Blech!

Jim had to work tonight, and we originally intended to go to another cooking class at Whole Foods, but unfortunately the class was cancelled due to a lack of people signing up for it. Sigh. I really would have liked to have gone. Ah, well, c'est la vie. We ended up going to Napa anyway for dinner. One of Jim's favorite radio stations, 107.7 The Bone, was at Downtown Joe's. It's a brewery located right across the street from the law firm I worked at while I was in college. In fact, Jim and I once went there for lunch back before we were dating.

I was surprised at how not crowded the place was. The bar area was pretty crowded, but we were escorted to the back of the restaurant, which I had never known to exist. We were both surprised to see how large the place was, and even more so at the absolutely beautiful view of the Napa river.

Jim started with crab cakes and I got a chopped salad with apples, raisins, and blue cheese. The salad was pretty good, and I did enjoy the chewy raisins and crunchy apples. I cemented my findings that I don't like blue cheese but that I do like Gorgonzola. Strange, huh? Jim liked his crab cakes.

Our main courses took way too long to come out. Jim's 8" cheeseburger wasn't actually eight inches. He was a little disappointed at that. It was stuffed with a couple of beer battered onion rings and a toothpick held a jalapeno on top. The beer battered French fries were absolutely delicious. The only thing that could have made them better was ketchup.

Unfortunately, my meal wasn't nearly so enticing. It was the first time in a while that I couldn't stomach a meal. It really wasn't very good at all. The dish was called "Mama Mia! That's Italian." It was rosemary polenta with mushrooms. I was expecting beautiful colors and flavors. Instead I got a brown lump of 'shrooms. I guess I was visually disappointed from the start, but then I tasted the dish and was even more disappointed. While there were cremini, portabello, white, and canned button mushrooms, which should have been a great tasting hodgepodge medley, but instead the mushrooms were drowned in some horrendously foreign sauce. It was overly spicy but not flavorful. The sauce completely hid the natural flavors of the mushrooms and even masked some of the polenta. Yuck. I really did try to eat the dish, but I couldn't hang. Jim ended up eating about half of it.

The sad part was that it could have been an awesome dish. Mushrooms and polenta are a fantastic combination, and a simple marinara would have been perfect. Oh well.

We ended up getting a slice of eight layer chocolate cake for dessert. Since I barely ate anything for dinner, I needed the dessert to fill me up. It was pretty good, but the fondant-like frosting was pretty gross. It tasted slightly stale, like it had been sitting out for a while. The cake itself was quite decadent and delicious--definitely more rich than sweet. We ended up not being able to finish it. I liked that it came with a couple of sliced strawberries and some canned whipped cream, though. It was, like Jim's 8' high sandwich, somewhat false advertising, as there definitely weren't eight layers.

Anyway, the time I spent with Jim during dinner was worth the crappy food. But man, I wish I had just stuck with a veggie burger. Live and learn.