FoodFash

Adventure Begins in the Kitchen

A Gluttonous Goodbye

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My last weekend in Tampa was one for the gluttonous books.  It started on Friday, ended on Sunday, and provided me with five pounds of extra errr love.  I am perfectly OK with tighter than usual pants.  It was completely intentional and oh so worth it.

Friday night, Lex, Lindsey, and I went to The Refinery where we split a handful of small plates and entirely too much red wine.  We cleaned our plates and headed to Fly, where we bounced back and forth between the upstairs and downstairs bars, sampling concoctions from my two favorite bartenders.  We laughed, we danced, we woke up on Saturday with upper-twenties-hangovers.

We completely failed in the picture department.  Thank goodness for Facebook…

Saturday night, Val, Amber and I cashed in my coveted Pizza Fusion coupon and had a pizza/movie/brownie sundae sleepover.  I think we all agreed that we had never felt so full in our entire lives.  The feeling was worse than hoarding candy on a childhood Halloween, but we powered through it until it was time for the deepest food coma sleep EVER.

On Sunday, after two serious girls nights, it was time to meet up with the boys and the family for brunch at Gaspar’s Grotto.  We packed around a few umbrella covered picnic tables and dug into more deliciousness.  My mom and I split the eggsters rockefeller which was so much better than I would have ever imagined.  Forget Canadian bacon, I’ll take spinach and fried oysters any day.

I couldn’t have asked for a better day.  My oldest friends, newest friends, and family, enjoying yummy food, bloody marys, and sunshine together?  Nothing could have topped that!

And there were even presents!!  Colette brought me a pair of Austin approved shades that I can’t wait to pair with my favorite bikini this summer.  They’ll be a good conversation starter, don’t you think?

And it dawned on me as I uploaded this picture that brunch was my last Tampa resident meal with Robbie, my all time favorite lunch buddy…  Yikes.

But it wasn’t just an amazing day, it was an amazing weekend filled with as many good memories as we could possibly squeeze into a way-too-short-two-days.  I am beyond blessed to have so many wonderful people in my life and, even though it’s so tough to imagine my day-to-day without them, I know without a doubt that we’ll be seeing each other soon (benefit of moving to a cool city, right?).

Urban Ma Dinner

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My mom originally planned her big trip over the bridge to be followed by some stand up paddle boarding and then Pizza Fusion, but a lack of planning on my part led to just pizza.  Can you tell I didn’t mind??

We managed to fit in some exercise by walking the Birthday Tourist route.  As much as I enjoyed that solo adventure, it was nice to walk the walk with my ma!

Starting with the Flatbread and Dip Trio was a good idea.  It came with artichoke-like tapenade, olive tapenade, and marinara sauce.  Next time, I’ll Kristin complicate my order by asking for an extra olive tapenade in place of the marinara.  We used some of the leftover dip on our pizza and it was ridiculously delish.

This was my second time ordering the Very Vegan pizza, but this time I added roasted red onions and forgot to order multi-grain crust.  The upside to ordering the wrong crust is that now I can say with certainty that the multi-grain crust is the tastier of the two!

 

Spring Has Sprung

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Yoga in the park has to top the list of perfect ways to celebrate the arrival of spring.  There’s just something about doing sun salutations in the sun that seems oh so right.  And thanks to Happy Buddha Yoga Lounge and flawless Tampa weather, I get to experience this kind of right (almost) every Sunday.

A sunshiny, 80 degree practice = A crowd of shiny, happy people.

After practice, we headed across the street to Pizza Fusion to take advantage of my Living Social coupon.  At the risk of over-using the word ‘perfect’ in this post, Pizza Fusion was the perfect place for Chrissie, an urban planner, and me, the product of an urban planner, to have our post-yoga meal.

We shared the Farmers Market pizza on multigrain crust with soy cheese.  You could have just changed the name of this pizza to the Kristin Special, cause I wouldn’t have done one thing differently.

Besides having beyond clean plate club worthy pizzas, they are also the most socially responsible restaurant I have yet to encounter.  Hybrid delivery vehicles, giving customers discounts for bringing back pizza boxes, using either 100% recycled or 100% biodegradable everything?  Lucky for me I loved the pizza, but I have to think that even if I didn’t, I’d still return out of principle!