My mom went to watch the condo, dog and cat of her best friend in Chicago while he went to India and Sri Lanka for a month in January. He has a great place north of Uptown in this awesome, ethnic neighborhood. I took the long MLK, Jr. Day weekend to go up and visit for a fun mother-daughter weekend in the Windy City. Continue reading
Trust me when I say that I feel lucky every day. Not every day is perfect, but gratitude is a major pathway to happiness and I am on it. But this year for my birthday had me feeling so incredibly loved and thankful. I put this blog together with some photos to make sure I captured this special time and my wonderful husband.
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Sean’s dad and stepmom invited us to have dinner with them at Next when we were in Chicago – very generous of them and a great experience to share together. Next is a unique restaurant that completely changes concept 3 times per year – for example it can go from completely vegan to modern Thai to Hollywood-themed in a single year. Very cool! This instance it was dishes from the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, requiring Next to get recipes, tips, special ingredients flown and in one case even the seeds to grow their own from 16+ of the world’s top restaurants. What a project.
In addition to the 16+ courses, we shared 2 of the premium wine pairings. This was first time at a true fine-dining restaurant and it was fabulous. I’ve included a photo, description and the wine pairing for everything we had below. You can be jealous, it’s ok. 😉 Continue reading
We’d been hearing lots of buzz about this new “hand-pulled” noodle spot on Buford Highway for awhile. I go back to our Bangkok, Thailand food tour and remember the “kitchen” of a restaurant that was back in an alley with the cooks tossing noodles in woks over garbage barrels and the little Thai women sitting nearby, pulling the noodles.
Lan Zhou Ramen’s hand-pulled noodle experience isn’t quite that epic but it is still pretty good. We didn’t have the regular noodles, but I hear those are good as well. Continue reading
Ah, spring. I love the flowers in bloom, the warmer days but nights that are still cool, thunderstorms, and the start of the plethora of produce that the sunshine brings. Of all the wonderful things about spring, I think I love strawberries the most. I remember my dad taking me and my brother strawberry-picking in Ohio when we were little kids. Sweet, juicy strawberries that I would pluck and eat despite me dad scolding me not to – the idea of pay-by-weight was not something I could comprehend back then, lol!
I’d heard there were strawberry patches north of Atlanta so Sean and I planned a day with several of his other friends who have kids and we borrowed our little “niece” Val from my best friend, Cherish. Val loves strawberries like me, so it was the perfect outing for us. <3
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Sean has been going up to Philly almost weekly for the last 4 months. His company has a big client up there and I’ve seen him go from ho-hum about the city to really enjoying his time there during this time period. Around Christmastime, he started mentioning that I should come up sometime and we could stay for a weekend together. When he had to be up there for a week AND weekend for work, we made plans for me to join him Friday-Sunday. Read on to see what we did but I’ll start by saying the city truly exceeded my expectations! Continue reading
My hubby offered to throw me a birthday party this year and he kept the details a secret until my actual birthday. He gave me Spanish wine and the cookbook Curate – and in doing so revealed the theme for my party: Spanish tapas! And he was going to make all the food from recipes in the book. I was so excited not only because we love Asheville’s Curate but also because I could relive our trip to Spain from earlier this year. Continue reading
I’ve been experimenting with homemade salad dressings for a few years now and this has turned out to be my favorite. I love making my own salad dressing – it’s cheap and it’s fun to experiment with ingredients I have on-hand in my kitchen. I first made this as a dressing for some arugula that I was serving Thai-style fish cakes on. It ended up complimenting the dish so well that I worked to recreate it a few more times to get the ratios just right. Now we have it often and on all kinds of salads. It would even be great as a marinade for chicken or fish. Continue reading