Chef In Your Kitchen

This spring I hired the services of Chef Lorainne Nielsen, of Chef In Your Kitchen.
This is a personal chef service here in Billings. Basically, she meets with you and goes over
all your likes and dislikes, health and dietary needs. Then she sets up a menu. She does all the
grocery shopping on the morning of the cooking date. She then comes to your house and cooks
your meals, bringing all her own equipment and utensils. For a fee and cost of the groceries she does this service. She was licensed and schooled by Chef In Your Kitchen.

She makes 5 different entrees, 4 of each for a total of a months worth of entrees, based on a Monday-Friday dinner schedule. After making the food, she packages it, labels it and freezes it. The labels all have the directions for reheating in the microwave or oven. It is very nice to come home after a day shift and gym at 730 or 8pm and have a nice meal waiting for me.

Here is the menu of my first month of food. I plan to have this done again this summer.

1) Braciole (stuffed flank steak with Italian cheeses, garlic and bread crumbs braised in a
marinara sauce and served over spaghetti)
2) Chicken Vegetable Stew (chicken with carrots, leeks, celery, & mushrooms in a light chicken
stock served with biscuits)
3) Pork Milanese (Parmesan-breaded pork chops sauteed and served with mashed potatoes)
4) Italian Chicken Bundles (egg roll bundles filled with chicken, spinach, green onions, ricotta
& Parmesan cheeses served with a herbed tomato sauce)
5) Liberace Casserole (lean ground beef, garlic, basil and a tomato-red wine sauce over
rigatoni pasta topped with cheese)

Key West

This was a cool tourist area. This is the Southern most point of the Continental U.S.
Cuba is 90 Miles! Very neat. Some of the following pictures are blurry, each bar got
harder to focus!

My friend Jeff. We stopped by a few of the Keys to take pictures and swim. The water was very neat although it doesn't show much in this picture. I didn't step in the water here as shortly after I took the picture, I saw a snake in the water. No thanks!

Check out the sign. This was an interesting bar to say the least. Unfortunately, the people

that took their clothes off should of kept them on, and the ones that kept them on, should

of took them off! Lots of times my pics get rejected when loading so maybe they are too

big. I just saw the option in the download to change their size so maybe that worked. I also

seem to have to do one pic at a time and not several as I get an error. Maybe they are too big

so this smaller option may work? Any tips would be great.

Notice the name of the bar. I think it was Ricks! haha

This is the first of several Margs. This one is Key Lime. I believe I had 4 Margs, 2 7&7s, and at least 8 Rum and Cokes!

We took pics of all the bars we hit. I believe we hit them all. But not all of them came out clearly!

One of many drinks.

I didnt want to get too close to the lizard. It gave me the creeps!

That lizard on the skateboard is real!

Sloppy Joe's

Here is the famous Sloppy Joe's Bar. They are a live webcam where you can get on the cam and wave to friends if they know you are there at that time. There was a fun musician there this night from Put n Bay near Sandusky Ohio. He had quite the following as half of the room was from Mi and the other half OH. He was hilarious!

Trying to look like a Bad Ass-Stay tuned for Key West Pics!

As much as I tried to look mean, I just couldn't.

More Florida Pics

Those are kite surfers in the background and thought they were so cool! I went over to talk to some of them to get an idea of what it is like. Looks pretty cool and they really get some air when they hit the waves. I plan to try that for a day next year.

The bottom picture is a Man O War. When I first got to Juno Beach I thought they were a sandwich baggie from a distance. Then got a closer look and asked someone. Their was a purple flag flying at the lifeguard station which I found out meant "Dangerous Marine Life". My first day there, they were all over the beach. Needless to say I didn't go in the water that day. They are filled with a blue substance of some sort with tentacles (not testicles!) stretching out from them. They were very cool to look at.

Florida Vacation

This is Juno Beach in Palm Beach Gardens. I went to 3 or 4 beaches and this was the best. Very pretty water, not many people, free parking across the street with very clean rest rooms! It was so relaxing. I did a lot of reading here.

Hard Rock Casino

This is the Hard Rock Casino near Fort Lauderdale. This is where Anna Nicole Smith died, so of course I had to take a picture. I spent the afternoon here at the pool while my friend and his friends had to do some work stuff, actually Code Camp! I did spend the morning at Code Camp. (This was an 8 hour day of various computer coding for softwared, etc) I keeping telling people, "This one time at Code Camp...." haha. Oh, I created next years Code Camp t-shirt. "I got laid at Code Camp 2008".
Hard Rock Casino is a huge hotel and casino with about 20 bars, shops and restuarants around it outside along with a lighted laser display of fountains sycronized to music. Very cool. I almost rode a mechanical bull here but I wasn't drunk enough.
Stay tuned for more pics to come and stories.

Finally getting around to posting some pics from Florida. I went to West Palm Beach for 10 days to visit a friend that use to live in Billings. It was a great time and will write more later. The pic at the restaruant was Hooters at the beach in Fort Launderdale. We came right from the airport to get a bite to eat.

First Snow!

This past week ago I had my first accumulating snow at my house, about 4-5 inches. It was a wet snow and stuck to everything. So I took a walk down to the river and sat on a rock for awhile to watch the sunset and to take some pictures.