Yearly Archives: 2011

On the Eve of New Year’s Eve

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Lee | 12 Comments

Since Jason has to work until 11:30pm tonight, we decided to celebrate New Year’s Eve last night by going out to dinner and then getting a few after dinner drinks. I knew that I wanted to go out in Decatur and a quick Yelp search told me that there was a new restaurant that sounded good – Harbor Bar and Fish House.

Unfortunately, this restaurant is in a sort of doomed location. Isn’t that weird how that happens in every city? There will be locations that restaurants just can’t stay open in. This space is cool, it’s an old house, but in the past maybe 5-7 years it’s been an ice cream shop, a Mexican restaurant and I think something else. I didn’t even know that it had been changed into a seafood restaurant. Nevertheless, we decided to give it a try.

Sorry for the terrible photos. I don’t know how to shoot pictures in a restaurant without using the flash or bumping up the ISO until they look incredibly grainy, which is what I did here with my point and shoot.

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Jason started out with oysters. I don’t like oysters but I tried one to make sure. Yep, still don’t like them. I don’t particularly like them cooked either.

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For my meal, I had the Thai Shrimp Salad. It was huge and came with eight pieces of shrimp. Nice.

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While the food was good, our only problem with this restaurant was that they didn’t really have a lot of grilled seafood and what they did have was on the expensive side. All in all, a decent choice though.

After dinner, we decided to stay out and have a few drinks. We walked over to Mac Mcgee’s on the Decatur Square where some friends joined us.

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I texted Alayna to see if she and Jeff wanted to join us since they live in Decatur and like to go to a lot of the same places that we do. Turns out they were on their way out the door to go to a different bar, so they changed their plans and met us instead.

I had three drinks at Mac Mcgee’s before calling it quits. Not exactly as wild and crazy as some of my New Year’s Eves in years past, but just as fun.

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Posted in Atlanta, Atlanta Restaurants, Blogger Meet-Up, Drinking, Seafood

Nike Workout App

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Lee | 10 Comments

My original plan was to take advantage of the temperatures in the mid 50s this afternoon and go for a run. My original plan did not happen. I was in a pissy mood all day. Partially because I ordered some jeans online that arrived and were a tad too small but mostly because I was bored and frustrated that there were no new job postings all week. So, instead of running, which probably would have made me feel better, I took a nap.

By this time I woke up and took Murphy for a walk, it was around 5 and getting dark out. I knew that the gym would be crowded and didn’t want to deal with that, so I decided to work out in my basement instead. A few weeks ago, Jen told me about this free Nike Workout app. I’ve used it twice and it’s really cool.

The app has a bunch of different workouts categorized into four different goals – get lean which is high interval cardio drills, get toned with is light weights and intervals, get strong which is increased weights and reps and get focused which is shorter workouts that target specific areas.

Once you pick your goal, you choose from beginner, intermediate or advanced and then from six different workouts, ranging from 30 minutes to an hour. I chose the Fire Drill workout from the intermediate Get Lean category.

The workout was 45 minutes long and had three circuits doing the following (after a warmup):

• alternating medicine ball push up – 1 minute
• squat arm curls – 2 minutes
• ski jumps – 1 minute
• squat jumps – 30 seconds
• split jumps – 1 minute
• plank – 30 seconds
• recover – 1 minute
• two feet lateral hops distance – 1 minute
• russian twists – 1 minute
• froggers – 30 seconds (these were hard!)
• tuck jumps – 30 seconds
• bicycles – 1 minute

The great thing about this app is that you can listen to music while you do it. A voice will come on over your music and tell you when it’s time to change exercises or any other directions you need to know. The phone displays a timer which tells you how long you have left of the entire workout and of each specific move. If you don’t know how to do a certain move (I had no idea what a frogger was!), there is a video that you can play when each new move comes up.

This was not easy. I felt like I was going to pass out by the end and I think I’m in okay shape. Whew. I worked up an appetite though and dinner did not disappoint. I went into my recipes folder on my desktop and picked out Sweet Pepper Curry with Tofu.

I make curry on a pretty regular basis and like to try out different recipes. This one was pretty easy. You start off sauteing some tofu and pepper in olive oil.

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Then you add some spices.

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And add the coconut milk and let it simmer for a while.

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Finally, serve over a bed of rice. I realized when I typed this that I forgot to use the lime and cilantro. Oops. It was good anyway.

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Do you use workout apps? Any recommendations for me?

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Posted in Home Workouts, Vegetarian

Drinkable

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Lee | 15 Comments

Today’s eats have been mostly of the liquid variety. And I’m not talking alcohol, although that would have made for an interesting (albeit regrettable) Wednesday, I guess.

I started my morning off with a cup of coffee. I didn’t even really drink coffee until last year. We used to have Starbucks runs at work which got me started and then when I gave up Diet Coke (confession – I’ve had one here and there since then), I needed an alternate source of caffeine.

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I used to drink my coffee with my breakfast, but since I’m between jobs and have no place to be, I’ve been making the whole thing a more leisurely affair. Yes, I just said leisurely affair which sounds ridiculous, but I can’t think of another word that goes with leisurely that conveys the same point. Anyway, so I’ve been drinking my coffee and chilling for a while before even thinking about breakfast.

I normally have eggs or sometimes yogurt, but today I decided to put the Vitamix to the test and make a smoothie.

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We’ll pretend it’s that color because it’s chocolate. I’m normally not a big smoothie person, primarily because my old blender sucked and I would find large pieces of ice in my drink. But also because they are never very filling to me. The Vitamix solved the ice chunk problem, but I was hungry an hour later. I should have put some protein powder in there at least. Coconut milk, mixed fruit, banana and a little bit of spinach does not equal a filling meal.

Lunch today was the third drinkable thing that I had. It’s been pretty cold here in Atlanta and one of my favorite things to eat in the cold weather is soup. Soup is one of my favorite things to eat in any sort of weather to be honest, but it’s especially nice in the cold. For some reason, Jason prefers canned soups (what?), so I like to make homemade soups on days when I’m fending for myself. I was smart this time and scaled down the Pickle Soup recipe to two servings.

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Yes, that soup had pickles in it and yes, it was awesome. It tasted like a lentil soup with just a hint of pickley goodness.

Maybe I should have a cup of hot chocolate for dessert, you know to continue the drinkable theme. Dinner, by the way, was not drinkable, hence the reason it’s not mentioned.