Tribute revisit with a friend + drinks and dessert at Holsem & Caffe Calabria

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of having a shared birthday dinner with a good friend...

I was just here last week with Bert...

Joe Matos Cheese Factory

Fresh from our caffeine fix at Flying Goat...

we headed westward to a small cheese farm...

that I first read about on Kirk's blog (post linked at the end)...

Negociant

After my visit to Grinds and Vine Coffee Bar during the last week of vacation...

I thought I'd take up manager Brian's invitation for a wine tasting...

Now this isn't something I normally do and I wasn't going to do it alone, so...

Random food + gifts

These past few weeks, we received a few food gifts such as pomegranates from TORC's backyard...

This was only half of them. TC had fun breaking these apart and picking out the seeds...

Another interesting fruit I received was one from Cathy's yard...

Tillamook Cheese Factory

As we traveled down the coast, it was getting cloudier and cloudier. A far cry from when we began the day traveling to Astoria...

It was 4:30 pm and the factory wouldn't close for another hour and a half...

Chicago Trip/Wisconsin: Day 5 - Culver's and heading back to Morton Grove

Culver's - Home of Butterburgers and frozen custard...and luckily for me, the words "Fried Cheese Curds" scrolled by just in time on the marquee...Although we didn't try the Butterburgers (still stuffed from our lunch at Himal Chuli), I was told by Wandering Chopsticks that they are just regular burgers except the buns are slathered in butter. Sounds healthy.
Drive Thru time! Culver's is like a Midwest In-n-Out. They're everywhere here! Culver's restaurants are also noticeable with their "trademark" blue roofs.

Their drive thru menu below. Their online menu here.

I love that, "Get Culverized"! OMG! They had a small size, a large size and a family size! The small was $3.50. We should have opted for the larger size! These delicious morsels of cheesy goodness were gone in less than 10 minutes! Okay, eight. All right! Five!

Delicious - 2 types of cheese (yellow and white)

Toll roads suck! Because the Midwest has such crappy weather conditions, their roads get messed up more easily. So, in order to have the funds to repair them throughout the year, everyone must pay tolls to drive on the freeways. Thank God we only have earthquakes to worry about! Ha ha. On our drive back to Illinois, we were prepared with loads of change, not like on our way up to the Dells! We were literally scrounging for coins, even asking our daughter if she had any. I felt kind of low asking my 9 year old for money for the damn toll road. She gave us two dimes and one quarter!

On another note...here's my new Converse One Star's from Target. This is the kid's size 6 which is equivalent to a women's 8. The kids' price was $19.99. The women's price was $29.99; same shoe but a different color (gray), so hell yeah, I got the kids' size! You know it's cold when you see me wearing socks. I normally don't even wear shoes that completely cover my feet. My fierce heels won't cut it here.

Here's a Meijer supermarket...

The Arlington Heights water tower...this was kind of different than the other ones we'd seen, which were tall and thin with a bulbous top,

After all that time driving...we were tired...but the day wasn't over yet! We still had dinner to go...

One more thing, if you can't get enough of Madison, Wisconsin, check out these past posts by Kirk!