Another wintery weekend in February. Fortunately, we spent it with good friends and hardly noticed the bone chilling wind - well we noticed it a little. We headed to Chicago for a weekend of fun and frivolity with our friends, John and Linda. We started off with seeing how lobster rolls in Chicago compare with those from Connecticut. John and Linda had wanted to check out the Original Island Shrimp House so we came along to help in the judging. The food was quite tasty, but it wasn't the right kind of lobster roll - it was a toasted bun filled with cold lobster salad instead of just hot buttered lobster. To make up for it (or we could all have just been ravenous) we added plates to pass of crab cakes and fried clams. Needless to say, no one left hungry. But just in case we headed to their house to a belatedly celebrate my birthday from last year (nice of them to put the year on the cake in case I had forgotten). While not exactly something you want to be reminded of, you can't argue with cake (well it is really the icing, the cake is just a carrier). I did enjoy the rousing rendition of Happy Birthday since Jo, Linda, and John are all good singers!!
Saturday we filled the day with a Pizza Tour - hence the blog title this week. The food reporter for a local Chicago TV station has organized a pizza tour of Chicago pizzerias, of which there are apparently several thousand (although some of them are just multiple sites of the same chain). We hit four of the ten different kind of pizzas the food guy has categorized pizzas into. Each stop we got the history behind the pizza, the history of the particular restaurant we were at, a slice or two of the featured pizza, and some tips on how the pizza was prepared. Great way to spend a brisk, wintery day especially since we got to visit each of the kitchens and stand by the roaring pizza ovens. The owners were all very open about how they make their pizzas and Jo and I learned some new tricks to try the next time we put together a homemade pie. We came home stuffed with pizza and knowledge - a very good day.
Later that evening, after we managed to digest a bit, we did a murder mystery event at the local historical society. While neither Jo or I guessed the right villain - John and Linda's son's girlfriend did and was the overall winner - we did have fun trying to figure it out from the clues provided and Jo got to do a little acting as one of the characters. Again, a fun way to spend a winter evening along with enjoying some appetizers and desserts (notice the food theme for the weekend).Due to the threat of a snow storm (which wasn't as bad a predicted) we headed home early on Sunday to get a little time at the gym - got to do something about all that pizza - and then some more prep work for our upcoming move. Also got to shovel a little snow to burn a few more calories.
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