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In the northwest suburbs, I frequent several sushi restaurants: Nobu’s Japanese Restaurant in Schaumburg, Sushi Station in Rolling Meadows, and Wild Fish in Arlington Heights. I like something different about each of them, so it’s hard to pick a favorite, but Sushi Ya in Schaumburg is quickly becoming my new favorite.

After opening about a month late due to construction delays, Sushi Ya is a welcome addition to the neighborhood. Michelle and I stopped by the restaurant for dinner Wednesday night, their second night of operation. Two days later I stopped by for dinner with Josh and Marsha before poker night. The staff is very friendly, and I thought the speed of service was pretty good for the first week in business.

Last week Wednesday and Thursday I spent the evenings not meeting with my grad school group, but working hard, nonetheless. With Chris being gone for a reading conference in Springfield, I finally got to working on restoring our iron skillet that had gone neglected for a few years. A month ago I lazy tweeted about restoring an iron skillet. I quickly received an @ reply with a link for a how to article. I have since lost track of that tweet and link, and have had to do my own research.

What I found was Black Iron Dude, a blog dedicated to caring for and cooking with cast iron cookware. I loosely followed the directions in Easy Cast Iron Skillet Reconditioning. Our skillet was in pretty bad shape, similar to the skillet pictured in the blog post (forgive me because, as I have gotten older, I have forgotten to take photos of things about which I wish to post). It looked like ours had rusted on every surface, which only made me wait a few weeks before actually reconditioning the skillet.

This morning I dropped Chris off at work because tonight she went down to Theatrefest. Before I left HEHS, I stopped by and said hello to the Tech department. We shared some news about work, and then I had to rush off to get to work.

Tonight, for dinner I made salmon teryaki with steamed broccoli and rice. It was pretty damned good, although it’s no replacement for the miso salmon at Cheesecake Factory.

I also started catching up on Samantha Who? while eating dinner, and then more while reading about the cash basis and accrual basis of accounting. Overall, I think my first of two nights while Chris is gone went fairly well.

Anyway, this post serves two purposes. The first is to quickly recall today, and the second is to show Rich that things seem to be working OK. And as I wrote that last sentence, I received confirmation that things are OK.

I’m going to make this really quick. Last week I learned a lesson about cooking the hard way. I was making a pot roast (the same recipe Hersch taught me). Actually, I was making two pot roasts to cover the number of people I was expecting for dinner. I was finally at the last stage – reducing the broth to a nice, thick sauce/gravy. This was something I had expected would take fifteen minutes or so to reduce, but because I had used the broth from both pots, it took well over an hour to reduce. So, long story short, I have learned that I must reduce sauces in much smaller quantities if I expect them to reduce in any reasonable amount of time. I’m sure other people knew this already, but it certainly hadn’t hit me until it was far too late to do anything about it. Sometimes, as smart as I am, I can do some stupid things.

We’ve been out of the state for two days now. First, we hit up Louisville, and now we’re in Gatlinburg. I woke up this morning to a gorgeous view of the mountainside near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I have another ten days here in Gatlinburg, and then we’re heading down to Ooltewah, near Chattanooga, to visit my aunt and uncle. We’ll have another two days on the road after that, but we haven’t figured out where we’re staying after leaving Ooltewah.

Last night Chris and I went out to an early Mother’s Day dinner with my mom and Michelle. After some discussion this afternoon, we had decided on Zed451 in Schaumburg. It turned out to be a very good decision.

The first bit of goodness came when I reserved a table using OpenTable.com. Normally, reservations are just 100 points each; however, with the relative newness of Zed451, the reservation was 1,000 points. This reservation pushed me over the 2,000 point mark, the lowest number of points required to get a gift cheque from OpenTable.com.

My mother-in-law told me about this. Next week on Wednesday, April 30, 2008, Baskin-Robbins will be selling 31¢ scoops. There are a few catches to the deal. The scoops are smaller than normal at 2.5 ounces (I think normal scoops are 4 ounces), and there is a 10-scoop limit per person, per purchase. That’s more than ¾-quarts of ice cream! Baskin-Robbins will then donate $100,000 to the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation.

Go get yourself some cheap ice cream next week. Oh, and I guess you’ll be helping out a charity.