Thinking About Outstanding Summer Dinners!

I've actually been pondering what I'm going to concoct for dinner out of the meatloaf left over from sometime last week, probably something involving pasta? We had pancakes and scrambled eggs for breakfast, but had a very light homemade soup for lunch so have room for a little bit more of a splurge this evening, perhaps with a nice glass of Pinot Noir.

But thinking about cooking inevitably leads to thinking about eating which, in turn, led to reminiscing about some of the great restaurants that I visited this summer. Dan and I attended the wedding of some very dear friends in Salt Lake City and got to have dinner at a restaurant that I had seen reviewed in a food magazine. It's sort of in the hills above Salt Lake, not right in the city, and it's called Le Caille.

Dan and I and our friends, Steve and Rhonda Lopez (Rhonda owns Nuttall's Fabric Centers; there are 4 locations in Salt Lake) went to the restaurant on an absolutely beautiful night. The temperature was just perfect for eating outside on the patio, so we did.

The appetizers were pretty enough for pictures: two of us had lobster bisque and two, French onion soup.

I got up and took a quick picture between courses; Rhonda looks like she is in deep thought, but Steve and Dan are ready to smile for the camera...

This is the view of the indoor dining from my seat at the table; if you look up on the roof, you can see the outline of the peacocks roosting up there.

Used the closeup function on my camera to see them better.

There were peacocks wandering all over the patio during dinner; we saw one of the baby chicks (I'm not sure if you call baby peacocks chicks or something more specific) fall out of a tree trying to fly to his mom! Fortunately, a rubber plant broke the little guy's fall and then one of the waitstaff rescued him, took him up a flight of stairs and leaned out a window to put the baby right back in the tree so he could try again -- second time was successful -- hooray!

A few days after we got home from Salt Lake, I flew up to Eugene OR to meet with Jerry Tippetts and his daughter Stacy, two of the owners of the Sew Steady company. Sew Steady makes the acrylic extension tables and cabinet inserts that we all use to make our sewing and quilting so much easier.

I'll be in the Sew Steady booth at Quilt Market in the fall; I'll be splitting my time between their booth and the Brother Int'l booth, so this was a planning session to see how our product lines fit together and what kind of synergy we could create to make Market fun and profitable.

My eyes are always open for new ways to help quilters do things more easily; while I was at Sew Steady, we found that using their new polish kit to keep the acrylic surface "slippy" works really well in combination with the Batt Scooters! I know slippy isn't a word, but slippery doesn't describe it, nor does slick -- it's just a really smooth surface that the quilt just glides on!

Of course, if you're gonna plan, you gotta eat, right?

We had a marvelous dinner at the King Estate Winery, located about a 20 or 30 minute drive out of Eugene. I ordered halibut with fresh pea puree and it was so good! I ate about half of it that night, took the other half with me and ate it for breakfast the next day, garlic and all -- brushed my teeth about four times before I went to the Sew Steady offices that day...

Here are a couple of pictures I took on the way in to dinner; the Oregon landscape is so beautiful -- all that green!

Well, enough daydreaming -- I probably ought to think about making some food instead of just thinking about it!