April 5 - Lola, The Cops, Ghostland

Didn't those spoons used to come with little ice creams?

I am relatively new to the world of the business professional. My experience with the 9 to 5 has been varied and, at times, uncomfortable. Especially when it comes to the business lunch. Food to me is something fairly intimate, and I like to enjoy it. It's hard for me to enjoy food when I'm around people who control my income, but I'm working on it.

Last week the Chief Administrative Officer (yikes!) took my department out to Lola for a celebratory lunch for doing a good job in the first quarter. Yay! We started out with a sampler of spreads served with griddled pita. I never want pita any other way. We got 4 spreads: feta (rich but not exciting), sweet red pepper (fresh tasting but again, not exciting), tzatziki (pretty good, nice and dilly), and kalamata~fig (definately the standout - delicious!).

Olives and figs: meant to be together.

Of course, since I knew where we were going for lunch, I did a bit of research online into their menu. I was excited to see that on their list of lunchtime kebabs was. . . lamb's tongue. What! Of course I was intrigued. How big is a lamb's tongue? What's it like? Will I feel guilty eating it, knowing that there is a lamb out there that can no longer get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?

Well, I never got to find out. The lamb's tongue was sadly absent from the kebab selection, and I was forced to default to my second choice: Vlahotiri cheese and poached fig, drizzled in fig balsamic and accompanied by a Greek salad and more of that beautiful griddled pita and tzatziki.

Oh, glorious cheese!

I was incredibly pleased with my selection. When it came out, the cheese was just slightly melty on the outside, and it paired beautifully with the sweet, chewy figs. Mmmm. . . cheese. I dug in with (professionally) careless abandon.

Unfortunately, not everyone had a win with their lunch orders. Jackie, one of my co-workers, did a soup and salad combo - featuring an experimental "tomato" soup. Why the quotations? Well. . . it didn't resemble any tomato soup I'd ever seen before. It looked like pureed beets, and tasted like cinnamon-spiced carrots. It wasn't altogether unpleasant, but definitely somewhat offputting. Back to the drawing board, Tom Douglas.

It was a nice color, at least.

So how cool is our CAO? Well, after a delicious lunch he took us all across the street to Dahlia Bakery. It's the bakery that supplies all of Tom Douglas's restaurants with their desserts. It's a great little standalone takeout spot, though. They have fantastic breakfast items and their tomato soup (the regular type) is consistently great. They also have what is universally accepted to be the world's best coconut cream pie, conveniently available in a single-bite size.

Tiny sized to reduce fat-guilt.

While I was tempted to go with the fail-safe pie bite, I was enticed away by the mini carrot-cupcake. Carrot cake has always confused me. Why would you make a dessert out of a vegetable? That doesn't make sense. So I've been trying to reach an understanding of the carrot cake. This seemed like a safe mini introduction.

And I was pleasantly satisfied with the little cake. I was saddened at first at the overly cream cheesy and underly sweet frosting, but when paired with the tender, spicy cake it worked perfectly. Well played, Tom Douglas.

The calculator is pictured for scale reference.
The cupcake didn't come with a free calculator. Unfortunately.

I was going to include in this post my first foray into macaron-making, but it was an epic fail. I will instead close with a couple pictures from some concerts I got to go to this weekend.

The Cops played at Chop Suey on Friday night. I think I might like Chop Suey because it looks like my parent's Chinese restaurant back in 1991. Maybe I find it comforting, I don't know. My friend Ian had been raving about how fantastic The Cops are live ever since they played The Tractor a little while back, so I was pretty jazzed to see them.

Rock n roll!

I wasn't disappointed. Despite multiple equipment failures, they put on a pretty rocktastic show. Especially this guy, who I suspect I may be in love with now:

If you're out there, I love you. . .

Saturday night I was lucky enough to charm my way into a ticket to the sold-out Ghostland Observatory show at The Showbox. They're also known for their mind-numbingly awesome live shows, so I was pretty ecstatic when my friend Jon called me two hours before the show to tell me he had an extra ticket.

Score!

The show was legitimately really good, but I have a gripe: there were so many fog and laser machines on stage I wasn't sure if I was being dazzled by the band or the stage techs. I mean, come on guys, you're young and hip, do you really need all that flashy stuff to put on a good show? Just a thought.

I took like 50 pictures and this was the only decent one.

I'm going to try those macarons again soon. You'll see a post of it here presently. Promise.