Labor Day Weekend

Labor Day Weekend - Saturday

The fun weekend in Seattle continues with our second Mariner game on another beautiful day. We started our day by picking Lauren up to go to University Village to buy pasta salad for the family barbecue tonight at my nephew and his wife's house. I offered to bring my favorite pasta salad from Pasta & Co.

Pasta & Co. is where I got my Couscous and Black Bean Salad recipe, the best recipe ever! But this is only one of their great salads.

Like their sign says, everything at Pasta & Co. is pure, all natural, full-flavored food with the best ingredients.

And they donate 1% of their sales to the Flagship Foundation which helps educate children in healthy eating and nutrition.

You can also get Beecher's Flagship cheese here that is made at their store at the Pike Place Market. When you walk into Pasta & Co, it smells like garlic and cheese…wonderful.

So much wonderful food to choose from, it seems endless.

I had decided I was going to buy their house pasta salad but after looking over all their choices, we decided we needed to think about it for a minute.

They let you sample anything you want to try, of course, with lots of samples on display.

In the end, we decided on the House Pasta Salad after all but got another one to snack on to hold us over.

Then we walked around to enjoy University Village

and did some window shopping like these Seattle chickens made out of recycled plastic but they looked just like our real chickens!

We also checked out Cupcake Royale's competitors, Trophy Cupcakes.

There is no shortage of cupcakes in this town.

They look too perfect to be real, but be assured, they are real.

Enough of the food spectacle for now, it was time to head to the baseball game! Felix Hernandez was pitching today or as Mariner fans know him - King Felix

so "the King's Court" was in session at Safeco which means Felix's fans all wear yellow and sit in a special section and makes lots of loud noise.

and eat turkey drumsticks

Even the Mariner Moose was decked out in all his "King's Court" gear to cheer on Felix.

The excitement was short lived, however, because the Mariner's lost again to the Angels, Felix's first loss since June 12th! We are not having very good luck with the Mariner's this visit! Felix still had a lot of strike-outs this game.

We left another lost game and headed to Joe and Monica's for a family barbecue. Beverages flowed freely so I started off with a Mac and Jack's.

Joe made some teriyaki flank steak - my favorite meat for a summer barbecue. How did you know, Joe?

Monica sliced up a watermelon

and lots of salads and food soon appeared ready to eat.

This looks like a pretty perfect plate of food, I'd say.

Everyone was ready to dig in to this delicious dinner.

After dinner it was time for a little friendly game of basketball.

Oops, a ball went over the fence.

Lots of blackberries galore back here.

Time to rest so Lauren decided to pet Gus a little.

Gus is shedding…

Time to end the evening watching Joe and Monica's 3-D TV.

A fun family evening on Labor Day weekend.

Meatloaf by Mark Bittman

Once again, I turned on the television yesterday and saw that Mark Bittman was on the Today show and was making his version of meatloaf . This must be meatloaf season. It was surprisingly similar to the Pioneer Woman's version who was also recently on. I was a little surprised of his version because Mark Bittman is into healthy eating and has lost a lot of weight and improved his health by changing his diet which he writes about in his book, Food Matters . His meatloaf recipe also included bacon and cheese! I must be doing something wrong. The thing to remember, which he writes about in his book, is that you can eat healthy without going extreme or changing your whole life. If you don't know who Mark Bittman is, he is a food writer and a four star chef with multiple cookbooks who loves to eat but changed his food philosophy to improve his health. He tells his story in Food Matters and provides a plan for responsible eating that covers a no-nonsense rundown on

Trader Joe's Gluten-Free Oatmeal, Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chip Cookies

I don't have very many gluten-free cookies on my blog because quite frankly, I usually don't like gluten-free. But occasionally, I do find a good recipe and this is one that is from the back of the Trader Joe's oatmeal and it's a good one. My friend brought some over to our house last weekend when Nick and family were here for our birthday celebrations and we all loved them. My friends lives a few blocks away and we walk the neighborhood together on weekends. We can easily go 5 miles in no time, talking non-stop. She loves exploring our neighborhood as much as I do and we discover so many favorite little spots. We even found a property with a horse (or more like a pony, I should say.) The views are always quite lovely, too. Bruce and I had our thirty-ninth wedding anniversary on July 18th and I made a point of walking past the house where we had our wedding reception. I told my friend, "Thirty-nine years ago today, there was a big party g

Spinach Stuffed Cod

Last night, I was in the mood for a healthy dinner so decided to experiment with a recipe I found from a blog called Creative in My Kitchen . Lauren and Ari brought us French cookies back from their trip to Paris and I basically inhaled them. They were so good! We were cat-sitting their two cats while they were gone. They liked lounging in the strangest places... I found one of their toys while I was cleaning so Lauren stopped by last night to pick it up on her way home from work. I was experimenting with this recipe which originally called for chicken breast but I thought it sounded good to substitute fish instead since I'm always looking for good fish recipes. We all thought it was totally delicious. When I went to the grocery store, they had Icelandic cod on sale so I bought about 2 pounds of that. You could use any white fish for this recipe such as: true cod or other cod rockfish halibut had

Sylvia's Scenario

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