Fat Tuesday

As I write this, I just finished a walkjog and I'm eating some Greek yogurt, but I haven't been adhering quite as closely to the Smackdown as I was last month. I'm still managing to show up at yoga once or twice a week, and I even (gasp!) jogged on the treadmill the other day when it was raining, but otherwise, I've been eating tons of super delicious food. My SLH is both willing and able to make dinner (I know!) so who am I to stop him? His projects primarily involve pounding meat and cooking it with fire (I mean "fahre") and I've been too busy stuffing my face to get any pics. But sometimes, we work as a culinary team in our teeny tiny kitchen and the results are (usually) pret-ty pret-ty great. Two recent examples are this chowder, from The Homesick Texan cookbook we got for Christmas (and Hey Mom! I also got to use my new hand blender on this one).

It doesn't look like much in this photo, but Y.U.M.

 And these beer-braised short ribs with thyme roasted sweet potatoes. We did a little interweb research on rib braising and then just winged it: meat, carrots, onion, celery, can of tomatoes, chick broth, beer, and of course a jalapeno. SO good. For the sweet potatoes I used this recipe. The next day we threw it all into the crockpot and stewified it. Mmmmm...meat.

Meat and taters

It also didn't help that the first two weeks of February are "festival of love" (sorry, hope you're not eating), another in a series of my made-up holidays. This one is similar to Hanukkah in that it celebrates a miracle: John's transformation from random guy hitting on me at a Super Bowl party to guy I would actually date and eventually marry. We don't celebrate Valentine's Day since our "special day" is February 15 (our first date). This year for FOL finale we had dinner at Justine's. (Here is the Chronicle Review which is tame and nice, and here is the restaurant website which is slightly disconcerting and has some pleasingly racy video) We ate snails! They were surprisingly tasty, but isn't anything tasty when soaked in wine, butter, and garlic? Thumbs up.
 Did y'all know we're moving? Woohoo! For the first time in six years I will live less than 25 minutes from everything I want/need to do. As my NW peeps would say, I'm hella stoked. To say goodbye to our uncool 78729 zip code, we visited a few of our favorite spots and a new, very silly place called Senorita's Cantina. Klassy indeed. Giant Margaritas,

The hub looks a little silly in this one, but it was the better one of me, so...

 and the most insane restaurant mural I've ever encountered. JS described these mermaids as being "explosively breasted". Hee hee. You must click to enlarge. Wouldn't this be awesome airbrushed on your truck or van?

This is the most ridiculous mural I've ever seen

The rest of the most choice photos from that evening are on the FB, and if you're not on there, you're lucky (and smart!)
Guess I should comb my hair and stuff but before I go I'd like to send a shout out of C&D love to our uncle, a Dallas Police officer who was injured in the line of duty last week. We're so very happy that you're on the mend. Hope to see you soon. You can read about what happened here. Let me remind you again- love your people, enjoy every day (even the walkjog parts).