Four shows on the Food Network alone, 30 Minute Meals. $40 A Day, Inside Dish, Tasty Travels and now Rachel Ray the Magazine: www.rachelraymag.com
Tonight we (Donna) decided on a whim to head on down to HHI early, so we quick like a bunny packed the car and heaed southeast. We were already going to go down for the weekend anyway, but plan was to eat a breakfast of oversized muffins at the New Moon before driving down. With the tempuratures in the low 70’s at quiting time it seemed a waste to not start the trip with the top down, besides traveling two lane blacktop under a clear sky and moss draped trees is awesome.
A quick trip downtown to get cash from the magic wall and a loop around the busy part of town lead us to New Ellenton for dinner. Pickings are slim in this small bump in the road between Aiken and the bomb plant, heck even the Huddle House closed due to lack of business, which meant the only choices we had were hot dogs at a quick stop or Popeyes. We chose Popeyes hoping that the service here would be better than the one we have in Aiken. Nope.
I had a Catfish Deluxe sandwhich which was not realy as deluxe as the picture on the menu board would have you beleive and Donna had the Butterfly Shrimp Dinner. We split her french fries, bicuit and drink. After we finished she proclaimed, that was too much fried food. So told her for the rest of the weekend we wouldn’t have any more fried food, we would be sticking to the 3 B’s. Baked, broiled and….I didn’t have three. We both paused trying to come up with the third B but couldn’t do it. So I restated my position, “The 3 B’s, baked and broiled!”
A couple miles down the road I thought of the third, boiled.
Spent another day learning stuff that we’ll never use at GibbsCAM school. It was not a total waste, although we will never be doing exactly what we covered today, we may see something similar in the future. Plus he more we monkey with the program the better we get with the interface and will feel more comfortable using it. And a dull day at training beats a good day at work anytime.
Tonight after school we headed over to the Concord Mills mall area. After a brief shopping excursion into the Bass Pro Shop we headed over to Razzo’s Cajun Cafe for dinner. The food and atmosphere when we visited in October were so great we just had to make a return trip this time. We asked to sit in Madeline (our waitress from last time’s) section, but were told she didn’t work there anymore. Oh well, we were seated in a booth just two away from where we were seated before. The place was pretty quiet tonight compared to last time and our server turned out to be a red hot little number named Pepper. Mark and I would have enjoyed flirting more, if we were into young men. No kidding, the guy’s name was Pepper. He said he was named after a famous baseball player from St. Louis in the 30’s, Pepper Martin.
Even though our plan of getting Madeline to hold up a “I miss you Mark” sign and having her picture taken with us in the booth, to email back to the other Mark who was with us last time, was foiled, we are still planning a trip back to the restaurant in two weeks when we return for our last training session because the food is that good. We just won’t necessarily be asking to sit in Pepper’s section.
Mark and I are off on another two-day training adventure in Albemarle, NC. We are saying in our usual Holiday Inn Express (Mmmm…Cinnamon Buns.) and this time I won’t be able to complain about the parking lot lights interfering with my beauty sleep. After my complaint at breakfast last trip, Mark cued me into the secret, ask for an odd numbered room. The odd numbers are on the backside of the hotel and face a patch of woods. Very dark.
Another plus about this trip was the drive up, I’m driving the Miata and in an effort to not get stuck in rush hour traffic in Charlotte, I charted a route that got us off I-77 about 30 miles south of the big city. It took us through a couple small towns (and a few really small burgs too) on the back roads. Even though the mileage was a little longer, we got to the hotel at about the same time as the earlier trips. As a bonus we were in Monroe, NC about 5:30 and found a Sagebrush Steakhouse to eat at. instead of having to wait until we got to Albemarle. The food was just as good as the one in Albemarle and the waitress here was a whole heck of a lot better than the one we had back in October.
Thanks folks. We appreciate the thoughts…and know if you were closer would probably be like some of our co-workers from Human Resources and Accounting who showed up last night with enough food to feed the incoming family (and then some.) Tonight we expect the second wave of relations and the second wave of food from the the people who work in Donna’s department.
Through the marvel that is the Internet: Barbara Morrinson’s Online Obituary
Aiken added another chain eatery to its lineup the other week, O’Charley’s. Tonight Donna and I sampled the place. The menu was pretty much like all the others in the casual dining category. There wasn’t anything there that you couldn’t get identically or really similar someplace else. Whatever their signature dish is, the one every one thinks of when they think of O’Charley’s, I hope we didn’t have it, because our dinner was totally forgettable. Matter of fact, we have after one meal decided that we may not ever need to go back. The place was packed, but that is more attributable to the fact that it is new, than the food and or atmosphere.
Not that the food was bad. We split a side salad, whole rack of ribs, fries and slaw. We started off with a bowl of potato soup that no less than two co-workers said was to die for, and I wouldn’t suffer through a paper cut for any more. More cheddar cheese and bacon pieces than potatoes served luke-hot. The ribs were advertised as “Fall-Off-The-Bone”, but they needed some coaxing to let go of the bone. Fries are fries and the cole slaw was slightly better than average.
Within a mile of O’Charley’s is a Chili’s, a Ruby Tuesday, an Applebee’s and they are building a Fatz Cafe which are all the same kind of eatery. Also within the same radius is an Outback, a Red Lobster, an Atlanta Bread Company, a Ryan’s, an IHOP, about a dozen different fast food places and the usual smattering of Chinese, Mexican and Pizza places. I wish them luck, put they probably don’t need it because although Donna and I probably won’t ever darken their door again there are definitely enough others that will.
Donna and I went for a bike ride this morning and ended up for breakfast out again. This time we switched things up a bit and went south of town, so instead of eating at the New Moon Cafe we dined at Best Bagels. We get one bacon, egg & cheese bagel and a second plain toasted bagel. We each then get one half of each bagel and swap tops and bottoms with half the B,E&C split between them. We learned long ago that getting two bagels loaded with breakfast food stuffs is too much for us to eat, not that we couldn’t do it, but it makes the last 3 miles home on the bike more difficult.
How is this for a neat trick, I went for a 10.8 mile ride while she went for 13.2 and we rode the tandem! Turns out her new cyclecomputer has two separate settings, so it could be swapped back and forth between two bikes if you were so inclined and somehow when I set the tire size calculation number I entered it for bike number two and the computer was set to number one. I broke out the instructions and set #1 to the same number tire size as #2, so no matter what the computer is set for, it will read correctly.