Weekend Dining

Over the weekend my hubby and I both gave in to our inner sloth. It was much too hot and too much trouble to bother with cooking and washing up. So, we had a good time trying new places to eat and getting take-out food. Enjoyed 5 whole meals and we didn’t have to wash a single pot, pan or dish! Bliss!

Friday night we tried a new (to us) Japanese restaurant called Raku-Raku. I love how Japanese food is so artfully arranged. I think it totally adds to how good the meal tastes. Jojo and I each had trays of the house special, tonkatsu, which is anything breaded with Panko breadcrumbs and deep-fried. Our dinners included the combo -- pork, shrimp and taro, a huge serving of shredded lettuce with a sweet-sour dressing (reminiscent of Thousand Island dressing but lighter), small dishes of pickled radish, jalapenos and beets, and a cup of hot miso soup. Jojo had a side order of cold soba noodles while I had four pieces of spicy salmon sushi. It was all very good and not too heavy on the wallet – dinner for two cost us $25.00 (plus tax and tip).

On Saturday, we had errands to run and found ourselves at the South Bay Pavilion mall. It’s not a very big place and therefore not a lot of choices, so we ended up at the Food Court. Jojo decided on a terriyaki chicken & broccoli rice bowl from an unknown but clean-looking fast food stall. Since I didn’t want to line up at the other food stalls, I had the same thing except my rice bowl was topped with spicy chicken and mixed vegetables. We weren’t really expecting anything great from the food court, but at least the food was okay, hot, quick and cheap ($4.95 a bowl).

Saturday night, we headed over to my new favorite take-out place, Famima!! It is an upscale Japanese delicatessen and premium food store where you can get anything from pre-packaged gourmet meals, to magazines, to coffee, to stationery, to DVDs, and many more. It’s sort of a high class and very clean 7-11 but with an eating/reading area too. Since it was well past 8 pm when we got there, Jojo and I were very hungry and everything looked so good. After going thru all the aisles, we decided to share a panini sandwich with pesto, chicken, sun-dried tomatoes and provolone cheese, a dish with 4 pieces of mu-shu pork and veggies with hoisin dipping sauce, and a plate with 8 pieces of spicy tuna sashimi and edemame. Plus mineral water our bill came to $15.72 – not bad for all that! After toasting our panini and heating our mu-shu we settled in to enjoy our meal and surprisingly it was really good. We were too full for dessert – too bad cause the green tea mousse and the tiramisu cups looked so tempting. I couldn’t stop raving over Famima!! the rest of the weekend to anyone who would listen.

Sunday lunch I cheated a bit on our “no-cooking-all-weekend-policy” since I defrosted some shrimp, sprinkled it with grill seasoning, baked it in the oven, and served it over pre-cooked egg noodles. But it was so hassle free and took all of 5 minutes for prep work that I am still considering it as “no-work-cooking”. Plus since I baked it in foil – it was also a “no-dishwashing” meal too.

Sunday dinner was a no-frills meal of “it’s-not-delivery- it’s-Di’Giorno” pizza. Between my hubby, brother and I, we had the medium sized, thin-crust four-cheese pizza and the regular-crust supreme pizza. Yummy, except I was reading Nicholas Spark’s “At First Sight” and was so into the book that I left the pizza in the oven a tad too long, resulting in slightly burnt pizza crust. But hey, pizza is pizza, and it was still good.

So, that was our weekend of no-cooking and no-cleaning. Although it was a lot of fun, it was far from healthy, so we probably can’t do this all too often. We’ll be eating more home-cooked and balanced meals in the next few days - at least until the next attack of laziness comes around!