Look who's coming to dinner...

Nobody.  I just like taking photos of my new Target dishes.  Yes, I set the table for fun.  **cough* nerd! * cough**

 

But look!  Everything's so beachy and modern!

I picked up the Target lantern and the dishes, and then just spray painted the middle tray with Rustoleum paint in Key Lime.

Dan and I had his family over this weekend for Mother's Day, so I did get to eventually bust everything out for actual people and not just a mini photo shoot. It doesn't take much to entertain me on a Wednesday night!

 

My favorite part is the striped plates:

I also wanted to share an entree and dessert I found on Pinterest and tried.

The first one is chicken lettuce wraps (same taste as the one from that chain Chinese place P.F. Chang's).  Click here for the full recipe and details.   It's a fresh, summery meal, albeit a tiny bit time consuming.  Here's the ingredients for the sauce:

You just chop up chicken, water chestnuts, onion, and mushrooms, and you're in business.

I keep making it and then eating it for lunch two days afterwards.  Crunchy-iceberg-tangy-spicy-yum.

For Mother's Day, I made this three ingredient key lime pie for Dan's family.  Get Nellie and Joe's Key Lime juice and follow the below recipe:

Nellie & Joe's Key Lime Pie

9" graham cracker pie crust

14 oz. can of sweetened condensed milk

3 egg yolks (whites not used)

½ cup Nellie & Joe's Key West Lime Juice

Combine milk, egg yolks and lime juice. Blend until smooth. Pour filling into pie crust and bake at 350º for 15 minutes. Allow to stand 10 minutes before refrigerating. Just before serving, top with freshly whipped cream, or meringue, and garnish with lime slices.

I forgot to take a picture, but it was delicious.  And a total coincidence that it matched with my new dishes.  :)

Pie pic via here.

12 Restaurants in 12 Months

Last year, while everyone else made resolutions to try Jillian Michaels' work out tapes, tone their abs, and stop reaching for the staff room doughnuts, Dan and I made a vow of a different sort:

Try (at least) 12 new restaurants in 12 months

Lazy? Yes. Fattening? Uh-huh. Best resolution ever?

Oh, yeah.

Not that it was a hard one or anything, but we nailed this resolution. I believe you've already heard about these three places:

Pescados at Church Street

* Food: Creative seafood and killer mojitos

* Decor: King Tritan meets Miami Vice

* Memorable quality: creamy avacado tart for dessert!

Lehja
* Food: Upscale Indian

* Decor: Domino magazine and a belly dancer have a love child

* Memorable quality: best. naan. ever.

Amuse

* Food: Artsy and creative
* Decor: Art museum chic with a splash of The Jetsons' retro-mod

* Memorable quality: Celebrating our 5th anniversary there

And for anyone interested, here are a few more, broken down superlative style.

Most creative: Sprout, who used old vinyl album covers to hold their menus.

Ignore this terrible picture of me, and check out the Carly Simon album for the menu:

They served healthy, local food, like this mushroom tarte.

Biggest Tree-huggers: Urban Farmhouse, a granola coffee shop that had organic everything, right down to the potato chips

Best brunch: The Black Sheep's rhubarb french toast, that had lavender marscarpone on top.

It didn't last long enough for me to take a picture of the dish.

Most frequented: A tie between Cafe Ole, which became our go-to Mexican place during the summer for the mango, fish tacos and The Mill, which is an American place three blocks away from our house

Best drinks: Xtra's Cafe, which made a mean bellini

We went to this restaurant with two other couples. Yes, my friends and I look like we're trying to be a lame "look-how-sex-and-the-city-we-are" in this photo, but I had to get a picture for the blog of those delicious drinks. I'm such a Carrie.

Totally kidding.

Best make-over: Tarrant's, which used to be an old-fashioned drugstore. I can't believe I forgot to take a picture of the gorgeous stained glass windows it still has

Most old-fashioned: The Courthouse Grille, for its sweet, nostalgic decor to fit with the 100 year old building and the good ole homemade pimiento cheese on everything.

Oldest crowd: Little Venice, the Italian restaurant we went to on NYE since I had a gift certificate. It had amazing tiramisu, and the oldest crowd I've ever seen. Seriously, it was like it was bingo night at an assisted living facility.

Our extra credit restaurants were:

Most haunted: The Pink House in Savannah. See this post.

Best place to feed and be fed: The Crab Shack on Tybee Island, where we fed alligators . See this post.

Most fattening: Amen in Charleston, which served us deep-fried green tomatoes. Can I get an "Amen"?

That was one delicious year.

Harry Potter

Nerd alert: This post is about Harry Potter.

If you don't know the terms "horcrux", "the golden snitch", or "Deathly Hallows", then feel free to skip this post. Or read it and judge my family and me for indulging our dorky side.

If you do know all of the above terms, I like you. Holla, fellow nerd!

The Harry Potter obsession started slow, with me reading the first one as an assignment in my college children’s lit class. That grew to me discussing the book with my suitemate and another friend, both of who were fans. That led to me convincing my sister to read it…

Fast forward six years: Harry Potter has become quite the book club discussion in our family. We all read all seven books, and even Dan, who refused to crack a single one, has seen all eight movies with us. That’s over 4,000 pages of reading and 16 hours of movie watching that we dedicated to Hogwarts, people. This total does not even include the two hours we waited in line to see the final movie, thus ending our obsession with the little-wizard-who-could.

As we left the theatre, however, I couldn't help feeling like we needed one last Harry Potter hurrah. So, when I was at the beach last week, I decided to participate in Young House Love’s Pinterest challenge, where people create something based on an inspiration photo found on said website. I thought it would be fun to create a Three Broomsticks’ dessert buffet as the final goodbye to the series we all loved.

First, I scouted out inspiration images on Pinterest, like...

this creamy butterbeer:

via here

this golden snitch idea:

via here

And this peanut butter trifle

(No, the dessert was not in the book, but trifle is very English, so it fit.)

via here
My photos of what I did came out pretty horrible, but I thought I’d share anyway.

First, here I am donning my dad’s Redskin… errr… Griffindor scarf, holding one of the golden snitch chocolates:



I decided that us Muggles needed a buzz, so rather than making the uber-complicated, virgin butterbeer from the inspiration photo, I just combined butterscotch schnapps and cream soda.

I think my sister enjoyed it! And I do love that it looks like Bethany is downing some hardcore drink, like scotch on the rocks, in this picture:


I stuck feathers into Rocher chocolates to make snitches:


I put out Bertie’s Every Flavor Beans that a student gifted to me this year:


And took a funny picture of my mom trying to choke down the soap-flavored one:




Other flavors we tried included cherry, marshmallow, black pepper, chocolate, and sausage, to name a few. My dad even tried an earthworm one.

And lastly, I made this sinful trifle. My pictures may not be as pretty as the Pinterest one, but I think it was a hit with the fam. Click on the link under the inspiration photo if you want to try this crazy rich recipe as it has all the steps. Basically, you mix peanut butter chips into brownie batter and bake. Once the brownie has cooled, you cut it up into one inch cubes. Then, you prepare vanilla pudding and mix in peanut butter and a little bit of vanilla extract. Finally, you unwrap mini Reese cups. The last step is the most fun: you layer the brownie, then the pudding, then a little bit of Reese cups until your trifle glass is full. Holy calories, Batman!





The day after I made this dessert, I saw my sister and her boyfriend with my camera and his computer open to Photoshop. They kept chortling sneakily before finally calling me over. What had they been up to? They took photos of me off the camera and Photoshopped me right into the world of wizardry!

They took one of the pictures of me wearing the famous scarf:

and inserted me into a Quidditch crowd!

They took this photo of me from our Italy trip last year:


And had me keeping Ron dry, with my wand at the ready!

Anyone else in on the HP obsession? It's okay to admit it. This is a "nerd safe" zone.

The food resolution continues!

After three straight days of eating at amazing Savannah restaurants, Dan and I had to roll out of the car when we returned home. It's definitely time to get back to eating healthy next week! In fact, I'm thinking of picking up Jamie Oliver's The Food Revolution so that I'll have some new healthy dinner ideas to make. Basically, this girl needs to detox her system because every Savannah dish has butter as the secret ingredient. But until then, forget The Food Revolution. Nope, instead, I give you:

The Food Resolution!

Our New Year's resolution was to try 12 new restaurants in 12 months. Here are two of our most memorable ones from Savannah:

The Olde Pink House

The atmosphere: Haute and haunted

I wanted to go to one restaurant that was classic Savannah, and this grand 18th century house (Savannah's oldest one) fit the bill. It originally was owned by a family who kept painting it with white plaster, however the red bricks would show through making the house appear pink. Later, when it was turned into a tavern and restaurant, the owners gave up and painted it the shade of "blush" errr... "bashful" err "pepto bismal" it is today. Oh, and supposedly it's haunted with the ghost of the original owner, which is very Savannah. In this city, haunted houses are like Starbucks... you can find one on every corner.

Anyway, the inside was gorgeous in a fancy way, all chandeliers and silk curtains. Where's a string of pearls when a girl needs one?

The food:

* I tried the famous BLT salad I heard about on Best Thing I Ever Ate. Two fried green tomatoes + honey smoked bacon + pickled tomatoes + ridiculously fattening dressing = one of the best salads I've ever eaten indeed :)

* The rest of the meal was equally Southern and fried and fattening and delicious. Dan devoured a plate of scallop linguine, and I had a creamy shrimp and grits meal. And you already know about the chocolate cake for dessert... Verdict: I was a little worried this place would feel like a tourist trap, resting on their pretty decor and interesting history and churning out subpar food. Luckily, the food was ah-maz-ing! It was such a special, memorable meal to have on my thirtieth. Then, the next day Dan and I drove to Tybee Island outside Savannah and ate The Crab Shack, the exact opposite of the Olde Pink House...

The Crab Shack

The atmosphere: Laid back, right down to the lazy alligators When Dan and I first walked up to The Crab Shack, we strolled over a bridge and took a campy picture with this guy:

Then, we saw this sign:

Thinking it was a hoax to be funny, we looked down from the platform into a small lagoon and saw twelve alligators all draped over one another. They were were so motionless that we still assumed they were fake rubber ones like the first guy that I had taken the picture with.

But then one of the gators moved his head ever so slightly, freaking Dan out so badly that he almost tripped over his own feet jerking backwards! I couldn't stop laughing when he dead-panned to me as I snapped a picture, "If you drop that camera in there, I am NOT helping you fish it back!"

Once Dan had recovered, we decided to eat outdoors, which had a view of the bay and a leafy canopy of leaves from the nearby cypress trees.

The whole place had a "you're in a treehouse vibe." I loved the apple baskets they used for lanterns.

The food:

Dan and I shared an enormous platter of boiled crab legs, crawfish, and shrimp to crack and peel ourselves. The below pictures show our reactions better than a blog post can:

Oh, and after we were stuffed, we decided to spend the three bucks to feed our scaly friends. We attached bits of rubbery alligator treats to the fishing poles outside the lagoon:

That finally got the alligators in motion!

I almost started a gator fight with my treat! They're actually kind of cute...

Verdict: Fresh seafood, outdoor setting, feeding alligators... what's not to love?

Sigh... the food vacation is over. But damn if it wasn't great while it lasted!

The Olde Pink House picture via here, inside from here, and the BLT salad photo is from here