Andy and Darcy’s Blog

So in preparation for the Friday Night Pot Luck tomorrow, Darcy and I made some shrimp etouffee. Apparently etouffee is French for “smothered”, and well it really does smother the shrimp. While we made it I took some pics!

Darcy likes cooking etouffee!

Maybe it was a good idea in the beginning to get my return address printed on our wedding invitations. As we were addressing them, however, we discovered that a lot of the envelopes were already sealed together. Maybe as part of the printing process? We were able to unstick a lot of them, but in the end I think we’ll have enough of the printed envelopes. (We did order 25 extra outer envelopes, but they didn’t print my return address on those…another odd choice?) But, we’re almost done and I think we have enough so there’s nothing to complain about.

On a complete separate topic, we went to the pancake breakfast at Holy Spirit this morning. It was fabulous. I’m still full. There are a lot of great things about this pancake breakfast. The meal consisted of pancakes, eggs, sausage (patties), ham slices, and 3 different kinds of muffins. There was coffee, milk, and real orange juice. And they used real silverware, too, so that means I don’t have to save my plastic fork for another use or use my camping spork. If you missed this week, I’m sure there will be another one soon.

Hello everybody, so I’ve decided to sell my Nikon D50 and the lens that came with it. I’ve hardly used it and I was going to put it on eBay but I decided to let everyone I know have a chance to buy it first.

I have all the original packaging and again I’ve hardly used it, it’s a great camera and a good place to start if you have been wanting to get into SLR photography. Here is what I’ll be selling:

Nikon D50, 6Mp Digital SLR, 2.5 frames / second, 2.0 inch LCD
Quantaray 28-90mm f/3.5-5.6 Macro Lens
1Gb SD memory card
Quick Charger (MH-18a)
Rechargeable Li-ion battery (EN-EL3a)
USB Cable, Video cable
PictureProject software

For the low, low price of $450.00.

If you are interested or want more details, let me know. You can reach me at andy.koch at gmail.com.

I’ve managed to reduce the amount of books I’m reading. I used the same method as those trying to reduce their outstanding credit. I finished one and then another one, and soon I had very few left. So now I’m reading two books, although the temptation to pick up another book is overwhelming at times.

I’m reading “How Much Is Enough?”, and its even non-fiction. I don’t usually read non-fiction, because who knows how much of it is real? At least with fiction you know its not real. Ha ha ha. But anyways, “How Much Is Enough?” asks some really important questions. Why do we have so much stuff? Why do we always want more? Why are we never satisfied?

And then the other book I’m reading is “Mr. Darcy Takes A Wife”. Doesn’t every Pride and Prejudice fan want just a little more of that story? This one’s a little embarrassing to read out loud, and yet I am still reading.

We’ve gotten a lot done in the wedding planning arena. Flowers, cake, music, marriage license. We are addressing invitations this weekend. And more.

But there’s a lot left to do. I’d make a list here, but it would be long. I should really have my dress altered. I should really get that done.

I had this idea, which hopefully will get me to blog more, since according to some I do not blog enough. The idea was to review restaurants around my home, Rochester, MN. Since I think of myself as one who enjoys good food and drink, hopefully I should be able to inform people about places to eat, both good and bad, in this wonderful city of Rochester.

For the inaugural post, I am going to review BB’s Pizzaria, which is a new pizza place next to Chateau Theatres, in the shopping mall that seems to kill anything unique that goes into it (e.g. Kona Coast, TCBY,…). With that, I wish BB’s luck because it looks to have some potential. The first thing I noticed was the name, Pizzaria, an obvious misspelling, however it did get me and my party to chat about it. This is a good sign for a new place, at least in my opinion, because it makes it somewhat unique and gets people to remember it rather than just blending in to everywhere else to eat.

So we get in and it’s like everyplace else built in the last few years in NW Rochester, very open, funky light fixtures and Earth-toned paint. Another thing that hit me right off the bat is that it feels a lot like Mr. Pizza, at least the NW Rochester one. This makes sense since according to Jeff Kiger, it’s owned by former employees of Mr. Pizza. They have mostly tables, booths around the sides, with some booths being able to accomodate 10 or more, depending on the size of the person. There are TVs around the place which were playing sports, nothing too surprising here.

So we seated ourselves at a clean table and took a look at the menu, garlic toast, nachoes, and other appetizers. For the entrees there was hoagies, and of course, lots of pizza. The pizza came in a few crusts, thin, traditional medium, whole wheat and pan. They had fountain soda drinks, coffee, beer and a small selection of wine. All of us went with water, the water had crushed ice in it which you don’t see that much, but Darcy really liked it. We had 5 people, so we figured we needed a couple pizzas. Darcy and I ordered a half order of garlic cheese toast and a medium thin crust Margherita pizza. Jon, Adam and Amber ordered a pepperoni and half italian sausage pizza on traditional medium crust. Amber also ordered a side salad for a reasonable price.

Our garlic cheese toast came and it was pretty good, quite simple though. Just a french bread with a lot of cheddar (I think?) and mozzarella cheese melted on top. I couldn’t really taste the garlic all that much, it could have used a bit more. After we had finished the toast, we realized that Amber hadn’t gotten her salad yet, we flagged down the waiter and he apologized and had it out after a few minutes. I am chalking this up to only being open a few weeks and the wait staff still learning the ropes. After a bit the pizzas came, the Margherita pizza came out first followed in 5 minutes by the pepperoni and sausage pizza. I was quite impressed by the Margherita pizza, it had bite size chunks of fresh tomatoes, mozzarella, basil and a light sauce, all on a crispy thin crust. Very tasty. I didn’t try any of the other pizza, however it did look rather tasty. Large pieces of sausage with lots of cheese, but it didn’t look overly greasy. I’ll have to try one of these later, perhaps the taco pizza, which I saw going out to another table and looked to be quite a good pizza.

After we had filled ourselves up, we paid at the register and then ventured towards the back to look for the game room. I was in the mood for a good game of pinball. We found the game room, it had about 6 arcade games or so and the obligatory claw drop machine. Lo and behold, they had a pinball machine, it was kinda old but it was still pretty good. The rest of the games were pretty generic, they did have Ms. Pacman and Galaga, which is pretty cool. I stuck to pinball and even though I’m not good, I had a good time.

In conclusion, BB’s Pizzaria offers a pretty good selection of pizzeria type foods and pizzeria type entertainment. The service was so-so, but I expect that to get better as they are open longer and work out the kinks. So if you’re tired of going to Mr. Pizza and want something like it, but still a bit different, give BB’s Pizzaria a try.

Ratings (out of 5)
Atmosphere: 4.0
Service: 3.5
Food: 4.0
Fun: 4.5, yeah so this gets this score solely because of pinball.

Overall: 4.0