Sunday, January 25, 2009

Happy Chinese New Year!

This year is the year of the ox. You can find out your "fortune" for the year here (click on your animal sign). I've got a particularly interesting fortune this year...let's see how it turns out!

Friday, January 23, 2009

Update on iSwirl

We stopped by iSwirl for some frozen yogurt tonight. We haven't been to iSwirl for at least a few months. On our previous visits, the yogurt was decent - not bad for being about a mile away from our house. BTW, our favorite fro-yo store in the Valley is juju berri.

We tried three flavors tonight - mango, original, and pink lemonade, with a bit of mochi sprinkled on top. All of them were absolutely terrible. They were very sweet with strong artificial tastes. Yuck! The mochi pieces were also overly chewy, with a hardened skin - indicating that they were not fresh (or stored incorrectly). It seems that the quality and taste of the yogurt at iSwirl has declined significantly.

I'm guessing that we won't be going back to iSwirl.


Places mentioned:

iSwirl
13778 W Mcdowell Road, Suite 301
Goodyear, AZ 85395

juju berri
7369 W Bell Rd, Suite 5A-1
Peoria, AZ 85382

Thursday, January 22, 2009

A great value at Hope Kee

We are pretty frequent customers of Hope Kee - the food is consistent, it's on our way home from work, plus we can grab groceries at Lee Lee after dinner without having to make another stop.

For dinner tonight, we tried something new and ordered the "Set Menu for Two" ($19.99). This includes the following:
  • Soup of the day
  • BBQ plate of the day
  • Sauteed beef and string beans
  • Sauteed fish and bok choy
Sorry - no pictures this time...

The soup of the day was a Chinese home-style soup with shredded beef, carrot, and some sort of melon (maybe cucumber?). The soup was excellent - we were expecting the soup of the day to be either hot and sour soup or egg drop soup, so this was a really nice surprise. I had two bowls of the soup and Patty had one. There was still enough soup for another bowl - the original portion was probably enough for four people.

The BBQ plate was a nice sized plate of bbq pork (char siu). Hope Kee's bbq pork is pretty good.

The fish and beef dishes were both decent. The beef was a bit chewy, but the beans were nice and fresh.

We finished about one quarter of each of the dishes and were completely stuffed. The leftovers should be more than enough for another meal for both of us.

Not a bad deal for $19.99!


Places mentioned:

Hope Kee
7575 W. Cactus Rd.
Peoria, AZ 85381

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Interesting fact about gold

From the article "The Real Price of Gold" in the Jan. '09 issue of National Geographic (highlights below are mine):

"In all of history, only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools. More than half of that has been extracted in the past 50 years."

That's crazy!