Pin 186

Original pin:

http://thespottedfox.com/diy-projects/diy-valentine-food-passport

I love this cute idea--its a "food passport." The idea is to write a bunch of different restaurants and try to visit them all throughout the year to eliminate the "where do we eat?" question. Perfect for my Valentine.

I found a perfect navy blue moleskin notebook at Barnes & Noble in a 2 pack for $6. Due to our normally busy Thursdays, we are celebrated our date night on Friday. Also perfect because that gave me time to put it all together during our mom's workday. I started by using my steel stampers to emboss the word "passport" on the front.

I decided to stamp out the restaurant names instead of writing them all out. I brought my rubber letter stamps and got busy.

It was really fun to do this with a group because whenever I got stuck on the next restaurant, I just asked the room for more suggestions. I also got texted in suggestions from my younger (and thereby, hipper) sister. I tried to avoid any place we go often, anything that was a large chain, and anyplace that we had been before but didn't love. There were just a few old favorites that made it in but most were based upon recommendations or ones we saw and had wanted to try. I did my best to include at least a few that would never, ever make my list but that I knew my husband would like. That's part of the gift. (Of course I get a gift out of this too--dinner out!)

When I was out picking up my moleskin book, I also came across these most-perfect stamps--passport style:

Each page got a lightly stamped passport stamp as well.

I only did one restaurant per page and ended up with 28 restaurants total. If you are local and interested, here is the list of restaurants I included:

1. Sweet Basil Thai
2. Big Shots Sports Bar
3. Cafe Medi
4. Bizzi's Wine Bistro
5. Uno's
6. Mi Cocina
7. Texas Land & Cattle
8. Fireside Pies
9. Brewed
10. Food Truck Park
11. Hibachi 97
12. The Melting Pot
13.  Jazz Cafe
14. Movie Tavern
15. Cabo Grande
16. P. F. Changs
17. Scat Jazz Lounge
18. Buttermilk Cafe
19. Miss Saigon Cafe
20. My Nizza Pizza
21. Nona Tatta
22. Piola
23. Fortuna
24. Bonnells
25. Mijo's Fusion
26. Dino's
27. Fred's
28. Babe's Chicken House


Where would you go?? If this is works as awesome as I suspect it does, I might have to make this a yearly tradition!

I could have saved the passport stamps to use and stamp each page as we go there, but then I would have to dig the stamp back out. We can just check mark or fold the corner or something.

Total cost: $15--including the extra splurge of the stamps. And NOT including the actual visits to all these places!

Total time: 2 hours

Final verdict: Funny, as we were headed out, before I had given it to him, we were having the dreaded "where should we go?" conversation. As we were driving down to a dining district we were passing a lot of these places! Once we got there I gave it to him and because it was so fitting in our discussion, he thought it was great. We are both so excited to start using it all up! I did have to give him a few ground rules--you don't get to check it off if you go there with your buddies, we have to actually eat our meal there, etc. After dinner we cooked up an idea for that second book that came in the two pack. We started our list for the "After-dinner Passport" when the question of "What should we do now?" arrived.  Other than the standard movie date, we already have about 7 or 8 things you can do on the fly after dinner. We are trying to think of the sort of things that you don't have to do too much pre-planning for. No exclusive, tickets-required engagements (like museum gala or something). For example, miniature golf, bookstore browsing, coffee, painting class. . .

What after-dinner ideas do you have?