Sunday, July 3rd, began with church. The St. Johns invited us to Ellisville First Baptist Church. Dad was able to join us but had to head to the hospital right afterwards because of being on call. Mom, Ben, and I picked up Subway sandwiches for lunch since we still didn't have more than a few drinks and a little bit of food at home in our dorm-sized fridge. The rest of the afternoon was rainy and uneventful. Here in Missouri, when it rains, it rains all day, instead of just for a few hours like in Florida.
Dad wanted to go out for some Chinese food that evening, but on our way there, I spotted Genghis Grill and suggested we stop there. It turned out to be a make-it-yourself Mongolian stir fry restaurant.
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| Seasonings |
It was actually a lot of fun- you take a small metal mixing bowl and fill it with your choice of raw meats, dry seasonings, and vegetables.
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| Vegetables |
Then you pick out a sauce in a separate container and take your ingredients up to the grill counter, where you tell the cooks what starches you want to add. They take all your ingredients and mix them together on a section of the grill. The grill looked like a giant pizza stone with wooden "lane dividers" to separate the meals that rotated so each cook could add different things to the meals. They bring your personal meals out to your table in about 10 minutes. I chose chicken, lemon herb seasoning, carrots, green beans, water chestnuts, baby corn, zucchini, squash, and snap peas with a light traditional stir fry sauce and rice and spiral noodles. It was a really yummy Mongolian meal! :)
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| The grill |
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| Yum! |
Genghis Grill was along the route that may be the one I end up driving to school, so we decided to see how long the drive would be and check out the progress of the new school building. I'll probably end up having about a 30 minute drive.
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| Progress!! |
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| It's a really big building... I hope I don't get lost on the first day of school! |
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| Blurry, but this is the sign with the map of the school grounds |
After the drive, we headed to Dierberg's for a family grocery shopping trip. We got a whole fridge-full of food- literally! We will now be able to make most of our meals at home. And have more than a half-gallon of milk and 3 water bottles in the fridge at one time. :)
We relaxed with some root beer floats made with our favorite root beer- Fitz's! Fitz's is a restaurant and bottling company in University City, where we used to live when we lived here before. The root beer floats were the perfect treat while watching a movie. :)
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| Oberweis ice cream- all of their stuff is yummy :) |
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| Ben being a goofball :) |
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| ...and again :) |
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| The recipe for a perfect root beer float :) |
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| Yum! |
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Momo enjoying his treat- not quite a root beer float,
but he's much happier with a bone anyways. :) |
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| Buckeye :) |
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| Jackson |
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| Buckeye's more interested in sleeping than in his bone :) |
Dad, Ben, and I chose to watch Food, Inc., a documentary about the horrors and injustices of America's food corporations. It inspired Dad to go all organic, and for the past week we've been eating anything and everything that comes in an organic or all-natural form. He firmly believes that, just like the documentary said, you vote when you scan products at the grocery store- you vote organic or not, local or not, etc. So, although back in May I thought the prompt for the AP Lang synthesis essay on the national exam was completely irrelevant to my life (it was on the importance of locavores), I was wrong. :) I love you Mrs. Sylvia!! Hopefully you see this. :)
As Ben and I were heading upstairs for bed, he spotted 2 deer across the street in the St. Johns' yard. Two things we don't normally see in Florida are lightning bugs and deer, and both are hard to take pictures of. I got a few of the deer, but they were blurry because of the darkness.
Overall, we all had a really great day. :)
