Happy At Houlihan's

Hola!

I hope this week has been treating everyone well! The weather is finally warming up here again and there has been no rain the past two days ... woo hoo! I seem to always talk about the weather at the start of my posts ... hmm ... I guess it's a good ice breaker? Ha.

Anyways, I'm here to talk about eating out, or at least a recent experience of ours. We don't eat out a lot to save money and unless you go somewhere more expensive than fast food it's just probably not going to be healthy. Now onto my story. Here is me wanting to go out for dinner instead of cooking. (Ha, except I wasn't really grumpy or mean ... I was just posing ; )See?? I was happy!Normally when we want to go out, we drive to Kansas City (about 45 minutes to an hour from us) because there's better choices and it's just more fun. Buuuut, we were really hungry and just didn't feel like the drive. So, we racked our brains for where to eat here. Now, our town is full of restaurants but we never know where to go because we don't really like many restaurants here. It's basically full of fast food and big chains. As far as eating out here is concerned, we frequent Panera and Chipotle and that's about it. We didn't want either.

We then both looked up random restaurant's menus online to see if there was anything that sounded good and fit our bill for healthiness. After much debate, we decided upon Houlihan's. When eating out, when possible we like to look at the menu and nutritional facts beforehand so we can pick something we know we will enjoy and feel good about, therefore getting our moneys worth. So, we had looked at an online menu from the closest Houlihan's to ours (as it wasn't online). We both had something picked out and thought, this'll be good! Before leaving ... So we got there, sat down and started to look at the menus and lo and behold ... tons of it is WAY different. Go figure that our Houlihan's has none of the healthy stuff we had already picked out to order. We were disappointed at first, buuut oh well, what can ya' do? So, we improvised.

We started out with Tuna Wantons for an appetizer. (Sorry, the pics are dark!) Then, I ordered the Mandarin Chicken Salad sans wanton strips with the dressing on the side. It was huge and looked SO good. Upon first getting it, Erik looked at it and said to me, "Where's the chicken". I said, "Oh, it's there" and then started mixing my salad around only to discover ... it wasn't!! Haha, we thought, maybe it's just a mandarin orange salad?? So we asked our waitress and a few minutes later, she brought we out my forgotten chicken breast :s haha.

Erik got a huge salad too (but not the same one) and they remembered his meat, haha. All in all, we ended up being very pleased because both salads and the appetizer were delicious! We pretty much finished off our huge salads (Erik helped me), and had a wonderful time together talking and eating.

What's your favorite restaurant or type of place to eat at? There's a few chain restaurants we like to go to, but our favorite places always end up being the unique little cafes that you have to search for.

Have a great rest of the week!!! : )

"Kind words are the music of the world."
F. W. Faber