Tonight's Dinner: June 28, 2012

For the second night in a row I found myself at the SF Symphony with Bonnie.  I'm pretty sure that I could do this every night.  This time Christopher and Nick joined us.  We made a night out of it and planned to have dinner before the Symphony like we had done when Nick surprised me with Disney in Concert.  I really enjoy Absinthe Brasserie and Bar not only because the food is fantastic, but also because it's within walking distance of the Symphony.   Tonight we were seeing Pixar in Concert.  Unbeknownst to us, it was the world premier!  John Lasseter, the chief creative officer of Pixar, hosted the whole thing.  I also was very excited that Michael Giacchino was in the house.  He did the scores for Up and Ratatouille as well as one of my all time favorites, Star Trek.  The show itself was absolutely unforgettable.  On their big screen they played montages of the movies while the musicians played along.  Up had most of the audience in tears.  I should have brought tissue.

Beef tartar with quail egg and crostini

Christopher and Bonnie's first try at beef tartar

Christopher and Bonnie got the house made
lamb pasta.

Nick's Alaskan Char

My 10oz rib eye with garlic mash and asparagus

Baked mac and cheese

I wasn't very hungry since Bonnie and I also ordered a bottle of champagne
to share, but I think I did a pretty good job at finishing. 

Nick's chocolate mousse cake

My semi hard cheese (can't remember what kind) with mango preserves and a
side of honeycomb.

Bonnie's cheesecake

For some reason Nick wanted to take "Prom" pictures.
I clearly wasn't excited about them. 

At the SF Symphony

We packed in some taster bottles of wine that
my mom had given me. 

Tonight's Dinner: July 27, 2012

Taco Bell and champagne.  Today was a very busy day.  First we had a company outing to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, which was fun but tiring.  From there I had to rush back home to shower and get on BART to meet Bonnie and see the SF Symphony play the score to the Wizard of Oz.  So for dinner we had Taco Bell at 11:30pm after getting back from the show.  Boy am I not used to wearing heels anymore.  I was literally running up the escalator to catch my train and then couldn't get the doors open to walk through the cars so at the next stop I had to get off and run three trains down until I got to doors that I could get opened.  From there we had to walk to the Symphony Hall and then at the end of the night walk from BART three blocks in Oakland at night to Bonnie's work where her car was.  She may be used to Oakland at night, but I was walking as fast as my little heeled feet would take me.  It's a good thing we had some champagne that we smuggled in for an appetizer.  It helped me not feel my feet so much.  Very classy, I know.  We had cheap, $25 seats and were drinking individual champagnes from our giant purses.  They Symphony's only criteria was that we put them in plastic cups because they don't allow class in the auditoriam.  Even classier.  This is what Bonnie and I do.  We also smuggled in mini bottles of wine to the Sex and the City Two midnight showing that we went to years ago.

So blurry, but we were trying to figure out how to focus Bonnie's new iPhone.
We did the tap to focus thing but it still turned out like this.  Oh well. 

Emmy's new squirrel

My mom had gotten Emmy a new squirrel from TJ Maxx yesterday because she had worn out the squeaker in the previous squirrel's head.  Nick said that this one is only encouraging her desire to catch real squirrels. She was literally plucking the fur off of the fluffy tail, leaving tufts of the stuff on my parents rug.  There is now a sizeable bald spot on little squirrely and she hasn't even had him for 24 hours.

Mommy look!  I caught one!

New Shoes

Hi my name is Allison, and I'm a shopaholic.  I've been going shoe crazy lately.  I haven't been buying that much makeup so it seems as though I've fallen back into buying shoes.  I alternate back and forth between the two.  Makeup a much cheaper habit, let me tell you.  A couple of weeks ago I bought two pairs of ballet flats from Target in a camel brown leather and royal blue suede (I can't find pictures on the Target website).  As if that wasn't enough to satiate my shoe lust, when I was sick I bought two more pairs.

When I was in San Diego in April for a friend's wedding I had worn my favorite dressy shoes.  They were very high at five inches with no platform so they were mighty uncomfortable, but they were beautiful.  Knowing this and that there would be plenty of dancing, I brought flip flops to wear.  It wasn't until a couple of weekends ago when I was looking for them to go wedding dress shopping did I realized I had left them under the table. After mourning their loss for a few days, I got on the internet to find a new pair of dress shoes.  I certainly did find them.  I purchased these shoes last week from zappos.com and then also saw them on the Aldo website when I was looking for wedding shoes.  They'd make great wedding shoes, but I'm not going to wait a year and a half to wear them.  Bonnie and I are going to the SF Symphony tomorrow where they will be broken in.

Photo from Aldo website

I had also gotten a pair of purple suede heels by Ivanka Trump.  On my laptop they looked more blueish and were called Blue Passion Suede so I figured that they were blue.  When I looked at them on Nick's computer though, they looked much more purple.  Either way I loved the color.  It turns out that they are much more purple than blue.  I'm still trying to figure out what I can wear with them since they're brighter in color than I was expecting, but they are gorgeous. 

Tonight's Dinner: July 25, 2012

My mom was gracious enough to Emmy sit so that she didn't have to stay in the apartment by herself all day. It was also planned for me to go to dinner at their house since my mom was planning on Corned Beef and Cabbage (a family fave).  It was delicious as always and I always like going home to lay around on the big sofa.  I think my stomach has shrunk since last week when I was under the weather. I only had one piece of corned beef and one chunk of cabbage.  Maybe I'm still sick!

Three toys and a bandanna on a memory foam mat

What. A. Princess.

Tonight's Dinner: July 24, 2012

Tonight's dinner was a lot of work and a lot of food.  Being the way I am, I didn't think just Fukien fried rice would be enough so I also made stir fried fish in brown sauce.  One or the other would have been plenty.  We didn't even make a dent in the rice and there is so much sauce left over.  I'm thinking that I can repurpose it into a soup or freeze it.  The execution was easy, but the prep takes forever.  I guess I could have made a more simple fried rice, but I wanted to use all of the veggies that I had in the fridge.  I still have three red bell peppers left to use.  Maybe we'll have stuffed bell peppers soon.  Like most Chinese food, I just kept eating and eating and eating.  I was full, but I loved the sauce over my rice and the fish tasted really good.  Nick said he was full and I just kept shoveling rice and snow peas into my mouth.

Diced carrots, shitake mushroom, bell pepper, and celery.

Fukien fried rice sauce

Yup, there is rice under there.

This fish in brown sauce was so delicious. I
might have to make it again next week.  It was
also a lot easier to prepare than the fried rice
simply because there was much less prep work
to be done. 

Tonight's Dinner: July 23, 2012

This week I decided that we're going to go Chinese.  I've noticed that we cook all different kinds of food from Mexican to Southern and tend to avoid Chinese.  Our Chinese food consumption is typically at our parents' houses, restaurants, or take out boxes.  I'm determined to learn how to cook more Chinese food.  I can do basics, but I'd like to go beyond that.  Tonight we made a simple family-style steamed fish and gai lan.  It was delicious and very similar to what you get in restaurants.  I generally don't eat a lot of fish, but I'm pretty sure I could have eaten this whole thing by myself.  This whole meal was about $7 for the two of us.  Pretty good bargain if you ask me.

In restaurants they usually don't put anything in the cavity of the fish, but
since we had a lot of green onion, garlic, and ginger cut up I decided to shove
some in for good measure.  This steaming only took about nine minutes.

We combined the oil and soy sauce step together.  I believe that you usually
steam the fish with soy sauce already in the steamer, but we just mixed it in with
 the oil to pour over.  It was just as tasty. 

I parboiled the gai lan and then quickly stir fried them in sesame oil and a little
bit of the left over soy sauce mixture.  We drizzled oyster sauce on top.

I think I ate most of the gai lan by myself, but it works out well because I like
the stalks and nick likes the leaves.  It makes it easy to share. 

Return Address Stamp

I'm just so stoked about this I had to show you all.  I plan to use this for our save the dates, invitations and rsvps.  After we get married I'll get a different one with our last name on it.  I had purchased this through a vendor called Save the Date on Etsy.com.  She has a ton of different styles to choose from, but I chose this cursive because it reminds me of Jane Austen's signature.  

I thought it was pretty nifty that she stamped it on the the canvas bag she
sent the stamp in.

This is what it looks like on a plain piece of paper.

Tonight's Dinner: July 20, 2012

Tonight we drove out to the city for dinner at Incanto for Mr. Fong's birthday.  He had been talking about getting the Leg of Beast since we went for our family engagement dinner.  Nick called midweek to reserve us a Beast that was meant to feed six people.  We did a pretty good job for only having five in our party.  We also want to do the whole pig, but you need at least ten people for that meal.  It was well worth the drive.  With our Beast we had a full-bodied Cabernet Sauvignon from Trefethen Winery.  This was the winery that I had intially thought of getting married at, but they don't host weddings.  The wine paring went very well with the richness of the food.  Again, I'll let the pictures do the talking.  Just imagine the heady aroma of rosemary and beef.

This was our pre-fixed menu.  I''m leaving this picture in the largest size even though it bothers me when it goes out of the borders so that you can see what is on it better.  

The grated parmesan cheese was so delicious on top of this slightly bitter
salad with vinegrette

Our Antipasto appetizer of panchetta, thinly sliced bacon, ham, pate,
 pig head, roasted garlic and turnips.   The pig head was surprisingly crunchy.

Cannellini beans

Toast, horse radish, whole-grain mustard, and rock salt for the bone marrow.

Heart attack in a pan

We each got our own giant marrow bone and shared the leg of beast. We
had so much left over and took the bone home so that Mrs. Fong could make
jook.  

Roasted cauliflower with white rasins

Deliciousness

Happy Birthday Mr. Fong!

Lemon panacotta

Chocolate souflee