Domestic Geek

As I was cruising around the web this evening, I came across the coolest cake creation: A Knitting Basket Cake. One day I'm going to have to take a cake decorating class and give something like that a try.

OK, to offset all the hating this morning, I'm going to send out a little lovin'.

We had absolutely no food in the house two nights ago and I was too tired to go to the store or cook. They opened a Noodles & Co. practically across the street from us and Marcus half-heartedly promised me we'd try it out sometime. Well, I decided Tuesday night we were going to do it.

I printed out the online menu so that Marcus could peruse it from the comfort of home. When he walked in the door, as I handed him the menu, I told him to keep his shoes on, we were going out to eat...my treat.

I'm so glad we finally tried it. The food was yummy! I had Beef Stroganoff and Marcus had Mac & Cheese. The clincher was that the iced tea was very good. That's a deal breaker for us with some eating establishments. Since we stopped drinking soda, a place has to have decent iced tea. It is a little expensive, so not someplace we'll eat at a lot, but definitely some place to keep on the short list.

There's a little club of theirs that you can join online. They sent me a buy one bowl, get one free coupon in my email yesterday. You also get a free bowl for your birthday, too. Very cool.

There's this girl at work who loves to forward emails. Drives me crazy. The most recent was this one with all sorts of cookie recipes in it. I noticed all the the URLs when to the same site, so I checked it out. The site is NorthPole.com and it's actually a kid-friendly Christmas site with lots of stuff. The cookie recipes are part of Mrs. Claus' Kitchen where there are lots of recipes and stories. I'm going to waste a lot of time on that site, I can tell already.

It's looking like the Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert is already sold out. Damn it! If it was on a weekend, I could probably get him to take me to the show down in Colorado Springs, but unfortunately it falls during the week. I wish someone around here would give away tickets to the TSO show! I also see that Mannheim Steamroller is coming December 17th to do a Christmas show. I don't think I could get Marcus to go to that one (if there are tickets left - haven't checked yet).

I've gotten myself hooked on Chai Lattes instead of coffee beverages. I found a good article on "What is Chai Tea and how to make a Chai Latte." It doesn't appear to be very difficult. I think I'll stock in those supplies and make them from scratch. Marcus and I have been trying to make changes in our eating habits to include less processed and premade stuff.

Of course, since Chai is actually the word for tea in many languages, saying Chai Tea is redundant. Those kinds of things drive Marcus batty.

I wrote almost a year ago that I wished that the Tootsie Roll company would put out packages of only Vanilla Tootsie Rolls.


Well, a voice mail on my phone from my friend Nina (Thank You, Thank You, Thank You!) alerted me to the fact that I have gotten my wish! Target is carrying limited edition bags of Vanilla Tootsie Rolls for only $1.99 each! I picked up two today and will probably grab a couple more later this week. I'm going to be good and ration them, though. Don't want too much of a good thing.

Edit: I just found that you can get the Vanilla Tootsie Rolls at Amazon.com for $2.99 a bag if you want some and can't get them near you.

Marcus and I have had some bad experiences at Atlanta Bread Company, but there not being any good bagel places close and him really wanting one, we gave it yet another try.

OK, the service still sucked in a major bad way. They hadn't changed the soup of the day menu yet and the manager wasn't sure the soups Marcus ordered was on the menu. Marcus' order wasn't right. Still not going to get a rave review from either one of us.

I did have a most awesome salad, though. It was called the Balsamic Bleu Salad (Field Greens and Romaine Lettuce tossed with Bleu Cheese Crumbles, Toasted Walnuts, Granny Smith Apples, Tomato, Red Onion and Dried Cranberries with a Balsamic Vinaigrette Dressing). I had a half & half, so I got French onion soup for the other choice. That was a tasty and satisfying meal.

Now I just wished they would get their act together. We really do want to like them.

After our dinner over at Nina's last Saturday, she realized the chicken she had purchased was organically raised and was probably the reason they were not as large as she normally got. It got us to discussing how they put hormones in everything lately, which can not have a good effect on us humans. Especially the estrogen hormones they put in milk. It's a likely cause to the increasing number of men with "man boobs" that you see everywhere. Marcus was a little horrified about this as he was not aware of the practice of giving cows additional hormones to increase milk production. We're going to be switching to organic milk.

Marcus' best friend Mike is out of town at some training thing for work. Since we normally all go out to eat together every Saturday, Nina invited Marcus and I over for dinner this evening. She makes the absolute best Chicken Cordon Bleu in the entire world!

She gave me the recipe years ago yet I've never tried it. I must give it a go here soon, although I'm sure mine will never quite taste as good as hers.

Thanks for a wonderful (as usual) dinner, Nina!