Weekend: Part I

Tonight I’m attending the Share Our Strength’s A Tasteful Pursuit dinner at Stephan Pyles, courtesy of Foodbuzz- which I’m beyond excited about and pretty sure that it will warrant its own post. Soooo, this one is just for the rest of the weekend.

FRIDAY

I’ve been nursing a summer cold all weekend, so Friday we decided to keep it low key and headed to our favorite neighborhood Thai restaurant, Tukta Thai. The tom yam soup is perfect for what ails ya:

I forget the name of my entree (I always order by number!!), but it’s basically just chicken, broccoli and carrots in a light sauce with TONS of black pepper and cilantro. Brian gave me a taste of his Siam noodles, too.

And then afterwards we rented Sunshine Cleaning. Very cute.

SATURDAY

We ran a ton of errands on Saturday. Poor Brian was a total champ, too. We did try a new restaurant for lunch: Texas de Brazil Express. I’ve only tried Fogo de Chao, never Texas de Brazil- but those places generally bring two words to mind: MEAT and EXPENSIVE. TDB Express definitely has their fair share of meat, but it’s very reasonably priced and they have a good veggie selection as well. I had the bacon-wrapped chicken salad topped with cucumbers, tomatoes and red onions (all three marinated), hearts of palm, roasted red peppers, pumpkin seeds, parmesan, and balsamic dressing. Brian deemed it “A Very Heather Salad.” Indeed. I loved that all of the vegetables were marinated, though I guess that might turn some people off. This was less than $7:

Lauren and Robert invited us over for dinner Saturday night, so I volunteered to bring dessert. Busted out the Baked cookbook yet again for the Root Beer Bundt Cake:

Lauren’s dog (and Chloe’s boyfriend) Charlie recently had some pretty major surgery so Chloe suggested that we make him a little something, too:

Thanks to Brian for the photos styling. Homemade dog biscuits, which can be found here on DallasEats and are ridiculously easy to make. I refrigerated the dough to make it easier to roll out and cut. Baked at 300 for 30 minutes, then turned off the heat and let them harden in the oven. Don’t you love the little pugs?

Speaking of, guess who got a sassy new collar this weekend???

Isn’t it cute? Found it at the Lucky Dog Barkery, but I’ve seen it online as well (it’s made by Bella Bean). A little pricey but her last collar was Bella Bean and it lasted four years.

When we got over to their house, Lauren was going all Paula Deen on us, standing at the stove in her cute little damask apron, frying okra and listening to the Old 97′s. Okay, that okra was GOOD. I stood there and picked at the dish while she fried and then managed to eat everything on this plate afterwards, too.

The turkey burger was really good, too- topped with hatch chili cheese. Ugh, talk about stuffed. Thanks Lauren and Robert!!

SUNDAY

My brother called and asked if we wanted to meet for brunch. We’d been trying to get into The Grape for brunch for the last few weeks in order to try Texas Monthly’s Best Burger, but they’d been booked SOLID. On a whim, we showed up today as soon as they opened and happily scored a table!

Zach and I both ordered the burger. Can you believe how huge this thing is?

Topped with bacon, sweet horseradish (?) pickles, white cheddar, butter lettuce and dijonnaise. So good, but I could barely take a bite! I was cracking up watching a little kid across the restaurant try to take this monster down.

Okay, gotta go get ready for dinner. Hope everyone had a great weekend and I’ll fill you in on the Foodbuzz dinner tomorrow!