Le Colonial (birthday lunch)

It's been a busy busy pair of days just completed. I'm knackered, and my body is telling me so through the inconvenient onslaught of a bad cold. Yay. I LOVE growing older!

Back to Friday: Conrad and I took the day off, and after a lazy morning of sleeping in and a few busy and not so busy things done, we met CG for lunch at Le Colonial. A French-Vietnamese restaurant down near a part of town known as (I'm not making this up) the Viagra Triangle (well, realtors and the city of Chicago don't call it that, but...). I'd never been before, so this really was a treat for me. Conrad looked very handsome, and CG was no less lovely. We ordered a bottle of a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and started on a leisurely lunch.

Sharing dishes was the idea, and so we had two appetizers between us: a salad with beef tenderloin (this was, I think, my favourite) and some monkfish with sesame crackers.

Similarly, we shared a dish of chicken in yellow curryand a mixed seafood dish(and I was delighted by how the seafood was NOT overcooked, a danger in a dish like this) along with rice and a plate of sauteed pea shoots. Tasty tasty pea shoots.

All was good, and we kept picking at it, waving away the staff trying to clear our plates from time to time.

Eventually we moved on to dessert, at which point CG tried predicting what I would have based on her past dining experience with me. Conrad is easy - there was a chocolate and raspberry dessert, so that would have to be it. CG nailed me with her second choice - she knows I'm very fond of custards and puddings, so it would be the crème brûlée or possibly the tapioca with banana. Tapioca it was.Which makes me giggle in hindsight because it makes me think of the episode of Friends wherein Monica makes birthday flan. Truly, I'd be quite pleased with that! CG, by the way, had the lemon tart.

And then it was off to see Harry Potter 5. Kind of a Harry Potter weekend with the various gifts of books and DVDs, plus I finished the final book. But a heck of a good way to spend my birthday, thanks very much to CG and Conrad treating me to a great lunch!

making me cry

I won't get into details, nor will I explain any in-jokes that Conrad and I share. Some of you will understand this entry, others will just see stuffed animals and cake - NOT mixed together. It's my birthday tomorrow, though, and Conrad had a lovely treat for after dinner tonight. His presentation, moreover, was enough to reduce me to tears.

In other words, I love him immensely.

:-)

Whole Foods comes closer

A monumental day in our happy Chicago gaybourhood: Whole Foods is open and doing business. And what business it is! So many samples to snack on tonight. It's a wonder we even bothered with dinner!

Yes, I know some of the criticisms of Whole Foods. Expensive. Anti-union. And more. But I gave up on Treasure Island's meat a long time ago because of the smell in that area of the store, and the night I bought salmon from Jewel and had to sauce it heavily to mask the odor I swore off all but chicken from that store. And barely that. We've been buying produce and meat from Whole Food for some time now. Add in cheese and dried goods and even wine, and, well, there's not a lot we need from other grocery stores.

Whole Foods was a bit of an expedition for us, however. A trip there required a car. Now I can get off the Red Line at Addison or the Halsted bus at Graceland and just walk over to the new GLBT community center. The store - and all credit to them for this - anchors the new center.




Ah yes, Whole Foods knows of the power of the gay dollar. Smart.

It opened this morning, and we made plans with Rachel
to stroll over, buy our dinner, and eat on the deck at her apartment building. This was a good decision. The evening was so pleasantly warm, and it was easy to put things on plates and dine. Some turkey meatloaf; a baguette and a wedge of Cocoa Cardona cheese; a little antipasti selection of garlic marinated olives, cornichons, roasted red pepper, and an artichoke spread with little balls of mozzarella; Marcona almonds; something of a Greek salad. We sipped a Babich Pinot Noir and capped the evening with Rainier cherries and a Vosges Barcelona bar (my favourite!).





So, no more big journeys for groceries every couple of weeks. Now it will be stopping in to buy some meat and veg for dinner, maybe a bit of fun cheese or some other treat. The neighbourhood will change and adapt because of the new Whole Foods, but I, for one, am delighted! As is Conrad!

;-)

Hey, look! We're having dinner on the balcony again!

For a couple of weeks there I kind of went on strike against myself. It happens periodically - I decide that it's nicer to sit down and eat the hot/warm dinner when I set it on the table rather than photograph it so much that I'm eating lukewarm or frankly cold food nightly. Shocking, I know.

Still, I have an obligation to the three people who read the blog more than once a week, and I am a little vain about providing Conradwith nice dinners, so...

Some salmon tonight.Seared, simply. A topping of capers, shallots, and parsley in plenty of butter. And if that wasn't rich enough, then there's the nice thin wedge of Ossau-Iraty cheese we picked up earlier this evening at Pastoral.
Ahhhh, now there's a fine store. We went in to place an order for a customized tray to be served at our wine tasting party on Saturday. Six cheeses, plus some other fun things, and a bit of fun stuff to bring home for ourselves as well.

Smelts BBQ, 2007 edition

I'd point anyone reading this blog entry back to 2006 photos of the annual barbecue at Liz and Adrian's, but I wasn't there. I can't quite believe I missed it. I am sorry. These events are always quite fun, and this year was no exception. In fact, it was a more intimate group than usual, and I think that the food contributions were especially good.

Curiously enough, though, I took no photos of the spread of food. Oh sure, photos of people and their plates, but none of the tables laden with bowls and platters. I didn't even photograph the chicken wings I made, or the brown butter mango tart. Ah well.

Lots of teammate photos, though. Names included where I can think of them:


I can pick out Rudy in the pale blue, Joe in white just to Rudy's left, and Anthony blocking the view of Joe. Ross is in back with the printed shirt, and that's Heidi's hair colour and jacket. The other guy is Anthony's BF, I would guess.


Chris, Ross, Stuart, and a glimpse of Corinne.


Another pre-dinner knot of chatting Smelts. Michael, Scot, and Hal are gathered while Paul is in the background.

Some individual shots:

Tim. Too cool for school?


Scot.


Steve. Nice to see him back from a year in Argentina!


Steve. A different Steve. Too many Steves and Dans on this team, I sometimes think, though hardly as problematic as the overabundance of Andrés and Jean-Hyphenates on ACC.


Daniel. We got lots of shots of him tonight, and Tim and Corinne for that matter. The people I found myself chatting with most, I suppose.


Romel

But this was about recent birthd on the team, the families. It was a shower of sorts for Amber and Bill, and for Ron and Carrie.
Bill, Kate, and Amber.


Ron, Why am I blanking on the name of his son?, and Ross.


Steve, Deborah (visiting us from Minnesota), Channing, and Kate.

Dinnertime, and there was no shortage of food. Or wine, for that matter.
Deborah, again. Delightful to see her!


Heidi


You all know who this guy is.


Tim


Stuart


Heidi and Barry.


Michael


Steve


Scot


Conrad. It was a smart thing to pack a sweater - a wonderful temperature out for running!


Carl and Romel. Brad is in the background.

The team had gifts for the new parents. As you can see, Liz is in line for a shower at some point soon as well. Channing co-presents the gists with her.




After dinner, more chit chat and snacking on the food still laid out.
Romel and Deborah.


Corinne and Tim. Cute couple.


Look, I'm in a photo. Or in many. With Rudy in this one.


With Corinne.


With Tim.


Tim and Corinne again. I chatted with them a good bit, though not just with them. We'll work on the ANTM poses when next they come for dinner.


Daniel, Tim, and Corinne.


John, Michael, and Paul. A miniature gathering of apostles?


A terrific shot of Conrad and Daniel.

And finally, two photos of Conrad and me. We have thousands of photos on our hard drive, yet so few of us together since one of us is usually taking the shots.




I expect that next year we'll be doing a bigger event of some sort to mark the team's 20th anniversary, and I hope that we'll have a substantial turn out. But no complaints about the missing folk tonight. There were others at the dinner whose photos did not turn out so well and so are not shown here. A very pleasant evening.

Now then, to bed. Up since 4:55 makes for a long and tiring day, as you might expect.