Saturday, February 14 -- Happy Valentine's Day!

Well, Happy Valentine's Day!

The restaurant offers a nice buffet breakfast, and with the added incentive of a 2-for-1 Senior offer (hee hee ... I got carded!) we were happy to tuck into it.  Baskets of bakery and breads, a lovely fresh fruit spread, interesting items on the hot table, and some more European items (rolled turkey slices, cheese chunks) ... lots of choices.  There were plenty of tables to go around so we took our time; Linda needed to change chairs for security after discovering a dove had taken up residence in the rafter just above her.

While we were out, we explored the little on-site store, which is pretty well-stocked and not terribly over-priced.  But too many recipes to try -- back to the room to get prepared, and then off to WalMart with us!

In prior visits, we'd spent a lot of time choosing recipes and creating shopping lists.  This trip, Linda & Claudette came over to my place a couple weeks ago and marked a lot of recipes they thought looked tempting.  I winnowed the list a bit to create a reasonable meal plan and dumped it all into Excel (no surprise THERE).  So we came down with dozens of tiny zipper bags with a couple tablespoons of spice or herb, and an automatic way to know we had all the fresh ingredients we'd need.  Very slick indeed.

As usual, we split up by merchandise category; Linda & Claudette sought out basic grocery and kitchen items, I went over to produce & meats.  We're still cooking from Rick Bayless' early cookbooks, so the produce list is long and varied.  With some extra effort and a lot of talking with our hands, we ultimately found everything on the list and some reasonably-priced wine as well.  Our taxi back was open-air, and the air was very fresh and crisp after the storm yesterday.

You might think we'd go right into cooking, but the restaurant had a well-priced prime rib special for Valentine's Day and we had reservations for that treat.  The prime rib was nicely sauced with a mushroom gravy, and flanked by a little baked potato and a lovely saute of mixed vegetables.  We started with a house salad and ended with a nicely-nuanced vanilla mousse with a red-berry sauce.  Somewhere in the middle one of the staff distributed a long-stemmed rose to each lady in the room, a nice surprise.

Not having truly recovered our sleep deprivation, we pretended to read or catch up on email for a while, but each having nodded off ... we gave up and went horizontal.