We have been making the rounds to all our favorite local restaurants lately to make up for lost time due to the pandemic. It’s so nice to see everyone’s smiling faces and feel normal again and it’s especially nice to not have to cook from scratch once in a while.

Tuesday night we went to the Sandpiper, which sits alongside the Snake River in downtown Idaho Falls. Their food is amazing and the patio is such a great place to relax, have a drink and watch the world go by.

We are always entertained by the local ducks who know how to work the crowd in order to get a free handout. This girl brought a couple of her adorable ducklings out to increase her odds but was quickly run off by the boys who didn’t think that was very fair.

I tried explaining to this guy that we’re not supposed to feed them bread, which is all he really wanted, but he totally ignored my reasoning and begged loudly anyway.

He finally left when I told him he’s lucky he’s not on the menu and that if he came to my house he’d be the main course! Eventually he returned with backup to plead his case but we didn’t give in. By then we’d eaten all the bread anyway.

I wasn’t lying to him, either. Had we not went out we planned to have Muscovy for dinner (again).

You may or may not know this, but we became homesteaders thanks to my wonky immune system. We raise almost all of my “safe” foods here ourselves, from free range chicken, duck, turkey, pheasant (and now quail) eggs and meat to fresh, organic fruits and veggies. This diet has kept me from anaphylaxing and prevented costly, unwanted trips to the ER.

I am grateful we can do it, but honestly? It gets pretty boring eating the same handful of foods all day, every day, and the work it takes to prepare and cook every meal from scratch is both overwhelming and pretty monotonous at times.

So, after three years of eating nothing but home cooked meals, I decided to take the risk and found if I take a double dose of my mast cell medicines and am super careful with what I order (and then come straight home and take a couple of Benadryl before a reaction can set in) I can eat out.

Yay science and yay me!!

It’s not ideal, but it works as long as I am super careful about timing. I definitely can’t eat out every day and some foods are still off limits for me no matter what, but I can live with that!

Not that we could afford to eat out every single day anyway. Nearly every place we’ve went to has upped their menu prices since the last time we went in, which was just before the pandemic, so it was a bit of a sticker shock, to say the least.

Some of them frankly aren’t worth what they’re charging now, but some are, like the Sandpiper. We’ll definitely be back soon…