Bleeding money

I cannot believe how much freaking money I have been spending lately. I swear, it's like a never-ending list of bills and other freak expenses. Midget has been ridiculously expensive lately, and now my car, in today for its $350 30K tune-up (which was supposed to be a simple oil change, mind you), needs new tires to the tune of $900! I should be able to get a better deal through Costco, something like $750, but still! It's one unexpected bill after another. The tire thing came out of nowhere, because I only have 30,000 miles on the stupid things. I definitely wasn't expecting to need new ones already.

Anyway, Jim dropped me off at work this morning and then stayed in the area to take me out to lunch. Yesterday we decided we wanted Mary's Pizza Shack, a small California chain that makes some pretty mackin' pizza. The weather is so nice today that we definitely wanted to eat outside, and for a while we were the only ones there. Inside the restaurant was absolutely packed. Our poor server seemed to be the only one working, which was really weird. They had several people seating and bussing and taking drink orders, but he was all by himself for everything else.

Despite his busyness, he was really nice and as on top of it as I think he could be. He didn't charge for the iced tea and also brought us out some bread to munch on while we waited, so those were definitely points in my book. And the pizza was great as always. What I especially like about Mary's is their light, flaky crust that doesn't tear up the roof of my mouth despite the crispiness. We ordered a large pizza, half vegetarian with light cheese for me and half Toto's combo for Jim, which was, from what I could tell, your stereotypical combo pizza. The one difference I noticed was that their pepperoni is smaller in circumferance but thicker.

Jim came and picked me up right after work, and we drove to the Honda dealership to pick up my car. After that, we dropped of my car at Jim's house and went to the Benicia Farmer's Market, something I swear we've never done together and Jim is just as adamant that we have. For the record, as we were walking back to the car, he admitted that he was perhaps mixing it up with something else. Ha!

Right at the entrance of the market were two booths selling Indian food and passing out samples. The first booth we went to let us try just about everything, which turned out to be a petty smart strategy since we ended up buying some spinach paratha, chicken tikka masala, and some sort of tomato sauce that Jim liked more than I did (I preferred the cilantro chutney). Plus we grabbed a samosa to-go topped with my cilantro chutney.

Indian food is definitely something that's grown on me recently. I never cared for it when I was younger, but my friend I, who is Indian-American, cooked dinner for a group of us. The rest, to cliche, is history. The Indian food she made was absolutely amazing. The spices, the creaminess, the smells . . . there was nothing I didn't love about any of it. Ever since then, I've relished every rare opportunity to eat the stuff.

Back to the present, we also sampled the other booth's offerings, but he wasn't nearly so generous and their foods were slightly more expensive. So we went with Booth A in the long run. We wandered down the rest of the street, sampling strawberries, raspberries, white peaches, yellow peaches . . . tons of fruit. We ended up getting 3 pints of raspberries for only $5, which was way too fantastic of a deal to pass up. Plus the raspberries were beautifully sweet and mild without any tartness, which meant that I loved them. My only complaint about raspberries is their tartness.

On our way out we grabbed our Indian food and munched on the samosa. The samosa was soo good. It was room temperature, which concerned me a bit at first, but it was still light and flaky. It reminded me that I want to make a version of samosas that I read in Cooking Light, which uses phyllo dough and is baked instead of fried.