Hanging with Hannah

It seems lately like my life has been like the movie Groundhogs Day – wake up, blog, go to work, come home, cook food, watch t.v., go to bed.  Rinse and repeat.  So when Hannah discovered that she had asked for this past Saturday off a couple months ago, she asked if I wanted to meet her for lunch.  Um, yes please!  While I feel guilty leaving Tony alone, when he’s by himself all week, I needed to just get out of the house and do something . . . different.

We met in Schaumburg, which is pretty much half way point between where we live.  I got there first, so I had about 15 minutes to walk around.  I now only have three pairs of shoes – flip flops, sandals and gym shoes.  My Born shoes that I’ve been wearing all winter for the last several years, finally gave up on me.  I bought them for $10 brand new at a thrift store, so I got my money’s worth!  So I pop into Carson’s.  It just felt weird because I haven’t bought clothes or shoes in a retail setting for probably 10+ years.  Well, except for underwear and bras – I have to draw the line somewhere!

So I see the pair of shoes I want – score!

Um, until I saw the price tag – $115!  And these Sketchers?  $85! Crazeballs.

We originally thought of eating at Big Bowl, but then I found a Pho restaurant not too far away, and then Tony reminded me of Yu’s Mandarin – duh!  That place has never failed us on great food.  You know have walked into a great Chinese restaurant when 90% of the customers are Asian.

I had soup on my mind, since it was overcast and in the upper 40’s.  I decided on the Noodle Soup – mixed veggies (asked for no onions!), shrimp, chicken and beef in a spicy broth with house made noodles.

The portion of my soup was embarrassingly large – Hannah got lemon chicken and white rice for her lunch – not too much breading and love the lemon in her dish.  My dish?  So much flavor going on – the broth tasted like a chicken based broth, with sriracha and lemongrass – the noodles were so tender – I was so happy!  It felt like I ate and ate, and I barely made a dent.  The server needed TWO large take out containers for my leftovers!  I love that the kitchen is wide open too – you can watch them cook:

Then we were of to thrift!  There were three thrift stores within a 2 mile radius of the restaurant.  While we were driving, we were singing to songs, goofing around – it felt so good to just not have a care in the world for an afternoon and just. . . laugh!

Janine, you know I wanted to buy all the snowmen I saw, but I know that you and I both have enough of them.  Still fun to look at though – for the record, I’ve already switched to my snowmen coffee mug collection at work.

Then after thrifting, we got stuck in traffic because of construction.  It took us 30 minutes to go 2 miles, but I didn’t care – just gave me more time to hang with Hannah!  I tried on her glasses, which are just for fashion, she doesn’t need glasses.  I may have whitened my teeth a bit too much on picmonkey on this pic – ha!

And before I knew it, it was time to part ways.  It was a wonderful afternoon – thanks Hannah!  The drive home was beautiful too – so many colors to see!

It was a low key Saturday night, Tony wasn’t feeling well, and as much as I want to ask every 5 minutes “can I get you anything?!” I know that bothers the shit out of him, so we just watched t.v. in pretty much silence.

Yesterday I slept in until 10! Love that I can still sleep like a 16 year old.  I did some laundry, then knew I wanted to shop at Mariano’s this weekend – their flagship store is only a 20 minute drive from my house.   OMG.  Since I was by myself I could take my time and look and touch all the food – which normally drives Tony nuts – he wants to get in and out.  That store has gelato, a juice bar, wine bar, sushi bar and a bbq restaurant inside!  I decided that I was going to stick to my list though and not impulse buy anything.  Still fun to look at though – I did add a $3.00 piece of goat cheese to my basket – it sells for $14.99 a pound!

That was just one of EIGHT cheese display.  I want all the cheese!  And check out these langoostinos – they look like baby lobsters!

I did good though – only spent $61, and $7 of that was on garbage bags – so not bad! I did buy one of their rotisserie chickens for $6.00.  I ended up getting 1.6 pounds of meat off the chicken after I pick off the skin and bones.  With the carcass and some of the meat I plan on making a broth based chicken tortilla soup this week for dinner one night.  I used about 3 ounces in my chicken fried rice dish I made for dinner last night – not near as good as Tony’s fried rice, but it was tasty.  I may have added a little sriracha to my egg.

I plan on using some for chicken flautas for one of my lunches, and still will probably have 8 or so ounces leftover to make a chicken and avocado panini.

All that delicious chicken skin will make an awesome broth.

And now we’re back to Monday.  Gah.  Can’t I just win the lottery so I could cook all day long every day?!  Although I still have yet to check my lottery tickets from Friday’s nights draw – you never know!

And Monday means WI day . . .I am up .2 this week, but I feel . . .thinner?  I am so happy to be doing strength training again, and I know that what I did the past 7 days won’t automatically show up on the scale when I want it to.  No worries. . . it’s a distance run, not a sprint.

What was the highlight of your weekend?  Make it a great day!