A funny dinner

Finally Half Moon Cafe opened in an old building within walking distance. I'm not positive which nationality of food they serve, but it is middle-eastern. Turkey, Greek, Israel, could be any of these.

When I go into a new restaurant I forgive a lot of things. In the first week or so I know there are a lot of bugs they are still working out. So when we had some problems, we were quick to forgive. We sat down , got our menu (singular) and looked it over. They had a few funny typos and other general silliness.

Anyway, we quickly ordered the fatoosh and the half moon special plate. I looked up fatoosh later and found out that is not what we got. What we did get was a very delicious greek salad and hummus. No pita, but we didn't really know what fatoosh was, maybe this was correct. So the hummus became like a dressing and we enjoyed the food. But we still didn't have water. We asked for some and got a couple bottles of water. No glass or ice. That wasn't that big a deal, just peculiar. Then we started waiting for the entrée.

We were having a great time and talking to each other and just kinda hanging out. The guy who I think is the owner came over to check on us a couple times and we told him we were fine. We didn't really need anything. Just waiting on our food. There was 1 point I heard a small crash in the kitchen and the owner kinda had an "oh no" expression. We saw a couple other tables come and go and we were still waiting. At that point I thought that it was very likely that our meal had just fallen and they now had to remake our dinner. But that was just speculation. After about an hour, and I had never seen the guy who took our order earlier. I finally decided humorously that we never ordered. So we flagged down the owner and asked him if our order had got to the kitchen.

"We ordered the half moon special plate". (he is nodding in agreement the entire time) "Did that get to the kitchen?"

He said, "Yes, yes, yes. What do you mean 'get to' the kitchen?" Then kinda shakes off this notion and finishes, "But I'll get it right now"

About 5 more minutes and he brings us a salad again, and hummus, just like before but this time with a big bowl of pita. It was delicious. I don't know why we got it. I assume this is just part of the service. Which makes me wonder what happened to the fatoosh earlier. But it was only about 10 more minutes and we got a huge plate full of pilaf, all kinds of meat; chicken, sausage, shwarma (it's kinda like the meat on a gyro) and all in all it was some of the most delicious food we have ever had. It was truly the high point of our day. We got stuffed and kept eating, It was amazing, I loved every piece of everything we got.

We paid, we laughed and we left thinking this was one of the funniest restaurant trips we have ever had. And planning how quickly we could go back.

Bus trip

Today we took a plain old trip to Crown Center to get in on some fun kid activities. But we decided to use public transportation to get there.

On my Google phone, I can get directions to anywhere and use public transportation to get there. I'd always wanted to try it out, and Fia is infatuated with the bus. It's a popular point in a lot of her kid shows.

So we walked the mile to the closest bus stop. Google even told me how long the walk should take, but we left a few minutes earlier. Not quite early enough. We would have been right on time, but I didn't account for her needing to stop for a potty break. So while she was in the bathroom at a gas station, I watched our bus pass right by.  50 minutes till the next bus (thanks phone for giving me that information) We took our time at the gas station, then walked to McDonald's for a snack and to wait. Finally, caught the next bus. It took us about a half a block away from our destination.

We got off, we went into Crown Center, hit up the Clifford exhibit at the children's museum, ate at Fritz's restaurant. She even passed up Panda Express, her favorite place, to go to Fritz's. Then to Kaleidescope. It was lots of fun. Then a 1 1/2 block walk back to the bus stop.

I have to say. Except for the distance between my house and the bus stop, it was actually convenient, cheap, and I didn't mind it as much as I thought I was going to. And Fia was excited to ride the bus, she liked the adventure, or as she kept saying today, "a-BEN-sure"

Let me rant

So I watched Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution last night and I really support the overall idea.  However, I have a few problems with the show.

First of all, Jamie Oliver is 100% correct to say that America should be eating healthier. And I love his approach to say that you can eat anything you want, as long as you look at what is included.  To take his point to an extreme I will tell you that recently I made polish sausages from pork shoulder, natural casing and of course a lot more.(but I knew exactly what went in there)  I also made coney sauce (chili) from scratch.  One night (actually, a lot of nights) I took those things, added mustard and buns and made my own chili dogs.  According to what Jamie Oliver preaches the unhealthiest part of this meal was the bun and mustard.  Because I made the sausage and chili myself I know that there was no high-fructose or hydrogenated anything.

No, I'm not claiming that chili dogs are healthy.  But I am stating that the worst part of chili dogs is all the unnatural ingredients that go into them.  Why would you need sugar in your hot dogs? Yet if you look at the ingredients, most hot dogs contain some sweetener.  High fructose corn syrup or whatever. Yech!

While on the subject of processed meats, that brings be back to Jamie's show.  He took 6 children and did a genius experiment with them.  He took a whole chicken, removed each piece (breasts, wings, thighs, legs) and took the carcass, with scrap meat on it and blended it up.  He took that puree and smooshed it through a sieve to separate the meat from bone and added "binders" and "flavorants" (I believe the actual ingredients were representative of the binders and flavorants) and pressed them into nugget shape and breaded and fried them.  He asked the kids who wanted to eat those nuggets. He expected the children to react to watching the 'chicken puree' ooze through the sieve and all of them being turned off, but 4, I mean, 5, I mean all of them said yes (the number changed cause I believe kids raised their hands as they saw others lead the way)

Fact is, he was shocked that the experiment failed.  But I would have raised my hand too. The biggest opposition I have to the entire process is what is in the bowls of "binders" and "flavorants" because he has just shown me that mechanically separated chicken is still chicken.

Tonight I took a whole chicken and tore it apart.  I cut off the breasts and saved them for later.  I cut off all meat from the thighs and legs and used them in a chicken fried rice and I took all the rest of the bones and skin and whatnot and turned it into chicken stock.  Are you to tell me that my chicken stock is on the same level as McDonald's McNuggets? I don't know if that's a compliment to McDonald's or an insult to my chicken stock.

I always assumed that the worst part of 'mechanically separated chicken' was the paste that came out at the end.  But Jamie Oliver showed me that paste is as natural as the boneless skinless breasts it came from. I am most scared of the binders and flavorants. But he blew by those ingredients like it was as natural as the bread crumbs for breading the nuggets.

I don't know. I seem to be torn between his point of, 'We are eating crap', and his methods of, 'You should be wasteful and not eat the less desirable cuts'. I know that is not his overall message, but that is the message he projected on this one specific point.

Let me stop now. I have chapters that I could write on this situation. I would rather keep this to a blog-posting length. So I will say good night.

Why are the called a "Medium" if they are more in tune than average people?

This is a true story.  While Fia was in the womb, a friend of Lill's came to visit with a date.  His date was a psychic.  (Ugh!)  And we were introduced, and like everyone that came into Lill's for those 9 months, Trelle mentioned how I was expecting.  After having met the psychic for all of 3 minutes, she informed me that my child was going to love music.

I still doubt her ability.  Maybe she saw me tapping to whatever was playing (I was because I wasn't interested in what she was saying) or whatever.  But she was right.

At 3 years old, Fia can sing, and does... a lot.  She likes kid songs, like Row, row, row your boat and Twinkle Twinkle.  She likes her genre like Laurie Berkner and other children artists.  And she likes my songs.  A few Beatles, an Owl City, and more.  Her favorite movie right now is Fantasia 2000.  (If anyone sees the original Fantasia, that would make an excellent gift.)

I'm not giving any credit to the psychic.  But it is memorable.  She called it.  But I knew that (I push it on her enough) and I can tell you a few other things that Fia will get into.  Reading, science, snide comments, and other things that she will pick up from me.

Fia's music

So the odd thing, is ever since I got my Facebook, I'll post whatever. But the 2 times that the post seems to have taken more space than I think I should allot in Facebook, I'll post it over here. It's almost resparked my blogging interest.

Tonights story is Fia's music. When she sleeps, we put on some music to drown out the external noise of the cars and whatever. But what we let her listen to is the situation. We haven't found a great radio station that we can just turn on and forget. So we are cool with making our own mix for her. I have enough mellow stuff to fill up a while.

Her stereo takes a USB, so we just buy a 2gig jump drive and hit 'random' and let it play.It has 20+ hours of music. So repeating isn't really an issue. But a few weeks ago, something broke. Turns out it was the jump drive. So I went onto Amazon and bought another 2 gig jump drive for about $7 total. And after WAY TOO MANY problems getting it, I finally got it today and had to fill it up.

I have about 15 gig of music on my hard drive. But not all of it is "sleeping to" music. So I went through it all tonight to fill up her jump drive with only the mellow stuff.

Wow. I never remember all the things I like from my music selection until I go through it piece by piece. In my last post, I mentioned a funny quote from a fwd I got. Same email gives me another quote that is applicable here. "I love every song in my iTunes. Until I put it on shuffle, then I love about 1 out of every 15 songs." And that's what happened tonight. Except I'm not focusing on those songs that I don't care about. I'm focusing on those 1 out of 15 songs that for whatever reason, I stopped listening to them.

Existentialism on Prom Night by Straylight Run is 1 song that I forgot ever existed. The hook of the song is, "Sing like you think no one's listening" and I like how those lyrics and that message is played out. It made me think of another song about how awesome singing is. Sing, by The Dresden Dolls is all about how, whatever the circumstance, "just sing". Both those songs came out at about the same time. And I liked the message of both of them. But I haven't thought about either song in years. But I bet you tomorrow at work, I'm singing about singing. Not sure which song. But it'll happen.

General thoughts about Dr Seuss and Childrens books

So I've been reading every night to Fia for about 2 solid years, and we have gone through a lot of books. The 'No More' series by Peony Lewis was her favorite for a while. The "Oakey" series was her favorite. Right now she likes "Charlie and Lola" and to be honest, Lynette and I like it too. But we have always included those stories that we read, or had read to us when we were children.

Slight tangent. I saw a collection of humorous thoughts, and one of them was, "Sometimes I'll watch a movie when I was younger and realize I had no idea what was going on when I first watched it." Specifically this rang true with Indiana Jones. When the 4th movie came out recently, I rewatched the previous 3 and realized that I don't like the movies. I could have sworn I did. I remember liking them. But I guess I was wrong. Cause all 3 never sparked true interest. Just mild nostalgia.

But back on point. That same theory can be adapted to books. Before I had a kid, I would have told you, and beat into your head, that I liked Dr Seuss. When Fia was young we read a select few of them as I thought was necessary. And we read and enjoyed books like, "The Cat in the Hat" and "I saw it all on Mulberry Street" but then when we expanded our horizons, I found that Dr Seuss made no sense.

Has anyone read "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish in the last 10 years? It starts out like you expect, with fish. Then less than 10 pages into it, the fish story translates back to land. "From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere." and that's the last line that makes sense to any plot. Any random page contains a short, meaningless story that makes no sense. Let me flip randomly and paraphrase a page. A lady calls Ned. She asks how things are in his bed. He replies by saying that he is not having fun and a cow, a dog, a cat and mouse are all in his bed with him. And the page prior and following have totally different stories. The entire book is like that. I firmly believe that Dr Seuss was heavily on drugs when writing this book. That would make sense. When Dr Seuss says, "Whoa, dude. What if this lady calls Ned. And Ned is in his bed. Duuuuuude. That'll be awesome."

I mean, some stories are cool. Cat in the Hat mostly makes sense. And I actually liked, I Saw it all on Mulberry Street. But we have read our fair share of Dr Seuss, and for better or worse, about half of his stories revert into a page-by-page mini-stories that are just there for the sake of rhymes and a string of 2-paragraph sub plots.

Hop of Pop seems to split the difference. It is that same page-by-page mini-story that is neither here nor there. But it is redeemed in the fact that every word is the very basics of speech that the beginning reader can latch onto.

And let me finish by saying that there are a list of stories that are very well written, have a good story, a great moral and are just straight-out entertaining for me and my daughter. Yertle the Turtle. Gertrude McFuzz. And others provide wonderful stories and great morals. I like those.

But those aren't the books that I remembered loving. I liked The Cat in the Hat, and even worse, One Fish Two Fish. It was horrible.

Happy Birthday Fia

Our little girl is 3 now. It doesn't seem possible. She is growing up so fast. This year we decided to go low key and just spent the day focusing on her. We went to lunch with Grandma and Papa Cobb at 5 guys (or in Fia talk the place with burgers and peanuts) and had cake and presents. Then we took her swimming. It was a good day. She kept on telling us it was "the best birthday ever". I wanted to share a few photos and a cute video of her with her birthday cake.

She helped make the cake. You can guess what happened next...