Possibly the best weekend ever pt 2

The next day Grace showed me how to make freezer paper stencil tshirts. She made one with a big black birch tree and I made one with a large white birdcage on the lower right side and a tiny black m-shaped bird on the left shoulder. By the way, freezer paper doesn't seem to stick to shirts with synthetic fibers. Next time I'll either use a 100% cotton shirt or contact paper. But it was really easy and fun with very nice results.

We finally made it to Bev's where Grace and I had lunch. I had the world's perfect sandwich. They call it a grilled cheese but it's really a grilled prosciutto and pesto and cheese sandwich. I also had a cup of she-crab soup that was more like a thick chowder than a soup. I finished my lunch with an ice cream that combined by two favorite flavors: coffee and cookies & cream. Truly a lunch from heaven.

It was blazing hot that day so we stayed out of the A/C-less house. So the best thing on a hot day is of course a movie and a giant Icee. We saw Ratatouille and it was SO FREAKIN GOOD. Animation: unbelievably gorgeous. Story: great. The fact that it is about food and rodents (please consider my background here)? Awesome! If I could, I would shove you all into the theaters right now to see it.

After the movie it was around dinner time but still felt like midday on the surface of the sun. I suppose, midnight on the surface of the sun would feel the same, but... shut up. Even though we were planning on a dinner with just a little cooking, it still involved cooking in a house with no A/C. So we went to Grace's favorite Thai restaurant instead. Grace had an excellent pad thai that wasn't overly flavored one way or the other and had lot of great seafood. I don't eat Thai very often so I'm still always surprised to see so much of it is like Filipino food. For example one of our appetizers was fried tofu. I eat that pretty much every week at home. And dessert was mango (one of the good yellow ones, not the red/green ones) and sweet sticky rice cooked with coconut milk which is Khao Niaow Ma Muang in Thai, but in the Philippines it's called suman and cooked in banana leaf. The foods are basically the same, but I think the flavorings are the biggest difference. Plus I have this feeling that Thai incorporates different flavor sensations ie spicy sweet salty sour more in a single dish so the combinations can be rather startling to the uninitiated Westerner, whereas Filipino tends to be very sweet or very hot or very sour. On the other hand, I could be totally wrong.

So that was my fantastic weekend from two weekends ago.

This weekend I had to work Sunday and so I had Monday and Tuesday off. Wasn't a terrible weekend but I am looking forward to the 29th when I go back to Richmond and cook Filipino food for all of Grace's friends that I met at the brunch.