Indian Feast!!

After last months lunch date, which hubby still doesn't think should count, we planned a bit better for this month!

 

Our awesome babysitter Amy was booked in advance and we had a restaurant.com voucher to use!

 

So we headed out to one of our favourite Indian restaurants the Taj Indian Cuisine. We have had many meals from this place but always take out, never dined in! 

 

Our waitress was really nice and apparently loved our Aussie accents. I told her she had a cool accent too lol!

 

I went with a pinot grigio and hubby tried a bottle of Kingfisher beer. Its an Indian beer, brewed at Mendocino Brewing Company in California, a local craft brewery! The demand for this beer was so big in the USA that they started making it here to keep up!

Now on to the food!! We went with the Royal Feast! It included Papadams, Meat Samosa ,Tandoori Chicken, Chicken Tikka, Tandoori Shrimp, Chicken Kabab, Lamb Seekh Kabab, Vegetable Curry, Chicken Curry, Raita, Sweet Mango Chutney, Mixed Pickles, Naan, Rice, Dessert, and Hot Tea or Coffee.  It was amazing and hubby will enjoy the leftovers for lunch!

We chatted a lot about our return trip to Australia in Oct/Nov and some future plans which may see us applying for another overseas military posting!

 

We finished eating as much as we could and rolled out of the restaurant and on to Hard times Café in Downtown to catch up with friends, have a drink and play trivia!

 

We enjoy going to Hard Times, but it is a smoking venue and at times, like last night, the smoke was really bad. My eyes were stinging even after a shower. Yes you have to come home and shower because the smell is that strong on everything!!

 

Always a great time though and worth the smoke to hang out with some great friends :)

 

All in all a great date night! Look forward to next months!

Not ideal ~ but we WILL count it!

Well this month went super fast. We did have a planned night, but circumstances changed that!

 

SO, we went for the next best thing......a lunch date!

 

I drove out to hubby's work and picked him up. We just went to a nice little local bar & grill called Roma's (Romas). Its close to the base and the staff were really nice. Food was great too and as you would expect for a bar.

 

There were several other people eating there from the base, but we had our little booth of togetherness on our own :)

 

It was nice to just sit and chat, enjoy the awesome burger and work out some future travel plans.

 

The time is going past so quickly that our focus has now turned to our return trip to home and the dreaded removal! We have 3 types of removals/ packing that will be going on. The air freight, sea freight and the stuff coming with us in suitcases!

 

The best part of the process is planning the awesome 'holiday' back to Oz!

 

Hubby does not think we should count a lunch date as part of this challenge, but I say why not!!

Sometimes you just have to take any moment you can get!

We will make a better effort next month though :)

 

 

 

Jan 24th 2014 ~ 1st date night for the year!

1st Date Night for 2014!

 

Well the sitter is booked, the kids meals are sorted and hubby & I are looking forward to the first month of our New Years Resolution Challenge!

 

The plan is to go out for dinner, somewhere we have not eaten before, then catch a movie!

Date Night for Jan successfully executed!!

We headed to the newest restaurant in town the Texas Roadhouse. The place was packed and we had a 45 - 50 min wait time for a table. So we got our little buzzer and joined the wait list! An hour later still no table, so hubby went to check where we were on the list.....KAPOW table ready for us!

On our way to the table they take you past their meat fridge where you can hand pick the steak you want cooked, or just order from the menu. After careful consideration hubby found his perfect bone in ribeye steak!

Because we had an hour wait we already knew what we wanted from the menu, so we ordered right away! Besides it was now 7:30 and we were hungry!!
Hubby had his hand picked ribeye along with vegetables and mash, brown gravy and mushrooms.
I pretty much ordered the same, but went for the much smaller menu sized steak!

We ordered a cactus bloom for starters, which is pretty much the same as the blooming onion from Australian Outback! Deep fried onion like a flower bloom, so you can pull each petal off and eat it. It was great but we could not eat it all. Needed to leave room for the mains! We also had some hot bread with cinnamon butter.....tasted more like a donut! Hubby was not so keen but I enjoyed it!

I got a non alcoholic smoothie and hubby enjoyed a few beers.
The meals came out and were huge!!! We managed to get through most of it but wow what amazing tasting steak! Highly recommend a feed there. Our waitress Jenn was really nice and even gave us a 10% military discount :)

Hand picked 25oz steak!

 

 

 

We finished as much as we could of the meal and headed over to Paragon 12 to catch a movie. We decided on Lone Survivor and paid the extra $5 a person to sit in the over 21s section. It was on an upper level with reclining leather seats and had a great bar area that you could buy food and drinks at to take in with you! Well worth the extra $5. The bar area even had a pool table and nice lounge seating to hang out in while you waited for your movie!

 

The Lone Survivor was VERY graphic, VERY confronting and based on a true story.

I don't want to give too much of it away but it is based on a USA Military exercise in Afghanistan. Very raw and real. The movie is very well done BUT I am not sure I would recommend it to anyone who has a loved one, or is likely to have a loved one on deployment in the sand pit now or in the near future. 

 

I am glad I watched it and I have a feeling it will win some awards. Eric Bana is in it, a great Aussie actor :) It certainly opened my eyes up and I did come away with more knowledge on how things are over there and that not all Afghans are Taliban.

 

We got home at midnight and the sitter said the boys were great. She has happily had the boys many times over the past 2.5 years, so I guess that's a good sign!!

 

All in all we had a really great date night. We got to talk about lots of things over dinner, including our return to Australia later in the year. Time is going by very quickly and the realization that we will be home before Christmas is hitting home hard!

 

So there you have it, January TICK!!!