Pineapples and Pregnancy

The last two days have been pretty busy. I won't dive too deeply into the details but it involved a late night trip to Ikea where we didn't have enough time to even enjoy any Swedish meatballs, renting an SUV to bring a tremendous amount of Ikea purchases home, returning said SUV, arguing with Enterprise about the mileage I put on this SUV, clearing out as much things from out apartment as possible, getting a cleaning lady to our place for the first time (best money we ever spent), moving around furniture, doing a huge amount of laundry, and picking up paint at Home Depot.



With all that going on I found the time to pick up the celebratory produce for week 31 of Jen's pregnancy: these pineapples! After photographing them and planning a dinner around them Jen notified me about an old wives' tale that pineapples induce pregnancy. I did a Google search and found a bunch of idiots debating this topic on a number of message boards. No actual scientific evidence, just anecdotal evidence from anonymous people. Most of it was along the lines of: "Oh my god! I was 39 weeks and 6 days pregnant when I ate some pineapple and my water broke 12 hours later! It's totally true!"

Even still, I didn't want to risk the possibility of driving Jen into an early labor so I pushed the pineapples aside and forbid her from eating them.



Instead I served up this salad with heirloom greens, garlic lemon olives, red onion, grape tomatoes, feta cheese, lemon, olive oil, salt, and pepper. We ate this while the grill heated up since we were both ravenously hungry from a long day of having someone clean our apartment.



For dinner I made this mixed grill. I skewered some shrimp which I marinated with lemon, garlic, red pepper flakes, olive oil, salt, and pepper. I also grilled up this red pepper, and some garlic herb sausages which I served over basmati rice. It was nice to eat outside and enjoy the relative quiet of zero babies. The only creature that disturbed our meal was a baby rabbit which sat in silhouette amidst the bushes near our patio observing and judging us from afar.



For a drink I enjoyed this Freshchester Pale Ale from Captain Lawrence Brewing Company, the brewery closest to our apartment. This was a very nice pale ale for a fine evening grilling outside. I haven't had a ton of beers from Captain Lawrence but this was probably my favorite so far. It had a nice floral hoppy aroma to it and a slight bitter citrus aftertaste. It's like this beer is representative of Westchester. It's well made, aromatic, and sort of bitter.

I can only assume this beer is terrible at parallel parking, loves Asian fusion restaurants, and is exorbitantly taxed. That would really complete the metaphor.