ahead of us.  We were able to find four of them: Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, and Cape Verde.  After good-faith efforts, we ended up cooking two at home: Andorra and Bahamas.  Now, for the first time since we started this project, we threw our hands up and resigned ourselves to cooking at home before we even (extensively) Googled Comoros.  Pretty pathetic, right?

We picked a night, spent a couple hours trying to find an authentic Comorian recipe, found many of very dubious provenance, then switched to Googling in French, finally found someone’s Comorian grandmother’s nice-looking lamb stew recipe on a Comorian forum, and headed out to grab what we needed.  We live in a Bangladeshi neighborhood, so there’s no shortage of halal butchers.  We walked into the first one we saw.  As you might expect, the shelves were fully stocked with Goya products and corn tortillas, and a youngish Mexican kid stood in a bloody smock under an airbrushed painting of Mecca. read more »

We know, we’ve been bad alphabetical eaters lately. We have lots of excuses: work, travel, Mongol Rally planning… But we can, we must, do better. And we will! A post about our quest to find food from the tiny island nation of Comoros is forthcoming, and we believe we have found a restaurant that serves food from the Congo. So stay tuned, more exciting food from countries beginning with the letter C await!

In the meantime, we wanted to let you know that we’ve been invited to speak on April 5, 2011 at the Adult Education Useless Lecture Series at Union Hall in Park Slope. The theme of the evening is “Cuisines of the World.” Hope you can join us for some beer, powerpoint, and lots of talk about our favorite topic!

And to tide you over, here are a few shots of things I ate on a trip to Vilnius, Lithuania last week.  Enjoy! read more »

Thats right folks, in 2011 the Confined Nomad team will be unleashed to drive, eat, and generally battle our way from Europe to Mongolia in a highly unsuitable vehicle, and it’s all for charity!

The Mongol Rally is a grand adventure of 10,000 km of bad roads, worse roads, and no roads through cities, mountains, deserts, seas and steppe.  This coming July, a couple hundred teams will embark on this harebrained journey, taking whatever route they choose, in cars with engines of less than 1.2 litres (1200 cc).  They will each raise at least £1000 for charity, and upon arrival in Ulaan Batar, their cars will be donated.  And we’ll be one of them.

The Rally is the opposite of a guided tour.  Teams are left to their own devices to deal with Russian police asking for bribes, breakdowns in remote deserts, and days of waiting at border crossings.  It’s all about adventure!  And saving the world, of course!

But we need your help!  Donations to our charities, sponsorship of our journey, and general advice about the best and worst border crossings in Central Asia are much appreciated. Please visit the 2011 Mongol Rally (un)Confined Nomads team website to find out more about supporting our adventure.

Here’s a little about how you can help:

• We are raising funds for two amazing charities: The Christina Noble Childrens’ Foundation and the Southern NY chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.  Your donation to these important organizations goes a long way. Please visit our team website to make a donation today!
• We need sponsors!  This is not exactly going to be cheap.  We need a car, camping gear, tires, jerry cans, a satellite phone, gifts for small children, bribes for border guards, among many other things.  If you or your company would like to sponsor our journey, we’ll place your logo right along the side of the car, and prominently display it on our team website.  If you are trying to reach markets anywhere from London to Mongolia, this is a great advertising opportunity!
• The Confined Nomad crew will be bringing you updates of delicious, atrocious, and unfathomable things we eat along the way.  We’d love to hear suggestions of foodstuffs we should not miss, items you’d like to dare us to eat, and meals we should avoid at all costs.  We’ll do the food blogging on this site, so let us know if you have any particular requests or suggestions.

Follow us as we document our preparations and eventually our trip across the world’s largest land area next summer!  www.theunconfinednomads.com.

Oh, and watch our short announcement video:

Serendipity brought us to Bogota Latin Bistro (141 5th Ave, Brooklyn) recently.  A co-worker and I were chatting one day about some nonsense, and he brought up a friend from his volleyball league, who owned a fantastic Colombian restaurant in Park Slope.  The timing couldn’t have been more perfect for our alphabetical eating adventure, and we visited Bogota the next day.

On a Saturday night at 8pm, this fairly large space was already packed, and the wait was 30+ minutes.  No matter, there was ample space at the long bar for 3, and the bar tender was whipping up some magical looking mojitos, caipirhinhas, and margaritas.  Creative, homemade infusions, like jalapeno-infused tequila, made the place all the more appealing.  We were happy to wait. read more »

Sorry folks, we know it’s been a while since we last posted.  Things have been busy around Confined Nomad territory.  Our excuse is that two of us ran the IMG New York City Marathon in November (woo hoo!), and one of us has been traveling quite a bit (food photos forthcoming).  But never fear, we are resuming our alphabetical gastronomic adventures – just in time for the long cold winter ahead.

We did finally call it quits with China, and moved on to Colombia this fall.  We went to two different places to sample this rich, heavy, and delicious South American cuisine: Tierras Colombianas II in Astoria, Queens (3301 Broadway at 33rd St) and Bogota Latin Bistro in Park Slope, Brooklyn (141 5th Ave at St. Johns Place).  We could have picked any number of others in Jackson Heights or Corona, or even the little place near our nabe, so if any readers have comments or suggestions of stand out Colombian joints around the city, comment! read more »

The East Harbor Seafood Palace (714 65th St – between 7th Ave & 8th Ave – Brooklyn, NY 11220) is comprised of one cavernous, nondescript  room.  With it’s fake crystal chandeliers and 20-foot ceiling, it feels more like a Howard Johnson convention room than a restaurant, but it turned out to be perfect for the multitude of little dim sum ladies maneuvering  their steaming dim sum carts through dozens of big round family tables.  The whole scene feels a little chaotic at first.  The room magnifies the already formidable din of the Sunday crowds, which seem to represent at least four generations of Brooklyn’s Chinese community, and the cart ladies, as friendly as they are, don’t seem particularly eager to hang around while you weigh your choices, or even try to figure out what they are. read more »

Earlier this week we reflected back on the Chinese food we’d eaten, in an attempt to determine if we can in fact say we are “done” with this country. It’s hard to say yes or no. Yes, we’ve been to all the Chinatowns (Flushing, Manhattan, and Brooklyn) and we’ve tried food from across the land (Uighur to Fujianese). But we hadn’t yet hit some of the more popular cuisines (from Shanghai, Hong Kong, or Beijing). So we decided to spend a little more time sampling some of the diverse regional offerings in these boroughs.

Our latest effort led us to a very rare treat indeed: squirmy, slimy, and yummy things from the Qingdao region on the north-central coast.  That’s pronounced “Tsingtao” (and yes, it is where the beer comes from!). M&T Restaurant (44-09 Kissena Blvd, Flushing, Queens) has been generating buzz on the interwebz since it opened in mid-2009. Robert Sietsema, an early fan, gushed over the restaurant’s unique offerings in the Village Voice last year.  Yelpers and folks active on Chowhound have been singing its praises as well.  We figured we couldn’t skip this one. read more »

The sensitive artist who captured the joy on Little Pepper’s face clearly must have caught him just after his first bite of the lamb in spicy sauce (with cumin).   It came out first along with the delicious cold cucumber with mashed garlic, and both served as a good indication of the quality that was to follow.  The lamb was cut in thin, tender strips and was flavored much as the name would suggest. Definitely a highlight.  A pair of solid, but average dumpling dishes followed.  The dumplings with spicy sauce were steamed and pork filled, covered in a sweet, mild soy-based dipping sauce.  They were good, but there wasn’t much to distinguish them from your everyday steamed pork dumpling.  The dumplings in soup were basically the same but floating in bland thin clear broth.  Not bad at all, but not worth going for over the wealth of great flavors elsewhere on the menu. The chicken with cashew nuts was a favorite of the table, but also wasn’t unlike what you might find at a lot of good Chinese places. read more »