Afternoon everyone …..
After the $4 plus plunge on silver, the price seems to have semi stabilized. What exactly does this mean? There are to many scenarios in my eyes. First it could be the writing on the wall that silver is going to explode and the big players smashed it down to buy up whatever they could before it blows up. This could also mean status quo for a while. But it could also mean that silver is shaky at $48, and scared money might push it down even further.
What I do know is what the numbers tell me. Last week was the second highest volume of silver sales in over two decades. There was also a tremendous amount of paper contracts thrown around as well. I don’t know of a way to track silver contracts year versus year so I’ll just assume that the volume was way up with the silver price being nearly double last years price.
I’m still very bullish on silver, but this run is very awkward and is very hard to follow and make a legitimate analysis in my opinion. I’ll be watching it closely.
On a different note…..
With all of the family drama and being behind on jobs because of it. We meaning my girlfriend and I haven’t had a true date night in several weeks. On Tuesday night I made a reservation at a recommended Italian place semi near where my girlfriend lives. The name of the place is Verde.
It’s a smaller place with roughly 20-30 tables in the town of Morris Plains. It’s a very nice area, suburban New Jersey. I chose a 6:00pm reservation, giving me enough time to get off the job site, drive to my girlfriends for a shower and leave. It was not very busy when we arrived, but filled up some as we were eating and leaving an hour later.
The food was solid, I’ve definitely had better. There were things that bothered me, probably because of my culinary background that most likely wouldn’t bother most if any.
They did bring out a freshly baked small loaf of Italian bread accompanied by both butter and a plate of extra virgin olive oil. The bread was very good, crispy crust very soft inside. But the olive oil wasn’t dipping quality and was plain. No rosemary, garlic or anything else added to it. This was the first strike in my book.
I’ll give you an example of other things: I ordered a Caesar salad. To me a fine dining restaurant would have dressed the salad in the kitchen, tossing it to coat, then plated it adding the shaved Parmigiana Reggiano afterwards.
Well as you will see in the picture below. The dressing was plopped on top on the salad, croutons not dressed just thrown on top. The cheese was very good and definitely real Parmigiano Reggiano which was a plus at least. I’d give this salad a 6.5 out of 10. This was my second issue.
Jennifer ordered an appetizer special which was a stuffed roasted Italian pepper stuffed with a freshly made beef ragu, ricotta cheese and topped with mozzarella cheese. It had a decent flavor, but the texture was very mushy to me. I’d give this appetizer a 5.5 out of 10.
Jennifer ordered a chicken parmigiana dinner with penne. While I didn’t try it at all, she said the sauce was flavorful, the chicken was very tender and the breading was nicely done. I trust her opinion and asked her for a score. She gave it a solid 8 of 10. She ended up taking half of it home. If you look at the plating there is sauce splatter in several spots, I know it sounds petty but it’s the details. Strike number three for me.
My choice for dinner was veal Marsala. My favorite Italian dish is Osso Bucco, which was not on the menu and rarely is because of the time it takes to prepare it properly. If there isn’t a stand out dish on the menu or a special that grabs me, a veal dish is where I will typically end up. The veal was very tender, the mushrooms were cooked perfectly and the pan sauce was tasty. The vegetables were over cooked and mushy, no flavor bad texture due to over cooking them. The potatoes were very smooth, I tasted butter so they were done well. If the vegetables weren’t so destroyed this dish would’ve gotten an 8.5 out of 10. But got reduced down to a solid 7 of 10 due to this blatant destruction of the vegetables.
It was a solid meal, this is definitely not a place that I would go out of my way to visit again. If someone wanted to go there, I wouldn’t say no but there are far too many excellent Italian restaurants near me to purposely visit this one again.
It was however great to get out and be alone with my girlfriend.