As I stated in a previous post, I had no plans for Halloween and was in bed by 10:00pm. It was fabulous. Around 7:30am on Saturday, I was woken up by a chilling need to add another blanket on my bed. I went into the living room to close a window and realized that winter had set in over night. Apparently no consideration for the need of fall weather was taken into account. Friday was it was 75 degrees. Alas, it was 39 degrees, rainy, and gross. I went to my hair appointment, stopped at Publix, ran a few other quick errands and then headed home to warm up and make chili. Chili is my go-to winter meal.
I love everything about chili from prep to ingredients to looking at it when it's finished. It is so versatile to me. It takes no effort to make and can be frozen, then thawed and used throughout the week for lunch or dinner. You can make it with chicken, turkey, beef. Eat it with rice, a taco, a tortilla, toast, or plain. Put just about any vegetable you can imagine in it. For this batch, I used ground beef, onion, two green peppers, paprika, a can of diced tomatoes, a can of tomato paste and McCormick chili seasoning. It's what I had in my fridge and pantry at the time. I dumped it all in the crock pot and let it sit on low for four hours. Then, I packaged it in small Tupperware containers and put those in the freezer to use later in the week.
Saturday night was almost as low key as Friday. I went to California Dreaming with one of my girlfriends. We had a variety of plans from going to see a movie to going downtown but in the end, we were so disgusted with the weather that we chose comfort food and a bottle of wine.
I was introduced to California Dreaming almost a year ago by this same friend. The restaurant is on the water and during the day, the views are wonderful. The alcohol is fairly priced. (I paid $2.95 for a Bud Light.) The food is....average; the prices are not exactly reflective of the food quality. Jaye and I split an onion square (sort of like the Bloomin' Onion from Outback.) For my entree, I chose the ravioli. There was too much sauce and not enough cheese in the actual ravioli. I'd bet my left pinky finger that it was just from a bulk package of frozen ravioli. Jaye made the wiser choice and had a grilled chicken salad. In my opinion, it's pretty hard to screw up a salad so, at least they got that right.
The lighting was dull and the noise level was almost too much to bare. For such a large space, it seemed as though Jaye and I were having dinner with the people on both sides of us. We could hear every piece of their conversations. In between their conversations, we were trying to have our own conversation. Part of which, involved us agreeing to actually start a JOINT blog! Woohoo!
Aside from the well priced alcohol, there is nothing that would actually bring me back to California Dreaming. Okay food and a noisy, dimly lit atmosphere doesn't exactly lure me in.
Sunday was less than exciting but productive. Finn and I took a couple of long walks, went to the dog park with her boyfriend, 'T' (a Doberman Pinscher.) She took a snooze in my lap while I attempted to correct last week's assessments. We also took a drive to Petco to sign up for some puppy classes. The reason behind the classes needs to be dedicated to an entirely separate post. We start this Thursday, November 6th. After our first class, I'll be able to give a more updated, informative post.
Time to get back to the grind of Monday morning....!
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