By now you should know my friend, Kristy, who has been mentioned in quite a few of my posts. It's great having her in Florida with me. We are both complete Jersey Girls at heart, but we love our new lives down here. While we both love to cook and bake, we never shy away from going out for a good bite to eat. We love the guacamole and drinks at Rocco's Tacos, the Fuji Apple Sake wine and sushi at Yakitori, and sharing all of our baked goods recipes with each other. It's good to have a bestie with the same interests. Not to mention, we both just moved into our very own apartments, so not only do we have food and cooking to talk about, but decorating too!
Anyway, our most recent dining adventure was for lunch at Maggiano's Little Italy of Boca along with her boyfriend, whom I was finally meeting for the first time. Gotta get the BFF approval, which she did! :) The restaurantreminds me of Carmines at the Tropicana in Atlantic City — very family-style Italian and comfortable. It took us forever to order as we sat and talked for a while. Every time the waiter came over, it was like "One more minute..." until finally we just shut up and ordered. For starters, we shared the stuffed mushrooms (bottom left). This was a huge portion for an appetizer; it came with 6 jumbo mushrooms caps, stuffed generously with spinach and seasoned bread crumbs in a garlic white wine sauce — VERY good. It's hard to believe I used to scoff at mushrooms and think they were disgusting; they're one of my favorite foods now!