Beyond my Speed Racer montage from yesterday, I now have a new issue.

Starting just before lunch, I felt something on my cheek.  I reached up and found a tiny little tender spot.  Ouch, Charlie!  That really hurt! But I didn’t look at it.  I was afraid of what I would see.

It’s now been over an hour and it hurts more than ever and I’m frightened that it might actually be some alien trying to get out of my body through my face.  Now I really don’t want to look at it.

And you?  Don’t look at me!  I’m pretty sure I’m hideous!!

Help me.  Help me, please!

I woke up with this little “song” in my head:

Here he comes, here comes Speed Racer
King of the Wild Frontier

What is that??  That makes no sense!!!  And how will Davy Crockett feel about it??

It has not left my head all day.  This could actually make me certifiably insane.  Truly.

I would be a much happier person if I could work from home.  I’m good at it - I’m very loyal and hard-working and my job lends itself very well to telecommuting (do they still call it that??).  I could SOOOO do this!

Harumph.

Back to work…

I love this!  Courtesy of my good friend, ls…

Buzz and I don’t usually go out on Valentine’s Day ‘cause everyone does that, ya know?  And we don’t exchange flowers and chocolates ‘cause everyone does that, ya know?  (Plus, neither one of us should be eating chocolates and the flowers end up getting eaten by one of the cats.  It’s so impractical!)

So we planned a dinner for the two of us at home.  And it worked out perfectly.

Dinner started with an appetizer of some fresh shrimp cocktail and a glass of prosecco by candlelight.  (I did pick up some flowers at the grocery store because sometimes I just can’t stand to not have flowers in the house.  I even googled how to fold napkins so I could make the table pretty!)

Then we steamed two lobster tails, sautéed asparagus, baked small potatoes (heh - I said “small potatoes") and grilled two filet mignons.  We served dinner with a fabulous French wine - 2004 Clos des Soutyères from Les Verrières.  The theme of dinner was simple but elegant.  And here are my impressions of each.

1.  Lobster tails.  I had always said that lobster is lost on me.  I now think that’s because I had never had a lobster tail that was cooked properly.  And for our first attempt at steaming lobster tails?  I think we did a pretty fine job!  Five minutes in a steamer basket on top of a pot of boiling water - that’s it.  They were moist, succulent and sweet.  Served with a small bowl of melted butter.  Perfect!

2.  Sautéed asparagus.  This is one of my favorite recipes.  Slice up 1-lb. asparagus into 1” pieces.  Melt 4 tablespoons butter in 1/3 cup water - bring to a boil.  Throw the asparagus in.  Sprinkle with some kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper.  Put a lid on it and let it bubble for 5-10 minutes (depending on how crisp you like yours - we like ours not so crisp, so we went for the whole 10 minutes).  So simple, so delicious!

3.  Baked potatoes.  What can I say?  I don’t eat a lot of starch any more so every single baked potato is a prize to be savored!  A pat of butter and a dollop of sour cream (sour cream always comes in a dollop, did you notice that?) with some chives sprinkled on top.  Yes, thank you very much!!

4.  Filet mignon.  My favorite of the meats, bar none.  We took a special trip to our butcher and bought two lovely steaks.  Buzz sprinkled them with a little Nature’s Season and grilled them on our Griddler.  These steaks were sublime.  Sublime, I say.  The most tender and flavorful filet I have ever had.  And I have had a lot of filet!

5.  The wine.  Where do I begin with the wine?  First off, it’s a French wine and there could not have been a better food pairing than, oh, everything on our plates with this spectacular wine.  At a restaurant, they could easily have charged $100 for this bottle.  We have had it in our cellar for almost a year - and we paid $22 for it.  I could not believe the velvet mouthfeel of this wine and the amazing fruit-and-chocolate, tobacco-y flavors that emerged.  Stunning!

We finished off the evening with a small glass of Three Rivers Late Harvest Gewürztraminer (which tasted like a bowl of poached pears in caramel - yum!) and two episodes of Scrubs.  What better way to spend your Valentine’s evening??  It was perfect.

I love sticking my head into the fridge and coming up with all sorts of goodies that need to be used - I love it even more when they all fit together!

This morning, I wanted something more than a bowl of cereal for breakfast so I stuck my head in the fridge.

I had gotten a carton of some kind of egg substitute a while back because it was on sale and I had a coupon.  I grabbed that.  I grabbed a half of a green pepper that was in the produce drawer.  I grabbed a couple of green onions that were heading toward the edge of uselessness.  I grabbed a few slices of light American cheese.  I grabbed the last two flour tortillas (that I didn’t even know were in there).  I grabbed a jar of banana pepper rings.  And I started chopping.

Buzz arrived just about then and started cooking.  He sauteed the peppers and onions, plus a clove of fresh garlic and some red pepper flakes, in just a touch of butter.  I added some Kosher salt and some fresh ground black pepper.

Buzz cooked up the “eggs” with the pepper mixture, threw the cheese on top and made omelets, which we rolled into the tortillas.

Clean up time turned into a very yummy breakfast!

Last weekend, I bought a half-gallon of fat-free half-and-half.  There are so many things wrong with that sentence that I don’t even know where to begin, but I’ll try.

A half-gallon??  OK, so we use a lot of half-and-half.  It’s the only thing I take in my coffee and I like it. 

Fat-free half-and-half?  Definitely a contradiction in terms.  But they make it (I’m scared to know what it’s made of).  I’d much rather have the real thing but it saves me a lot of WW points.

I checked the expiration date on it before I bought it because I didn’t want it spoiling before we used it all.  Everything was OK - it was way far in the future.

Only, Buzz opened it this morning and tried to pour it into our morning coffee.  I say “tried” because he told me that he should have actually used a knife to add it to the coffee, rather than pouring it.

*erp*

Now I’m totally frightened.  If the expiration date was not even close to being here, what made this liquid turn to a solid?  There’s not even any fat in it!  AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!