Friday Things

1. Since we chatted last Friday, something very important and very exciting happened… I got engaged (with that gorgeous Pittsburgh skyline as the backdrop)!! Needless to say, I could not be any happier and have been floating on cloud nine :)

2. I had dinner for the first time at Hyde Park last weekend, and it was an incredible meal. I know they have restaurants in a number of cities, so if you ever have the opportunity to eat there, I highly recommend it! I had the French onion soup, the “Hines Ward” (filet mignon coated in garlic and cracked black pepper with roasted shallot Cabernet butter) and roasted garlic whipped potatoes. I got the colossal carrot cake to take home for dessert, and two of us ended up eating it every night for FOUR nights. They’re not joking when they say “colossal”… that thing is enormous! But oh so, so delicious.

3. You may remember me mentioning that my Chief Culinary Consultant and I were looking for a new TV show to watch together. We finally settled on… old episodes of American Chopper. I only started watching it in the last few years, so we’ve gone back to the very beginning so I can catch up on everything I missed. I never thought I’d like a show about building motorcycles, but I’m totally addicted to it!

4. When you find picture-perfect avocados, you make guacamole.

You eat a lot of it, and you have zero regrets.

5. For those of you that are bloggers and/or do a lot of photography, how do you utilize Flickr? Do you use it to host photos, showcase photos… do you use it at all?

6. Have you heard of PrintablePaper.net? It’s a website with over 1,000 different paper templates that you can download for free. It has everything from regular lined paper to financial sheets, music, game scorecards and everything in between. I’m about to print out some 500 and Dominoes score sheets!

7. The combination of these two photos sums up Einstein pretty much perfectly:

8. Have you heard about the service that will take a hand-written recipe and wood-burn it onto a wooden cutting board? I love this! What a fantastic way to showcase a treasured family recipe in your kitchen. I am definitely going to look into doing this with one of my grandma’s recipes.

9. I am dying to get my hands on one of those Kate Spade “Eat Cake for Breakfast” t-shirts, but everywhere I look they’re sold out. I’m admittedly not very “hip” to the fashion world, so if there are any little-known sites where I might be able to find one, I’d love to know!

10. TGIF! This guy has the right idea!