Salud To Your Health!

Mike and I went to Espana last night for our Valentine's Dinner. We have eaten there once before, but last night's meal tipped me from "like" to "love." I don't know if we ordered a better selection of tapas, or if the chef was having a better night, but I was truly wowed by the food this time.

We started off, of course, with their wonderful Margaritas. Served in a slender juice glass, Espana's Margarita is made with tequila and orange juice - no syrup or fakey lime sugar water. Delicious. And nutritious!

Our first round of tapas was cold. We ordered white asparagus in aioli and a fish/scallop seviche with baby spinach and plaintain chips, and we also received a plate of crusty bread. White asparagus can sometimes be a little on the bland side, but no so in this case; it was tender but full of flavor. The aioli was marvelously tangy and made a nice dipping sauce for the crusty bread. The seviche was one we have ordered before but had to try again. The best way to eat this is to pile the seviche and a leaf or two of spinach onto the plaintain - the flavors together are delightful. Seviche is seviche, but if it's fresh and light, it's good.

Next we had our hot tapas (with another round of Margaritas, of course). We had grilled shrimp in garlic, olive oil, white wine, and lemon... or so it said. I tasted lime, which was tart and sweet and wonderful. Shrimp is very hit or miss for me - if the shrimp itself is bland or too soft, I can't stand it. But this was firm, just a tiny bit crispy on the outside, and full of flavor. 

The low point of the meal was the bowl of steamed clams, I'm afraid. They were a bit tough and sandy, and the white wine sauce was fairly ordinary. Not bad, just a little predictable. But I will forgive one weak spot.

Finally, we tried one of the special tapas of the evening - parsley pesto crostini with divers scallops. And oh. my. god. Wow. These completely blew me away and erased any memory of substandard clams. Each bite just melted in your mouth. The scallops were a bit carmelized on the outsides and tender beyond belief. The bread was soaked in pesto just enough to be soft but not soggy. They were warm and rich and... just wow.

We opted out of dessert, but maybe next time we'll see what they've got. The Margaritas were sweet enough that I wasn't really craving a dessert by the end of the meal. In all, it was a little pricey at $80 plus tip, but well worth it based on quality.

Surviving a Recession Human-Style

Tough economic times have hit the nation, and even the irrepressible Humans have been affected. While I wouldn't exactly call us bona fide Recessionistas, I think we have found a few ways to cut costs during this financially stormy weather.

Cut cable and landline. As I've mentioned before, our cable bill was enough to make Baby Jesus cry. So we got rid of cable TV, canceled the landline, and signed up for a $17/mo Netflix account that gives us three DVDs at a time. Net savings = $120/mo, not bad, not bad at all. 

Shop a little smarter at the grocery store. We call Whole Foods "Church," so I must confess that this is really the last area we are willing to seriously slash. We love food, we believe in eating well, and we don't want to skimp at the expense of our health. But we have done a few things that have lightened our grocery spending. (We include household cleaning and paper products in this line item.) I substituted some canned and frozen veggies for fresh - broccoli is just fine frozen, and canned corn is good enough in the off-season. I switched from canned beans to dry - canned beans are cheap to begin with, but dry are cheaper. And some of the pricier items we use, like soy milk and granola bars, we now buy at Target instead. Net savings = about $25/mo, not too shabby.

Don't heat the rooms we aren't using. I finally got around to it today, but I have been meaning to do this for months - since the summer, I think. I bought magnetic vent covers to block the heating/AC vents in the finished basement and guest room, neither of which we ever use. They cost less than $5 for a three pack at Lowe's. Net savings = TBD.

Don't go anywhere. It's about as much fun as it sounds. But in the short run, we have saved a lot on entertainment spending just by staying in.  The Netflix subscription certainly helps there too. Sure, we're getting cabin fever, but we've had a lot of fun too. You can't do The Robot at a movie theater, and believe me, I've tried. Net savings = as much as we can stand.

No News is Good News.

Perhaps by the same token, not reporting it will make the bad news disappear?

Your friendly neighborhood Humans are in a slump. January was a difficult month and we're hoping that February will be a kinder, gentler set of days.

We kept things pretty low-key this weekend. Friday night we stayed in and decided to drown our sorrows together. I drank a few glasses of wine and Mike rustled up some Bushmills and some Diet Cokes that we had left over from a party (last June... that's how often we drink soda at home). We listened to music, pored over the household budget, watched some 30 Rock on DVD. 

I'm somewhat hard to please when it comes to TV comedies, but 30 Rock is truly funny. We've also tried to watch The Office via Netflix as well, and I just can't get into it. There are a few good jokes here and there, but the show is boring, the plots are boring, the characters are one dimensional... it just does nothing for me after watching one entire disc. By contrast, 30 Rock draws me right into the plots and characters, in addition to making me hoot with laughter. Alec Baldwin is impressive as a comedic actor, and I adore Tina Fey's portrayal of the hapless Liz Lemon.

On Saturday we went grocery shopping, visited my father-in-the-law in the hospital, and I made a lasagna for dinner. I have tried the same lasagna noodles twice - Isola gourmet lasagna - since they've been on sale at Whole Foods, and concluded that there is a reason they're on sale. The noodles are thin, leading one to believe that they will be tender when baked. But they come out hard and cemented together. On my second attempt, I even buttered each noodle with tomato sauce in the hopes of preventing them from sticking together, but the improvement was marginal at best. It's almost impossible not to please Mike with my cooking, but this lasagna got the thumbs-down from both of us.

Saturday night we stayed in again and watched The Darjeeling Limited. Another thumbs down, I'm afraid. The music was great - the movie, not. For me it was one of those films that seemed like it might get better... any minute now... for a long 90 minutes... and it never did. Buy the soundtrack, skip the movie.

Edited: Ha ha, I forgot about this little football game thing that happened on Sunday! Anyway, it was fun, we watched with family... all the adults were cheering for Arizona, without much personal investment. Our hosts made vegetarian chili specially for Mike and me, which was very nice (and yummy). I ate too much cheese dip and got a tummy ache. Our nephew is a big Steelers fan, so at least the one person who cared about the outcome got to see his team win. And that was the Superbowl this year!