kkeym

thanks everyone! some good inspiration -- I'm waiting for my herbs to flower so I can make Marcia's, and I've made a few others in the meantime... I love roasted garlic butter but it doesn't keep so long...

I like to keep a few herb butters on hand, but have run out. Seems I've also run out of inspiration. I'm doing a fresh basil and garlic one, and a roasted red pepper with black pepper. Any other ideas? I've hit a brick wall on inspiration. What combinations have you done that you love?

My pet peeve is any novelty drink -- sex on the beach, slippery nipple, slow comfortable screw -- you get the picture. I hate those drinks because they are almost always ordered by kids who are already drunk and hovering on either side of the legal age. Who are lousy tippers to boot. Ugh.

For both of my pregnancies I made sure that I always had some hard candies (pref. butterscotch) handy, they were good for beating a blood-sugar low wherever I was. Sea bands every night helped too. I couldn't even think about chicken, and the mere idea of cooking chicken made me sick. I also developed a bionic sense of smell and certain smells just got to me. I could smell a cigarette from a mile away, and let's not even talk about coffee. Incidentally, I read a study when I was pregnant with #2 (my daughter) that linked daily chocolate intake in pregnant mom with happy baby -- no kidding -- and I jumped on that as an excuse for a daily chocolate fix -- just a little bite of something. My daughter is the happiest baby I have ever seen. So that is my advice -- chocolate every day!!!

I tend to leave 20% as a minimum unless the service was truly horrible. The way I see it, the difference between a not-so-good tip and a good tip is generally only a couple of bucks, and I figure the server probably needs the extra couple of bucks more than I do, so why not be good to the person who has waited on me...