Archive for May, 2010
officially off our list
May 30, 2010
It is official. Macaroni Grill is off our list of go-to restaurants. I don’t know if they’ve changed recipes or if they’ve changed ingredients, but the last couple of times I’ve gone there the food has been an overall let-down.
Luis’ pasta tasted like it had been sitting for a couple of hours, his chicken was dry, and his salad seemed that it had been sitting in the fridge for at least a day. My lobster ravioli was all carelessly plopped onto my plate and broken apart, and the sauce was watered down. The bread (which we usually love) was dry, cold and stale even though our waitress swore it had “just come out of the oven.”
And to top it all off, the service was horrible. Even Luis, who usually has a strict 20% minimum tip policy, was willing to leave only a 14% tip. It makes me sad to have to say goodbye to a place we used to enjoy going quite a bit. But alas, when you leave a restaurant thinking that your version of that same dish is a million times tastier, you know it is time to quit.
date night
May 28, 2010
I’ve been wanting to do the Great Date Experiment for some time. Now that Luis is finally in Las Vegas with me, we were able to start on the first date. It was so much fun. You start off with printing the different phases, and the idea is that neither of you is supposed to know what is going to come next. Each phase comes with its own set of instructions of what to do, where to go, what to order, etc., along with a list of questions to ask one another. I would tell you all the details, but I don’t want to ruin the fun for you and your spouse. So I’ll just say this, for our date we ended up going to Sonic, taking a drive down the strip, and then heading to the District to try to catch an outdoor movie:
Now it’s your turn. Download the 1st Great Date and then let me know what you thought.
words with friends
May 27, 2010
Natalia: So Luis had been all a-buzz about this iphone app “words with friends.” The long and short of it is that you play scrabble on your phone with a person of your choosing (or a randomly selected person if you have no friends). So I downloaded the app and started a game with Luis. As you can see above, after only 3 rounds, Luis suddenly stopped playing. Why? Well, I believe the answer is clear if you simply look at the bottom left corner of the above picture which shows me clearly winning.
Luis: For the record! I am not a sore loser… I just got a little frustrated when Natalia (essentially) threw herself on the DoubleWord and TripleWord tiles I had been plotting to use, with do-nothing words & letters.
Natalia: Of course, this doesn’t mean much in scrabble because he could have still annihilated me within a couple of rounds. But did he? Nope. So what was I forced to do? Start a game with a randomly selected person because apparently I have no friends… well none that want to play with me. But don’t worry, I’m beating Yc250altman by 23 points.
Luis: See… it’s a win-win. … Speaking of ‘win’ … I destroyed Spencer in my game. One of my words scored me 60 points. I forget which. Spencer forfeited before I had the chance to use my ‘Z’ tile.
Luis: Anyone up for a game?
onion sweat
May 26, 2010
Have you ever eaten so many onions that you feel like you’re sweating onions? Pretty gross, isn’t it? Well, tonight we tried a new recipe: Fettuccine with Caramelized Onion Cream Sauce. I chopped seven onions. SEVEN! I’d like to say that this was the most time consuming part of the recipe, but unfortunately it wasn’t.
After all the chopping, the onions had to sit on the stove for 45 minutes. Yes, forty-five minutes. I thought I could outsmart the recipe and just leave the onions on the stove a lesser time, but halfway through cooking, I figured that I’d come that far, I might as well make the recipe as instructed. So I let them sit them (with some slight stirring in between) for the full 45 minutes.
At the end, I decided to use some of the onions to cook tilapia, and all-in-all I think the dinner was a success. Sure, we have leftovers for the rest of the week, and everything (the house, our clothes, our breath) smells like onions, but it’s all good :) Luis?
Luis: While the dinner was delicious (as usually is the case with anything Natalia cooks), I’m not quite sure it will be worth the effort (or tears) of cutting 7 onions (I had the same thought you’re having, as I looked at my grocery list yesterday, and piled in what seemed like 70 onions into a bag). But, it was worth the effort of merely trying it out. On to future cooking (and my part: tasting) experiments!
my dishwasher
May 25, 2010
I love having my dishwasher back.
He puts away all of the food after dinner.
Just so you know, we don’t normally use that many dishes. This picture was the night we invited the missionaries over for dinner.
He hand washes all of our dishes.
(We are waiting for our landlord to either fix our dishwasher or replace it altogether.)
And then he leaves the counter spotless for me to make a whole new mess the following day.
sunday smiles
May 24, 2010
We got to spend our Sunday afternoon with two of our favorite little people.
We made Reese’s Bars
We read books.
We even went for a quick little sled ride around the lawn :)
two of my loves
May 23, 2010
my husband and wedding cakes :)
We spent our day yesterday filming a lovey-dovey couple as they celebrated their wedding day. It was a long day, and the weather wasn’t exactly what I would call “good.” but it is always fun to go to weddings and be reminded of the little quirks of our own wedding day.
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