The Melting Pot

Yesterday, some friends of ours, Shawn & Rachael, and Matt and I went out for dinner at a place called The Melting Pot. It is a fondue resturant. How many of you know what Fondue is? Well, we didn't. It sounded like something Chinese we thought. Anyway, what a big night we were in for! First off you decide what kind of cheese fondue you want (the appetizer). We ordered Fiesta kind and they ordered Cheddar. Then they bring out the ingredients in little bowls and put them into little silver pots that are sitting on burners on your table and they mix it all together. Then the guy gave us little bowls of bread cubes, tortilla chips, granny smith apples, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower and celery. You get 2 "pokers" each which are color coded and you get to start poking and dipping stuff in the cheese. You do that until its all gone. Then you order your salad. They had lots to choose from but none that were "normal". I got a California salad which was good except it had some yukky cheese on top (Gargonzola or something) and so I didn't eat it. I did pick the walnuts out and eat them though! Then after that, you order your main course. We did the "Dinner for Two" which consisted of bite-sized peices of chicken, pork, steak, salman & shrimp. You have to choose your cooking style which means what kind of stuff you want to cook the meat in. We went with something called Mojo that had like garlic and citrus in it or something. Then they bring you out clean little pots with your cooking "juice" in and you dip your meat in there for about 2 minutes per peice and then eat it. They gave us 6 different sauces to try with our meats. Also they gave us as many potatoes, squash, mushrooms and broccoli as we wanted to cook also. After all that....then they brought out the chocolate menu. WOW! There were SO many to choose from but in the end, we ended up getting Yin-Yang (which was milk chocolate swirled with white chocolate) and The Flaming Turtle (which was milk chocolate, carmel & pecans). Then they brought out a tray for each of us with a slice of cheesecake, strawberries, pineapple, banana, oreo-covered marshmallows & brownies on for us to dip in the chocolate! WHEW! I thought I was in dessert heaven! Rachael and I joked that we needed to just stick our straws in the chocolate pots and drink up! It was SOOOOOOOOOOO good. Oh---by the way---the reason we did this big night out was to celebrate our birthdays. We both turned 29 last week (me on Tuesday and her on Thursday). This place is MIGHTY expensive...so we needed a good excuse to go. Anyway, all in all, it was a wonderful time. We ate WAY WAY WAY too much. We were so miserable when we left! Another thing about that place...it takes FOREVER to eat all that! We were there for over 3 hours and none of that time was spent waiting...it just takes a long time because you cook your food one bite at a time!! After that we exchanged gifts. She got me some diffuser reeds & oil from Secret Garden. It is sweet pea fragrance and it smells wonderful. She also got me some eyeshadow that I had been admiring of hers. It is a really pretty shade of dark plum.

On Friday I took the kids to get pictures done. No real special reason...just hadn't gotten any in a long time and I had some good coupons. I am going to try to take a picture of the picture so you can see...but they probably won't turn out great.