Quick update

So it has been a while since my last blog. It has been hectic around the ol' Hampton house. My grandparents and Uncle Gregg came into town the day before Easter for a visit. It was nice having them out here. We cooked them dinner almost every night from our list of successful recipes. Good food, lots of wine, and good company. The only problem was our schedules are really different. They get up later in the day then us then eat lunch around 2 or 3 o'clock and we try to have dinner about 5:30 or 6:00 so that we can be done and cleaned up from dinner by 7 so we can get the kids ready for school the next day. Because of the different schedules, we were eating anywhere from 6:30-7:30. Oh well, it was nice having them out here for a while, but I am glad that things are back to normal now. Dad finally went off to work yesterday. It has been since mid January since he has worked. He got the flu which turned into bronchitus. You can't fly sick so he has been off since then. He flew out yesterday and won't be back until Saturday. So I am sitting in a quiet house.........the silence is great. Carrie Underwood is on the TV right now.....life is good.

I have been playing online a little bit in the last couple of weeks. I am trying to qualify for the WSOP main event on Full Tilt. They have these freerolls running constantly. If you win one of the .net sit n go's or place 1st or 2nd on the .com sit n go's you move on to round 2. If you place 1st or 2nd in one of the round 2's then you go to the finals. Once you get into the finals you have to place in the top 3 and you win a seat. A lot of work, but someone's going to win those seats, why not me?! The round 1 tourney's are funny. There is no play what so ever. That's why we call them donkaments. It is a turbo structure so the blinds go up really fast, so everyone tries to get a lot of chips early. They are also starting new tourney's every couple of minutes so if you get knocked out you can just go get into another one.

I have been working on the business plan for the personal chef business and that is going well. I have started the menu and have been testing new recipes, so that is moving forward pretty well. Not as fast as I would like it, but hopefully this week with the quiet house during the day I can get on a little faster pace. I have had a couple of people contact me about using my services once I am up and running so that is a positive motivation for me to get it done.

Other than that, everything is going well. I'll give an update later on in the week. Talk at ya'll later.

Food, Poker, and business stuff

Didn't play much online poker this week. Played one night and qualified for the Sunday $1000 freeroll, and played some last night but didn't have anything too exciting happen. I have really been concentrating on gathering information on this Personal Chef business. Instead of playing live poker on Friday, Kim and I went to some restaurant supply stores and let me tell ya, we were like two kids in a candy store. It was a ton of fun. We bought some black aprons, squeeze bottles for the EVOO and other oils, some flexible cutting boards (don't really like the ones that we got, they slide around the counter too much) some individual pizza pans for everyone in the house since we all like different toppings, we can all make our own, some spoonula's, and a couple of big square bowls primarily for garbage bowls (they were on clearance for a buck). The main reason we went down there is to find a Jaccard. If you don't know what that is, it is a meat tenderizer that has multiple small blades that you push into the meat. http://jaccard.com/Home-Product-WTender-16B.asp?group=R if you want to take a look at it. I really wanted the 48 blade model, but it costs $42 in the store. I thought when I was researching it online I saw that model for $22. I ended up get the 16 blade model just because we needed to have it for the flank steak fajitas that we ate last night. Probably should have bought the one I wanted, but oh well. The Jaccard does an amazing job with the meat. We had tried a tequila marinaded fajita recipe a couple of weeks ago and found the marinade a little too sweet and the flank steak a little too chewy and tough. Last night we tried a new recipe for the marinade and used the Jaccard on the meat before we put it in the marinade, and it turned out REALLY GOOD. You basically put lots of little holes in the meat to help break it down, then the marinade gets into all the little holes and just flavors the meat beautifully. I highly recommend the Jaccard to anyone who works with tougher pieces of meat. Don't use the normal metal mallet tenderizer, those things are worthless.

As far as the Personal Chef business goes, I have been putting together a ton of info and it is really coming together nicely. Kim had an idea for the name. I found some really nice yellow towels at COSTCO that we use in the kitchen to wipe our hands with, put under cutting boards, and clean up afterwards with. Then we bought these black aprons. I put my apron on and tucked my yellow towel in the front of the apron and Kim giggled and said I looked like a bumble bee. For what ever reason, that has stuck with me and all I can think about is using that as the name of the company. Not bumble bee but Busy Bee. The marketing, advertising, tag lines, uniforms, and even a possible logo design keep going through my head. I looked online for some possible website URLs and it seems to be a possibility. I don't know, it could be really cheesy, or it could work really well. I have a list of possible names, so I added it to the list, we shall see.

Well it is just about time to start getting ready for the race and some online poker. Talk at ya later.