Marvelous in my (Weekend): Pre-Blending blending.

Thanks Katie for hosting another Marvelous in My Monday linkup! I don’t usually do linkups anymore, but I had a marvelous weekend, so I thought I would share.

Happy Monday! How was your weekend? Mine was pretty fantastic since a couple of my favorite Blends and I decided to meet up  and hang out at my place for the weekend. I met Amanda and Katie at Blend (briefly, but we’ve become better friends since then, and realized we all live within a semi-short distance of each other). Amanda and I ran a race together in September, and have been talking about getting together again and inviting Katie along for a while. Finally we were able to do it, and we need to do it again before Blend!

Our original plan was to hang out in Iowa City/Cedar Rapids since that was the midpoint between all of us, but I decided to save everybody some cash and invite everybody to stay at my place instead, which meant that one of them would have to drive farther than the other, but nobody seemed to mind.

So, Saturday Katie and Amanda arrived, and we had brunch at my place, that none of us photographed or instagrammed, surprisingly. I made dairy- and gluten-free waffles (yes, I can now eat gluten, but I don’t love it, and I still want to avoid it in most of my diet — home is a place that I can easily do this — and Katie and Amanda have issues with dairy), and Mark made scrambled eggs. We sat around and chatted, played a bit of Uno, plotted our dinner plans, and eventually I drove everybody to ISU’s campus to run (since campus always has great snow-free sidewalks in the winter).

After our run, we headed to Des Moines to one of my favorite places, A Dong (yes. A Dong). It’s a Vietnamese restaurant with so many delicious things on the menu (more than 100). Again, I don’t think any of us photographed our food, but we did enjoy it. Down the street from A Dong is a place called Gateway Market that has some foodie-esque grocery items, so we went and took a peek.

We went home and everybody was super tired, so instead of playing games and drinking the wine that Katie brought, we had a lot of cups of chai tea and watched a bit of Portlandia.

Sunday morning we did brunch at my favorite Ames restaurant, The Café. Their menu is always changing so I was hoping that they would meet our dietary needs — and they did, though Katie was pretty limited in what she could eat since she’s dairy-free and vegetarian (I’ve had a similar experience when I was more strict with pescatarianism and gluten-free items — but I’m flexible now with meat based on the production, and The Café uses friendly farmers).

Everybody’s food was delicious, of course. I’ve never had anything I didn’t like at The Café and I usually order something different every time (well, with a rotating menu, you kind of have to).

After brunch, we went to Wheatsfield Co-op because we’d been talking about nutritional yeast, and I knew that they had it in their bulk bins, plus, I love that place, and I had to share it.

When we got back, Katie and Amanda left to go home. It was a great weekend with friends! I forgot how much fun it is to have house guests, and it would be fun doing that more often.

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How was your weekend?