Since it looks like I’ll be heading back to the 305 a little earlier than I expected (only until January! Don’t worry, good people of Argentina, I’ll be back!), now seems like a good time to share four new Miami-based blogs that I just discovered.

The first is Miami Dish, a very cool blog about Miami food and events, which I found via Twitter. (I still haven’t gotten around to learning how to use Twitter properly, and I was just about to abandon it when I saw a “tweet” by Miami Dish. Twitter, Miami Dish bought you another chance.)

The second, also found via Twitter, is Greener Miami. For being such a clean, stylish city (last spring, Forbes named it “the cleanest city in America“), Miami doesn’t make its green initiatives very obvious. Public transportation isn’t great, traffic is heavier than you’d think, and I’m pretty sure my building didn’t recycle a single bottle in the three and a half years I lived there. The more blogs like Greener Miami, the better, in my opinion - especially when you consider that, if Al Gore is right, and the sea level does rise, South Florida is one of the places with the most to lose.

Two others I found on Miami Dish’s blogroll:

Mango & Lime: another great food and restaurant blog. The recipe for portobello quesadillas looks pretty fantastic, and the restaurant reviews are great. When I get back to Florida, I’m sure I’ll be checking out this site a lot more often.

The South Florida Daily Blog: a useful aggregator of news stories, blog posts, discussions about all of South Florida. It was SFDB that directed me to this Sun-Sentinel news story about local businesses trying to silence critics on the Internet by suing them. (Just when I was starting to give Florida a little credit.)

My sister just sent me some pictures from yesterday’s massive rally for Barack Obama in Miami’s Bayside Park. Yes, the pictures are kind of blurry (she must have been shaking with excitement!), but she was there.

And here’s one of the crowd:

By the way, the point of this rally was to kick off early voting, which has just begun in Florida. So if you live in Florida, you can go vote anytime between now and Tuesday, November 4. If you want to avoid the lines, you’re probably gonna want to get moving on that sooner rather than later.

Buenos Aires is not, as far as I know, known for its great Chinese food. However, if you happen to be in the Las Cañitas neighborhood (which is where all the cool kids, including me, live), there’s a take-out only place called Min-Min which makes a mean chao mi fen con verduras (vegetable chow mei fun - like lo mein, but with very thin rice noodles). There are two nearly identical locations: one at Migueletes 623 and one at Olleros 1767. (There’s also a different, nice-looking Chinese place on Maure, but I haven’t tried that one yet - I’ll let you know when I do.)

Speaking of good Chinese takeout, if you happen to be in Miami, Florida, Kim’s Chinese Restaurant in South Beach (at 1245 Lincoln Road) is the best you’ll find, and it’s not bad at all. The only thing they don’t do very well is General Tso’s Chicken.

This leads me to my final recommendation of the morning: if you want the best General Tso’s Chicken in America (and, in all likelihood, all of the Americas) you have to go to New York, a fact that surely comes as no surprise. The place from which you have to order, though, may surprise you quite a bit. It’s called Wu Liang Ye (at 215 East 86th Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues; there are also locations in midtown on Lexington Avenue and on West 48th Street - but I’ve never been to either of them), and it looks like a typical Manhattan Chinese place, which it pretty much is. Except for the all-white meat General Tso’s.

To get the best version, you can’t simply order the General Tso’s Chicken. You have to specifically ask for it with all white meat, and they’ll do it for you, no questions asked. The difference is striking, and I expect thank-you notes from the people who take my advice on this one. I mean, I’m telling you about life-changing General Tso’s here.