Got an early start driving to California today, allowing us to miss the crush to get out of Phoenix. With the major stress of leaving not happening it set the mood for a casual drive over. Also, strangely enough, we arrived in the city of angels with plenty of daylight left. While Caroline was prepared to indulge me with a visit to one of my nostalgic haunts for dinner, I opted to find a place known for its Sichuan style cooking and that’s just what I found.

It’s not every day you find a restaurant cooking up duck tongues, but Sichuan Impression on Valley Boulevard in Alhambra was serving up that and some spicy bullfrog and the amphibian dish came with a warning that it was seriously spicy. Our server wasn’t joking as we worked hard to eat our frog while our lips felt like they were swelling. We would have had some ginger rabbit too, but they were out.

Duck tongue has a bone, a rather large one at that considering how little meat you suck off the thing. What was there certainly tasted like a duck and now that we’ve had it we won’t likely be ordering it again. Not because it wasn’t good, it tasted fine (if you like duck) but it did require a quite bit of tedious work to tear the small portion of flesh off the bone.

Once checked into our motel in Burbank we hit Magnolia Boulevard to get a few miles of walking in after the long drive. We make a mental note to visit this area again during the daytime to visit the shops as it’s a nice area around here. Tomorrow morning we have an event to attend right here in Burbank, more about that in my next blog entry.