Of Weekend Eating

It's Monday again, drat, I haven't even digested the weekend yet.

Oh the weekends of adults are mostly running around doing errands and performing chores at home. If I knew it was going to be like this, I'd have delayed my adulthood (wink).

Kidding aside, I'm already feeling run down early in the year, and this despite the gorgeous atypical weather we've been having. 70F in January, no kidding. I was wearing short sleeve! I cannot remember when our weather was this gorgeous. However, all this beautiful weather has some bad side to it. If we continue to have this spring-like and summer-like conditions, we might get in trouble come summertime when we need our water. Our water reserve mainly rely on the snow in the Sierra in the winter and rain down where we are during fall and winter months. We haven't had rain down here, nor did it snowed in Sierra yet. All the snow that's in the resorts right now are all man-made. Somehow, we need to get our winter going here.

Still, the gorgeous weather makes one want to be outside. Which meant that we found time to remove our "lightings" from the Holidays. We didn't really put many stuff outside, so when I was done, hubby was surprised that we put in too little time getting the decors back in their boxes.

I have to still get our Christmas tree down, maybe one of these nights. Not tonight I have a church meeting, which means I may have to miss CASTLE.

Let me tell you about some eating I have done this weekend.

Every Saturday I take my mom around to run her errands. Among her errands is lunch in either Chow King or Jollibee. Now that she completely dumped Jollibee (price is high for the serving they give you, she said), she has found a regular lunch place in Red Ribbon. She simply adores the combo meal - half an order of arroz caldo and 2 mini siopaos. I on the other hand either gets the palabok by itself or the half palabok + half arroz caldo.

So you see I don't really miss so much of the Philippine food scene. Next door is Max Fried Chicken. There are plenty of other restaurants that serve cafeteria style Pinoy food around.

On Saturday evening we took our newly widowed friend Gay to a little dinner over at Villa Romano. Our plan was for lunch but for pete's sake the restaurant doesn't open for lunch on the weekend.

So dinner it was. We drove to Napa where the restaurant is located. You see we pass by this restaurant each time we drive to Napa and every single time I let out a sigh wanting to try that restaurant. We never got around to it, until last Saturday.

We made reservations at 5 pm the time they open. There was one table already occupied. It's an old house converted into a restaurant. It feels like eating at a friend's house.

The waitress said we have to have the garlic bread, it's a must she says. So we had it. It's actually like a half of a round french sweet bread that was baked until the crust was crunchy and brown and it was topped with cheese and served in a nice platter. The waitress then took a broiled/baked whole head of garlic, pinched it and all the goooey garlic goodness oozed out and was spread thickly on the bread. It was too die for. Not only was the bread really delicious, the presentation was superb. Never had a garlic bread done this way before.

For appetizers, we got only one order of fried calamari, which in my experience is always enough for four people. I was right. There were only three of us, but we ate the whole thing all thru the meal, we couldn't seem to finish it.

Caesar salad followed. I didn't really want a salad, but said okay when hubby suggested we split one order. Thankfully we did that because as always the Caesar salad itself looks like an entree portion.

For our entree I chose risotto with chicken. The husband had the three cheese tortellini with pancetta. Gay had the seafood linguini.

I simply adored my risotto. The serving was large, the chicken was delicious, I don't usually order chicken in the restaurant. The creaminess of the risotto was wonderful. Although it's not the traditional big grain risotto that we're so used to. It was marvelous.

Gay's seafood linguini looks very soupy, which didn't escape her notice. But it's supposed to since she ordered seafood and seafood is watery. Anyway we asked the waitress to give us some extra cheese to counter the soupy nature.

Hubby's tortellini dish was right on the spot too. However, there was more pancetta than I or he wanted and needed more tortellini, but otherwise a good dish.

After all these dishes and wine, we had room for dessert. We ordered one sampler dessert and that was just fine serving. The dessert plate had a sorbet, which was a palate cleanser, an espresso tiramisu and flourless chocolate cake. While the chocolate cake was good, the best flourless choc cake I had eaten so far is at Ristorante Due Rose, Italian restaurant in my neighborhood.

And so it was a fun 2.5 hours of dinner we had. We even saw the sunset while sipping wine.

You know I do have photos of the dishes, although I don't think they turned out well. I was only using a point and shoot, because I cannot bring myself to whip out a DSLR when dining, do you?

I'm going to keep track of all our dining out expenses this year. While we were really good with budget last year, we didn't really know how much of it goes to eating out.