What Happens When We're Away?

Often I find myself wondering what the dogs do when we are away from home. I have now discovered what our little precious animals are up to. Seamus seems to enjoy jumping up on our bed. It seems he especially enjoys mommy's side of the bed. No doubt he snuggles up against her pillow.
Deirbhile on the other hand seems to enjoy being near Stuart and thus it is no surprise that she jumps into her puppy's crib. Such naughty puppies we have, I'll have to have a talk with both of them.
Now that Mom and Dad have figured out about the dogs antics while we're away, Seamus is keeping a close watch on our comings and goings. He doesn't want to be caught again.
Seamus and Deirbhile disagree as to who is to blame for this discovery. Deirbhile is giving Seamus a good piece of her mind, she apparently believes he is to blame.
In other news, Agnus bothered to come up to Michigan. As you know she and her husband, (what's his name again?) moved down to hillbilly country in Virginia. As you can see, she's holding Stuart, who was only mildly thrilled to see her. Janna on the other hand was much more excited.
Agnus is in an extreme state of pregnancy and thus is craving various foodstuffs. One such foodstuff is turkey and so we made her our world famous brined turkey with port wine gravy. It was cooked perfectly (breast side up) and was throughly delicious. After dinner we moved into the living room to watch several episodes of Barefoot Contessa, which appears to be a favorite of Agnus'.

Restaurant Bloom

Last Friday Janna and I had dinner with my folks, my brother and his wife at Restaurant Bloom at 40 Monroe Center NW. (There is a current menu on their My Space blog) My brother was in town for an interview of one kind or another which allowed for this little get together. He lives in Cincinnati so we rarely get to visit with him.

In any event, Bloom is a relatively new restaurant with a husband and wife team operating the kitchen. I would say the style is modern, though not quite the avant garde modern of TRU, Charlie Trotter's in Chicago or French Laundry in San Francisco. Nevertheless, for Grand Rapids this is about as close as we're going to get and we will all smile and enjoy it.

Our dinner started off with an amuse bouche of salmon belly in a maple sauce. I love the concept of providing guests with an amuse bouche and I loved the salmon belly but the maple sauce was over powering and way to sweet. I am not a fan of sweet dishes not called desert and even in desert I'm not a fan of to much sweet so perhaps my aversion to the maple sauce is rooted in that. But Janna, who has a sweet tooth, also thought the sauce was to sweet. Good concept, maybe they need to try something else.

For an appetizer I ordered the tuna tartar, roasted peanut, hot sauce sorbet and parsley. The tuna was absolutely perfect and the roasted peanut and hot sauce sorbet perfectly complimented the delicate tuna. The sorbet, while different, added a nice coolness to the dish while at the same time providing a hot zing. This dish alone made the evening worthwhile. Janna started off with a baby spinach salad with crispy ham, aged cheddar and cider dressing. She will attest that the salad was very good, presented beautifully.

My main course was a roasted duck, swiss chard, rutabaga and roasted concord grape juice. The duck was perfectly cooked medium rare and the grape juice provided just the slightest hint of sweetness to this otherwise savory dish. Janna got lamb sirloin, chanterelle mushrooms, red cabbage and hazelnut. She's been raving about the lamb ever since Friday. It was perfectly cooked and perfectly seasoned. Other dishes enjoyed included salmon and ribeye, I'm told both were quite good.

Desert alone is worth going to Bloom for and I understand they have a desert lounge which we will no doubt be frequenting. I got pumpkin cake, coffee ice cream and dates. I'm here to tell you that on its own the pumpkin cake wasn't very good but put together with the ice cream and dates and the pumpkin danced in my mouth. Janna got chocolate goodness, ginger sorbet, hazelnut and sea salt. The chocolate tasted much like a dull Nutella if a bite was taken without the sea salt, with the sea salt the flavors were enhanced and it turns into a wonderful desert. My mother got the most interesting desert of the evening, peanut butter mousse, bacon, bananas and chocolate sorbet. I tried a bit of hers and the bacon went perfectly with the peanut butter mousse, it gave the flavor a certain smokey saltiness that was absolutely wonderful.

Bloom is a great new restaurant downtown and I highly recommend it. The only drawback is that the wait staff wasn't up to par for the quality of restaurant Bloom is. Our waiter when asked simply told me that everything on the menu is good. Well, no kidding, care to provide me with a dish that is particularly good? The woman who brought out all of our dishes felt the need to announce herself by declaring 'look what I found.' One wonders where exactly she found it. In time, I'm sure the chefs will have their wait staff better trained. The food is good enough though to shine despite the waitstaff. Out of a possible 5 stars, Bloom earns 3 stars.

Birthday Weekend

We spent the weekend celebrating Janna's 225th birthday. The celebration started on Thursday with a trip to the Grand Rapids Chop House for dinner. The Chop House is your typical Chicago steakhouse with high end dry aged steaks. Not exactly a cheap restaurantbut since we went on Janna's birthday, her dinner was free. It's a sweet little deal they've got, since her $40 steak was free dinner wasn't that much more expensive than Outback. Janna of course went all out since her entire meal was free, she's been dreaming of carpaccio (raw steak, thinly sliced) and she ate it all up.
Friday we went up to my folks beach house to enjoy a quiet weekend away from things. Stuart always enjoys going up to Ludington.
Seamus and Deirbhile were very excited to celebrate Janna's birthday up at the beach house. But they were more excited about playing with Stuart. Stuart has started crawling around so that makes the play that much more exciting for the dogs.
Stuart's favorite dog is Deirbhile. We think he loves her more than us. We're certain Deirbhile thinks more of Stuart than her parents by adoption.
Seamus grew tired of playing, there's only so much the old boy could take. But he didn't tire out for long, here he is playing with Stuart and Deirbhile again.
The sea was angry that day my friends, like an old man trying to return soup in a deli. The weather was very windy on Friday, very cold on Saturday and very rainy on Sunday. We were actually iced in Sunday morning, had I tried to drive the car I would have slid right off the driveway. A little salt did the trick but we weren't able to leave until afternoon. Once we did leave, we encountered rain and fog all the way back to Grand Rapids. Not the worst ever, but it made the drive home a little more of a production.
We watched a ton of football over the weekend, Janna's actually beginning to not only understand the game but she has come to enjoy it. The college season has been wild, we really enjoyed watching the refs almost hand West Virginia their game against Pitt, thankfully Pitt overcame the inbreds and the refs. We also enjoyed watching Oklahoma beat Mizzou, let chaos reign in the BCS. Janna especially enjoys overtime games, we enjoyed Oregon State's 2OT win over Oregon yesterday afternoon.
Stuart had so much fun at the beach house playing with the dogs, he has no idea how much more fun it will be when it gets warmer out.
And so we leave the beach house and return home. It's a great blessing for us to be able to get away for a few days. But we must return home and I must earn a living for the family. Hopefully we'll enjoy many more weekends up north and many more years with Janna.