News flashes

News flashes, and random tidbits:

• The Madagascar Dragon Tree is now in its nice roomy new pot, which should keep it from tipping over in every breeze. Photos to come.
  
• The yellow violas are also in a nice new pot. Ditto on the photos.
  
• High chair covers should always be machine-washable. Because sometimes, they just need a good long soak. We're using a hand-me-down from DH's sister, and there was some unidentified something on the back of the cover.
  
• The covers for the couch cushions didn't shrink in the wash yesterday. Yay! On the other hand, I trimmed off two handfuls of straggly hem-edge thread.
  

Cool discovery of the month: Many years (actually, 8) ago, there was a Chinese restaurant, the Peking, in town that had the absolute best lemon chicken I'd ever tasted. (They also delivered, which was great since they were downtown where parking stinks, and I was in college and parked a good distance from my dorm room.) It was chunks of breaded deep-fried chicken, and this lemon sauce that was delicious. It must have had gelatin of some form in it, because the leftover sauce would set up nicely overnight into something close to jelly. They had other good food too, but the lemon chicken was my favorite. Unfortunately, the Peking closed about 7.5 years ago, right after DH & I started dating. And I spent the next few years trying the lemon chicken at every other Chinese restaurant we ate at, and never found anything to match it (although I found one or two that were close).

Anyway, about two weeks ago, the front of the business section in the local paper featured a photo of a Chinese restaurant, leading to the article inside. It's the Peking - apparently they closed for a few years, the family had some time off, and they reopened last year in the southern part of town. And the same cook is back! Woohoo! (No, it doesn't take much to make my day sometimes.) So, at some point, we need to go out to the new location and see if they still have lemon chicken on the menu.

So far, this is the second time that our favorite Chinese place has closed down, taken a few years off, and reappeared. I think there's one left that I've eaten at a lot that hasn't taken a vacation, although it won't surprise me if I drive over to Orscheln's one day and Loon Sheng is closed. They're in a bit of a strip-mall situation, and they've had at least one run-in with the city about the state of their grease trap. On the other hand, when I lived on that side of town, they were convenient, affordable, and pretty tasty. And their scores on the Health Department inspections never scare me. Unlike at least one other place in town that's permanently off our list - having the inspection scores printed in the paper has good points and bad points. We've eaten at places that later had abysmal, frightening scores from the Health Dept.