Category Archives: Wine

WIAW: Suso Latino Basket – Manchester, CT

Happy What I Ate Wednesday (WIAW), hosted by Jenn of Peas and Crayons! I try to refrain from sharing what I ate during a day because no day is typical and I also don’t want anyone to compare my daily eats to his or her own. So as usual, I’m doing something different with WIAW. Today I’m sharing my experience at a hidden gem of a restaurant in Manchester, CT: Suso Latino Basket.

My co-worker Kevin lives in Manchester and has been recommending Suso to me for awhile now, but Connecticut has so many restaurants to visit (both new and old) so I haven’t found time to make it over there! I even purchased a Groupon awhile back and it expired on me. But I used it for the face value this past Saturday night. I mentioned on Sunday that I ended up eating way more at this meal than I was comfortable with, but that is indeed a testament to the food – it was so freaking good!

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Suso does not serve alcohol so they are BYOB with NO corkage fee! We brought a couple of reds from Charles Fine Wine in Glastonbury.

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Trade Em Up Tuesday

Alex is a big fan of Trade Em Up Tuesday (her post today is living proof) and I have always wanted to participate, but the timing never worked out. Well today it has and I have plenty of little shares, so this post is perfect for just that!

I would trade…the serious Monday doldrums I was in yesterday. I know I said that I allowed myself to enjoy my weekend without too much regret and I did…until Sunday night. I went over to Kat‘s to have dinner and watch the Golden Globes with our friend Carolyn, and ended up drinking way more Cupcake Prosecco and St. Germaine than I’d originally planned. I also ate a TON of baby cabbages (roasted in olive oil and curry powder, a new-to-me roasting ingredient that I’ll surely be using again) which just made me feel so full. Even if I’m full of veggies, that full feeling is hard to deal with and messes with my head. I woke up on Monday feeling dehydrated and bloated, so my clothes felt tight on me. I checked the tag on my shirt and it read XS, so I attempted to comfort myself with the fact that such a small size purchased earlier in my recovery surely may feel smaller on me now, but then my ED started beating me up for trying to make myself feel OK with not fitting into the smallest sizes out there. AGH.

I would not trade…the excellent time I had at Kat’s! Carolyn is hilarious so having her around to watch the awards with us was great. Kat made an amazing dinner (she roasted a lemon and rosemary chicken and gave me a mini tutorial on how to do so; it turned out delicious) and damn, Prosecco and St. Germaine is fantastic. Of course I also got quality time with Kat’s daughter Penelope, and even was able to babysit her for about thirty minutes while Kat and her hubby went on an errand. It meant a lot to me that they trusted me with their little girl and I hope it was the first of many babysitting sessions to come!

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New Year’s Eve 2013

Lindsay commented on my last post and said some say New Year’s Eve (#NYE as we social-media-lites like to call it) is an indicator of how the upcoming year will be spent. I both hope and don’t hope this is true! I am currently sitting in my kitchen drinking the last of a Starbucks black coffee (Daybreak was closed today 🙁 ) and writing this post to put off going to the gym. I cannot stand all the New Year’s resolution talk going on right now but today I sure do wish I had the motivation of a resolution-er. Given the fact that I work out consistently, it’s just any old gym day for me. Stairs, abs, and maybe arms are on my agenda.

My New Year’s nails, which I surprisingly haven’t messed up yet.

Anyway, New Year’s Eve was fun. I pretty much allowed myself to drink and eat what I wanted. We started with a lovely dinner at Bricco Trattoria in Glastonbury, where I un-surprisingly ran into many people I know from around town. My good friend Kelly came to visit and some other old friends, including Greg, were part of my evening too.

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MIMM: Holiday Cheer!

The winner of my giveaway for a Blue Nile Sterling Silver Branch Necklace is actually the first person who submitted any entries – Shawna! I will be contacting you to get your shipping address. Congrats to all who entered and thank you for the enthusiastic participation!

I had plans this past weekend for not one but two holiday parties. Unfortunately Saturday’s snow resulted in one of them getting cancelled but I still managed to make my weekend full of plenty of marvelous holiday (and overall) cheer.

Be sure to link-up with Katie if you’re participating in Marvelous In My Monday today!

Marvelous is…visiting Kaitlin on Friday! She was kind enough to host me for the evening and showed me a wonderful time. We started with a gift exchange…she got me a set of champagne flutes and a bottle of Prosecco, not to be opened until I move out of my parents’ house and get my own place 😉 my kind of motivation! The booze theme proceeded to carry on throughout the evening.

We went to Total Wine in Norwalk (which only made me more pumped for FL this month because there’s one by our condo) and they were having not one but two wine tastings AND a vodka tasting. Thank you Friday night! I’m worse in liquor stores than most girls are in Target so I walked out with two bottles of late harvest dessert wines, a nip of coffee liqueur, and a really nice Cabernet to share with Kaitlin at the holiday party we planned to attend later. I also ran into a fantastic guy named Latif who overheard me asking an employee if Total Wine carried Cesca Vicent, my favorite red to order at Barcelona. We immediately bonded over our love for Cesca and Barcelona! It was classic.

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Thanksgiving 2013: Dining Out

In recent years my family has spent Thanksgiving at the home of our friends, the Gerbers. Unfortunately this year they moved to Texas and we decided instead of finding another group to join or having Thanksgiving at home, we would go out! Obviously this was my idea and of course we selected J. Gilbert’s, my favorite restaurant, as the spot. Thankfully (ha get it?!) we were smart enough to call a couple of months in advance and lock down a 6:30PM reservation for our party of six. We received a call the day before Thanksgiving letting us know that a 4PM slot had become available, and my parents jumped on it. This was not fun for me because the earlier the reservation the more time I was going to have between finishing dinner and going to bed to think about what I’d ate. But I was the only one in that camp, so I had to deal!

The Croswell Fam!

The Croswell Fam!

I felt ridiculously hungover on Thanksgiving morning thanks to the previous evening’s festivities (Jager, never again) but made it to the gym for 30 minutes of StepMill intervals and an upper body workout. I sure am glad I went because I felt a lot better afterward, but man it was torturous during! I rushed home to shower and get cozy with coffee and the Black Friday circulars…a tradition! I felt very tempted to restrict after the gym and just not eat until dinner so that I would ensure I’d have plenty of room for the amount of food I was “bound to consume”. I texted my girl Brittany for support and she gave me the reality check I needed to push forward and fuel my body post-workout.

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Pacific Foods: Man-Friendly Casserole

Interrupting my Thanksgiving long weekend recapping to bring you this sponsored post for Pacific Foods. You can read the full-version over on their blog!

I recently started doing some cooking on my own, but with other peoples’ recipes. So imagine my excitement when I created my OWN recipe! Casseroles are a great “first recipe creation” because they seriously are just a bunch of ingredients mixed together in a pan and then heated in the oven. Have pan and oven, will casserole!

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Right before the star ingredient – the beans – was added!

I dub this the Man-Friendly Casserole because I made it with my main man – my dad – in mind. My mom was still down in Florida at our condo but he came home to go back to work. So on a Sunday afternoon, I put together this casserole for the two of us to share the next night. It was super easy to throw in the oven and heat up after we both got home from long days at work and the gym. The size was perfect for two. Also the only green in it came from peas, which bros just adore because you can’t taste them.

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MIMM: Home and Away

The winner of the Ellovi Body Butter giveaway is Mahdi! Congratulations and look for an email from me about getting you your free jar of raw six-ingredient body butter. Remember if you didn’t win you can get 15% off (click here to purchase a jar) by entering offer code “caitplusate”.

I went into the weekend wary of how I would handle my plans to visit my good friend/former neighbor Molly in Boston on Saturday night. I still wasn’t feeling good about myself after Wednesday night’s dinner out and was doing a lot of future-tripping over the guilt I would surely feel after a day and night of restaurant hopping in Beantown. For that reason I made sure to keep Friday night low-key and stayed in my hometown. Of course everything turned out marvelous in the end, as it often does. I’ve got another weekend of excellent memories and moments I’d re-live again in an instant, even if they also came with some not-so-kind thoughts toward myself.

Share your marvelous via Katie’s link-up!

Marvelous are…my tolerant, flexible parents. I was a bit of a mess when I got home Friday night. I’d been sitting in traffic, stewing with too much time to think about our evening dinner plans. We would have to fight that same traffic again to get over to our planned destination (Rizzuto’s in West Hartford) and it didn’t seem worth it. But if we didn’t go there, where would we go? I’d already mentally prepared myself for one restaurant and I know it sounds silly, but I do not handle plan changes well when it comes to food. Hello, control freak. My parents calmed me down when I got home and let me choose a new restaurant destination that I was comfortable with and that also wouldn’t take us on a highway. Speaking of which…

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Pond House Grille Side Dish Cooking Class

I received complimentary admission to this event in exchange for a blog post about my experience. All opinions are my own.

This past Friday night I had the opportunity to attend my second cooking class (read about my first one here) at Pond House Grille in Glastonbury, CT. The restaurant has been doing one class per month, and with Thanksgiving coming up this one was appropriately themed “Spice Up Your Side Dishes”.

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This month’s class had enough participants to be held in a bigger room in the restaurant’s adjacent banquet facility.

All classes are taught by Executive Chef Jordan Stein but I wouldn’t exactly call it teaching…hosting is a more accurate word. Jordan is so great with his guests! I felt like I was in his home and he was letting us all help him make Thanksgiving dinner. He made sure every “student” got some hands-on cooking time in. He would demo each step and afterwards pass it off to a volunteer – or someone he chose. Some guests were hesitant to volunteer and Jordan did a wonderful job of encouraging them to do so.

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MIMM: Well That Worked Out!

The winners of the Bristol Bliss giveaway are Steph, Heather, and SmileyJoyLove! Congratulations and I will be contacting you for your shipping info so that you can receive your scrub. Remember to check out the Bristol Bliss Etsy shop for natural beauty goodies for yourself…or a custom gift basket for a holiday gift!

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This weekend taught me a few lessons and gave me some great ammo for the next time I’m feeling down. I always need these kinds of weekends to prove to myself that the fun in my life is not a “bad habit”…it’s marvelous!

Join Katie‘s marvelous weekly link-up!

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Wine Wednesday: Staples Wine Cellar Giveaway!

I received a personal wine cellar free of charge to review. This is not a sponsored post. Opinions are my own.

It appears that I am such a wino that everyone knows it…including Staples. What does Staples have to do with wine, you ask? After all the closest my wine gets to a Staples product tends to be in a glass next to me as I type on my laptop or make lists on a notepad. Well Staples sells appliances, not just office supplies. In fact, I would even argue that the Haier 6-Bottle Wine Cellar is the perfect office supply. Who wants to have to wait the whole drive home for that post-work glass? Not I!

Wine tasting at my favorite local package store, Sonoma!

Wine tasting at my favorite local package store, Sonoma!

Like I said, my wino rep is widely known, or at least it is by mass retail chains. Staples sent me one of these wine cellars, which are priced at $99 each. You can also get FREE SHIPPING if you are a Staples Rewards member, and anyone can have the wine cellar shipped for free to a local Staples for pickup. They have the same type of deal for most kitchen appliances!

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Meet Caitlin

I’m a 28 year old full-time working girl living in Boston (previously lived in Connecticut). I’m passionate about food/drink, restaurants, self-love, fitness, and the ever-present search for balance. I write about that journey on this blog – I hope you enjoy!

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Design Credit

My header was originally designed by Mai Le and later tweaked by Chris Roggi to match this theme, which he helped me customize. He also moved me over to self-hosting! Both can be contacted through their sites for design & development work!

Disclaimer

I am not an RD and do not have any official training, certifications, or degrees in nutrition or fitness. This blog is a way to write about my life. Any views I express are mine alone, based on what works for me, and should never be taken as medical advice. Always talk to your doctor or a trained professional before starting a new diet or fitness plan. In addition, this blog and its content are in no way affiliated with Kate Gosselin, “Kate Plus 8”, TLC, or any related affiliates.

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