Vegas, baby!!

Last week I finally had my first trip to Las Vegas - woohoo!! Hubby's sister and her fiance were in town so we flew over on Wednesday to catch up with them for a few nights.

I couldn't make up my mind which hotel I wanted to stay in, but a little on line research and some recommendations from friends indicated that the Wynn was the place to be, and they were not wrong!!

From the moment we stepped out of the taxi we were blown away by how awesome the hotel was!!

This picture on the left is the entrance lobby.






Unfortunately I didn't get any photos of our beautiful corner suite as every time I remembered it looked like a hurricane had hit it!! However, Hubby did get this awesome shot of the view from our window ...

Once we had unpacked and freshened up we were off to meet Hubby's sister, Caroline, and her fiance Christopher. We had a wee drink at the bar while we caught up, then went in search of dinner. They suggested we head to the Venetian, and as that was at the top of my To Do list we agreed!



People had told us what to expect at the Venetian, and I had seen pictures before, but nothing prepares you for seeing it in the flesh!!

They have St Mark's Square, the Doge's palace, and gondolas sailing up and down the canals! There were even a couple of bridges we recognised from our trip to the real Venice!

The painted sky was really trippy, and it was quite hard to remember that we were actually indoors!!

It was a magical wee place and we had a good wander round before we settled on - surprise surprise! - an Italian restaurant for dinner.

Next, we ventured on up to the Mirage and stopped off at the Rhumbar for a round of massive frozen margaritas which, although delicious, gave us all brain freeze and we struggled to finish them, I know, I know - there's a first time for everything!! By now we were getting quite tired, and the DJ was quite simply atrocious, so we decided to call it a night and arranged to meet up with Caroline and Christopher the next day at 11am.

Cut to 10.45am and me and him waking up in a panic as we realised we were going to be late! This wouldn't normally be a huge problem, but neither Caroline or Christopher's phones would work in the US, and our only means of communication was Facebook when Caroline found somewhere she could get wifi! We managed to get ready in record time and headed towards the tour booth we had decided on last night.

Cut to the second problem - they had picked the tour booth based on Google maps information, and the booth did not in fact exist any more. We spent a good half an hour or so running back and forward trying to see if they were hanging around before we decided to head back to the hotel and try and leave them a message.

By some miracle we found them just beside our hotel, where they had decided to wait for a bit to see if we would come back. After much rejoicing, we declared it to be time for lunch and headed back to our hotel as Hubby wanted to try the Red 8 restaurant.

The menu offered a selection from various Asian cuisines and i thoroughly enjoyed my Malaysian chicken and shrimp fried rice! C & C enjoyed their meals too, but Hubby was a little disappointed with his laksa :-(




After lunch we decided to explore the hotel and stumbled across a little wine bar, or wine and food hideaway as it called itself, called La Cave. And then the drinking began!! I wont go into full detail of all we did or drank that day as quite frankly, I cant remember!! But here are the highlights!! :-)

I remember stopping off at the encouragingly named Margaritaville, and this time the cocktail did not freeze my insides!

Armed with our happy little plastic cups we set off for the Bellagio.

The fountains at the Bellagio were one of the highlights of our trip. So elegant and beautiful - something else that needs to be seen to fully appreciate! This video really doesn't do them justice! (And yes, that is me squealing in the background ......)

Next we cut through the hotel to get to the monorail that would take us to C & C's hotel and on our way we got to see this exquisite ceiling, made up of 2000 hand blown glass flowers.

Our path took us through their conservatory and botanical garden where we saw bees and birds ......

...... and frogs ........

...... and ladybugs .......

 ..... and mini hot air balloons!!   It was wonderfully fairy tale (and yes, I was rather tipsy at this point ...)

Oh yeah, and they had a chocolate fountain at the cake shop!! :-)

Once I had been pried away from the fountain, we continued on our merry way to New York, New York, where C & C were staying, which was, again, visually spectacular!

I loved walking through the bars and restaurants, all laid out like city streets. I would show you a picture, but unfortunately my margarita consumption had not improved my camera skills so all I have are blurry shots :-(

The boys decided that they wanted a go on the rollercoaster, while the girls decided that we'd rather stick needles in our eyes, so we waited for them at a bar and had another wee glass of wine. *hic!*



C & C then packed up a change of clothes and we returned to our hotel to get ready for dinner.

Hubby had a fancy for steak, so we reserved a table at the SW Steakhouse in our hotel and got our glad rags on!

And once again, the meal was exquisite! Wonderful, perfectly cooked steaks, with fries, potato gratin, and some broccoli so we could at least pretend to be healthy!! ;-)





After dinner we ventured down to the nightclub, which was a very fancy outdoor setting with a river and a waterfall, and some really good music (Swedish House Mafia, if you care) but unfortunately nowhere for me to sit, and that was the point that I decided I may now be too old for clubbing! I would much rather have been sitting comfortably with good company and a nice glass of pinot noir listening to the music than constantly getting bumped out of the way and  unable to hear what anyone was saying!! Anyway, old lady rant over! I stuck it out for an hour or so then decided to leave the others to it and head back to the room (with a final glass of prosecco for the road)

I vaguely remember people coming back to the room and rough plans being made for lunchtime the following day, but my next real memory is of the monster hangover I woke up with! Hubby wasn't much better and we lay in bed willing ourselves to get up so we could go meet C & C. We were very relieved when Caroline sent us a message saying that they also felt like death and would be hanging around their pool all day. We agreed to do our own thing and meet for dinner later.

After another hour or so in bed the hunger kicked in and I knew we had to get up. I was craving a burger so we headed to the Palazzo hotel and found an appropriately named I <3 Burgers. It was heaven! Aside from the weird greasy bun, my burger topped with blue cheese and bacon was delicious, and Hubby's bacon-fest (a burger with chopped bacon through it, bacon on top and bacon mayo!) hit the spot.

But nothing could compare to the sheer joy that was my Tahitian vanilla bean milkshake!! :-)

Granted, it did make me a bit sick on top of my hangover and the big ass burger I had polished off, but dear God it was awesome!!

After that we shopped for a bit but I was suffering from milkshake intoxication so we headed back to the hotel to chill for a bit before dinner.





Dinner that night was Caroline's choice, and we went to BB King's Blues Club at the Mirage. My hangover was still demanding lardy food so I had fried chicken with mac and cheese - yummy!! The music was mostly pretty good there, apart from a woman who couldn't sing to save her life and murdered many classics right before our eyes!!

None of us were in a drinking mood so we paid the bill and headed out for the Mirage's hourly volcano display which was fun. We were ready to call it a night, but wanted to catch one last show from the fountains at the Bellagio which was even more spectacular than the day performance! I wish I had captured that one for you, but I was too busy watching and enjoying myself!!

We said our farewells then, and made our way back to the hotel. It was still relatively early (for Vegas, anyway!) but we weren't feeling terribly sociable so we just chilled in the room. Tiesto was playing in the club that night and, as the club was directly below our room, we were able to listen to his set from bed - rock 'n' roll!!!

Sadly, the next day we had to go home :-( We had a couple of hours to kill after we checked out so we went back to La Cave and had some more of their delicious wine and some lunch and sat contentedly til some posh English assholes came in and were .... well .... assholes. We decided to relocate to the bar in the lobby for a last wee drink before we had to drag ourselves to the airport :-(





So that was my first Vegas trip, and I loved it!! There was still so much that we didn't get to see, so I will be looking forward to making a trip back as soon as possible!!

Here are a few other random pics we took:

The Palazzo & Venetian hotels, with our hotel in the background

Outside Caesar's Palace

The Paris hotel

Giant parasols suspended from the ceiling in our hotel

Stuff 'n' nonsense

Greetings!! What's new in your part of the world? We haven't been having too many adventures, but I would like to tell you about our new favourite wine bar, Grapevine in Willow Glen. We ventured down with the usual suspects (you know who you are!!) on Saturday night and loved it so much we were back there on Tuesday! They have a really good selection of wine and speciality beers, and a truly scrumptious appetiser menu. The ham and Gouda grilled cheese sandwiches, and prosciutto, cheese and arugula flat breads will definitely keep us coming back for more!!

We also got our Vegas trip booked - woohoo!! :-) We were planning a longer road trip there but Hubby will be very busy at work so we are going to fly there Wednesday night and come back Saturday afternoon - that should be just enough time to pickle our livers without destroying them completely!! Thanks to everyone who has suggested restaurants and things to do - I think we have enough recommendations to see us through at least another 5 trips!

I got round to making one of my new recipes that i've been meaning to try for a while last night, and I can confidently say that spicy basil chicken has gone straight in to my top 5 recipes - hurrah!! I made the sesame rice as suggested, but I used white rice as we were too hungry to wait for brown to cook, and it came out a bit soggy but the flavours were really yummy and went well with the chicken.

This will be a good meal to make when our friends Greeny and Nadine get here for their visit (19 more sleeps - squeeeeee!!) as Nadine doesn't eat meat, and it would be very easy and equally delicious made with shrimp.

Well, now I shall go back to contemplating the gym. I went on Tuesday and did a couple of new upper body exercises but have shocked some new muscles in my arms and chest in to life, and dear god they are sore!! I only got 3 or 4 hours sleep last night as no matter how I lay something was hurting just enough to keep me awake :-( Maybe I'll skip the gym today and get some exercise walking around the mall instead .... ;-)

Laters ..... x

And how was your weekend?

Happy Tuesday, my friends! Did you have a nice weekend? We had a rather busy one.

We were supposed to be going to a classical concert outside San Jose State University on Friday night but I was exhausted and incredibly sore after a new routine at the gym and three hours of baking, so we joined the neighbours for some wine and hot tubbing instead. It was a wonderful way to spend a Friday night and my
muscles were very grateful!



Saturday morning we were off to the Guglielmo Winery nearby for their quarterly bottle your own wine event. This is a great wee event where they blend up their excess wine and sell it off for $7 a bottle, and if you buy a case you get free access to the buffet of sausage, garlic bread, cured meats, cheeses and baguette.

The wine can be a bit hit and miss depending on the blend, and sadly this was not one of the better ones. It's still better than a lot of the crap you can get for the money in the supermarket so we got a case to put by for when Greeny & Nadine get here next month (5 weeks today to be precise - WOOHOOOOOO!!!)




Once we were home we had a short space of time to frost the mountain of mini cupcakes I had made the previous day to take to John & Teo's housewarming party. Luckily my handsome assistant, aka the Hubby, took care of the frosting duties while I was busy clearing up and working out how to successfully transport 70 mini cupcakes on a train. The answer? Carefully!!!

The featured cupcake this weekend was the butterscotch with salted caramel frosting, and everyone appeared to enjoy them. They might even be rivalling my chocolate chip cookies and my Oreo truffles for the top spot in my friends' affections!!

Fun times were had at the party, including a thorough testing of John's new BB gun. No people or animals were injured during these tests, but a Diet Coke can was disintegrated and a broken garden chair was, well, destroyed further!

Just another Saturday night in sunny California!!











After a brief hangover on Sunday I surprised everyone, including myself, by making it to the gym - more for a muscle stretch than a real workout it, but I felt better for at least trying.



In the evening we finally made it to one of the free classical concerts that Symphony Silicon Valley and San Jose State University put on every summer. We really enjoyed the ones we went to last year with Eric and Rose and were looking forward to them again this year, but unfortunately we managed to miss all but the final one on Sunday :-(

We spent a lovely hour or so listening to the music in the sunshine and enjoying a glass of wine and some leftover cupcakes. Oh yeah, and some free ice cream! :-)

Well, I'm off to the gym now. I have a fun afternoon of tidying out my shoe closet to look forward to - but don't worry, I'm not getting rid of any of my babies!! We just ran out of room so we got some more shelves to help make them more comfortable :-) If you behave yourselves I might show you some pics when I'm done ......!!

Laters .... x

Dish of the Day

Good morning!! How are you all today? Just wanted to stop by and tell you about the rather tasty snapper I made for dinner last night! Snapper with zucchini and tomatoes and orzo, to give it its full title.

As I mentioned yesterday, i haven't really cooked fish before - especially without Hubby at my back to monitor my progress! But he was upstairs slaying dragons or something so I was left to my own devices, armed only with Nadine's earlier advice to poke one bit of fish to see if it was ready then give Hubby the intact portion (cheers, hon!!)

It became clear towards the end of cooking time that I hadn't fully prepared for this recipe so I was somewhat running around at the last minute, but I was fairly pleased with the end result.

The fish was a little overdone, but that was down to my panic cooking and then having to spend a wee bit longer keeping warm in the oven than it should. The pine nuts in the orzo were a little under-toasted, but that's because i'm an idiot and didn't notice until two minutes before serving that they needed toasted! I thought it might have been a little lacking in flavour, but that's probably because I used dried herbs instead of fresh and may not have used enough.

Even so, Hubby proclaimed it to be delicious and of restaurant quality!! Yeah, right!! I think he may have been a little generous with his praise, but i'll take what I can get - thanks Hubby!! Definitely one to transfer into my recipe notebook! Thanks again to Cooking Light for their inspiration! For anyone who cares, here are the recipes - snapper with zucchini & tomato with parsley orzo

In other news, my parcel from pinupgirlclothing.com arrived and I was very disappointed to find the dress of joy I had ordered was too small *sob* Now trying to decide if it is something I will fit into once my latest goal is reached or if I should send it back for a bigger size. FYI, here is the dress in question ... pinupgirlclothing.com

There will be no kitchen adventures tonight as it is Wednesday, therefore eating out night. I'll let you know if we have anything noteworthy. Today's challenges shall be limited to getting my ass to the gym (third time lucky this week?) and clearing up the paperwork shitstorm that appears to have accumulated in the corner - fun times!!

Laters .... x

Sausage-tastic!

As promised yesterday, last night I had another go at making sausage risotto, and I am pleased to report that it was (mostly) a success!! Hurrah!!

My first attempt had been a bit of a disaster and I wasn't too sure why. Hubby and I both agreed that the flavour was fantastic but the texture was mega stodgy. For some reason I ended up having to use a hell of a lot more liquid than the recipe called for and I had to cook it a lot longer too. It was all rather disappointing, but I knew it was something I wanted to try again.

I had decided that perhaps my stock wasn't hot enough when I was adding it last time (the recipe calls for it to be simmering but not boiling and I think I may have been a little cautious) so I decided to focus on that this time. 

A risotto is quite a tedious thing to make as it requires constant stirring for about half an hour or so, and I was glad of my newly developed biceps from my recent adventures at the gym!

I got to the end of my stock about 5 minutes before the end of the half hour so I ended up putting about another half cup in, but still a lot less than last time!! Also, the rice wasn't quite done so I gave it another 5 minutes before serving, but again this was way less than last time.

End result? Not bloody bad! I jumped the gun a bit taking the rice off as some of it was still a wee bit underdone, but it was edible! It was also a bit on the salty side as we had used a normal stock cube plus one of Hubby's homemade chicken stock cubes, and my extra half cup of liquid was also stock (I'm fairly sure last time I just used extra water) But these are both things that can be easily fixed for next time!

If you are interested at all here is the recipe I used, once again from my beloved Cooking Light magazine! sausage & spinach risotto I halved the recipe so it would just serve two, but I still used two sausages as no-one should ever have to share a sausage! I also threw in a handful of peas because everything tastes better with peas! :-)

I really enjoyed getting back in to the kitchen and cooking something fun, and cant wait to try some more new stuff! Tonight I'm going to cook snapper for the first time so I'm a little nervous - I'm not very good with fish and usually leave it for the Hubby to cook, but I suppose id better learn at some point! I'll let you know how that goes ......

Well, now I'm off to hover by the window waiting for the FedEx man to deliver my fabulous new dress from pinupgirlclothing.com - my new favourite website - and if he doesn't arrive too late I may even get to the gym, as my fabulous new dress will need a fabulous flatter stomach to do it justice!! (or maybe some Spanx instead ........)

Laters ....!! x

Best. Anniversary. Ever.

This weekend Hubby and I celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary. Normally we would go somewhere for a nice meal but we wanted to do something a bit special this year so we booked ourselves into the Four Seasons hotel in Palo Alto on Friday night. We had eaten there once before and the meal was exquisite, but it is one of the places that you have to drive to so we had wanted a good excuse to go back and stay over so Peter could enjoy the wonderful wine and not have to worry about getting us home!


As that hotel mainly caters to business guests Friday night is the quietest night of the week, and the restaurant was practically empty. Friday night is also when they run their half price wine offer, so we were able to get a rather divine pinot noir that would normally be way out of our price range!! :-)



The meal was, once again, exquisite! I cant remember word for word what I had to eat as the titles were quite fancy, but essentially I had a chilled tomato soup with mini croutons and some kind of cream dolloped in the middle, followed by snapper with sun dried tomatoes, marsala soaked raisins and almond couscous (this is actually what I had the first time we ate there so I already knew it would be good!) Now, to clarify just how good this meal was, I hate sun dried tomatoes and I have never voluntarily eaten a raisin in my life, but I cleared the plate and it was delicious!!!










For dessert we both had the doughnut balls which came with chocolate Guinness sauce and salted caramel sauce for dipping. O.M.G!!! We had to restrain ourselves from drinking the rest of the sauces when we had run out of doughnuts!!

We finished our wonderful evening with a couple of drinks at the bar then retired to our room. It was only one of the basic rooms, but it was still really nice!! One wall was all floor to ceiling windows with views over the San Francisco bay and ...... errrr ....... Ikea.

Yep, they really are the same all over the world!!

We had a nice lazy morning on Saturday reading the paper in bed, then a wonderful brunch back in the restaurant (crab cake with poached duck egg and Parmesan creamed spinach - yum!) then Hubby checked into the spa for a nice long massage. Massages aren't really my thing, but I enjoyed having the room to myself while I caught up with my magazines.




We were home in time to catch up with some friends who were having a wee party at the pool in our complex and spent a nice hour or two drinking and lazing in the sun.

When dinner time rolled around we figured it would be near impossible to find somewhere nearby that would be able to seat all 10 of us so we decided to order an obscene amount of ribs from our local barbecue restaurant and take them back to ours. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't polite. We all stood around our kitchen island like savages and devoured the meat, and dear God it was good!!

!

Quote of the night has to go to John, the only other guy there, who turned to Hubby after he'd had his fill and announced that it was now time to fight for the women!

Once everyone had digested their meal most people went off for some late night hot tubbing, but I was too tired so enjoyed a quiet hour or so sipping prosecco and listening to 50s/60s music - bliss!


Sunday was a bit of a return to normal as Hubby had to do some work and we had to go grocery shopping (boooooo!!) but we did manage to finish off our anniversary weekend in style with some more bubbles!!

So, like I said - best anniversary ever!! Thank you, Hubby, for yet another awesome year of marriage, and a wonderful weekend of celebration! How on earth are we going to top that next year?!?!?!

LOVE YOU!!! xxx

Hello!! It's me again!!

I know, I know!! It's been, like, forever since my last post! Well, actually it was May, but it feels like forever! How have you all been? Things have been pretty quiet chez Kavanagh, hence my radio silence. 

The most exciting news from the last couple of months has been the awesome progress on my weight loss challenge! I had managed to lose about 4lbs earlier in the year but was really struggling to shift any more, so I decided to make the most of Hubby's two and a half week business trip last month and made myself huge pots of healthy bean soup and veggie bean rice to live on while he was away - fortunately they are two of my favorite meals anyway so it was quite easy to stick to them. 

I also spent an obscene amount of time in the gym, but the result was another 6lbs off so by the time Hubby came home I was back to 170lbs, the weight I was when we moved to America - hurrah!!! Ive managed to lose another 6lbs this month which pretty much puts me back at my happy size - more hurrahs!! I don't really want to lose much more weight, but I would like to improve my current shape so I will be spending even more obscene amounts of time at the gym trying to convert some of this lard to muscle. *groan*

But at least I wont have to "diet" anymore and I can get back to my cooking which I am really looking forward to, and will give us more stuff to chat about again - yet another hurrah!! First up, tonight we're going to have another bash at a sausage and spinach risotto I tried a while back - I don't think I told you about the first attempt as it was ... well ... a bit shit! I'll let you know how that goes!

Now, please don't be worrying that I'm going to disappear again for months!! There's way too much exciting stuff happening that I'll just have to tell you about!! Curious? Well, here's a little teaser of what to look forward to:

1) Hubby and I will be doing a cheeky wee road trip at the end of the month, which will include a few nights in Vegas catching up with Hubby's sister!!

2) In a mere 6 weeks we will have our first visitors from Scotland, which we are ridiculously excited about!!!

Oh, and I'm totally going to have to show you all the pretty new dresses I've bought to celebrate my return to fabulousness!!! 

Well, that should do for now. Stay tuned for a little rundown of our anniversary weekend coming up shortly, and of course, tomorrow's exciting risotto update ......

x