Dinner for cheap

My stomach is bursting after a three course meal deal! From the 11th-23rd August you can go to a wide selection of restaurants (the more expensive end) and get a three course meal for $35 (not including taxes and drinks!). The menu is obviously cut down, but there is some good things on offer. Tonight, four of us from work went to Smith & Wollensky, just opposite Highland Village (a posh shopping mall/area). Amusingly, we didn't have much variation on what we all ordered. We all avoided the Caesar salad and the chicken for main! We started with the split pea soup, which was individually served from silver bowls by the waitress (as photographed!). Actually, I forgot to mention all the cutlery was silver, however, at one point I thought they were going to replace our silverware with a cheaper alternative since we were on the $35 menu :) Then medium rare steak fillets, or rather 'filays', as you call them here. They had amazing crispy outsides, plenty of butter and salt!, and they melted in the mouth. For dessert, well it was rude not to when you are paying for it, so I had the sorbet, while the guys had chocolate cake, see fork for scale!, and cheesecake. The chocolate cake was sickly sweet and I think my sorbet was a better choice to cleans the palette. I forgot to mention I got left to choosing the wine, as I had said I don't like whisky, only wine and G&T's, on a concersation about Scotland. The menu must have been A2 paper size with about six pages top to bottom in wines. First of all, I said where are the prices - there were numbers up and down the right hand edge, but they were three figures so I assumed that was a code! Oh no, they really were three figures and some above the $500 mark. We decided it would be a tad uncouth to go for the $35 menu and then order a really expensive bottle of wine. So as a true Scot I started reading the menu right to left (i.e. price to wine!). This rapidly slimmed the selection down. We passed up the cheapest Texan wine on offer and settled on a read Merlot from the Nape Valley. It was drinkable, but probably still way over priced! All in the all, the company was great and the food was very good too, so no complaints.

However, getting to the restaurant was a hike. I went off for a swim from work and unknown to me there was an enormous thunderstorm while I was in the pool. Danny said the lights and computers went off and on at work, due to some sort of power surge. It actually happened at the pool briefly, but I didn't think anything of it. I estimated, at the worse, it would take me 30 minutes to get from the gym to the restaurant. Well, three traffic lights out and a lady in a large pickup perpendicular to Westheimer in a ditch, meant my reasonable journey took just over the hour! The lights had gone out due to the storm. Just to put this in prospective, Westheimer, at the point I was at, is five lanes in each directions and a turning lane, not to mention two lane roads joining from either side. Everyone is remarkably disciplined when the lights do go out and it is all turn about, but it does slow everything down, and you still have to be aware for the crazy ones. When I finally made it to Highland Village I parked on the opposite side of the road to the restaurant, parking around there can be challenging. Two nice police, however, stopped the traffic for me to let me cross Westheimer :) I decided not to make eye contat with the drivers!

After I got home this evening I have been madly packing because it my weekend to Austin, to go tubing on the Guadalupe River. We leave, by we, I am mean Laura, Chris (her man) and a friend of Laura's from work, with some forty others from Houston in a bus to Austin. On the Saturday we are going tubing, I am not exactly sure the format but I assume we each get an inner tube and float down the river. However, with the drought in Austin this year I think we might be walking (so my trainers are packed!). On Sunday, the bus drives us back to Houston for early afternoon. It is going to be a fun weekend and there is about 80 people going in total, with the other half busing in from Dallas. My bag is absolutely stuffed as I am not exactly sure what I need, I have got five pairs of shoes, enough changes of outfits for at least a week, heaps of sun tan lotion and my gardening hat :) Because I will be away from home and my computer this will be my last posting until Sunday - I know you will all be utterly distressed by this! I could do a post from my blackberry, but I would get finger crap trying to do a posting this long!

Have a good weekend and I will tell you all about my trip on Sunday, or rather Monday for all you at home.