Memorial Day

Today was our big fun cookout. As cookouts tend to go, there was way too much food, but I got to see some friends that I've not seen in the mess that is 3rd year, and I got to eat a yummy hot dog from Rudolph's, as well as several brownies, some home-made hummus, and some angel-food cake with strawberries.
Tonight we went out to some random place in north Plano (I think it's called Oklahoma) to smoke hookah with E's brother and his girlfriend. I don't smoke a lot of things (really only the occasional hookah, and a very, VERY occasional cigar. Drugs are bad.) but it was a nice way to spend a couple of hours chatting and relaxing and listening to Cicadas sing. I just realized again that even though the day-to-day bullsh*t can get really annoying, I love my life right now, and I love where I see my life headed with E. It feels glorious.

Yodeling and Cooking

first off, a video of Regan yodeling.


Things we made today:
1. Marinade for Beef Burgundy (for Tuesday)
2. Mole sauce for Chicken Mole tacos in the crockpot (for lunch tomorrow)
3. Brownies- One pan with butterscotch chips, chocolate chips, and mini marshmallows, and a second pan with chocolate chunks, Kirsch, and Maraschino cherry pieces.
4. Hummus, middle-eastern style (no garlic, using dried Chick-Peas). This wore out a rubber gasket in my blender which is thankfully about $5 to replace. It also made an ungodly amount of hummus, at least half of which will have to be frozen.

Why all the fuss? partly because E and I both love to cook, and he gets us both having fun in the kitchen with all the new things he wants to try making, and partly because we're having a Memorial Day cookout tomorrow afternoon.
Yesterday we went to Rudolph's butcher to get the hamburger meat, hot dogs, stew meat for our Beef Burgundy, and some country sausage for E's dad. It's a pretty awesome old butcher, where they make all their own sausage, chili meat blends, aged steaks, etc. They also process meat that has been shot by hunters. So much more fun than standing in line at the grocery store forever.

I also made a bouquet for my kitchen table out of a bunch of parsley, since one of our recipes called for a single sprig and a had a boatload left over. I think it looks kind of fun and leafy. E keeps tearing off leaves and eating them, so I guess he likes it too.

It's mine!

the A3 is mine... and it's totally awesome. But I'm letting Ethan play with it too sometimes (he used to always drive, now I think we're going to go halvsies).

My Car is dead... long live my car!

one week ago today my trusty 2002 Toyota Camry had a messy run-in with another car... and then that car had a less-messy run in with a third car. Point of the story is, my brakes went out in the rain and as a result my car was so smashed up that they declared it to be totaled. So now I'm going to have to get a new car, which is kind of scary because I've never picked out my own car before, and kind of exciting for the same reason.
I wanted something a little more fun/sporty while still being fairly practical, but not boring. Which is hard to do and almost a contradiction. I don't like SUVs because I was once in an extremely low-speed rollover accident involving one. Plus they take a crapload of gas and they're hard to park. No convertibles because they're heavier than a regular car and not as fast or safe. No red cars because I think they're vulgar (except I think red saab hatchbacks are cute for some reason). I wanted something that I could drive and have fun in for a long time, including being able to put 1-2 children in it because within the timeframe that I own this car I'll probably have that many.
Enter the Audi A3. It's something between a hatchback and a wagon, you can drive it like a racecar but it still gets almost 35mpg on the highway.

I took a 1.5 hour lunch today from Family Medicine clinic to go test-drive one. It was fun and pretty and it made me feel fun and pretty. Ethan's going to go look at it tomorrow because he is much more knowledgeable about the subtleties of cars than I am... and if he thinks it looks okay then hopefully I'll be able to get into the car by the end of the week! I'll admit, the no-frills Chevy Cobalt that I'm currently borrowing from Enterprise is not so hot.

mid-week weekend recap

Saturday E and I slept in a bit, then got up and went to Fuel City to get tacos. I had heard of their tacos before but never actually eaten any (mainly because I didn't know how to get there). We got 12 because they're tiny, and it was incredibly necessary to get that many because they were SO GOOD. They are supposed to be some of the best tacos in TX and they were mighty tasty. My favorites were the Pastor and the Barbacoa. We got extra lime and cilantro and fried onions to put on top. As a side, we picked up a cup of corn from a lady selling it at a stand in front of the gas station (corn kernels with hot sauce, sour cream, margarine, and cheese mixed in. also really good. For drinks, Mexican Pepsi (I prefer Coke but couldn't find any). As there's nowhere to sit, we ate our meal rather ungracefully in the car (which, four days later, continues to smell of tacos) before heading over to the Dallas World Aquarium. I'm not actually sure if these are the absolutely best tacos that I've ever had in my life...I think part of the appeal is the illusion of slumming it, and the fact that the taco stand is open 24 hours a day, which means that one can eat Fuel City tacos while drunk at 3 AM, when everything tastes super amazing.
If you've never been to the aquarium, it's definitely a fun thing to see. It's not really so much an aquarium as a miniature zoo. You walk down from the top floor to underground, going through different levels of rainforest (with lots of monkeys and birds and a few tree sloths) down to alligators, then down further to the fish. If I go again, I'll pick a day that is not a saturday, and especially not a rainy saturday, because the place was super crowded. And everyone knows that the most irritating tourists are the ones who are getting in your way while you're trying to be a tourist.


Sunday we went out to coffee and breakfast with E's parents, then made a stop by Cost-Co to pick up things like, oh, two lb bricks of cheese (3 different varieties) and frozen turkey burgers. Every time I go there I re-remember why costco is the bomb. They're catering our wedding for sure.

bleh

bleh is how I'm feeling today. It may be from staying home for three weeks without any goals or work to do in life, but I think a larger part is that I'm recovering from a night out of karaoke with E and his brother. Lets just say that my tolerance has dropped quite a bit since college... and first year of medical school (when I would go to class hungover...in retrospect, drinking on weeknights was a poor decision). What always helps me out is eating something mildly terrible for me; this food must include fat, protein, carbs, and hot sauce. e.g.: fried egg sandwich (runny yolks) on toast with mayo and lots and lots and lots of hot sauce. For that particular meal I prefer Crystal hot sauce, as it's vinegary but it still has some substance, unlike Tabasco which is all spice and vinegar but there's no background. Also, Crystal is like 88 cents for a giant bottle. As an aside, my favorite Mexican hot sauces are Tapatio and Cholula. If I go to a Mexican restaurant and they serve me a Cajun hot sauce I get a little angry. The other hot sauce in my kitchen right now is Dave's Insanity, which is nothing but spice. It's good if you put a single drop in your ketchup when eating fries, but other than that it's more restricted to being a cooking hot sauce. So in total we have 5 hot sauces in our kitchen... we used to have a bottle of Louisiana's Best, but we only bought it when we couldn't find Crystal and it's not terribly outstanding. I also am reminded while writing this that we're lacking a chipotle/smoky hot sauce, which will be remedied during the next trip to the grocery.
Last night we went to Patrizio's because it's less than a mile from our house and I remembered that it was my mom's favorite restaurant in Dallas, but I didn't remember anything from the menu. So we decided to go... I had the Linguine with Mussels in red sauce, extra garlic. It was very, very good, but our meal was somewhat overshadowed by some ridiculous forty-somethings seated at two tables right next to us. Basically there was one table with two men and another table with two women, and they were all acting fools. They went from talking about their wives/ ex wives/ husbands/ ex husbands to flirting and talking like they were twenty-somethings trying to pick up numbers in a bar, and maybe even get lucky. And they were using teen slang from like ten years ago ("that's so whack!") which made it even weirder. I just wasn't raised in an environment where it was considered normal for married men and fathers to meet married women/mothers at happy hour and buy them several rounds of frozen peach bellinis. (I will, however, be okay with it if in 20 years E decides to take me out to happy hour and buy me several rounds of frozen peach bellinis. I'm talking about people who are married to someone else!) So in summary, Patrizio's gets stars for its food, but X's for its weird-ass obnoxious and preadulterous clientele. Maybe next time we'll sit inside...