Restaurant Tip

You've heard of a new restaurant opening up that's supposed to be amazing. You're dying to try it so you rush out the minute they open, have a horrible experience and vow never to return again. Sound familiar? My tip to you, as hard as it will be to restrain yourself, is to wait at least 3-4 weeks (or longer) after a restaurant has opened to visit. Let other people have the bad experience while all of the kinks are worked out and you can saunter in to reap the benefits and have a good experience to talk about instead of telling all of your friends NOT to try the new hip spot in town because everything sucked. You know what I'm talking about too - the servers are clueless, they ignored you, the food took over a half hour to get to your table and after all that, it wasn't even very good and you think it was overpriced. You go home totally bummed and complain to your friends. I can't recall one time in recent memory where a friend has told me about their experience at a new restaurant being good. Even if it wasn't terrible the response is usually something along the lines of, "Eh, it was okay."

Bill and I have gotten burned too many times and (I think) have finally learned our lesson. There are currently 3 new restaurants in town that we have yet to try but know of people who have tried them all. They all went either on the first night it opened or shortly thereafter and based on their reviews, we are waiting. 6 months and counting in one case (okay, maybe we're just lazy). So wait if you can. The restaurant may thank you too for the good review versus the bad one you would have given. And if it's still not good even after waiting, at least you gave them a fighting chance to improve.

Frugal Tip

Bill and I just starting growing our owns herbs this year, although I should say "herb" because so far we only have mint. We've always talked about doing this but just never get around to planting anything. Even the mint was pre-planted from Bill's parents house. (LAY-Z!) But what a money saver! We buy fresh parsley and cilantro every week from the grocery store. Now, it's only like $2 total but still, that's over $100 bucks a year. Anything more fancy than that like basil or sage costs $2.50-$3.00 and comes in this cheap plastic box that still allows the herbs to go bad in about 2 days. When you only need a few tablespoons per recipe, that's not money well spent. (Keep in mind that this is grocery shopping in Iowa. You may have a better selection in your town.) I know that if we had herbs right on our patio, we'd use them much more often. So my tip to you is to plant your own herbs. Be careful though, use pots because many spread worse than weeds. Even with our pot, we think we're going to have mint around our patio's perimeter come next year. Did someone say mojito party?

Another tip that I cannot claim as my own comes from the newest Food Network celebrity - Melissa D'Arabian. She just won the Next FoodNetwork Star and is really great. She's not professional trained but somehow whips up these clever and super yummy looking meals. I wouldn't be surprised if she became the next Rachael Ray. Anyway, her tip is that once you get down to the whites of scallions (green onions), put them in a little bit of water and watch them grow. Bill and I are currently working on this experiment and you honestly would not believe how fast they've been growing. The picture below is after 1 week and I've changed the water once. Notice that they're skinnier than what you'd buy in the store so I'm not sure if they'll fill out or just keep getting taller. We'll see I guess! I'll report back.

Type A Tip of the Day

Organize your grocery shopping list based on store layout.

If you're anything like us, you dread grocery shopping and want to make the trip as quick and painless as possible. You already know that we limit our weekly shopping to once a week by writing our list based on what we're eating for that week. What I also do is organize our list based on how we shop the store (I say "we" because both B and I go together. Since we both hate grocery shopping so much, why should only one person suffer?). For instance, we always start in the produce section and move our way through the store, ending in the dairy/frozen area. Produce items go at the top of my list, meats/condiments/bread/beer in the middle and dairy and frozen products at the end. There's nothing worse than thinking you're done shopping and then realizing you forgot something all the way on the other side of the store. It also saves you time from having to continually scan your list to see if there's anything else to get in the area you're in. This method isn't completely infallible. I've forgotten to write down items before or when writing the list, I don't leave enough room and need to add items at the bottom. 99% of the time though, it's worked very well. Having a pen to cross off items is also helpful.

Happy shopping!