Ty’s Weblog

So today, Kate and I went and had dinner at GG Cafe. It’s a little Italian place in downtown Leesburg, and it was excellent. It’s a small place, in one of the old buildings downtown. The inside was very nice though. The restaurant is upstairs, and has windows which look out over downtown. The food was excellent. It will likely become a regular place for us to visit. While we were there, we found out they even do delivery! If you are looking for a small local place to eat, I definetly recommend GG Cafe.

The kids and I did some cooking today.  We make a Strawberry Trifle and Tuna Melts.  They both impressed me with all the stuff they were able to do, and with how interested they were in doing it.  Both things came out great!  Tomorrow we are planning are making turkey burgers and maybe even some banana bread.

I’m a bit jealous that we don’t get this around here.  I would love to get my hands on some Coke made with cane sugar!  Everyone I’ve ever heard talk about it has said it is much better than the high fructose corn syrup kind we are used to.

I’d never been to an actual Benihana before.  Kate and I have done teppanyaki at lots of other places, but never at a Banihana.  One opened up in Dulles Town Center this week, so we took this kids today for lunch. We all loved it. The food was great and the kids loved watching the show. It was the first time we’ve taken Mira to a place like that, and the first time since Xander was old enough to remember. They both enjoyed watching the chef and though his tricks were quite amazing! Xander thinks he might want to take some of his friends there for his birthday.

I had a great time today working with Xander and Mira to make meat loaf, using Alton’s recipe, and it turned out quite tasty also! Xander helped me with the spices for the meat loaf and the cutting up of the veggies. He also helped me mix everything together before we put it in the oven. Mira helped me measure out the spices for the glaze and did the mixing for it. We had a great time working together on it. It turned out great and we all enjoyed eating it.

Good Eats! We ordered the first 12 volumes of Good Eats recently and they arrived last night! Good Eats is one of our favorite shows and we’ve watched it for years and years. Alton does such a good job of explaining food in a way a nerd like me can understand and enjoy. He doesn’t just talk about the what of food, he talk a lot about the why. A lot of food science goes into the episodes, which hooks me and make it a lot easier for me to spend time doing something I wouldn’t understand the point of otherwise. Not everyone will have the level of love that means you need to buy a set of 36 DVDs, but I think everyone should at least watch a couple of episodes to see if it is for them.

Kate and I got our act together today and did some actual cooking.  We made the homemade tortilla chips that we saw on an episode of Good Eats we recently found on the TiVo.  We didn’t make the tortillas ourselves this time, we bought those, but we fried the chips ourselves.  They are very good and we are feeling quite proud of ourselves.  Kate is currently in the process of making us some nachos out of them.  I’m looking forward to those being done also!

For the record, yes they are very good.  Kate got us the peppermint and the cinnamon, both were quite yummy.

Ah, yum. This was a post on Slashfood back in August, I’ve not noticed them in stores though. I’m not normally a big fan of dark chocolate but I’ll be on the lookout for these anyway.

Looks like at least one type is out. I’ll really have to be on the lookout for them.

I’m thrilled to report that we have an Arby’s in Leesburg now. It opened today and we ate there twice. It was a madhouse at dinner time. Apparently, we really needed an Arby’s.

I had one of the best pizzas I’ve even eaten today.

We went to San Francisco Oven, which is a new pizza place that opened up in Ashburn a month or so ago, I guess. We’ve been once before, but I didn’t get pizza that time.

Anyway, I got a pizza with pepperoni and roasted garlic. It was wondeful. The roasted garlic just make the whole thing great. They do take and bake pizzas also, where they make it up and you bring it home and cook it yourself, which sounds wondeful also.

I take my lunch to work, because the food at work seems a bit pricey to me for what it is.

Recently, Kate started buying me A Taste of Thai quick meals. They are so good I thought there were worthy of a mention here. All 4 of them taste great. Everything except the water comes in the box. You just mix it in the box, microwave it for about 4 minutes, and you have a nice yummy Thai meal for lunch. It’s been a nice change from the sandwiches I usually bring.

Xander made us dinner tonight.

Kate bought us some small pizza crusts. We sat Xander down with a jar of pizza sauce, pepperoni, chopped black olives and cheese. We showed him how to spread the sauce out on the crust and then let him do that and then put the other toppings on. He’d ask us before each topping, “Would you care for any cheese?” for example. It was very cute. He did a great job and had a lot of fun doing it. Then Mommy got things put into the oven to cook. Then when it was done, I helped him cut them with the pizza cutter.

So Xander made us dinner.

The (now former) head of Red Lobster didn’t guess that when they said “all-you-can-eat” people would eat all they could.

Over the summer a high school student doing an apprenticeship did a scientific study of the 5 second rule. You know the rule. You drop something on the floor and if you pick it up before 5 seconds pass, it’s safe to eat.