It's Thursday Again

And I suppose I need to write something here again, right?

My offline life is getting busy - work is getting hectic - and other extra-curricular activities start piling up, and with two other blogs aside from this, something is bound to be neglected.

Unfortunately, this blog is the one victimized by my busy schedule.

I'd like to rectify that today.  And fingers crossed my next post won't wait another week to be published. 

Anyway, I can't remember what exactly we did over the weekend.  The weekend was a blur, especially now that another weekend is upon us. 

I'm going to be riding a plane this weekend, which will take me to a place where I'd catch another ride to my week-long vacation destination.  Oh, the much-needed get-away is here.  Thank heavens!

I didn't intend to tell you that, it just slipped into the post.

Last night I went to dinner with "friends".  Why the quotation?  I don't know if I'd categorize them as friends or they belong to the gray area where they are more than acquiantances but less than friends.  But for the sake of this post they are friends.  They are my husband's colleagues, they have been to the house and eaten my food more than once, so I guess friends is not an exaggeration.

January is California's Restaurant Month, wherein the Visitor Bureau encourages you to patronize local businesses by going out to dinner.  In return, the business gives special deals, like lower prices for prix fixe meals/3-course meals for $30.  Oakland has it's Restaurant Week this week.  After work last evening, I met with friends for dinner - to Mezze - which is about 5 minutes from my work. Isn't that mighty convenient? 

Anyway, there were 3 girls and 4 boys that went to dinner - and no one brought a camera; I don't know how the photos of food taken by cell phone turned out.  6 of us ordered the 3-course meals.  The menu is quite limited, and on a Wednesday at 7 pm we were told that the tuna is sold out and they only have 2 orders of scallops - that went to our table, I ordered one with butternut squash soup and bread pudding for dessert.  M ordered the salmon entree, which we all agreed was overcooked. Two ordered the steak entree which was according to both who ordered it was too spicy and that the pepper crusting is too overwhelming.  My husband ordered ala carte of Morroccan lamb shank.  The portion is huge and delicious.   I ordered the scallops.  The order consists of three huge scallops over parsnip puree and some veggies with pancetta. 

I like my entree.  It is flavorful.  I always like anything pureed - even parsnip.  The scallops weren't as flavorful as I'd like, but if you bite into the pancetta, you get the maximum flavor.  The accompanying corn succotash looks like it came from a frozen veggies bag.  All in all I enjoyed the dinner.

However, we were all united in saying the highlight of the dinner was the chocolate croissant bread pudding - so delicious and rich.  It will make anyone happy.

On Wednesdays they waive the corkage fee so we brought two bottles - which were both Bordeaux, a pleasant surprise.

We chatted all through the three courses sipping wine and agreed to dine about town every month.  M assigned me to pick the next restaurant.  I'd like to choose one where the entree prices are under $20, because this dining out can get very heavy on the pocket too :)

And because I went out last night, I missed American Idol and I failed to record it.  I also missed Top Chef, but I believed that there was no new show last night, so no harm there. 

Happy Weekend everyone.