A Mongol horde of one

John I. Carney
Jul 22, 2017 · 3 min read

I wanted to go to Murfreesboro, didn’t have much reason, just to kind of get out of town. As it turns out, right before I headed out I got some news that I needed to process and pray about.

So I drove to Murfreesboro and wound up at Genghis Grill in The Avenue, which I’ve wanted to try ever since they first opened several years ago. Many of you, judging from the comments on my check-in, are already familiar, but for those who aren’t, it’s a stir-fry place (Mongolian barbecue) with the twist that you pick out your own ingredients. They have recipe cards to suggest specific combinations, which you can use or ignore. I did not even look at the recipe cards.

You order a small, medium or large portion and they give you a little metal bowl for going through line. You start with your protein — plain raw beef, seasoned beef, sausage, fish, meatballs and so on. (Tofu is also an option for those seeking to go meat-free.) Then you add whatever spices you like, and then you add veggies. You get a little metal cup to fill with the sauce of your choice, with a number of different flavors available. It would be a great place to bring a group because I suspect everyone could find some combination of flavors they would like. Not all of the sauces are specifically Mongolian, and there are tiny little plastic spoons for taking a sample taste of a particular sauce before you commit to it. You hand your metal bowl and cup to one of the griddle masters, along with your ticket, and you tell them what type of starch you’d like — rice, udon noodles, spiral pasta, etc. You can combine two different starches. Then you go and sit down, and eventually your waiter brings out your fully-cooked meal (in a big plastic bowl with room for the noodles or rice, not the metal one you used for the ingredients!).

It was a fun process, and I was delighted with my bowl. I chose beef, seasoned with “dragon salt” and red pepper flake, and added spinach, onions, green pepper and mushrooms. I had a soy-based sauce of some sort; I forget what it was called. I got confused and thought I had to get two different starches, and so I had rice and udon noodles (which actually worked out OK).

I also really enjoyed the fizzy raspberry-and-mandarin-orange drink I ordered.

After lunch, I stopped by the big Walmart on Old Fort Parkway (one of the first Walmart supercenters, back when they were first rolling out the concept) to look and see what SodaStream flavors they had. The Walmart in Shelbyville stopped carrying SodaStream products long before I bought my machine, although they still exchange the CO2 tanks at the service desk. The big new Walmart on Church Street going into Murfreesboro doesn’t seem to have SodaStream stuff either, but I knew from the SodaStream website that the Old Fort Parkway location does. I bought several flavors. I’ve been getting my diet cola syrup by ordering from the Walmart website and getting free ship-to-store, but the whole point in buying the machine is having more than just cola to drink, especially on a hot weekend like this one.

I especially like the Welch’s grape flavor. It’s sugar-sweetened, not diet, although most of the SodaStream sugar-sweetened flavors (including this one) also contain artificial sweeteners. I suspect that this is so that it takes a conveniently-small amount of syrup to flavor your drink, and so that the syrup is thin enough to mix easily into the soda water. I have noticed that the sugar-sweetened syrups are thicker and take more swirling and tilting to mix than the diet ones.

The Kroger on Church Street going into Murfreesboro also has SodaStream products, but I wanted to see if the Walmart had a better selection. (It was about the same.)

I guess it was silly to drive all the way to Murfreesboro for lunch and a small grocery purchase, but it was a nice outing nevertheless.

John I. Carney

Written by

Small-town journalist; United Methodist layspeaker; lover of old movies and new comedy. http://lakeneuron.com

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