Don't read this if you are hungry

I started taking pictures last night of the microwave bacon cooker my husband gave me for Christmas.  He's so romantic.....lol

I was talking to my mother about how great it was, that I was taking pictures to show her how wonderfully it cooks the bacon and with less mess.

But then I started taking pictures of all the food because it looked so good.  So now you are just going to have to be entertained looking at pictures of my dinner last night.

Our menu tonight:  BLAT's (Bacon, Lettuce, Avocado, Tomato), Pickles, Olives, Macaroni Salad

And while the bacon was cooking......I was preparing all the extras

 

And don't forget all the fresh cut veggies!

 

 Here's the finished bacon.

I guess I was so hungry that I forgot to take a picture of my heaping plate of food.  Trust me, the sandwiches were delicious and so was the salad.

In fact, it was so good....we've decided to have it again tonight.  We still have lots of salad and fresh veggies and Paul is going to "bring home the bacon".

Don't judge us.

My new office

It seems like I spend day after day after day after day sitting at this desk working.

Tonight, I thought I would mix it up a bit.  Maybe a change of location would make me more motivated to get lots of work done.  So I got a hotel on the beach.  Just kidding.

I downloaded my Quick Books onto the laptop and did my work lounging in bed, watching TV, (and if you look very carefully in the picture), enjoyed a nice cold beer.

That box the laptop is sitting on is all the stuff that I need to get entered into QuickBooks to try and getting ready to get the stupid taxes done.

My office assistant was on hand, in case I needed anything and I didn't want to get up.

Actually, I sat there for about 2 1/2 hours and made really good progress, although I still have LOTS more progress that needs to be made.  But it really was a nice and refreshing change. 

I think I'll try and do that again tonight.

Look what I made today!

Chicken Taquitos!

And they are BAKED taquitos......so it's a healthy meal!

 

 

I gathered my ingredients:  shredded chicken, black beans, white & yellow corn, salsa, monterrey jack cheese, cheddar cheese, cilantro, and egg roll wrappers.........what??? egg roll wrappers????  Yes, these taquitos are baked in the oven in egg roll wrappers.

Assemble all the ingredients together and mix it up really good. 

Then you roll it up in the egg roll wrappers.  The recipe called for Cumin......but I can't stand to eat any food that has Cumin in it.  I can't stand the smell of it and unfortunately my husband LOVES it.  So........I portioned out some of the filling and added cumin to it just for him.

Had to separate the Cumin laced taquitos.......I'd have a fit if I ended up accidently biting into one of those.  After you put them on a butter sprayed cookie sheet.....you spray the tops of them with the butter spray as well.

Let them bake for about 30 minutes until they are golden brown.  I had to keep flipping mine so that they browned on each side.  I served mine with a little lettuce, tobasco sauce, and guacamole on top.  They were a big hit in this house and we'll plan on eating them again.

The filling can be changed up like adding spinach, chicken and cheese or adding different vegetables.  The egg roll wrappers were nice and light and were actually better than if we'd put them in a flour tortilla.  I will be experimenting with these again the near future.

Sometimes I get to play housewife

This weekend I could just not bear the thought of sitting at my desk and doing paperwork.

The best part of the day was getting to do the bank runs with the top down.  It was a beautiful, gorgeous day and it was so nice to feel the fresh air and get my hair all messed up!

I got up off my butt and did "wifey" things.  Like clean the living room, cook, bake, launder, get called into Pizza Zone (grrrrrr.........), and play with something that I got for Christmas.

I got to start my garden......indoors.  I had a hard time picking only 3 things out of the four packs of seeds they sent.  (hmmmmmmm.......wonder how my mother is doing on her garden????)

But here's the 3 items I've started growing sitting in their new home.

I even had time to whip up a delicious salad for us to munch on the next couple of days.  My only problem is I always want too many ingredients in my salad and it takes forever to make.  This one has Italian Lettuce Blend, cucumbers, green onions, radishes, zucchini, jalapenos, celery, broccoli, and cauliflower.  I had carrots to put in there too......but I got tired of cutting all that stuff up.  Made up a bottle of Good Seasons Zesty Italian (the bestest dressing for salad in the whole wide world) and we'll be munching on this for a couple of days.

The only thing I did not get accomplished was making the Baked Chicken Taquitos I was going to make for dinner last night.  Got called into work.....so cancelled that plan.  However, I do plan on making them tonight for dinner.  Should be interesting......baking them in egg roll wrappers.  I plan on documenting this monumental occasion with a blog.

Have any of you noticed I have a good obsession??

I'm not just a Pizza Zone employee

There are so many days I'm nothing more than a PZ employee.

My days are filled with paperwork, employee issues, or some other emergency that has cropped up that needs to be dealt with.

Today......I decided to take a small portion of my day and so something that does not have anything to deal with Pizza Zone.

I made banana bread!

Actually, we had some bananas that were very ripe and they either were going to be thrown away, cut into slices and frozen for smoothies, or make banana bread.  We haven't had home made bread for so, so long......so the decision was easy.

I also purchased the necessary ingredients to make Zuchinni bread in a couple of days (actually going to use the recipe my sister sent me 2+ years ago).  That's our absolute favorite kind of bread......although Pumpkin bread is really good too.

Now I think I'll do something productive and work on cleaning up some of this messy house.

Just making it by the hair of our chinny chin chin

Last day in Columbus.  Woke up and the weather was ZERO degrees!  I've never seen that before.  We had an 11am flight and were a little concerned about the weather in Charlotte.  They were having a weather advisory and we hoped that we didn't get stuck there.

But our last day in Columbus began in the usual way -- get up and go downstairs to the breakfast area.  We especially loved sitting in the window seat where we could enjoy the view, read the paper, see the TV news, do work on the laptop, or play with our phones.  Of course, we also enjoyed our little breakfast.  Here's what the area looked like (not my picture):

After breakfast it was time for us to take the hotel shuttle to the airport.  We got to the airport with plenty enough time.  Our flight took off on time and we were on our way to Charlotte. 

When we finally got settled into our gate in Charlotte, there was only enough time for us to catch a quick potty break and then make the mad dash over to Terminal B -- which was a good 15 minute walk.  Since we had eaten only a small breakfast, we dashed into a little shop that sold pre-packaged sandwiches and grabbed a couple of sandwiches and chips to eat on the plane.

We had absolutely no time to spare.  Our plane was in the final boarding stages as we got to the gate.  We were thankful we made the connection, but never realized how important that was going to end up being.

Here was our view as we were waiting to leave the gate to go through the de-icing process.

In fact, from the time we landed in Charlotte to the time we took off (maybe 45 minutes or so) the weather conditions really started to deteriorate.  I snapped this next picture as we were finally cleared to go to the de-icing area.  There were literally planes sitting everywhere.

Thankfully, for some reason, our plane had been given first priority to be de-iced and get approved for take off.  Must be they knew some celebrities were on board (us!)

I took lots of pictures of the de-icing process.  We have never been through that and it was quite interesting.  Luckily the pilot explained what was happening during the course of it so that made it even more interesting to actually know what was happening.

You pull up into an area on the runway that is lined with these funny little trucks on each side.  First they spray a mixture of hot water and a chemical to melt any of the ice buildup on the entire plane.

Then these same little trucks spray another solution on the wings that will prevent from ice forming.

 

After you get de-iced the plan is to get you on the runway to take off quickly before the chemicals wash off.  I was just praying that those guys did a good job and we wouldn't have any problems taking off. 

It was funny to look back and see all the planes still waiting to go through their de-icing.  We heard that it was the first time in 10 years that Charlotte has had to de-ice planes.

And here we are during take off saying good-bye to the nasty weather in Charlotte!

Once we got above the clouds the weather was beautiful, clear, and sunny.  We found out later that our flight was the last one out for the day to Houston, as they had to cancel the other 3 flights due to weather.  In fact, the airport shut down for two days because Charlotte had such bad weather. We are so thankful that all our connections were made and that we were able to get out of there before everything took a turn for the worse.

We actually do have to say that Columbus was even better than we had expected.  Yes the weather was cold and the warmest it ever got was 20 degrees, but we made it an adventure and enjoyed all the new challenges we had to deal with.  We've also decided that we choose to live in the South and not have to deal with all that nasty weather.  We also learned that this was the worst winter the Columbus had had for a long, long time and we feel fortunate that we were able to go there and enjoy a little bit of it with them.

Now, it's back home and back to work!

Taking a food break

I still have one more exciting day to post from the Columbus trip......our adventure to get home, but I've been taking a few food pictures the last couple of days -- so I want to post those instead.

 My husband made the best patty melts the other night.  Paired with some fresh cut veggies and Ranch dressing.....I was in heaven!

Sampling a new wing flavor.......Carolina Gold.  The employees think it sucks......we think it's delicious.  Hard to sway these Texans to a new flavor of BBQ sauce.

Sampling the March Pizza of the Month.  Shhhhhhhhh.......don't tell anyone what it is yet.  We want it to be a surprise.  It's got Pizza sauce mixed with Honey Mustard Dressing, Turkey, Ham, Bacon, Tomatoes and Swiss Cheese.  OMG.....it's delicious.  I wish we could say that it was our own creation, but we "borrowed" it from a pizza place that we tried on our trip to Memphis.  I think we "borrowed" it wonderfully!

That's what theirs looked like......it tasted just as delicious as it looks.

Well that's enough food for one day.....I'm getting hungry and I don't have plans for dinner yet. 

Do you really want to know what happened on Day 3 in Columbus?

Day 3 really started the same as Day 2.  Breakfast in the hotel lobby, except this time we ate Cheese Danish along with the coffee, orange juice, hard boiled eggs, and English muffins (with butter and grape jelly on them).

Day 3 began with the bitter cold, like 6 degrees, so we just bundled up and braved the elements for the walk to the Convention Center.

This day was spent the same as yesterday:  visiting vendors, attending seminars, sampling food, yada yada yada.

One of our favorite tastes of the day was the Cheese Ravioli with Pesto Sauce and the Sausage Ravioli with Marinara sauce.  YUMMMMM.  We have requested a sample from our food distributor and plan on doing a trial run on it to see how successful it was.  It was incredibly delicious!

The hours for the food show today were 10:30 a.m. and ended at 4:30 p.m.....so we knew where we would be spending our entire day.

Of course you can't go to a trade show and not come home with bags of treasure that you will have to go through when you get home.  A collection of the samples and people we met.

 

 

That's another whole job just to go through those bags and sort through what we are really interested in.

We finally headed back to the hotel at the end of the show and just relaxed and napped for awhile before making plans for our last night in Columbus.

We headed for the North Market, which was supposed to be an eclectix mix of Farmer's market type stores, but by the time we got there most of the businesses had already closed.  Probably because all the crappy weather was keeping everyone home.  We ended up at Barley's again to get a couple of beers.  Paul had really liked their house Pilsner from the other evening and it was a warm and close place for us to make plans.  We ended up eating dinner here since it was their $5 jumbo make your own hotdog night.  How could we resist?

The evening's entertainment was going to be at Bernard's Tavern, where we expected to see some karaoke action.  We love to watch other's sing, but we prefer to just be spectators (we both know how bad we sing).

We had awesome service, awesome beer, awesome homemade potato chips, and some really great karaoke singers.  The night was getting late and it was freezing outside.....we opted to hire a taxi to take us the short distance back to our warm and snuggly hotel.

What a nice way to spend our last evening in this really cool little city.

Day 2 in fabulous Columbus

Day 2 started out with a surprise.  I woke up and peeked out the windows and there was a blizzard going on.  We knew right away it was going to be a way different day than what we were used to.

The temperature at this time was about 10 degrees. 
Our first stop was for the breakfast downstairs in the lobby.  We feasted on OJ, coffee, bagels and made our game plan for the day.

Of course, you definitely have to stop and take a picture in a new city and it's snowing like crazy.  It was the wildest travelling weather we had been in yet.

Of course, Paul was quick to try and snap the pictures so that we could get on our way.  But this is a cute little "behind the scenes" look at myself trying to put my gloves back on for my big pictorial moment.

But a short moment later we got the money shot.  This picture sums up how fun it was to be experiencing this crazy weather.

The food show was being held in the Columbus Convention Center, which was just almost a block away from our hotel.  It was actually pretty fun to take the walk over there and back each day and a good way to BRIEFLY enjoy all the cold weather.  The Convention Center was HUGE.  It seriously was as long as 5-6 city blocks.  I have never seen so many meeting rooms in my life -- I don't even think the Las Vegas Convention Center is that big.  For some reason, Columbus must hold a lot of conventions......we're sure it's not because of their great weather.

Had to snap a picture to remember that we were here for learning how to be better and smarter pizza shop operators.  You always have to keep educating yourself so that you can continually try to do a better job.  And of course, to learn how to make more money.  Here's our fearless leader getting ready to spend from 11am-6:30pm locked up in this big building.

The first day here we each attended 3 seminars, talked to countless vendors, sampled numerous slices of cheese pizza, ate some really good ice cream, and learned how to make a few new specialty pizzas.  At the cocktail event, we sat with 2 couples who ran shops in West Virginia and Indiana.  It was fun sitting there and telling each other about our businesses and asking questions.  Always good to connect with people that are doing the same thing we are.

After our day, it was back to the hotel to take a little break and figure out something to do for the evening.  Searching on the internet yielded no results......so we decided to brave the elements and walk around and try to find some place to eat.

4 frozen blocks later it was just too darn cold and we headed back towards our hotel.  There was nothing open, there were no people on the street, and it was so freaking cold with the wind blowing.  We found a restaurant inside the hotel next door and decided this was where we were going to have to eat.  Thus, we had our first experience with Max & Erma's.

Nice restaurant, good food, and great service.  Plus it was warm and right next door from our hotel.  Due to the inclement weather, we were forced to go back to the room and entertain ourselves.  Which we did with reading, watching the Olympics, and getting a really good night's sleep.  Wow....we were actually relaxing on a trip away (that doesn't happen often).

A cold Day 2 is in the books.

Why on earth would we go to Columbus?

This is one of the things I look forward to in my life.

When I get the chance to sit down and totally relive a trip that we just took.  I know it might sound corny to you.....but travelling with Paul is like one of the things I enjoy most in the world.   We can go to the biggest of cities or the littlest of tourist places and still end up having a great time together.

This time it was a trip to Columbus, Ohio.  This destination was chosen just because we wanted to attend the National Pizza and Ice Cream Show.........and it just happened to be located in a city that has had it's share of winter.

It was an early morning start since we had to catch a 5:05 am flight.  That meant getting up at 2:30 am to get ready and get to the airport on time.  It actually was pretty easy since we didn't get hardly any sleep the night before.  Seems like we are always anxious and excited to go on a trip that we never sleep the night before.

Needless to say, the flight to Charlotte was extremely quiet.  Almost everyone on the plane was asleep, but me and the lady sitting one row behind me.  We both spent the entire 3 hour trip reading.  Although, we did invest in something that we've been meaning to try on every trip.  We got a set of these:

Must have worked good because Paul slept almost the entire way.  Our layover in Charlotte was only about 40 minutes and we had to change terminals.  By the time we hit the restroom and quickly hustled to the next terminal, we only had a few minutes before it was time to board. 

Our adventure at the Charlotte airport was having to walk out to the tarmac and climb steps to get up into the airplane.  Haven't done that for a few years!

The flight to Columbus was nice and smooth but when we landed at the airport there was absolutely no activity going on there.  There was not a single plane landed there......when we exited the plane, there was a line of people waiting to board it to head back to Charlotte.  Creepy being in an airport with the hustle and bustle of people.

Our next mission was to get our suitcases and call the hotel to come and pick us up.  This was our first chance to experience the weather of Columbus!

He looks so serious.  He has no idea what he has in store for him the next 4 days!

   It was so, so cold waiting there for the hotel shuttle!

This was where we waited for the shuttle to pick us up.

 

After getting picked up in a nice and warm van, we headed to the Red Roof Inn in downtown Columbus.  This is what it looks like in nice weather:

This is what it looked like when we got there:

We got there about 11:30am and they didn't have any rooms yet, so we headed over to High Street (where all the action is) and looked for someplace to eat lunch.  I have to mention that we thought we had one of the best rooms in the hotel.  They put us in a corner on the back side and it gave us windows on 2 sides of our room.  It was really fun in the morning watching what happens in everyday life in Columbus.  I had even more fun watching the commuters walk from their parking lots to their offices in all the snow!

This is some of the snow that we saw along the way.  The temperature at this time was 18 degrees.

We found a Greek Restaurant and feasted on yummy food.

Next stop was to head back to the hotel to see if they had a room ready for us yet.  We were so ready for a nap by this time......it had already been a long day.  We slept for a couple of hours and then got on the internet to try and find entertainment for a Saturday night in Columbus.

Our search for something for dinner took us to this place located on High Street:

Barley's Brew House.  What a good decision that was.  The place was packed, but after a short wait we had a quiet little booth and ordered some of their famous char grilled wings and the Polski platter.  We tried for the first time Sauerkraut Balls and Pierogies.  Paul loved both......I'm more a fan of the Pierogies than I was the balls.

After dinner our plan was to go to Shadowbox Live.....a live theater place.....and watch their featured show Foreplay.  It really wasn't a play, but a collection of skits like Saturday Night Live with a live band in between each sketch.  We had awesome seats and it was a great way to spend our first night in Columbus.

Here's a couple of pics (not taken by us) of the show.  It was funny, different, and entertaining.  We really did pick a great thing to do on our first night there.

Can't believe how much I had to write about only 1 day in the wild town of Columbus.  Stay tuned for the rest of the excitement...............