A Date! Blue Spice, 16 Handles, & Northern Lights

We went on a date on Wednesday! It was impressive, too, because instead of a movie-and-the-usual, we tried all new things.

First, we went to Blue Spice in Clifton Park for some Thai food. (By the way, if you don’t take your kids out for ethnic food, read my old post in which I urge you to try it!) This was our visit, and it was all very tasty. As soon as we started eating appetizers, I had to yank out the camera and take a photo, because I deemed it bl og-worthy. These are Crusty Crab in the foreground and these crazy beet-and-peanut wontons that were a special that night. They were so sweet that they almost seemed more like dessert than an appetizer, but still yummy.

We also loved both our entrees, a yellow curry and a drunken noodles dish. The only thing we didn’t love was the ginger iced tea, which was just too gingery for us, because we’re wimps.

We couldn’t finish all our food, but of course we always make room for dessert.

So we tried out 16 Handles, a fairly new make-your-own yogurt place. This is the most “family-friendly” portion of the date, so here’s how it works:

You grab a cup (in my opinion, even the smalls are pretty dang large):

Then you get yourself some yogurt from one of the many machines (16 flavors). Here I’d offer two tips. First, you can ask for teensy sample cups to taste, and second, go easy on the yogurt, because it’s really not about the yogurt. In my opinion.

Because there are roughly a ga-jillion toppings, including all the basics as well as non-basics.

Then they charge you by weight. Our not-particularly-overloaded small cups each cost about five dollars and change, which is a bit expensive.

Of course, you’re paying for the experience (which, it seems to me, could be splendidly fun or a freakin’ nightmare, depending on your children and their mood on that particular day), and for the opportunity to make something both creative and delicious.

I went with coffee & chocolate yogurts, topped with chocolate sprinkles, Heath bar, and brownie bits. The brownie bits were particularly yummy. Cute W had cake & chocolate yogurts and topped it with Cap’n Crunch cereal. As we say at our house, concerning taste there can be no argument.

Then we rolled ourselves out of the store and headed to Northern Lights to see The Airborne Toxic Event (if you don’t know them, they do that song Sometime Around Midnight). So, first of all, I was ambivalent about Northern Lights because, let’s face it, it’s in a strip mall. Also, I feared that we might be the oldest people there. But not only was it a friendly and enthusiastic mix of young and old (including some mom who brought her kids, which seemed somewhat ill-advised with the f-bombs and pot fumes floating about), and I almost felt magically transported to my 20s in New York City.

And the concert was great. Excellent music and likeable band. They seemed pretty super-pleased to be there. At the end, the lead singer, Mikel Jollett threw a water bottle into the crowd and I caught it and took a picture of it for you.

I snatched it up in the middle of concert fervor,  but once I took it home, I thought, “Well, that’s silly. I need to recycle this.” If it were Elvis’ water bottle (or, you know, John Lennon’s or Bruce Springsteen’s), I’d keep it forever, right?  Or sell it on E-bay? And if I were, say 12 years old, I’d be perfectly age-justified in keeping a water bottle, even if it just belonged to the cute boy in my social studies class. So I started to imagine a possible chart, where the X axis is the super-famousness of the water-bottle-drinker and the Y-axis is the age of the water-bottle-gatherer. And however that chart would be drawn, we’re clearly in the “just recycle the damn thing” zone of the chart.

Anyway, we had a wonderful date.