A lovely lunch

 

Happy Sunday! When you're skipping a meal (every day for months on end. It's called intermittent fasting), you start to become obsessed with food. (Starting?) I start planning lunch the minute I open my eyes in the morning (and sometimes that's at 3:30. I'm really BAD at sleeping). Since my brother gave us some croissants, I've been salivating more than Pavlov's dog. 

Ideally, I'd love it with chicken salad, but...egg salad is almost as good. (With minced celery and chopped olives--and LOTS of mayo. I've found the best olive oil mayo is actually Walmart's Great Value brand. Costs less than the big brands and tastes better. Has almost half the calories of regular mayo, too. Commercial over.) I have just enough lettuce to put on the croissant, too. (Boy, have I been nursing this head of lettuce.)

 We're having fried rice (with ham click the link for the recipe) for supper tonight. (I love it because you can make it ahead.)

What's on your menu today?

Love me a good SPUD

A few weeks ago, Mr. L and I tried a new-to-us restaurant for lunch. I ordered a Cuban sandwich on our first visit. It wasn't the best I'd tasted. Needless to say, I wasn't impressed. Mr. L chose a brisket sandwich and he raved about it. He wanted to go back. Me? Not so much. But before we went last week, I went through the menu at least three times and could not find anything I wanted. The only thing that vaguely interested me was a loaded potato. I love baked potatoes and when I'm at home, I usually only have butter and a lot of fresh-ground black pepper. Because I'm trying to lose weight, I ordered it with the grilled chicken, but without the sour cream and cheese ... but that's mainly because I don't care for sour cream or cheese. (Okay, I'm a bit of a picky eater.)

It was GOOD. So good, that days later, I was still thinking about it. And last week, we went back for our third try. (Mr. L and I go out to lunch twice a week. Yeah, not really a good thing if you're trying to lose weight, but I'm down seven pounds with intermittent fasting, so...it could be worse.)

The bartender messed up my martini (ick--he made it dirty, dumping in olive juice), not a good omen but they replaced it right away. And when it was time to order, I had made up my mind that I would try the potato topped with pulled pork instead of grilled chicken. (Just to try it out, you understand.) But when it came my turn to order I found myself blurting "with prime rib."

Where did that come from?

It's been more than a year since I had prime rib. Besides ground beef in a burger, taco, or a burrito, I'm just not a fan of beef and if I eat it once a month, that's a lot. EXCEPT for prime rib. I really LOVE it, but it's so expensive, we only have it once a year, usually on my Mum's birthday--even though she's been gone for nearly five years. We used to invite her (and Dad) over for supper on her birthday and always served prime rib. (We always had lobster on Dad's birthday.)

OMG -- that loaded potato was even better then the one the week before. The beef was cooked to perfection, and though there wasn't a lot of it, it was the perfect amount and beautifully seasoned.

We're planning on going back this week and guess what I intend to order?

P.S. These pictures don't do it justice. I will have to take a photo the next time we go.

What do you like on your loaded spud?

Thumbs up?

I am useless with my phone. It's a beautiful white iPhone 4 (used) and it lives in a beat-up pink case. (Very cheerful.) I use it quite a bit ... to take photos of martinis at the restaurants Mr. L and I go to.

Okay, Mr. L took this one of me in a joint called O'Keefe's. (Hey, it was cold. I kept my jacket on.)

This one is from a place called the Jolly Roger.

Back to O'Keefe's.

At the Sunset Grill.

You get the drift. I even made a movie of my cat, Fred (but since have not been able to do it again. Damn).

The thing I really can't do well at all is text. My friend (and former Cozy Chick) Ellery Adams can text faster than the wind. She sends me a text and I painstakingly send her a short message, and then 4 paragraphs come back lickity-split. Oy. And now ... something has happened to my thumb and I will never be able to be a thumb texter. One day I woke up and not only didn't it work anymore, it wouldn't bend, either. According to my quack, it's arthritis.  I mean, she just blew it off.

Hey, I need that thumb. It does wonderful things for me. Like ... helps me to open jars and club soda bottles for my Happy Hour whiskey. It helps me pour milk into my tea cup(s). Going down steps it help to hold onto a railing. But ... not anymore. "Well, you could have surgery, but it probably wouldn't work." Thanks for being so cheerful, Doc. So the advice was "live with it. Oh, or you could take turmeric capsules.

So I ordered turmeric capsules, which just arrived yesterday. I took one so far. It hasn't done much (anything, really).

Luckily, I can still type. Hitting the keyboard's space bar is about all that poor thumb can do these days. And when I'm not typing, it lives in a splint, because otherwise Mr. L will be sitting in his office hearing, "YIPE" all day long when I move it to attempt to do things like seal an envelope full of bookmarks for readers, or stick tape on a package of yet more bookmarks for Cozy Chicks readers. Or even putting a CD in the player under the theory that I might actually write a couple of sentences on the WIP.

So. That's it. I have a useless right thumb. Anybody else got one? If so, how do you cope?

Spring has sprung ... now what?

Monday was the first day of spring. YAY!!

Okay, the winter wasn't that bad. (And they threatened us with the worst.) But spring bring with it places that are "seasonal" or are just seasonal to me.

I spend a lot of my summer at our family's summer cottage. I use it as a writing retreat. Usually it's just Fred (my Tuxedo) and me writing up a storm. I can see the bay from my office window. If the weather cooperates, I may be able to go on my first retreat as early as the end of April.

But spring means we can also go to come of our "summer" haunts.  The Halloway House reopens for the season  It's a historic old restaurant that cooks good, old-fashioned food. In fact, you can have Thanksgiving dinner whenever you want it. (We haven't tried that yet. for a set price, you get the whole shebang with enough food to feed six people. What a bargain.) And they make good drinks, too.  Every customer gets Sally Lunn bread (a cross between bread and cake) and orange sweet rolls. OMG -- I can't wait until it reopens (in 3 weeks) so that we can go there and enjoy it once again.

I'm really looking forward to getting out in the garden and attacking my rose bushes.  I bought a new bush last fall and asked the guy at the garden store when I should prune what I've already got. He said in the spring. That's kind of open-ened. I mean, spring is technically now, and runs through most of June. What part of spring?

The other day, I spent way too many hours watching gardening videos on Youtube.  I have never really pruned my old-fashioned rosebush and it's totally out of control. I got the answer to my big question above when  one guy said not to prune until the forsythia blooms--so that's my timeline. I've got pruning shears and loppers and when the time is right, I'm going to go to town. I saw at least 6 pruning videos, so I think I'm ready.

I also watched a bunch of videos on African violets, and learned I've been doing just about everything wrong. Oddly enough, I haven't killed any of mine. (I had 3 and inherited my mothers, so I've now got 6 or 8.). You're not supposed to get the leaves wet or they'll go brown.  Oops!  No wonder I have little brown spots on some of my leaves. In future, you can bet I'll be more careful when I water  them. The one my Mum had at the hospice home bloomed for 20 months straight. It's taking a break now, but I gave it a little fertilizer and hope I can coax it to bloom again soon.

I'm not sure if I'm going to try to grow veggies again. It's so labor intensive and we have a market two miles down the road that sells local produce really cheap, and all I have to do is wash it. No weeding, no watering, no critters stealing my crops and breaking my heart. Yup. I think I'm going to give up growing veggies.

So, what does spring have you hankering to do or go?

Out to Lunch

Earlier this year, when my mother-in-law went into the nursing home, Mr. L and I decided we needed to spend some quality time together away from worries and the hustle and bustle (and Internet) of daily life.  And since we like to go out to lunch, we thought we might like to do it once a week.  Since we often paired our lunch dates with a visit to his mother at the home, we went out a lot during the week.  Sadly, we lost her in August.

At Coleman's -- toasting Jeff.

Over the summer we also took little day trips on the weekend to places like Coleman's Irish Pub in Syracuse and The Sherwood Inn in Skaneateles, and a bunch of other wonderful restaurants outside of Rochester and had wonderful meals. I should also add that we don't go to franchise places. Nope, we like to go to locally owned restaurants where the food is freshly made--not microwaved and served by kids who don't know a spice from an herb.  (Sorry, kids.)

But now it's WINTER and we're not driving very far to get a bite to eat. And we aren't doing it on weekends, either. Why?  Because it seems there's some kind of conspiracy among the locally owned restaurants NOT to open for lunch on Saturday.  What's with that?

We checked (online menus from) restaurants in Syracuse and Buffalo and lots and lots of them are open for lunch on weekends, but not here in Rochester.  The only exception appears to be Keenan's. Okay, we like Keenan's. They make good martinis, have wonderful food, and they have a popcorn machine where you can help yourself, but we don't want to go there every week.

So .. I guess we're stuck going out to lunch on weekdays.  Today we're heading to one of my favorite restaurants, Bernard's Grove, where they have a wonderful beer-battered fish fry and lovely martinis.

Do you like to go out to lunch, and if so -- what kind of restaurant do you frequent?