I share most (if not all) of their food tastes. Having married a very meat-and-potatoes kind of man, it's very exciting to me to be able to meander up and down grocery aisles with them, picking out favorites and then coming home to prepare it to find that they love it all too! We glutted ourselves on poke, something I'd never heard of before, but what is now indisputably one of my all-time favorite foods. It's a raw fish - most often ahi tuna. It's cut into cubes and marinated in various concoctions. I salivate as I type this description. My favorite is a spicy one sprinkled with fresh roe, but let's face it, I've yet to meet a poke I didn't love, and love passionately.
We carefully pored through cookbooks and chose exotic salads to prepare. We ate a phenomenal wheat-berry one that nearly found me swooning. We ate grilled eggplant stacks with goat cheese and a balsamic/red wine reduction. We inhaled some amazing tabouleh. We ate a miso/edamame/soba noodle salad. And then there was the melon and prosciutto one that was all the more beautiful because we ate it on the beach while watching Jody twirl with the setting sun behind her (Despite the whimsical image this description evokes, it was really just downright hilarious and I nearly peed myself watching it all unfold. Let's just say that there was some falling involved!). We feasted on exotic cheeses and the girls introduced me to truffle for the first time (I'm sad to report that despite my very desperate wanting to love it, alas! I didn't.). We found a favorite new white wine called Cupcake that we originally bought solely for the beauty of it's label.
We ziplined, which was a first for me and most definitively a trip highlight. It wasn't as adrenalin-y as I'd hoped, but it was still so, so fun. It was, in fact, my Christmas present from JoyBoy this year and it's a gift that I suspect will always rank high as an all-time fave.
We glutted ourselves on sunshine, golf-cart joyrides through places we weren't supposed to be and shopping. We ran along the beach boardwalk and we did a new exercise class - zumba - which was also a trip highlight. I felt like a groovin' latina for a second there. For the girl who can rarely make her body do what she wants it to do in the realm of The Dance, this was a novel sensation. For one brief moment, I actually had my torso and my shoulders doing two separate things!
It was wonderful and I don't think I'll ever forget it.