food - Lord Gonchar

Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste.

This Weekend

For the past few years, we’ve gotten a real tree for Christmas. Basically, since we moved to Ohio. They always suck. We vowed last year to pick up a nice artificial tree this year/ Ideally, we want a really tall one that we can put in the entry way. We kind of unofficially figured a 12-foot tree would be cool. Seems to be the point where the prices are still reasonable, but it’s tall enough to be something (I measured – the entry in 17 feet high). It’s about time we started finding one – and it turns out it’s not as easy as it seems to find a combo of reasonable cost and quality in a really tall artificial tree. But that’s for another post.

So to start thinking Xmas and maybe start scoping trees we decided to go check out our local Christmas Tree Shoppe. We knew a little about it and had been wanting to check the place out for a while. Well, our mistake for not looking into it more, but it’s probably the worst place in the world. I expected a cute little seasonal holiday-type place. It’s actually essentially a Big Lots with 1/4 of the store filled with seasonal holiday items of the Big Lots quality you’d expect. It fucking sucked. If it burned to the ground tomorrow, I’d chuckle with approval. I actually wished I were in a Big Lots. (for the record, Big Lots is one of my least favorite places on Earth)

Just a big fucking waste of time.

We noticed there was a Burlington Coat Factory in the plaza. We hadn’t been to one in ages, but we used to find pretty great deals at the one in Allentown when we lived there.

Mistake #2.

It smelled…mostly like sad. And there was absolutely nothing worth seeing there…except (and I swear we found these there) for the boys mustard yellow courduroy pants straight off the kids in early-70′s Sesame Street episodes. I had flashbacks.

We quickly slipped out of there and beelined to the other location we planned on hitting – Hobby Lobby. I don’t think I’d ever stepped foot in one prior to this. We saw an ad that said they had a buttload of trees in all shapes and sizes at great prices. It may have been a bit of an oversell. They had one 12-footer, but it didn’t look very real and was a bit bare…and even with the 50% off sale on all Christmas decorations, still came in at a price closer to four digits than two. Meh.

What a waste of a couple of Friday hours.

On Satuday, we had football equipment turn-ins in the morning, then my son and I decided to drive across town to see one of the semi-final tournament games. Looked to be possibly the best game of the entire tournament at the 4th grade level. One team was a sleeper that went undefeated and gave up just one touchdown in the 8-game season and only two TD’s in three tournament games. No one ever put up more than 6 against them. They were playing the team that has been a thorn in our side not just once, but twice in the past. They’re consistently good and passed us in the final week of the season for the highest scoring team in the 4th grade.

On paper it was the unstoppable force against the immovable object.

It didn’t play out that way. The sleeper team gave up 28 points. In one game they gave up more TD’s than they had total in the 11 games prior. We still had fun. Might go to the championship game at UD next weekend.

It was also my daughter’s birthday. I have a 14 year old. Her party was last weekend, so she got to spend the day alone while my wife was at work and my son and I were at the game. She got a cake from Ritters. She wanted a Mud Pie cake. Too chocolatey for me. A weird little quirk of mine is that I’m not fond of chocolate ice cream. Even worse, chocolate ice cream with more chocolate shit mixed in…and then topped with more chcocolate. Not my thing. But Ritters is awesome. It took us a while to discover them (we’re DQ people for childhood), but we haven’t been to DQ in ages. (for the record my very favorite ice cream is Whitehouse)

Tomorrow? Little stuff around the house and a Steelers game tomorrow night. Normally we rake/blow leaves the first weekend in November, but all the leaves haven’t fallen yet. Trees are still surprisingly full for this late in the year. Maybe next weekend.

I’m livin’ it.

Easter

Interesting Easter this year.

The wife had to work, so we decided to be a little unorthodox this year. We figured we’d give the kids Easter baskets (and the over-gifting gifts we’ve become guilty of) in the afternoon. This was interesting because my son is alarmingly late in figuring out the fantasy characters of our youth (Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus) are not real. I don’t want to have to physically say, “Look…” so between today’s weirdness and a few well placed comments I think the light bulb is starting to click…a little…maybe.

Speaking of being unorthodox and bucking tradition, this year we’ve made a semi-conscious effort to do untraditional meals on traditional meal days. Most people do pork on New Year’s. This year we did Sushi. Easter dinner usually means ham. Today we did rack of lamb. Turned out fucking terrific. We did garlic and rosemary frenched rack of lamb and I fucking crushed it. Seared them perfectly. We also tried two other new-to-us recipes and paired that lamb with French Onions (I’m becoming a worcestershire sauce fiend) and simple scalloped potatoes that may have been among the best potatoes we’ve ever made…hell, among the best we’ve ever had. Some simple green bean casserole and garlic/cheese rolls rounded out things. We also took the 20-some odd egges we colored and turned them into 4 different flavors of deviled eggs. Who knew you could get so creative with a simple deviled egg? Awesome fucking dinner.

We overgifted the kids again considering it was Easter. We always do. My son scored a basketball hoop and new ball and some lego shit. My daughter got a new phone and a bunch of jewelry and accessories.

On the plus side, we now look like every douchey house on every douchey cul-de-sac with a douchey hoop in the douchey driveway standing there all douchily.

Now that I talked about them, I think I want some of those deviled eggs…

April 25th, 2011 - awesome - food - holidays - home

Runts Revisited

Shortly after I started this little ol’ blog of mine, I did a post about Runts. Go ahead and read it real quick-like. Basically giving Runts love, but not digging the flavor changes that were new to me. My suggestion back in that post from May of 2007:

If they really wanted the added color/flavor, then why not grape? Actually that sounds good. Switch green back to lime and make the blue a purply grape and we’re back in business.

So today my wife runs to grab milk and decides to snag some candy. She got me a threater-sized box of Runts. Not sure how long it’s been since I last had Runts. Probably not all the way back to that last Runts post, but maybe. Who knows? It’s been a while.

I pour some into my hand and immediately spot a big purple oblong oval one. I was pretty sure it wasn’t eggplant, but they’ve made some questionable flavor decisions in the past. I look at the front of the box and right there is a cartoon bunch of grapes. Holy shit! Grape!

They finally had it right…or so I thought. Upon further eating/inspection I figured out that the green ones are no longer lime (or even crappy watermelon), but rather apple flavored. Sigh. Always has to be a weak link.

Let’s get green back to lime and I’ll be ok. I’d rather see a cherry than a strawberry too (or just bring cherry back and go to the 90′s 6-flavor setup), but strawberry is acceptable if all the other flavors are in place.

Wikipedia claims the flavor setup I have is the Chewy Runts lineup.

Still waiting for Banana, Orange, Cherry, Lime, Grape. (and Strawberry if we’re going with 6)

November 27th, 2010 - food - nerd

The New Kroger

Our local Kroger was kind of older and small. Outdated by modern grocery store standards. They built a new building right in the same parking lot and upgraded to a bigger, better experience. They opened earlier this month, but we just finally stopped by this weekend.

The have a ‘home’ section full of decor and furniture.

I’m not sure how I feel about buying a couch at the grocery store.

There’s also a jewelry store so you can pick up a loaf of bread and that engagement ring you’ve been wanting to give her. (there’s a joke there about carrots and carats, but I’m not making it)

I dunno, the list of store services is even funny-long to me.

Whatever. The dude making fresh sushi was enough to win me over.

November 22nd, 2010 - food - life - ridiculous

<< Older Entries

Newer Entries >>