tort me if you must, i’m sick of outlining

and i turn to food for my relief.

although i’ve sworn myself to eating as thriftily as possible (read: no more going out!) i haven’t had the greatest success. although i’ve been doing better than before on the spending horizon – packing lunches, bringing my own coffee, etc. and when i do eat out, it hasn’t been expensive, per se…

sunday was brunch with husband and sam and jenny at harefield road (which is also a nice place to go if you’re looking to go to a bar, and then it is a good place to go to for brunch, so harefield road wins).

eleven bucks for “harefield eggs” (eggs benedict with smoked salmon in place of ham; as i feared, the salmon was too salty – i missed my eggs florentine! – but the eggs were perfectly poached and the hollandaise sauce wasn’t overwhelming) + fruit + crispy yummy breakfast potatoes + coffee + mimosa = sure guarantee that it’s going to be a lazy sunday. mmhmm. jenny’s cobb salad was ginormous and husband was a fan of his breakfast burrito (with chorizo, otherwise i would have been on it like…white on rice? but the menu warns you rather sternly no substitutions! so i went with the harefield eggs – you didn’t forget already, did you?). sam seemed like the winner with his huevos rancheros. after the heartbreaking disappointment that was phoebe cafe’s huevos rancheros, i was buying into that salsa commercial that scorned the salsa from *new york city* (i can hear the disbelieving cowboy drawls now, but for the life of me can’t remember the brand name). i was wary of huevos rancheros in new york, but after seeing sam devour his plate, i think i’m ready for a second try.

for dinner last night we went to najeeb’s. husband goes there about once every other week and has been a fan, but falafel’s never quite done it for me. so for my first trip i got the vegetable combo plate: cold spinach with chickpeas, lentils with cracked bulgar wheat, and dolmades. husband had brought home the dolmades before, and they were expectedly delicious, and i love the yogurt dipping sauce, and the lentils were good but the spinach was…ugh. the spinach was the reason kids grow up thinking they don’t like spinach. spinach is so much tastier than that!

but i don’t fault najeeb, because he does so well with everything else. husband got the falafel platter (chris opted just for a falafel sandwich; difference seems to be that the platter is a sandwich deconstructed, with more hummus) and the falafel were *good*! Like, so good. the happiest little orangey balls of fried chickpeas you’ve ever seen. they look more like funky meatballs than falafels; more orange than brown, smaller, less green bits when you bit into them. maybe not so much what meatballs really look like, but what they look like in a kids picture book. yea, like that. yum. no but really they were. one reason might be because they are smaller, so you get a better ratio of fried crust to…innards. but even the innards were good (and i never like falafel innards!) so go najeeb. and husband likes them more than other falafels, and he likes falafels, so it’s wins all around.

husband also got mint lemonade with rose flavor and i had a cardamon iced coffee. coffee tasted like iced coffee, not like cardamon, but like really good iced coffee – maybe the extra goodness was the cardamon and i just don’t have a sophisticated enough palate to notice. mint lemonade tasted like lemonade, and then after swallowing a mouthful, you got a face-ful of rose. sweet! i dug it. husband dug it. i think chris dug it. good stuff.

so dinner was good, and afterwards was good too. we chatted with najeeb, who turns out to have a house in southern california, so he told us about that and about the yearly pilgrimages he makes to mount whitney (to shit! because he likes to shit in the highest place in the [continguous] united states! najeeb’s a great guy). and then he charged us $22.50 so husband gave him $25 and he gave us back $17.25 in change. huh? najeeb, you crazy. but we dig it.

obviously this meant we had enough left-over (though not really – even when i spend less money than i owe, that’s more than i’m supposed to be spending, since i’m not supposed to be spending *any*) for ralph’s! chris went with the reliable honeydew, but since it was cold out i wanted something more substantial (from my frozen dessert), so i picked the chocolate peanut butter cup (which they finally had! they didn’t have it when they first opened a few weeks ago). which meant that husband picked out most of the peanut butter bits. but it was still delicious and satisfying, in that what a great dinner we just had and this is going to be a good night, if only i didn’t have to study-way. yea. like that.

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