Ripped off

We took some friends out for dinner last night and got ripped off. It’s a restaurant that none of us have been to in a long while. Maybe for good reason, except that we wish we’d thought of it earlier. I’ve only been there once myself so I really had no recollection of how bad it would be.

And bad it was. They overcharged us by an arm and a leg. The food was clearly not the best and definitely overpriced. Well, guess what? You can cheat your customers once but note that we’re never going back there, period! And we’re going to tell our friends. So was the rip-off worth it? Think again.

No permission to spam

The trouble with signing up for a membership card is that you are inadvertently opening up yourself to spam and more spam. The newly remodeled grocery store that we frequent makes it a point to send me a text alert every morning at 8 with their promo items for the day.

Seriously! Every. single. day?

And no, I did not sign up for promo alerts aka I did not give them permission to spam me left and right.

Weekend grocery shopping

We’ve fallen back to the practice of grocery shopping on weekends, simply because it ties in well with our tendency to eat out on the weekends. It’s actually much more stressful to shop when the weekend crowd is out in full force, tripping over each other to buy everything and anything from shrimp to Slatwall Panels.

I typically can’t afford to browse, much as I would like to. I grab whatever is on my grocery list and I am out of there before the checkout lines get impossibly long. By the time we’re done navigating the crowds and traffic, we’re pretty much bummed out when we get home.

How difficult is baking?

I’m teaching my kids to bake. I think they think of it as something very difficult and complicated. I keep telling them it’s not. You can bake with anything you have on hand, and there are no hard and fast rules on what you can or cannot do. It’s true that in baking, you have to measure your ingredients.

But that’s about it, you don’t need any fancy precision instruments like scales or rulers. Quite honestly, you can be as creative as you want in baking. For instance, your scones don’t have to be round, they can be any shape you like them to be. So just get creative.

My grocery list

The weekend is here and I still don’t have my grocery list ready. Each week, my grocery list is a work-in-progress. It’s a list that I add to throughout the week with items that I think of or remember that I need. So my list basically keeps growing as the week progresses and hopefully it will be completed by the time I do my grocery run on the weekend.

Well, of course, a grocery list is never complete. Who am I kidding? There’s always something on my list that I’ve possibly missed out and that I will only discover over the course of the next week, usually around the time when I’m getting prepped to cook. Cie la vie.

Less than good service

I’ve been noticing that restaurant customer service has taken a nosedive. These days, it’s getting harder and harder to walk into a restaurant and expect good service. Either the staff are not well-trained aka businesses are willing to spend less on getting their staff trained properly, or the staff are not paid well enough to do a good job, or they’re just plain uninterested in providing good service.

However you look at it, it has become less of a treat to eat out these days. Unfortunately the days are so hot and humid and sometimes the only way to avoid having to sweat it out in the kitchen is to eat out. Bah!