Tag: feeling inspired

Weekend Things

Lauren1 Comment

Raise your hand if you stayed out way past your bedtime on Monday night and felt exhausted for the rest of the week.  No?  Just me on that one?  This is my way of justifying a lounge-y laid-back weekend that involved many naps, though we took my niece to see The Little Mermaid at the BDT Stage last night and it was midnight by the time I crawled into bed so I apparently did not learn my lesson.

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Post couch-nap on Friday, we headed to the Rockies game.  It felt like it’d been so long since we’d been to one, so Coors Field looked extra beautiful to me.  We saw a bat (the animal kind, not the baseball kind), my friend Ari and a Rockies win so it was a good night!

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We woke up Saturday morning and headed straight to Stowaway because we hadn’t been there for breakfast since… Easter?!  Can that be right??  I was starting to get the shakes just thinking about how long it’d been.  We had the shaded patio to ourselves and it felt so cool and peaceful out there as we shared a chai peach muffin, sipped coffee and ate up our entrees.

Afterward, we scoped out some work our company did at Improper City, which was having its opening weekend then did a little bit of garden clean up back at home.  We harvested our first yellow squash!  Andi seemed quite content to just be propped up in Joey’s hands 😛

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A bit later, I left Joey in the backyard and headed in to bottle some kombucha.  Lori got me this kombucha book for my birthday and I am feeling SO inspired by it!!!  There’s a whole section with flavor suggestions that I never ever would have thought up on my own.  I want to try them ALL!  I went with watermelon (blended up and strained to concentrate the flavor) and vanilla bean (look closely and you can see the flecks!) and I can hardly wait to see how it turns out.  Since I had already blended up the juice, I used the leftovers to make some salted watermelon juice, which is really just the preamble to salted watermelon margaritas, right?

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Spent a couple of hours at Kyla’s bridal shower after that and how cute is that balloon champagne display??  I got to visit with both sides of Joey’s family, drink a glass of sangria, watch a very funny game of pin the tail on the donkey (except not pin the tail on the donkey :P) and I even won a bottle of wine!  Can’t wait for the wedding, come August!

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I hit up a Sunday morning yoga class and between getting up semi-early and a super dreary rainy day, I basically felt how Andi looks in the picture above.  Our enthusiasm over the World Cup was about the same level too.  Is it just me or do soccer players have the most hipster haircuts of all athletes?

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After a mainly lazy day, I headed over to my parents’ to see my niece!  She opened birthday presents from Joey and I — a light blue bouncy cow that we named Claudia and decided is cousins with our cow and a modelling clay set — and she and I were both very into that clay.  Then my sister came over and we took her to the show!  I don’t know what game BDT is playing at by having a kid-friendly show start at 7:45 PM on a Sunday but we all managed to stay awake.  They actually did a GREAT job with the set, considering it’s a story that mostly takes place underwater.  “Under the Sea” was my favorite part!  Really appreciated the show’s desire to stay relevant by changing the words to “each little crab here knows how to dab here, under the sea.”

Hope you had a wonderful weekend, Happy Monday!

My First Cookbook

Lauren4 Comments

Monday was a low point for Cold #3.  I could’ve sworn I was feeling better on Sunday, only to spend an hour straight coughing like there was no tomorrow once I got into bed.  I got out of bed on Monday morning long enough to brush my teeth then returned to bed, saying “I just can’t.”  I ended up going to the doctor later on — and she prescribed me some codeinerrific cough medicine that isn’t doing a thing! —  and then spent the rest of the day in bed with a book.

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A cookbook to be more precise.  It all started the other night when Joey and I were cooking with Herbs de Provence and I reminded him that that exact jar had been our first dry herb purchase, probably, oh 5 years ago.  My mom had just given me this Rachael Ray cookbook.  Joey and I picked a recipe a week.  It was our very first foray into cooking.

Five years ago, I remember thinking each and every one of these recipes seemed to have an ingredient list a mile long, containing things I’d never heard of — I probably called my mom every time I went to the grocery store…I only call every other time nowadays 😛 — and that all seemed “too expensive!” for my college student working 15-hours-a-week budget.  So we spent “a lot of money,” burnt numerous pans and took far longer than 30 minutes on every meal, and that cookbook has been gathering dust on our shelf ever since.

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After coming across that jar of Herbs de Provence, I thought it would be fun to give it another look-through.  You know, just to see if it looked as confusing and ingredient-heavy as it did 5 years ago.  Guess what?  It didn’t.  Shocker.  Turns out, 5 years later, our pantry has grown, and {I’d like to think} our culinary knowledge has grown too.  I spent most of the afternoon drooling bookmarking recipe after recipe, remembering only the fun times we had cooking from this book and feeling really inspired to give Rachael another chance.

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Maybe we should try cooking every single recipe for the entire year!  Then I could write a blog about it!  And then it could get turned into a movie, starring Amy Adams!  Now why does that sound so familiar?