June 27, 2008
One tomato and cucumber, each sliced.
A handful of chicken breast, sliced.
A handful of pork with a smidgen of onions, sliced.
Orowheat whole wheat bread.
Mayo.
Combine all ingredients in layers on the bread, smush together, and it makes the best sandwich. EVER. I was quite sad when I finished eating because it was so delicious! I wished that I’d taken a picture, too, but that might have seemed a little weird.
And a coworker went on an ice cream run, and brought back a veritable smorgasbord of ice creams: Strawberry Shortcake bar, Raspberry sorbet bar, Drumstick, almond and chocolate covered vanilla ice cream bar, and Dibs! I, of course, went for the Dibs. They were tiny morsels of deliciousness.
Happy Friday everyone!
It’s almost shameful that it’s taken me this long to try our local farmer’s market. It’s only a few step from my train stop, and it’s usually going strong from April through October, 5-8 pm, once a week. The biggest obstacle has always been that the closest booths to the train station are the food booths, with kettle corn, funnel cakes (mmmmmm), and bbq stands all in the way of my fresh produce. Fearing for my wallet, I’ve simply never deemed it a worthwhile endeavor to out-willpower the funnel cake.
Today, I marched myself all the way to the produce area and found my three tomatoes, three short and fat cucumbers, and a pound of green beans for all of $3.73!
The green beans look super fresh, and the tomatoes and cucumbers should hold me over until our harvest at home. I think we should be ripe and ready for picking in about a week or two?
Wonderful SoCal weather and soil that we have, our plants have blossomed and fruited in what seems like no time at all.
June 24, 2008
Thanks to this doggy, who is blurred because he can NOT stay still, our tomato plants have been moved out in our front planter. I wouldn’t think that’d be the best place for them, but it seems like they’re thriving in the sunlight and non-doggy-thrashing zone.
At $2.49-$3/pound, I’m glad to have our own little patch of veggies. It took me a while to figure out which general vicinity to photograph, but I finally found it!
I still can’t spot our cucumbers, but Pa says they’re growing too, despite my visually-challenged skepticism.
June 4, 2008
Photo credit: www.ciaprochef.com/
BD and I are on a kick to see how useful iPhone can be. We’ve mainly been using the GoogleMaps function together, and a bit of the Safari browser on the side. I use the heck out of the email function now that it works most of the time, but that’s not useful when we’re hanging out.
I’ve found that there are a couple sites, like Citysearch and Amazon, that offer a special version of their site for the iPhone which would be special but they actually seem like dumbed down versions. Actual Citysearch on the web shows price ranges (very important!), location, ratings, reviews and sometimes, hours of operation. iPhone Citysearch locates restaurants and gives an address. That’s it.
On this particular quest, we were trying to coordinate dinner and a movie in the same city. Since we primarily have AMC tickets, we needed to stay close to an AMC theatre, but we weren’t familiar enough with the area to pick a restaurant. Between Garmin, random suggestions (Indian? Yeah, Indian sounds good. I’ve found ten restaurants, how do we pick? Uh, Japanese sounds good….sorry. Oooh, Japanese? That sounds even better! Ok, let’s find a sushi restaurant!), and iPhone Citysearch, I found Fuki Sushi in Palo Alto was a highly rated restaurant five years running. iPhone Citysearch wouldn’t tell me anything else more useful like how much we could expect to pay, and the reviews I’d Googled sounded both promising (palate) and intimidating (wallet).
We decided to give it a shot even though not knowing what the price range could be made us both nervous.
The menu was remarkably extensive: pages upon pages of appetizers, a la carte items, noodle dishes, rice/dinner combinations, sushi/sashimi combinations. I think we might have spent nearly as much time putting together the perfect order (portions, proportions of raw fish to cooked items, total cost) as we did eating the meal. We have a thing about overordering, at least when BD’s in charge, so we’ve developed a menu conversation where we try to balance it perfectly to have a reasonable amount of leftovers, if any.
Our appetizer, the spicy agedashi tofu, was heavenly. Perfection. The garlic and spices that made it spicy were completely worth the sniffles and watering eyes. Absolute heaven. I didn’t even want to move on to the next dish, it was so good. (Disclaimer: I love love love tofu and garlic, so if you’re not of the same mind, you might not be quite as enamored of this dish as I was. But I highly recommend it if you even lukewarm like tofu and garlic.)
We shared two pieces of hamachi (yellowtail), two pieces of madai (red snapper), a kani roll (snow crab meat) and an assorted tempura dinner that included a generous stack of shrimp and vegetable tempura, a generous serving of rice, and four additional pieces of sashimi. Mmmm.. I’m getting hungry again thinking about it. The fish was cold, not so cold that you couldn’t taste it, but just cold enough to accentuate the freshness. I always wonder how someone can have texture issues like I do and be ok with eating raw fish, but it never stops me.
The bill was just under $50 for the both of us, including a nice tip. I liked our server, she didn’t bother us during the meal but took care of each stage efficiently so we never had to look for her.
I felt like our meal was definitely a splurge since we weren’t celebrating any sort of occasion, but the experience was lovely and I look forward to returning to try the million other menu items that we had to pass on. Usually I get annoyed by a menu that’s too extensive, but this one was intriguing.
May 28, 2008
A colleague of mine has been jonesing for a home since her parents started pushing her to become a homeowner. I guess she got used to the idea, and decided to get serious about it. Her new declaration is that eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches everyday will save her $250 a month on lunch.
Call me skeptical, or an insufferably curious pf blogger, but I do wonder if that’s the extent of her plan. It’s simple enough to save money by bringing lunch, but I feel like a few more contingencies should be considered to make sure that she’s really saving money. If I were to consult with her on the overall plan, some major points I’d make would be …..
Tracking expenses: I’d suggest that she check her spending habits as a whole. Is there going to be an area in which she increases spending because she feels deprived or restricted by eating PB&J all year? Is there really going to be an increase in savings from changing her lunch diet? She used to buy lunch half the week, and brought dinner leftovers the other half. Perhaps that was equally cost effective.
Health: Is she compensating for the rather limited nutrition in her lunches by adding fruits and veggies to her other meals? Is she doing this in a cost effective way so as not to negate her savings from lunch?
Appearances: Is she doing the PB&J lunch because it looks and feels like she’s doing something proactive about saving for a house? Are there alternatives that might save more for less effort or for the same amount of effort but be more worthwhile? I love my food, so I’d have to be sure that changing my diet solely to save money was really the best way to go.
Actionable: How is she ensuring that the money she “saves” really goes toward the house and doesn’t melt away into her general spending? Does she have a plan to pay an allowance to her house fund out of her grocery allowance?
Are there other issues you might bring up? Of course, I’m not going to have this talk with her because I don’t want to pry into her finances, we’re not that close, and I don’t want to reveal my preoccupation with PF, and accidentally out myself. 🙂
April 29, 2008
Continuing the spending trend, I ordered a universal car charger for my phone from Meritline yesterday using the coupon code: NSUCT4OFF.
Originally priced at $6.99 with the $4 off, it came to $3.24, and I’ll get 1% Fatcash and 2% Citi TY points on the transaction. I went with the cheaper universal charger even though it requires me to supply the data cable connection to the phone because the more convenient charger was $11.
I wish I had waited, though, because that one went on sale today for $10.99 with a 60% off. All of 40 cents more, but I would only have to carry the single charger, and not the charger plus the data cable. Hrm. Should I exchange it?
Oh well. I’m not willing to pay more [postage plus restocking fee (15%) plus difference in price] for convenience.
On a happier note, I bought myself a lovely treat at Trader Joe’s last night. In addition to the usual half gallon of milk and a dozen eggs ($1.99, $1.49), I picked up a package of sweet pork italian sausage and a package of fresh pesto tortellini ($2.99, $1.99) to make sausage and onion pasta for my lunch tomorrow. The fresh, refrigerated pastas are a bit pricey, but it’s still cheaper than the sausage and pepper pasta I was craving from Macaroni Grill ($11?). I’ll let you know how it turns out!
April 11, 2008
Despite neglecting to pack a real lunch this entire week, I’ve been really good about not caving and buying lunch. This is totally thanks to a post I read last week, sadly I can’t find the post or the blog to which it belongs, about a blogger who avoids going out by scouring the cupboards for any random combination of foods to satisfy hunger before deciding to go out or get take-out.
It was a little kick in the pants to stop letting my laziness and unrest at home cost me lunch money, so I tried all manner of creativity this week to keep myself fed without resorting to the expensive, bland cafes here.
Monday: I brought a container of rice and a fillet of fried fish that I hadn’t finished from the previous night’s dinner. I didn’t have much appetite, so I didn’t even finish that. I did eat my orange, though, so no scurvy for me.
Tuesday: My leftover biscuits and gravy, and part of a vegetable and ham scramble, from the weekend were combined with a couple of fresh eggs. Brunch!
Wednesday: We had fresh Roma tomatoes, so I sliced that up. I’d brought some wheat bread for breakfast toast earlier in the week, and had a slice left, so I made a half sandwich of fish and tomatoes. It was surprisingly yummy. My banana from produce bargain day was dessert.
Thursday: This may or may not be considered cheating: we planned a potluck for this day. The goods (and boy, they were good!): Honey Baked Ham, garlic mashed potatoes, green beans roasted with almonds, roasted asparagus, steamed broccoli, white rice, and homemade macaroni and cheese with bacon.
Note to readers: the Honey Baked Ham store is a complete ripoff! C3 paid $25 for enough to serve 6 people. There was apparently an unbelievable amount of fat and bone, so they probably only got about 2 good pounds of ham from it. We won’t be making that mistake again.
It almost makes me feel guilty for contributing the cheapest and easiest items on the list. I roasted the asparagus in our toaster oven, having gotten a great deal on it, and steamed the broccoli in the microwave. Cheap and easy! I guess the asparagus could easily have cost me more than $3/bunch, and I could have wasted $5 on a bag of broccoli crowns, but it would have tasted the same.
Friday: Leftovers from Thursday. Mmm-mm delicious!
