az Archives - Ari's Menu

Early last week, I started asked my facebook friends where I should go to dinner after my 20 miler. I mean, clearly food is the most important thing after you run! I wanted to be prepared. 😉 I got a lot of great suggestions, but ultimately my friend Nicole won with her suggestion of The Grind. The menu looked awesome and all of the food is coal fired. Not to mention the drink list looked amazing.

Nicole’s drink: The Moscow Mule

My Blackberry Sidecar. Probably my favorite thing I tasted all night. After one, they ran out of blackberry and I was sooooo sad!

For dinner all of us except for Lance ordered the turkey burger. Nicole and I added goat cheese to ours which was an excellent choice. I would add goat cheese to pretty much anything though.

The burger was seasoned well, but it was a fattier turkey than I would have preferred. Maybe I’m in the minority, but I like my turkey burgers to be practically white, and at least 90% lean. A lot of restaurants in Phoenix offer some really lean turkey burgers, but this one was definitely a little greasy for my taste. It still tasted good, but not sure it’s something I would order again. Nicole and I also split an order of the half and half fries which were half herb fries and half sweet potato fries.

Honestly, they were pretty disappointing. The herb fries just tasted like regular old french fries, and the sweet potato fries were fine, but not exciting. Not like the sweet potato fries at Fez! They didn’t taste bad, just kinda boring. However, you know what was NOT boring? Umm this AMAZING dessert.

Hot, fresh donuts with a salted butterscotch dipping sauce. I diiiiieeee.

LOOK AT THEM!!! SO MUCH DELICIOUS!!!

Seriously, the drinks and dessert alone were worth the entire experience. Steve’s veggies that we didn’t photograph were also perfectly seasoned and delicious, so maybe I just need to try and order something else for my main course? Either that, or just go for cocktails and dessert, because those are the most important things anyway. 😉 Nicole posed with me to remind the world that I ran 20 miles. Good friends take silly pictures with you in public for you to post on your blog.

20 (.5)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That face is so cute, right? Maybe the next cycle of ANTM will be for old people, and I can pursue my amazing modeling skills.

What are your favorite restaurants and your favorite things about them??

Hi friends! This week is like the week of perfect scheduling when it comes to work outs. Kara and I have completely matching schedules conducive to stress free morning work outs! We left my house at 6:15 this morning and headed to Squaw Peak which they are I guess now calling Piestewa Peak? Weird. I dunno. Anyway, we went there for a morning hike! I haven’t done a ton of hiking, but I really enjoy it as a nice change to my normal work outs. We took the Summit Trail which is about 1.2 miles up and moderately steep. At the beginning it felt like cake, but very quickly turned into a challenge as I started huffing and puffing and felt my heart rate climbing.

Luckily, it was perfect weather and the trail was the perfect amount of challenging to push us and still be enjoyable! There were also some nice views along the way

It definitely got hardest towards the top!

It ended up taking us about 40 minutes to get up and we were glad to hang out up there for a little bit! “Yeah, I’m the badass that just conquered that mountain.”

“Hooray!! I climbed a mountain! Photos from above, please. There ain’t nothing cute about below angles.”

We made some friends at the top and asked them to take our picture together. I told them the rules, no double chins. They didn’t seem to judge me too much for my vanity.