Bah Chicky Bah Wah!

K and I had one of our rare date nights tonight. Actually, for us it's always been rare. Even when we were dating we didn't really have a lot of dates, at least not in the planned out, pick you up at seven type of thing. We've always been joined at the hip since before that first kiss, so we spent so much time together that we could never tell the dates from the normal everyday things.

Tonight was the planned type, although when you live in the same house, use the same car, and share the same shower, there's no picking up involved, although I did drive over to my parents' house to drop off the kid and then came back to get K, who was running a little slow for some reason. I even dressed up a little. K wouldn't let me wear the button down shirt and slacks that I had been planning on wearing because she didn't want to make it that fancy, but I did wear a polo shirt and slacks and she even put on makeup and curled her hair. I dig the hair, but for some reason I've always disliked makeup. At least K isn't one of those girls who put so much makeup on that they look like whore-clowns. She looked pretty nice, I just can't kiss her until she washes her face. Yes, I know I'm weird.

Anyway, we drove over a couple of counties to go to a restaurant called Elements. It's a surprising place I discovered last week that is a fancy little restaurant with a price line well above what I would have expected the town and surrounding rural area could have supported, but it's been busy both times I've been in there. To start off, we had the toasted ravioli with a marinara sauce, pesto and shaved parmesan. For the main course, I had the, in a moment of weakness that violates one of my principled eating habits, the veal chop with asparagus and angel hair with mushrooms and capers in a cream sauce. I really hope that was the humane version of veal, but likely I'm going to hell now. I'm not even sure it was good enough to make up for an eternity of self-marinating. K had the salmon with whipped sweet potatoes and sauteed green beans with almonds. During this portion of the meal, we discovered quite by accident that praline pecans are freaking amazing with salmon. The sweet potatoes were topped with toasted praline pecans, but not the heavily candied type. It was more pecan than praline, more like a thin candied glaze than anything else. Anyway, K somehow got a piece of the nut on a bite of her salmon and actually squeaked she liked it so much. She made me try it even though I was already feeling pretty done with the meal, but I'm glad I did now. I'm now obsessed with figuring out a recipe to incorporate these two on purpose. I do realize that it sounds disgusting; that's part of the reason I resisted K's enthusiastic demands that I try her serendipitous discovery, but it really was a nearly perfect pairing. For dessert we had chocolate and hazelnut cream puffs. Tasty. My only problem is that this restaurant is in a town famous for its sweet onions, and yet the Sweet Onion Strudel features Peruvian onions. What the hell?

Afterward we went to the movies. That's a fairly limited exercise here, given the fact that this town has the largest cinema in a reasonable driving distance of my house, but it only has five screens. The best of the options this week was The Bucket List, which actually turned out to be pretty good. For some reason, I was thinking it was supposed to be fairly cheesy, but I should have figured that featuring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, it should have been a little better than the typical Hollywood drivel. It's not making my list of top 20 films or anything, but it was definitely worth the watching. Not exactly a romantic film, but the other options were Jumper, First Sunday, Fools Gold, and The Spiderwick Chronicles. This being date night, Fools Gold was a serious contender while we were standing in line to buy tickets, but we ended up deciding to go watch two old men coming to terms with their imminent deaths.

Oh, and the title has no relevance to what actually happened after the date. We actually went straight to bed and K watched Mean Girls on TV while I typed up this post. It's a little hard to keep the romance flowing that long when you've been together for ten years. Plus, E's spending the night at his grandparents' and the prospect of getting an uninterrupted night's sleep with the possibility of getting to sleep in is too good to pass up. She's still a pretty cool chica, though.