[Note: scroll to the end of this post to see the restaurant list.]

The Allentown location of Carrabba’s Italian Grill has gone completely smoke-free!  Kim and I went there for dinner the other night, and when I asked (as I always do) to be seated as far from the smoking section as possible, the hostess replied that there’s no longer a smoking section!  Tears of joy streamed down my face.  And just when I thought that the day couldn’t get any better, they had swordfish on the specials menu.  It was amazing, as swordfish tends to be.

Carrabba’s has been one of my favorite restaurants for almost 10 years, and the only bad thing about it was the cigarette smoke.  With that issue resolved, I intend to visit Carrabba’s much more often.  I called the manager the next day to express my support for the decision, and to ask what made them do it; he said that more and more people were complaining about the smoke, and the majority of their patrons are non-smokers, so it was a good business decision for them to make.

Indeed, nearly 80% of Pennsylvanians are non-smokers.  It’s always been absurd that smokers were allowed to foul the air with toxins in public places, but it’s especially absurd in light of how outnumbered they are.  That being the case, the Pennsylvania legislature had better get their act together and pass a statewide smoking ban this fall.  Not only is it obviously the correct thing to do since second-hand smoke kills people by the thousands, but it’s also what the vast majority of the population wants.

If the government fails to take responsibility in this area, then I sure hope that more restaurants will do it themselves.  Carrabba’s is currently the only real restaurant to have gone smoke-free in our area.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, all the other restaurants that we visit still allow smoking: Applebee’s, Chili’s, Grotto Pizza, the Olive Garden, Outback Steakhouse, Red Lobster, Ruby Tuesday’s, TGI Friday’s.  (The website smokefreevalley.org has a list of smoke-free restaurants, but the vast majority of them are McDonald’s, Burger King, etc -- not real restaurants.)

Smoke-Free Restaurant List:

Carrabba’s on Cedar Crest Boulevard in Allentown; smoke-free as of Sept 2007.

Bravo at the Lehigh Valley Mall in Whitehall; smoke-free since its opening in Sept 2007.

Coca-Cola vs Pepsi.  ’nuff said.

Cheshire has been running around here chasing a fly that was buzzing along the wall.  He finally caught the fly while it was hanging around a small table lamp.  He batted at the fly with his paws until it mostly stopped moving, and then he ate it.  Now he’s running around crying because he can’t find the fly.

It must be extremely difficult to make good pizza.  I say that because the vast majority of pizza shops I’ve been to have sold pizza that is somewhere between horrible and "not horrible, but not worth getting again."  In fact, I can only think of 4 pizza places whose pizza is good:

Grotto Pizza in Delaware and northeast PA
Mack & Manco at the Jersey shore
Lorenzo’s in Philly
Domino’s thin crust pizza

What makes those pizzas good is that they are thin and somewhat crunchy, in addition to having sauce and cheese that is between good and great.  (Though I haven’t been to Lorenzo’s in a while -- is their crust actually crunchy?)

The thing I don’t understand is how dozens upon dozens of other pizza joints -- virtually all of them, in my experience -- get this so wrong.  The crust is almost always soft/soggy/floppy, and the sauce and cheese are between "eh" and "gross."  The only conclusion I can see is that it must be really hard to make good pizza.

But having 4 good pizza places is better than having none, right?  Yes, but the problem is that 3 of those 4 places have no locations within an hour of our house.  We do live out in the sticks, and there’s not much of anything particularly close to us, but guess what’s within 5 minutes: not one but two utterly crappy pizza shops.

Kim says that maybe other people actually like the kind of pizza that all these shops serve.  That seems unbelievable to me.  Is it just me?

Kim made this last night and it was amazing.  Bacon + pineapple + shrimp is a winning combination.

When we got Cheshire a few weeks ago, we were required to purchase a bag of the same food that he was eating at the pet store.  This was to make sure that he continued to eat during the stressful and scary transition to a new environment without his feline siblings that he’d grown up with to that point.

But for the first 2 days, he didn’t eat (though he had no problem drinking water).  And I didn’t want to give him wet food, because I thought once he had that, he’d definitely never want to eat the dry food.  But Kim was worried and just wanted him to eat something, so we eventually gave him some wet food, which he fangoriously devoured in about 3 seconds and promptly threw up again.  And I think he might have thrown up one more time, but after that, he was fine.

Meanwhile I started doing some research into the wet food vs. dry food issue.  I had never really thought about it before, but I’d always heard that cats need dry food, one of the reasons being that it’s good for keeping their teeth clean.  But in my research I read that that’s hogwash, because cats don’t even chew their food up; they just crunch it one time and swallow the pieces, so there is very little friction with the teeth which would be required for the "keep the teeth clean" theory.  And furthermore, dry food is something like 40% carbohydrates, so it eventually just turns to sugar on their teeth, which means it’s actually worse for their teeth.

This brings me to the second and bigger issue: cats shouldn’t be eating dry food period.  Cats are carnivores; their bodies are designed to eat and digest meat, and they never naturally eat vegetables or grains.  When I think about this now, it’s entirely obvious, and the only reason I can figure for why it never occurred to me before is that I never had a kitten before and thus never had to worry about what to feed it.

In the wild, big cats eat big animals (deer, zebras, etc) and small cats eat small animals like mice.  From what I’ve read, this natural diet gives them something like 5% carbs, and wet cat food is similarly proportioned, plus wet cat food being mostly meat has all the stuff that a carnivore needs.  Contrast that to dry food, which is around 40% carbs, and is mostly grains and vegetables, which a cat would never naturally eat.

As cats get older and many of them have diet-related diseases, often the first thing the vet does is switch them to a lower-carb (i.e. wet food) diet.  From what I’ve read, vets are coming around to the realization that cats should have been eating that kind of diet all along.

Of course, you need to take a grain of salt with the things you read online, but I’ve found quite a few different sites recommending an all-wet-food diet.  And today I had to take Cheshire to the vet for shots, and she actually said the same thing.  That, coupled with the fact that it’s common sense to feed a carnivore meat, makes it pretty clear to me that it’s the right way to go.

(And we were pretty terrified to discover that the food we’ve been feeding Cheshire is one of the dozens of brands that are part of a massive pet-food recall, but fortunately it looks like none of our cans/pouches are in the recalled batches, and Cheshire seems perfectly healthy in any case.  I asked the vet today and she pointed out that Friskies and Fancy Feast are two of the (few) brands not part of the recall, so we’re going to stock up on them for now.)

I’m not much of a fish eater, because I’ve never liked the fishy taste that they have.  I’ve always liked other seafood like crab, lobster, shrimp, and scallops, and I’ve liked shark and swordfish the few times I’ve had the opportunity to try them, but the more standard fish have never appealed to me.

But it was long ago that I formed this anti-fish bias, so yesterday I decided to give fish another try.  Kim and I went out to the Blue Mountain Summit restaurant and I got salmon.  I could smell the fishy smell from a mile away though, and I didn’t really like it.  The waitress explained that salmon is probably the fishiest of the fish on the menu, which included flounder and haddock.

We watched some Emeril last night and he said that you shouldn’t really be able to detect that fishy smell as long as the fish is fresh enough.  So, was my salmon just not very fresh?  Which fish should I try if I want less of that fishy smell/taste?

Wow, quiet times around here, no?  I know it’s time to make a new post when I get one of those "are you still alive??" emails from my mom.

I’ve been extremely busy with work, which I’m extremely thankful for.  July was my most profitable month to date, and business -- both sales and custom work -- seems to be steadily picking up.  Don’t get me wrong: my income is still no match for my student loan bills, but I’m making way more money doing web programming than I was making as a PC technician.

A couple weeks ago, Dan imparted unto me the secret to grilling with charcoal.  My problem has been that the coals are always too cool to put a nice charred exterior on meats, yet ironically I still can’t avoid making things more dry and well-done than I’d like.  Dan’s tip was to spread the coals out unevenly (after they turn gray, of course), so that they are just a single layer deep on one side of the grill, but stacked up on the other side.  That way one side of the grill is extremely hot and puts those nice grill-lines on your steaks, but you can move them off to the other cooler side after that.

To wrap things up, I’d like to say that Groove Salad on SomaFM is a great internet radio station.  They call it: "A nicely chilled plate of ambient beats and grooves."  It’s largely instrumental, and on the occasional vocal track, I usually enjoy the vocals too.  I listen to it pretty much all day every day.

Today I discovered that Planters sells a nut mix called "Pistachio Lover’s Mix" that contains just pistachios (shell-free no less), cashews, and almonds.  That’s what I call mixed nut perfection.  It’s about time somebody made some mixed nuts without all those weird nuts that nobody likes (filberts?? come on).

Also, while researching this post, I came across this gem of a webpage.  Be sure to read the whole thing.  It’s surely one of the most freakish pages there is.

Tonight Kim and I ate at this new restaurant called Boston’s Sports Bar and Grill.  We were eyeing up their BBQ Chicken Pizza but it had cilantro on it, and we couldn’t figure out what that was.  I thought it was somehow like parsley, but wasn’t really sure.

I asked the waitress, and she said that it was, in fact, parsley, and she even said "you can’t really taste it."  So we got the pizza with the cilantro, and while it’s similar in appearance to parsley, that’s where the similarities end.  The taste is very strong, which sucks because its taste is the taste of soap.  After a few bites of it I realized where I’d tasted that before: in certain salsas.  In fact whenever I buy salsa I buy ChiChi’s brand because Tostitos’ salsa tastes like soap; it’s all so clear now that I know why.

So I vote that we ban cilantro.  Admittedly, it’s not quite the most offensive food known to man -- a distinction which I reserve for gorgonzola cheese -- but it’s pretty nasty.

The pizza itself was pretty good, but the crust was entirely tasteless.  It was strange; they’re all about their "gourmet" pizzas but the crust was not unlike cardboard.  The other strange thing was the french onion soup that I got as an appetizer: the cheese on it was some of the best french-onion-soup cheese I’ve ever had, but in the soup itself, in addition to there being the normal onions, there were soggy breaded onion rings.  Normally french onion soup has bread or croutons in it, and they get soggy and it’s all good.  But the soggy onion rings were just nasty.

OK not quite, but Bob Evans is pretty good, and tonight I had a meal there which was really amazing: pot roast hash.

This is hash browns, topped with pot roast, and then topped with eggs (cooked to order, i.e. overlight) and cheddar cheese.  As I read the description, I was thinking, "Wow, this sounds really good" until I got to the eggs.  Then I thought, "Eggs?  Hmmm..." 

Nonetheless, I pressed on with my order, eggs and all.  And it turned out to be delicious.  Of course steak & eggs is a very common breakfast dish, but I’ve never gotten that, and pot roast isn’t quite the same as steak.  So it seemed like an unlikely combination of foods at first.  But they went together delectably, and I loved every bite.

I’ll probably be getting this almost every time we go to Bob Evans from now on.

When you go to Italian restaurants like the Olive Garden or Maggiano’s, they serve you these huge salads with literally two or three tiny tomato slices.  Not two or three tomatoes, two or three slices, for the entire salad.

How is it that Italian restaurants, establishments that owe their very existence to the power of the tomato (in sauce form), are so consistently skimpy when it comes to tomatoes in salad?

Last night, Kim took me out to Bravo! for our one-year anniversary.  We had never been there before, and I really loved it.  It’s like a more fancy version of Carrabba’s or the Olive Garden, with more space (higher ceilings, and tables farther apart) and completely non-smoking.

I got the "catch of the day" which was swordfish, and it was delicious.  Swordfish is the only fish that I like (well, and shark) because it doesn’t taste fishy like most fish.

Working backwards: the salad was also fantastic.  It was a "chopped" salad, which meant that there were no huge pieces of lettuce or whole slices of tomatoes or cucumbers; everything was sliced & diced small enough that you could eat it by the forkful without getting it all over the sides of your mouth because the pieces are too big.  (OK, so maybe I’m the only one with that problem.)  Also, the italian dressing was wonderful, maybe even better than the Olive Garden’s, which I also love.

Finally, the initial bread with dipping oil.  This is one of my favorite things to eat ever, and here it was as good if not better than at Carrabba’s.  The only thing Carrabba’s has on Bravo! is that the bread wasn’t warm at Bravo!

The one negative comment I have about Bravo! is that above the sink in the bathroom, there is a sign that says:

EMPLOYEE MUST "WASH HANDS"

Aside from the fact that that’s just grammatically stupid, I’m fairly bothered by the fact that the people preparing my food didn’t actually have to wash their hands, and instead can get away with some kind of finger-quotey mock rendition of hand-washing.

Actually, it IS the chicken.  Kim made cornish game hens for dinner and they were sooo good.  My mom made them every once in a while as we were growing up and I always loved them.  Despite having never even eaten one before a couple months ago, let alone cooking one, Kim served up a mean couple of little chickens tonight  : )

Kim made homemade chicken pot pie for dinner tonight and it was SO good.  The only pot pie I’d ever had before was the frozen kind, in which the chicken and vegetables are just kind of eh: not very fresh, not very nicely textured, not very good.  So I never really liked pot pie before, and had told Kim this, and I went into tonight’s endeavor not expecting to be too crazy about it.  But it was amazing, and now I know I do like pot pie as long as it’s fresh.

...summer, summer, summer-tiiime, oooh the summertime... doot doot pause doot doot...

Anyway, Kim and I had some watermelon yesterday.  If you’re ever not sure what season it is, that’s one good way to check.  If you’re eating fresh watermelon it’s probably summer.

It was delicious too, and that is the main point I’m trying to make.  Other fruits must be so jealous of watermelon.  I like most fruit, but there’s really no comparison.  I mean what other fruit is four times as big as your head, is hard and dry on the outside, and is hiding a cool, juicy, sweet, red paradise on the inside?

I also love raspberries and strawberries, but they are still no match for watermelon.

That’s right, Pgh.

After ranting the other day about not being able to find Crest’s Icy Mint Striped flavor of toothpaste anywhere for a month, I found it at a Shop ’n Save the very next day.  That’s still the only place I’ve seen it in, including two other Shop ’n Save locations, in the past month.

There are two snacks that I really want that I can’t find anywhere though: one is Golden Krackle, which is a Greek/Mediterranean flour-based chip, and is sold at Giant (not to be confused with Giant Eagle) and Wegmans back east.  I love the Garlic and the Cheese & Oregano flavors.  They’re sold in thin white cardboard boxes that are about one foot square and 1.5 inches deep, and they can be hard to find even in stores that do carry them; they’re usually not with normal chips/snacks, but rather by the deli or produce areas.  The second snack is Utz Pub Mix, which I’ve ranted about before, and can’t seem to find anywhere anymore :(

But on a happier note, Kim and I bought an old-fashioned push lawn mower, the kind with no motor, that instead has a set of curved blades that spin when you push the thing.  It’s really fun to use, though probably not as much fun if you have a big yard.  The only drawback is that it doesn’t mulch the clippings, but if you go over the lawn a second time, mowing over the trails of clippings, that mulches them pretty well.

The recipe for toby stew is hilarious!

So it’s now the season of "Lent" in the Catholic church (not that that applies to me, because I’m not Catholic, I’m Christian), and everywhere you go, you can find restaurant signs that say "Lenten Special."  Because the Catholic church forbids eating meat on Fridays during Lent, and because some Catholics abstain from meat completely during Lent, the Lenten specials offered by restaurants are typically fish dishes.  You’ll even see fast food joints offering fish -- as if fast food weren’t gross enough, now you can have fast fish.

Well tonight I drove past a Taco Bell and saw this sign: "Lenten Special: 2 Bean Burritos."

I’m not obsessive about cleanliness or neatness in general, but when it comes to anything that I’m going to ingest, eat off of, or which will TOUCH any such thing (i.e. people’s hands who are preparing things I will eat), I definitely am obsessive about cleanliness.  However I wasn’t always this way, and as a kid, I put a coin in my mouth at least one time.  I have no idea why, really.  But for some reason I distinctly remember the taste and feeling of it even now.  I also have no idea why that is, nor why I thought of it while driving yesterday.

My little sister IMed me this the other day, about our cat CJ:

Maria: hi
Maria: there was a spider on the ceiling and mom wacked it on the floor and CJ batted it around for a while untill it stopped movin (it wasn’t dead, it was just scared) and then he licked it up. a live spider!!!
Maria: eeeeeeeeeeeew!

"A live spider!!!"  That cracks me up  : )

In other news that isn’t funny or random, I fixed a problem on Kim’s notebook yesterday, for which she sent it back to HP twice and they did nothing but wipe the hard drive and leave the problem intact.  The problem was that it would sporadically just shut down for no reason at all, and then refuse to turn back on.  They apparently couldn’t identify the cause of problem, which is strange because it’s a common problem with notebook computers.  It stems from the fact that over time, as the receptacle for the power plug gets jostled and worn, the solder joints connecting it to the motherboard start to weaken and break.  It gets to the point that if you turn the power plug a certain way, it works fine, but bump it just a tad, and it breaks the contact.  Eventually, if it goes long enough without being repaired, there is no contact at all unless you press/hold the plug to one side, or up or down or something, and when you let go, it loses the contact immediately.

We disassembled the whole thing, which with notebooks is always a little tricky, and then I re-soldered the 3 connections for the power jack.  But upon re-assembling and testing, it was no different.  Which was pretty frustrating because the disassembly and re-assembly is quite a process -- not that it’s hard, but it’s sort of tedious because there are so many screws and different pieces which aren’t standard at all from one notebook to the next.  But I ended up doing it 3 times so by now I’m pretty good at it :)

The second time, I removed the jack completely and just soldered two wires directly into the motherboard.  This didn’t work either.  My last resort was to try maybe soldering the top of the board, too; instead of just soldering the pins when they come through the bottom, I now put some on the top too.  This was tough because there’s so little space and so many components right around the jack, in addition to the fact that the jack itself is tall and there isn’t much room to get the tip of the iron into the space around it.  I replaced the crusty old tip on my soldering iron with a nice pointy new one, soldered the tops of the pins, and that fixed the problem.

I’m pretty excited that it finally worked, because the only other source of power is the battery, which charges in the laptop through this power connection.  So basically the computer would be trash, even though the rest of the system is mostly fine, and it’s decently spec’d too -- 700MHz PIII, 384MB memory, 40gig drive, etc.  So I was really glad to be able to save the poor lappy; it’d be such a shame to have to get rid of it over something like this.

These are my top-ten lists for 2004... except that none of them have ten items.

Marcona almonds: these are big spanish almonds.  I get them at Wegmans, they come in a little plastic container with a little bit of canola oil and sea salt.  I guess they’re just nuts, but they are delicious.

UTZ Pub Mix: "A Savory Blend of Crunchy Snacks."  Also known as "Phat Mix" in some quarters.  I didn’t used to like this when my brother Brian would get it by the pound from snack vendor stands at malls etc, but this UTZ version is really good.  Anyway, from the bottom label, it consists of: Honey Mustard & Cheddar Cheese Twistix, Worcestershire Rye Chips, Honey Roasted Sesame Chips, Oriental Rice Crackers, Pretzel Stix, Nacho Bagel Chips.

Wegmans "Famous Chocolate Chip Mini Cookies."  Just what it says -- little chocolate chip cookies that are so good they are (or should be) famous.  They are soft.  (This is actually from 2002 but I didn’t do a best-of list then, so shut it.)

Wegmans Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies.  Peanut butter cookies with chocolate chips.  Sorta soft.  These might be my favorite cookies of all time.  Also a 2002-debuting item.

Moose Munch: carmel popcorn, some of which is chocolate-covered, and also including nuts (cashews and walnuts depending on where you get it).  Quite possibly the overall best sweet snack of all time.

Albums: an asterisk (*) indicates an album that wasn’t actually released in 2004, but I didn’t find out about it or get it till 2004.  These are in no particular order.

Taking Back Sunday / "Where You Want To Be" / indie|screamo

Emery / "The Weak’s End" / hard rock|indie|screamo

Jimmy Eat World / "Futures" / modern rock|indie

Straylight Run / "Straylight Run" / indie|dual-vocals-male+female

Pigeon John / "Pigeon John is Dating Your Sister" * / rap|hip-hop|not gangsta|not evil

The Alpha Conspiracy / "Aura" / ambient|techno|IDM, maybe somewhat dance

Telefon Tel Aviv / "Map of What is Effortless" / ambient|techno|IDM, but not dance

Freemartin / "An Escape Seems Appropriate" / fast pop-punk|indie

My American Heart / "My American Heart" / modern rock|indie|screamo

Rainer Maria / "Long Knives Drawn" * / indie|rock|female vocals

Beth Orton / "Daybreaker" * / semi-folksy pop|female vocals

The Early November / "The Room’s Too Cold" * / indie|pop-punk|acoustic

The Starting Line / "Say it Like You Mean it" * / pop-punk|indie

...is Kim, of course  ( :

I want to like Applebee’s.  I really do.  And it actually has a lot going for it: usually not smoky, usually not too long of a wait, clean bathrooms with automatic paper towels and a trash can behind the door, so you don’t have to touch the handle of the door, which 75% of men touch after using the bathroom and NOT washing their hands...

But I’ve only been to Applebee’s a handful of times in my life, and every single time there is a problem with the order.  I usually get steak when I go out, and the steak here is always overcooked; I order medium-rare and it comes out medium-well.  To be fair many places just can’t seem to get steak right, however a few places like Olive Garden and Outback consistently get it right, i.e. they cook it the way you order it.

Tonight was especially ridiculous, though.  I ordered a steak with mushrooms, and this particular steak comes with peppers and onions, which I asked them to omit.  The waitress noted all this.  But the steak came out -- overcooked but that is no surprise -- without mushrooms.  But at least they correctly omitted the peppers and onions, right?  Until I got to the bottom of my mashed potatoes and discovered that THE PEPPERS AND ONIONS WERE UNDERNEATH THE POTATOES.  You have got to be kidding me.

I also ordered a side-dish of vegetables.  These came out raw.  Not "just a little cooked."  They were not cooked.  I like my vegetables soft, but I had Kim verify because she likes hers crunchy.  She agreed these weren’t merely crunchy, they were raw.

Back to the mushroom situation.  Kim ordered a chicken dish that comes with mushrooms and cheese, but she asked to have it without the mushrooms.  Sure enough, "hidden" underneath a few slices of melted cheese, there were mounds of mushrooms.  Not only that, but literally two of them were sauteed; the other 10-15 or so were just raw mushrooms.

Every time I go to Applebee’s, I think hey, it’s been a while, they’ve probably gotten their act together by now.  I’ll give it a shot.  At some point I’m going to have to stop pretending.