There’s a man in my kitchen!

I am taking another little break from my California tales for a Saturday recap. I hope you all had a great weekend! Here in Boston it poured starting on Friday and pretty much went through Saturday. Friday night I ended up taking a taxi part of the way home from work. Our wine club shipment from Gundlach-Bundschu arrived at my office, so I was carrying 4 bottles of wine on my walk and started to get super hangry without an emergency snack! Don’t worry I stocked up on those this weekend! Friday night was spent vegging with pizza and TV and reading lots of blogs. Fun! Saturday morning I went to the shelter to visit my dog and cat friends and got to walk a few fabulous dogs in the rain, a shiba inu, 2 Chihuahuas, and a beautiful little pit bull lady. We walked in the rain, but they didn’t seem to mind! After our walks I visited with some mama cats and their kittens. Jeesh why don’t people neuter and spay their animals?! There are so many kittens! Argh. After volunteering, the hubs and I did our usual lunch at Myers + Chang. This place gets better every single time I eat here. We ordered off of their pan-Asian weekend dim sum menu: Asian pickled veggies, Chicken Congee, Thai ginger chicken salad, hot and sour soup, and tamarind glazed prawns. We sat up at the counter that overlooks the kitchen, and it was amazing to see how busy and organized the cooks were. They do SUCH an amazing job, and the restaurant was super busy. Everything was amazing. My favorites were of course the pickled veggies, so crunchy and tangy. I just love crunchy things! The prawns were sweet, smoky, and sticky. They were cooked right in the shells which kept the prawns super tender and moist. They were perfect.

Christopher Myers himself cleared our plates and took our credit card. I love that the owners of this hot spot are still very hands on. Love them! Saturday night was my turn to relax while the hubs cooked. He is excellent about cleaning up and doing lots of housework,but because I get home earlier and he is in grad school in addition to work, I do most of the cooking. When he does cook, he is GREAT. Tonight he made me shrimp and salmon chowder from the Stonyfield Farms’ website. Stonyfield has a great collection of recipes!

  The recipe called for chicken broth, but this Imagine Organic No-chicken broth was on sale.

Lovely potatoes and salmon

The finished product was really delicious. The Oikos yogurt that was part of the recipe separated a little bit, but the taste was amazing. I love shrimp and salmon cooked in a soup, they were so melt in your mouth tender that I ended up eating a lot of them! I know that I need more protein in my diet, so this was a good thing. The white wine we used was one of our Travessia chardonnay’s, and I think this also added an excellent complexity to the flavor of the chowder. Served with a glass of Travessia rose, it was just perfect.

After dinner, hubs went off to meet his parents who are visiting from Ireland. They went to visit some old friends, and I decided to let them have some family time while I rested my sore legs at home. Those sore legs would be from the 110 minute run I did on Thursday. Awesome!

Sunday morning I had brunch plans at Toro with my friend Adrienne. I woke up so groggy! We quickly fixed that with some of Toro’s great coffee. I wasn’t feeling the camera today, so I left it at home. We had a leisurely tapas style lunch to catch up. We haven’t gotten together since July! I had the patatas bravas, tortilla espanola, and half of a grilled avocado, topped with tomato and queso blanco. I need to learn how to make this; it was so good!After we parted ways, I wandered around the South End, picked up a homemade raspberry jelly donut and a raspberry seltzer at Flour, checked out the South End Open Markets, and then got picked up by hubs so that we could retreieve our wine purchases from the last Bin Ends wine sale. Lots of good buys to write about! The rest of the day was spent going for a long walk, laying around a bit, and doing some much needed cleaning.

The house is fully stocked with great groceries, and I am looking forward to my meals this week, especially breakfast: overnight oats mixed with Oikos vanilla yogurt, chopped figs, and almond butter. I am actually looking forward to Monday morning just to eat this! 😉 I am also planning on making coconut carrot curry soup this week. Bring on the fall weather!

That’s it from me tonight. Have a fabulous Sunday night and Monday, and I will “see” you tomorrow!