Cheerio Necklace

William had fun today making a Cheerio necklace with dental floss.  We've found "Reach" floss is the best for little hands because it's stiff enough to handle without dropping the "beads" of cereal.

"I can wear it and eat it!  Mmmm!"

Warm Pasta Salad

We have this quite a bit around here. The recipe is more or less this:

Ingredients:
1 pound of whole wheat pasta
1 bag of organic broccoli crowns
1 clove of garlic
1/8 cup olive oil
4 oz. asiago, parmesan blend shredded cheese (or can use other grated cheese-Romano, etc.)
1 can of olives
1 pound of cherry tomatoes
handful of fresh chopped basil
sprinkle of smoked sea salt
sprinkle of freshly ground black pepper

Instructions:
-Make the pasta according to package directions. While that is boiling,
-Steam the broccoli crowns in water for 2 minutes
-Chop the garlic, saute it in the olive oil and smash it up a bit in the oil to release the flavor. (Be careful not to burn!)
-Drain the broccoli, then add it to the frying pan so that the oil/garlic mixture coats the broccoli, throw in mixing bowl

-Open up the can of olives, and slice them in half. Add to mixing bowl
-Chop the cherry tomatoes in half, add them to mixing bowl, along with cheese and freshly chopped basil.
-Pasta should be done right about now. Drain it, add to mixing bowl.

-Toss everything together, sprinkle with smoked sea salt (Trader Joe's has it) and fresh black pepper

We eat this hot but also cold the next day! And there are a million variations depending on what I have in the fridge & cabinets. The above is the variation we had last night. Also try: sundried tomatoes, feta cheese, kalamata olives and oregano with the pasta & garlic broccoli.

Mmmm salad!

I just got back from lunch with Mona & Peter and Lauren at Tender Greens. We were deciding where to go, and I'd wanted to try that place. My parents have this rule when they're in a new town, they look for the restaurant with the longest line and go there, figuring it must be good. By that logic, this should be one of the best places around. And it was delicious! I ordered a large grilled vegetable salad, and when I saw how big the portions were, I told Mona that Ryan would be having the leftovers for lunch tomorrow. Sorry, darling, I ate it all myself. It was that scrumptious. The 8 kinds of grilled vegetables were not the usual boring eggplant, peppers, onion and mushroom. I think I ate grilled parsnips, fennel, cauliflower, and some other things that just blended in and all tasted delicious. At $10 a plate it was more than I usually spend on lunches but yet it was so good I didn't mind.

side note: they need to do a better job with their google rankings. i couldn't find their site by a search, i just found a bunch of reviews of the place, but then i found it on the back of their takeout menu. it's also unreadable unless you have the latest flash player, which this laptop i'm borrowing right now doesn't have.

2 more bite the dust

I posted previously about San Genaro closing their Culver City location. Tonight we decided to go out for pizza and encountered 2 more closures of favorite places. The Mann Culver movie theater which we enjoyed walking to, and Red Brick pizza, which was okay pizza, not as good as Victor Junior's or The Coop's, but still pretty good. And we liked the gelato and the televisions at every table. We think the new CPK nearby drove business away. Anyway, both Red Brick and Mann were closed and in both instances, we were just there a few days ago, no sign of impending doom. :(

We tried to go a pizza place on Motor, Mamma's, that we have always wanted to try, but then we remembered why we haven't when we couldn't get parking again, so ended up at Overland Cafe instead. It's been pouring rain here since this afternoon, so we couldn't walk from our place with the baby.

We decided to make a mental list of all of the local restaurants that we like(the ones still in business!) that we can walk to, and here it is: LA Dijionaise, The Coop, Victor Junior's, Versailles, Natalie Thai, Overland Cafe, the sushi place we can't think of the name of on Clarington, and that's all I can think of off the top of my head, will add more later!

Culver City has gotten