Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all my Bloggy friends!! I hope that 2007 brings you many happy surprises!

Joe and I had a very nice and relaxing holiday weekend. We spent some time at home just hanging out with our furbabies and being just plain lazy (needless to say, the x-mas decorations aren't down yet). We hadn't been to the movies in a LONG time, so we saw The Good Shepard, with Matt Damon & Angelina Jolie, on Saturday night. We spent New Year's Eve with a good friend of ours, Linda Marie, and she made us a fabulous dinner of baked salmon, asparagus & carrots, and yummy mashed potatoes. We topped that off with coffee & Baileys and chocolate cake. We hung out, chatted, played with her furbabies and rang in the New Year with the ball drop at Times Square.

My friend, Miyoung, has been trying to expose me to Asian culture, so this morning we met for brunch at a local Chinese restaurant that serves dim sum. I had no idea what dim sum was, but Miyoung said she would go easy on me and wouldn't order the chicken feet or tripe. This got me a little nervous since I'm not an adventurous eater, but I went this morning ready for a new experience to start the new year. For those of you, like me, who don't know what dim sum is...it's basically a meal served at brunch time where the servers wheel around carts of various dishes served in small portions, so you kind of get a taste of lots of different things. We had calamari, pork dumplings, shrimp dumplings, shrimp stuffed eggplant, chow mein, and sticky rice with bacon. The carts keep coming along and you can sit there and eat for hours! There was a cart that came by with tripe, but as Miyoung promised she passed on that for my sake....thank goodness!

After our meal, we went to a local Chinese grocery store, which was quite an experience! This isn't a small mom and pop store...it's a full-scale large grocery store with a big butcher and seafood counter. From the moment you walk in, the pungent aroma tells you that you're definitely NOT in your local American grocery store. The place was packed (although Miyoung said they get a lot busier) and people were going in all different directions at once making it hard to even maneuver the cart. Besides the produce section, with quite a few bizarre fruits and strange veggies (including a strange, hairy looking thing) they have isles and isles of Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian foods. Some of the items at the butcher counter were a little stomach churning and then as we approached the seafood counter, we see this guy pulling these large fish out of a tank and putting them on the counter...next thing we know, he's whacking them with a rubber mallet as they were flopping around! Now, that's something I could have done without!


As you can see by my purchases, which didn't include the strange hairy fruit, I kept to a few safe items to start with, but I definitely plan on going back before we have another Chinese food cooking night to get the ingredients for our dishes.

Thanks, Miyoung, for a GREAT new experience today and a fun way to start off the year!