Drew this for Chris in honor of his new favorite game ‘Don’t Starve.’

Dinner was fun! We went to a fancy shmancy steak house in Bellevue. Apparently since Valentine’s Day was on a Friday it was really hard to get reservations anywhere. (Last year Valentine’s Day was on a Wednesday, so it was no problem to call February 13th and ask for a reservation… However, this year Chris called 7 different places about 2 weeks in advance and endured plenty of mocking and scoffing by those answering the phone.) Finally, the restaurant we really wanted to go to came through because someone else canceled their meaty steaky reservations in the nick of time. :-D

Dinner was great! I’ve always wanted to sit by the window there because the entire wall is a giant window that lets you check out Bellevue (I just learned that ‘Bellevue’ is French for ‘beautiful view’)… However, I’ve always been too much of a pansy to ask for special seating. #firstworldproblems. But after reading a Tim Ferriss blog about how he gets free stuff all the time, I felt a little ballsy and spent the day asking for stuff. Plenty of folks told me no to the random crap I wanted, but every once in a while someone said yes and so we enjoyed dinner by a huge window with a great view of the cityscape, mountains, and cars getting stuck in traffic during the gentle sunset. The staff gave me a rose (d’awww) and it’s safely in a vase where the cats can’t eat it.

We ate bacon tempura and filet mignon… all of which were crazy tasty (yes, the verbiage I used was “crazy tasty”… There’s a reason why I’m not a food critic). Oh, and we were delighted to see they had Kopi Luwak (aka cat poop coffee). For those of you who don’t know, the luwak is a cat that does what cats do… eat everything and poop everything. It eats coffee berries, but can’t digest them and poops out the beans. The next day, being unperturbed by the prior day’s lack of success, they remember that motivational Thomas Edison quote about it taking a thousand tries before building the lightbulb…  and they go at it again… and every single day they keep on trying to idigest those coffee beans, like a Lewis County native stuck in a roundabout. Or, as the menu delicately phrases it, “the Luwaks naturally occurring enzymes massage and ferment the beans, smoothing the harsh edges found in other coffees… Unable to digest the coffee beans, the Luwak graciously deposits them on the jungle floor.” [Bold emphasis added by me.]

Yup… cat poop coffee is a delicacy and costs $45 for serving… Perhaps this is another reason why I’m not a food critic (this is a dig at me by the way… it probably tastes good… I hope). Instead we went to a tasty gelato place afterwards for dessert! Here’s a picture of Chris eating tiramisu icecream affogato (aka with espresso)

Hope you had an awesome Valentine’s Day too! And if you didn’t, then at least you probably didn’t drink cat poop.