Menu Plan

This week is a little different because V is out of town, and one of my good friends A is coming to visit this weekend! What a crazy week!

Monday - Pizza with butternut squash, onions, spinach, chicken, and goat cheese
Tuesday - Leftover pizza
Wednesday - Leftover pizza (hey, it takes one person a long time to eat a pizza!)
Thursday - Balsamic braised pork and butternut squash. Probably not that exact recipe, but something similar
Friday - Pizza at Gino's East, best Chicago style pizza!
Saturday - not sure yet, we're going to play the day by ear depending on the weather
Sunday - Salmon

Weekend Recap

So, somehow last week slipped away from me, and we're back to a weekend recap again! Oops!

Our weekend was spent mainly 2 ways: trying to spend as much time out in the awesome weather as possible, and trying to stay out of the St. Patrick's Day crazy. We were supposed to go up to WI on Saturday to hang out with some friends, but V had a long week and neither one of us was really feeling it. So instead we went to Julius Meinl for brunch and hit up the store so we could have corned beef and cabbage for dinner. Then we spent pretty much the rest of the day walking the dog and sitting on the front porch drinking cider. We found a new cider at the store, Julian Hard Cider, and bought the regular and the Cherry Bomb. The regular cider was good, but a bit too tart for me. The Cherry Bomb, however, was so amazing! It tasted like cherry pie filling, only not quite so sweet. But it definitely wasn't as tart as the plain cider. I'd definitely get it again!

We also spent some time playing the new Mario Party 9 (pretty much the only reason we still have our Wii. Well, that and Zelda). The main change is that all of the characters ride in one car together, so you go through the board a lot faster. Also, you can't play as a team anymore. I used to make V play on a team with me because he's a lot better at video games than I am and I was afraid he'd always win. But it turns out I can do just fine on my own! We played 2 rounds and each won one, so I thought that was pretty good.

Weekend Recap

I feel so lame, because we had another pretty boring weekend. But that's ok because we have some crazy ones coming up! We did manage to use a Groupon that was about to expire at Fontana Grill. I'm so glad we did, too! Our last Groupon was kind of a disappointment, but this time the food was so good! Our Groupon was for a TON of food, and we'd totally go back there. We had grilled calamari, Mediterranean salad, chicken rolatta, eggplant marinara, and caramel cake. See, a ton of food, huh? The grilled calamari was really good, we were both worried that it would be tough, but it was so tender. And the sauce it was plated with was just right, salty, but not too much. Our entrees were good, I think they were pretty much what we expected. The one weird thing we noticed at this point was that all of the food was pretty sweet. The really funny part was that when we got our dessert, we noticed it was pretty much the same level of sweet and salty as the other food. We thought it might be, since we knowingly ordered a salty caramel cake!

Other than dinner, we just hung out. We've been neglecting Rock Band lately, so we played for a little while Friday. That was after we walked down to the Irish place, O'Shaughnessy's, for a couple drinks to unwind  ;-) We also spent a lot of time walking the dog, because it was actually warm!

Prague Recap, Part 1

After we left Saint Petersburg, we headed on to Prague. We'd heard from a lot of people that Prague is a beautiful city and a great place to be a tourist, so we thought we'd check it out! I'm so glad we did, because I loved it and it's definitely near the top of my favorite cities list! Who can't love a city where you can get beer for cheaper than bottled water?!

Our first day in Prague, we hit up one of the Free Europe tours. We'd done these tours before, and found them to be a fun, informative, and a good price (you pay whatever you think is fair, and we always end up paying pretty much the same amount as any other tour, but the guides are far more into the tour). Starting a visit to any city off with a tour is a really good way to familiarize yourself with the layout and to find out about places that you might miss otherwise!

The tour started off in the town square, which is beautiful. It's surrounded by churches

And restaurants.

There is a big clock tower on one side, with an astronomical clock. You can climb up the clock tower, which we did later in the day, for some beautiful views of the city.

And a statue of Jan Hus, who was a religious reformer.

From there, we walked through the Jewish Quarter, which has some of the oldest synagogues in Europe.

Then on to Saint Wenceslas square,

Past a tower from the old town walls

And some really beautiful buildings.

We ended near the Charles Bridge, looking across towards Prague Castle (where we spent most of the next day).

After the tour ended, we had lunch (and beer!) wandered around for a bit, and then decided to go up the Clock Tower to check out the view. Prague is a very pretty city, but it sure does have a different skyline from Chicago!

Looking down, you can see the people watching the clock go off.

They decided that the clock wasn't dramatic enough, so they have a trumpet player play a little fanfare as well. I happened to be standing next to him!

It was getting pretty late by then, so we climbed back down and ate dinner at one of the restaurants in the town square. Luckily the weather was much nicer than in Russia, and we were able to sit outside and people watch (and drink beer!). It was a perfect evening!

Menu Plan

Tuesday - Lemon garlic olive chicken*, peppers and potatoes
Wednesday - Leftover chicken
Thursday - Shrimp with Pinapple Habanero sauce from Costco, tomato and avocado salad
Friday - Leftover shrimp
Saturday - out, we have a Groupon to use at Fontana Grill!
Sunday - Butternut squash and pork lasagna, salad
Monday - Leftover lasagna

*I don't really have a recipe for this, just an idea about what I want it to taste like. We'll see how it turns out!

Weekend Recap

Oh man, I think we had the most boring weekend of all time! The most exciting thing that happened was an impromptu trip to Ikea on Saturday to look for desk chairs. We used to have 2 nice, big, comfy chairs, perfect for hours at the computer, but one didn't make the last move (thanks to the cats clawing it up when they were kittens) and one broke (quite a while ago, actually), so we were down to using our dining table chairs. Which (a) aren't very comfortable and (b) are scratching up the wood floors. So finally I nagged V enough that he agreed to get new chairs. Desk chairs are really expensive! We'd looked at Ikea before, about a month ago, and they didn't really have much that was appealing to us. I happened to look at their website last week, and they had different chairs. Hooray! Off to Ikea we went. I love any excuse to go there. It's so fun to look at all their sample rooms/apartments and get ideas. I can't wait to move in July (even though we're not sure where yet) because we're going to ditch a bunch of the old, worn out stuff we have now, and that will mean I have a great excuse for plenty of shiny new Ikea things!

Saturday night, we ended up doing to Opart Thai House for dinner. It's one of our favorites, and is also on the Bib Gourmand list. I usually judge Thai restaurants on their Pad Thai, but theirs doesn't really do it for me. However, I've loved everything else I've ever had there! The food is just spicy enough to let you know you're alive, but not so spicy that you can't taste how amazing the food is. Plus as long as you get there before 7 it's pretty easy to get in  ;-)  And it's near Julius Meinl, so we have the perfect excuse to stop there for some coffee before going home!

Saint Petersburg Recap, Part 2

Day 2 in Saint Petersburg started off with a tour of the Winter Palace section of the Hermitage. It was just amazing! The Russians have a huge collection of art from their past government confiscating all kinds of collections from citizens, from the Nazis, and so on. I tried to take a lot of pictures, but mostly I was busy being awe-struck by the palace and the artwork. Here are some of the pictures I did manage to take.

One of the ballrooms

A room full of paintings paying tribute to soldiers

The throne (I couldn't get a good picture of the throne room, there was a huge group of school kids in there)

A mechanical clock

One of many pretty rooms

Even the hallways were impressive

And more pretty floors, inlaid wood.

Some of the artwork

A collection of armor

Sculptures

The outside of the palace section of the Hermitage and the Alexander Column

We were taking a pretty late flight that evening to Prague, so before we had to go, we managed a visit to Saint Issac's Catherdral. Again, you can see the European influence in the artwork and architecture.

The doors were huge!

Icon Stand

Inside the Icon Stand

The top of the dome

You could climb up one of the towers and walk around the outside of the dome, what a neat view of the city!

And that was pretty much the end of our time in Russia. We did get to eat plenty of good food, we went in quite a few shops, and even managed to drink some vodka. It was such a quick trip that I know we missed all kinds of things, but I think it still gave us some good exposure to Russia and to a culture that is different from ours! Moscow was definitely the hardest place I've ever been in terms of getting around and ease of being a tourist, but it was still amazing! Saint Petersburg, being a lot closer to Europe and a lot more European in feel and style was a bit easier to navigate, find food, shops, and so on. Going to Russia first definitely made Prague and Amsterdam seem like a cake walk!