Sweet Yet Sour

There will be no Encore for me…

Saturday, November 29th, 2008 | Restaurant Reviews | 1 Comment

One of things that I miss about my life pre-Anna (besides sleep) is restaurant reviewing.  I miss going to a new restaurant, hanging out with friends and having the whole restaurant review experience.  I really had a good time on the Cupcake Tour, and it made me miss RRC more.

Recently, when my friend Jen wanted to meet for dinner, she let me pick the restaurant, knowing that I would love to pick out somewhere new to go.  It’s rare that I go out at all these days, but Jen is willing to meet late (7:30 p.m.) on weekend nights to accommodate my schedule of putting Anna down and then heading out for the evening.

Anyway, I looked around and decided to try Encore.  It has gotten a “Best Fries” accolade from Westword, and what tipped the scales for me was that it is located next to the new Tattered Cover on Colfax.  That way, when Jen and I got done with dinner we could work off our meal looking for books. Sounds perfect right?

Unfortunately, there will be no encore at Encore for Jen and I.  As soon as Jen and I walked into the restaurant, we knew we were not right for the restaurant.  I say this because it seems that Encore is one of those “places to go if you’re in the in crowd”.  The people are pretty, well-dressed, young people with no fat on their bodies and Appletini’s in their hands.  I am SO not like these people…

They are also incredibly loud people.  This is a personal prejudice, but I do not want to have to yell at my fellow dinner and the waiter in order to heard.  Encore seems to encourage this sort of noisy atmosphere as if this will making your dining experience better.

Anyway, on with the rest of the review…

The restaurant is located on the east side of the Lowenstein Theatre, and there is a connecting door between Tattered Cover and the restaurant, as well as an outer door.  Parking is pretty convenient, with some on-street parking, but this was all taken, so I opted for the parking garage next to Tattered Cover (it’s free and well lit).

The decor is cold modern, but with low lighting in the evening so it seemed like a warmer place than it probably is during the day. We were seated at a tiny table for two along the west wall that gave us a nice view of the wine cooler. The wait staff were all courteous and generally quick to respond.  The kitchen is open for viewing for the diners and this may in part add to the noise in the restaurant.

While Encore has a large wine list, it is stingy on the wines available by the glass and even these are expensive, with the cheapest being $7.  As a side complaint, I hate the huge mark-up that restaurants perform when selling wines by the bottle.  Encore sells a wine that I buy regularly from the liquor store for less than $25 a bottle that was selling for $66.  Come on!

I’m not drinking these days, so the wine prices don’t matter much to me, but I can testify that the bar at Encore makes a nice Shirley Temple for $2.50.

We began with the “Wood Fired Artichokes with Truffle Butter and Aioli”.  I’m not sure that I tasted the truffle in the butter on the artichokes, but they were nice warm and crispy artichokes and the aioli was good.

I’m always on the lookout for a good burger, and since we’re living on a budget lately, the “Encore Burger with Gruyere-Bacon-Blue Cheese Compote” for $10 seemed like a good choice.  That way, I could try those award-winning fries with the burger. The burger itself was good and cooked to my specifications.  The compote was okay, but not great.  The amount of Gruyere and blue cheese overwhelm the bacon and these tastes are not, in my opinion, a good pairing with the fries.

What makes the fries stand out is the hot mustard sauce with which they are drenched.  The fries are nicely done shoestring fries, and the hot mustard (picture a thinner version of the Chinese hot mustard served with egg rolls) is great.  But again, the combination of the hot mustard sauce and the compote on the burger is not good.

Jen tried the “New England Style Baked Scallops, White Wine Butter and Ritz Crumb”.  Jen also ordered the seasonal vegetable, which that night was a roasted eggplant in Miso sauce.  Jen enjoyed the baked scallops, but had to avoid the Ritz crumb topping, as it was apparently too salty for her to really taste the remainder of the dish.  Her roasted eggplant was really very good, but best eaten immediately after it arrived as it lost it’s luster once the eggplant cooled.  When the eggplant arrived it was light and crunchy but as it cooled it became more rubbery.

The food at Encore is good, not great and is pretty pricey.  Jen’s scallops were $20 and my $10 burger was one of the cheapest things on the menu.  Don’t go here on a budget.

If you’re someone who doesn’t mind a lot of noise while you are dining, then feel free to try Encore.  For Jen and I, we escaped as soon as we could to the quiet of Tattered Cover after our dinner.  On the other hand, if you have a friend who drones on and on about themselves or other boring matters, you might want to meet them at Encore; you won’t be able to hear them over the noise…

P.S. on the Compost

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 | The Daily Special | No Comments

I’m feeling a little badly today that I didn’t make it clear enough that Mike and my dad built, by hand, my compost bin.  It took them three long days, multiple trips to the hardware store, and Mike driving back and forth to Colorado Springs three days in a row to complete the bin.  The bin has no sharp edges, thanks to a lot of router work by Mike, and has very little metal in it – real woodworking at it’s best.  Oh, and there was an incident with a chisel, so Mike also had to get five stiches to make my beautiful bin.  He even continued working with gauze on his thumb all day after the chisel incident and then didn’t go to get the stitches until we got home.  Now that’s a wonderful husband!  Thanks Mike!

You can put your eggshells in there…

Monday, November 24th, 2008 | The Daily Special | 4 Comments

Check it out! I have a compost bin!

Check out the beautiful compost...

This weekend Mike and my dad (along with Mike’s friends Andrew and Matt) installed my new compost bin.  It’s really awesome!  And really pretty too.  All handmade with redwood; you wouldn’t think of throwing old vegetables in there it’s so beautiful!

Such a pretty compost bin!

This was supposed to be a surprise Christmas present for me, but it’s kind of large and my dad wanted to get it done so that we could put our fall leaves in it and get that compost brewing.  It has two bins and removable slats in the front of each bin to make it easier to turn the compost and get it out when I need it.

Of course the nasty HOA says that we have to have a lid on the compost bin, so Mike will need to make that at some point.  But, we put it on the side of the house where the next door neighbors rarely go and hopefully we can maintain the compost well enough that it won’t smell.

Just another (slightly expensive) step that we are taking to reduce our household trash waste.  And next summer I can use the compost for the vegetable garden I have planned.  Yeah for compost!

I can get my toys myself, thank you…

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 | Anna | 2 Comments

Every morning when Anna wakes up, after she has been fed and changed, we play on the floor in her room.  I pick out a few toys from the vast collection we have and give them to Anna. Here she is playing with her new cloth book.

Yummy cloth book

Apparently Anna has decided that she would like to choose which toys she plays with in the morning.  To this end, she has mastered pulling out the drawers in her bookcase where her toys are stored.  As shown here:

Getting the toys

That blur there is her little kicky legs, which are always moving…

Once she’s pulled out the drawer she likes to root around in there and pull out toys of interest.  I think the caterpillar was looking especially good this day:

This looks like a good toy

But in the end, the decision is made that really the whole drawer needs to be taken out and gone through.  What you see below is the beginning of a process that will end with all of the toys out of the drawer and spread on the floor around Anna.  (To see all the photos of this process click on “Anna’s Mom’s Pictures” to go to my Flickr photostream.)

Let's just get all the toys out

My mother will especially love to hear this, as there is a story of how I used to like to do the same thing, only with her underwear drawer…   Sometimes, when I tell my mom about Anna’s latest activity (keeping me up at night, rolling over on the changing table, etc.) I swear I can hear under my mom’s laugh her saying very quietly to herself, “My wish came true! You did get a kid just like you!”

4 Years!

Thursday, November 13th, 2008 | The Daily Special | 3 Comments

Yep, it’s official, I have 96 more years left to spend with this guy… Let’s hope that there’s a renewal clause at the end of 100 years.

I’m an Obama Mama

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 | Updates | 1 Comment

I’ll admit that I am a cynic at heart; I generally assume that the worst will happen and I don’t really have a lot of trust in others.  So when Barack Obama began his campaign for the presidency I really didn’t think much would come of his run.   I also thought “anyone could come out and say “we need change” and the country would be excited about it.”

As the months passed though, I began to get more and more hopeful that Obama might just win.  I began to dare to hope that real change would come.

Before Anna was born I did worry about global warming and the fate of our planet, but in a sort of “I hope someone else does something about it” sort of way.  Once Anna was born I began to realize that we all need to do something about it and began to fret about what sort of world Anna would have when she grew up.  Would she see snow on Christmas?  Would there be enough water?  Would the world she lived in be like the scary place in “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”?

I started doing little things, for Anna, and for the planet.  I started turning off the water while I was brushing my teeth thinking “That’s Anna’s water.” I started driving less, recycling, and working towards composting.  But I knew that I couldn’t do this myself, so my excitement about Obama grew when he declared that he would like to follow Al Gore’s 10 year plan to solve the climate crisis. 

I understand that I and everyone around me will need to make sacrifices to make this happen, but I need this for Anna.

So I became an Obama Mama. Of course, being a mama, I don’t have a lot of resources… I donated what I could, put a “Red Hot Mama for Obama” button on Anna’s diaper bag, joined the Liberal Ladies of Highlands Ranch, went to a “Women for Obama” rally, and when they opened an Obama campaign office in Highlands Ranch, I signed up to bring in meals for the staff. It wasn’t a lot, but it was what I could do with a limited amount of time and energy.

Last Tuesday night, my sister, who is an Obama mama with a lot more free time now that Brendan is in pre-school, called me right before Anna’s bedtime. She told me that they had kicked everyone out of the Obama office and told them all to go stand on a corner and hold Obama signs. This being VERY conservative Highlands Ranch, my sister and the woman who had joined her on a particular corner were getting anything but a warm response. They had been called “terrorists”, “socialists” and had gotten called all sorts of other things not printable here.

So I drove out to join them, knowing that probably Mike would have a hard time putting Anna down without me (sorry Mike), but thinking that since this was election day, I needed to do this now. My sister and her friend Susan were pretty quiet, simply holding their signs up for the cars to see, and were still drawing insults from passers-by.

When I joined them and began to yell “Obama”, “Mama’s for Obama” and “Vote for Change”, things improved slightly. There were lots of honks and waves from motorists, along with the usual middle fingers, thumbs-down and other expletives. One mother had her son (who looked about 8 years old) yell “NOBama” out the window at us. Nice! The weirdest thing we got yelled at us? “Vote for Obama if you want to give your money to someone who isn’t even really black.” Yep, thanks for proving that you are a) Stupid, B) Racist, and C) Unable to make a left turn and come up with a good insult at the same time…

My throat was really sore the next day from all the yelling (and the cold that I subsequently got), but it was worth it. I am still a cynic and I do believe that Obama will not be the perfect president that I want for him to be, but I have hope that he will do a few things well, make progress in the fight against climate change, have the humility to admit it when he does things wrong and also know that “decider” is not a word and isn’t what he is anyway…

Anna’s New Quilt

Monday, November 10th, 2008 | The Daily Special | 3 Comments

When I was pregnant my mom told me that she wanted to make some quilts for the baby.  Together we looked at some ideas and settled on two: one bright color block quilt and one blue and yellow quilt with a bunny on it.  For the first few months of life babies don’t see very well and what they do see best are bright colors, so we thought the color block quilt would be a nice thing for the baby to have on the wall.  And mom and I love blue and yellow, so we decided the blue and yellow one could be the baby’s sleeping quilt.

When mom got sick the quilts were put on hold and for a long time my mom wasn’t well enough to work on the quilts.  But as she progressively got better and better she was able to get back to working (hand stitching) on the quilts.  Today, as a testament to how much better my mom is, Anna got her color block quilt.

Here is Anna rolling around on her new quilt:

Anna on the new quilt

Beautiful eh?  And the back is nice too; a lovely purple flannel with trees and sheep.  Here is Anna trying out the soft flannel side:

There are more pictures of Anna and the new quilt on Flickr; just click on the “Anna’s Mom’s Pictures” link. Thanks mom, we love the quilt!

The Halloween Caterpillar

Sunday, November 9th, 2008 | Mom Stuff | 2 Comments

For Halloween we dressed Anna up in a sweet little pink caterpillar costume.  We liked the fact that the costume would be warm, since Halloween is generally our first snow in Colorado.  Thanks to global warming it was instead 78 degrees on Halloween, but I digress.

Mike took a bunch of pictures of Anna in her Halloween costume and here is one of my favorites.

It was getting close to her bedtime by the time we put her in the costume, so we couldn’t get her to smile…  There are more pictures of her in her costume on Mike’s Flickr photostream, just click on “Anna’s Dad’s Pictures”

Anna is 7 months old now! Wow! She’s sitting up now; if we put her in a sitting position she’ll stay there on her own for quite a while unless something distracts her and then down she goes… She keeps doing tummy tucks to try to sit up on her own, but she hasn’t gotten there yet.

I took some cute pictures of her the other day after I put her in a snuggly little brown and pink outfit.  There’s plenty more of those on my photostream too, just click on “Anna’s Mom’s Pictures”.

7 months old and sitting up!

The Main Attraction

Thursday, November 6th, 2008 | The Daily Special | 2 Comments

I have been reminded lately by many people that Anna is the main attraction for them to my blog, and most importantly, pictures of Anna.

For those people who like to view lots of pictures of Anna I have updated the links (look to the right) with links called “Anna’s Mom’s Pictures” and “Anna’s Dad’s Pictures”.  These are links to our Flickr collections of Anna pictures.

I’ll try to keep my Flickr pictures updated so that I upload every time I take the pictures off my camera.  I take a lot of pictures of Anna (as well as video) so this should be fairly often. Enjoy!