Thankful for Food, Family and Friends

It was a nice having a short work week and nice anticipating a little time off. A bunch of us took off from work to go to a farewell lunch for one of our work co-workers on Wednesday. We went to the Macaroni Grill, which I hadn't been to in a couple of years, at least. For a chain restaurant, I think it's excellent. Any restaurant that specializes in pasta would have a challenge in disappointing me. I had lobster in taragon ravioli. The cream sauce had warm diced tomatoes and small shrimp. I enjoyed it thoroughly and had a great time overall.

For Thanksgiving dinner, this year, we decided to experiment with actually going out to a restaurant. Since the whole family is on the ACME Food and Beverage Company mailing list, we each got the menu in our in-boxes and it sounded delicious. ACME, as I may have mentioned before, is my favorite restaurant and it certainly followed that they would have a Thanksgiving meal worthy of our celebration. That was correct. Our first course, pictured on the left, was a salad with greens, crumbled bleu cheese, small croutons and pomengranate. My dad tried the pumpkin and apple soup instead, which was delicious, but I suspect it would have been way too filling for me. For our entrees, we each had tender deep fried turkey with ham and wild mushroom gravy, oyster dressing, southern style green beans, yukon gold mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, collard greens, and cranberry ginger compote. I apologize for not having a picture of that, but I dove in too quickly. I have to confess that I skipped the sweet potatoes and the collard greens, but that's good, because I would have popped otherwise. For dessert, I had apple and dried cherry cobbler with cinnamon whipped cream. By the we got to dessert, I was ready to take most of it home.

I've been washing lots of dishes and doing many loads of laundry. I believe I'm at least caught up in the laundry.

Today my dad and I went to the Rudino's at Northpointe and he made the made the mistake of allowing me to make a recommendation. When they served the two Spinach Sophia grinders, he sounded panicked when he asked, "It's vegetarian??!". Oops. It was great having one of those again.

For dinner tonight, I made tuna salad with about 6 oz of macaroni, one can of tuna, 1 tablespoon of mayonnaise, grated parmesan, red grapes (cut in half), dried cranberries, about 2/3 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, three stalks of semi-diced celery, a spoonful of ginger preserves, at least a tablespoon of dried orange peel, black pepper and I think that may be it. I liked it.