It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood...

Considering how awful the weather was yesterday, it is absolutely gorgeous today! 55 and sunny in the middle of January, yes, please!

But before we get too into today, a quick recap of last night's dinner. Instead of pizza, Ky, our friend Chris and I decided to order calzones from D.P. Dough. I insisted on getting a salad so I could have something remotely healthy today along with my Danger Zone Calzone:

The "Danger Zone" calzone is stuffed with hamburger, cheese, onions, hot sauce and mexican spices and came with marinara sauce on the side. The sauce definitely did not go with my calzone so I didn't use it. The salad was supposed to be a mix of romaine and iceberg lettuce, but was all iceberg. It was topped with tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, carrots, and balsamic vinaigrette. My 1/2 calzone was delish, but the salad was very lackluster.

Now onto today! I didn't have breakfast because as I was making a bagel with my newly bought cream cheese from yesterday, I made a horrifying discovery. THERE WAS A HAIR IN THE CONTAINER OF CREAM CHEESE. No, it was not mine, it was a long, dark hair that I spread onto my bagel. Needless to say, I lost my appetite pretty fast.

But it worked out okay because of my over-indulgent lunch time adventure!!! I'm still not walking much, but since Kyle decided to take MLK day off (UMD is not closed for it), we decided to go to Bethesda so that I could try this Mongolian BBQ he loves.

BD's was really fun! I highly recommend it based on the experience, the food, and the nutrition. If you have never been to a place like this, you get the freedom to make any stir-fry combo you can imagine.... not only can you pick and choose from several meats, dozens of veggies, and hundreds of sauce combinations, but you actually physically put the ingredients together so that you control the quantities of what you are eating.

Look at that meat and pasta! Rotini, rice noodles, chicken, steak, scallops, shrimp, pork, sausage, several kind of fish....

But I was most impressed by all the veggies to choose from! They had everything from peppers and onions to fresh basil and pineapples:

So, after you stuff as much meat and toppings into your bowl as you can, you go over the sauce bar and make a 4-5 oz cup of sauce for your food to be cooked in. Sorry, I didn't get a picture, but it was super crowded! But they had pad thai sauce, asian blackbean sauce, marinara, chili oil, peanut sauce, ranch, etc etc and you could mix and match however you pleased. They even had a little spice rack where you could add extra dry spices to your food.

When you have everything ready to go, you take it over to large circular cooktop and one of the chef's takes your bowl and cooks it up!

They cook several people's food at once; it was pretty cool! A lot better than a local place I went to once in Durham. Even though DB's is a chain, I really liked all of their ingredients and everything seemed very fresh and well prepared.

Bowl #1: I got 6oz of New York Strip, 4 oz shrimp, peppers, onions, mushrooms, baby corn, and water chestnuts (my FAVORITE part of any Asian cuisine!) with chili garlic sauce. For my first try I decided that I would not mix sauces, and based on Kyle's experience he thought the chili-garlic sauce would do the trick. It was perfect!!! I ate every last bite, and could not have been happier. They do priovide rice and tortillas, but I declined.

Bowl #2: Kyle convinced me to get the "unlimited lunch" for $2 more, where you can go back as many times as you want... but honestly who can handle more than one of these? The portions are HUGE!. This time I got about 4 pieces of sausage, mushrooms, baby corn, and water chestnuts. For my sauce I used 1 part asian black bean, 1 part chili-garlic, and 1 part tomato. This combo did not do it for me.... the sausages were cold in the center, and the the sauce was overwhelmingly tomatoey. I had a few bites and called it quits.

Even though we were STUFFED (Kyle had a bowl and half!), he pointed out the "mini" desserts for $2 on the back of the menu. We decided to split one, and got the chocolate mousse:

There are no words. It was everything I could have hopped for and more, despite my being stuffed to the gills! We split this little guy before heading back out into the beautiful weather!

Before heading home, we made a quick trip to Home Goods, TJ Maxx's houseware's store. I wanted to pick up a few plates and bowls for the blog so I could have prettier pictures.

Now I'm off to relax with Kyle, have a happy Monday!