Tag: King Cake

Mardi Gras & National Pancake Day Celebrations

Lauren4 Comments

So, I originally planned on posting about our Denver Restaurant Week dinner at The Oceanaire last Wednesday (as in post finalized and scheduled for today), but I was feeling a little too jazzed (<— get it??) about Tuesday’s celebrations to not write about them.  Also, as I’m writing this (actually on Tuesday), I’m feeling a little too caffeine and sugared out — you’ll understand why in a moment — which = writing inspiration.  That’s acceptable, right?

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This is the chalk wall I was working on this weekend.  I figured there was no better message to break it in with than this one 🙂

Yesterday was Mardi Gras!  I expect most people outside New Orleans don’t actually celebrate or even realize it’s a holiday (unless you’re a college student…), but I’ve decided that having experienced a real Nola Mardi Gras (hello Bourbon Street balcony party!) as well as having family who lives there justifies me celebrating it.  Also, my Nola family is going through some tough stuff at the moment 😦 so my heart wants to keep them extra close right now.

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In addition to being Fat Tuesday, it was also National Pancake Day!  Could Tuesday get any better?  No, no it could not.  For the past couple of years, I’ve been aware that my favorite pancake-slinging breakfast restaurant celebrates this “holiday” by rolling out an extended pancake menu, selling them “sushi style” and donating the proceeds to a local charity.  I’ve always wanted to participate but as we were previously living a good 25 minutes from any Snooze location, it wasn’t all that practical of an idea.  Now that we live 5 minutes from one, there was no way I could pass it up!

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Remember how I always complain that this place always has a ridiculous wait to get a table?  Yeah, well I’ve figured out how to avoid it.  Go in at 6:30 AM on a Tuesday!  Empty tables galore.  Somehow, I don’t think this was Joey’s idea of fun but he perked right up after ordering a mocha and a flight of pancakes.  Funny how that works, huh?  Below would be buttermilk/salted caramel cream cheese, buttermilk/candied bacon/cheddar crisp, red velvet, king cake, buttermilk/mocha and my forever favorite… the sweet potato pancake.  I died and went to heaven shortly after trying all of these.

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 Typical Mardi Gras “celebrating” continued as I played the Mardi Gras station on iPhone Radio and streamed live parade and French Quarter feed all day at work.  I swear, I was also doing actual work.  Turns out it was cool and rainy all day in Nola yesterday, but even so, those parades are so much cooler than any other parade I’ve seen.  I read that Quentin Tarantino rode on one of the floats during Harry Connick Jr.’s parade on Monday night.  How cool would it be to catch a pair of beads from Tarantino?!

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Please ignore my awesome green polka-dot socks…

We topped the celebrating off with a traditional Cajun dinner of Red Beans and Rice.  Shockingly, I’ve been eating Red Beans all my life but have never once made them myself.  Actually, I swear I’ve never even seen my mom in the process of making them.  By some sort of magic, she just always seems to have a big pot full by dinnertime.  She kindly gave me her recipe so we could try it for ourselves.  Verdict: pretty good for our first try!

And that’s about as fun and crazy as a Colorado Mardi Gras gets for me 🙂  Regularly scheduled Denver Restaurant Week recapping will commence shortly.

Weekend Things

Lauren2 Comments

If I was a normal Coloradan, I would start this post with something like…

BRONCOS!!! OH MY GOD!!! SUPER BOWL!!! OH MY GOD!!!

But I’m not a normal Coloradan so instead I’ll just say hi, hope your weekend is going well!  Despite the fact that our whole house is yet again covered in a layer of dust, it’s been a great weekend around here.  The perfect mix of being productive and being totally lazy.  Friday started with dinner and a movie.

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We finally got around to cooking up some of those steaks we’ve had in the freezer.  Turns out our meat thermometer considers medium rare to be more like well done, but they were delicious nevertheless.

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We went to a new (to us) Denver movie theater and it was so cool.  It’s a tiny place with only a few theaters but there’s two floors and one has a full-service bar.  We saw 12 Years a Slave in a theater that probably sat 150 people tops.  It felt very Denver.  The movie was incredible but so hard to watch.  At the end, I realized my entire body had been tensed up through the whole thing.

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On Saturday I was up bright and early for some bridesmaid dress shopping.  This is me pretending to not know Hannah was taking a picture of the dress I decided on.  She gave us all the option of getting any style dress as long as they were all the same length and color but we all ended up liking the same one.  I’m so excited to stand next to my best friend in this dress come July!

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I came home to Joey working on our exposed brick wall so I took myself to the grocery store in an attempt to not go crazy from the noise and dust.  I’ve been going to the Sprouts near our house and I’m not really sure how I like it. On the one hand, it’s nice to shop at a more Whole Foods-like store (bulk bins galore and a Toms toothpaste section that I thought only existed in my dreams), but it’s also A) crowded and B) catered towards people who probably make 3-4 trips to the grocery store a week.  Can I get a full-sized cart please?  I bought myself this treat as a reward for braving the Saturday afternoon crowd.

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Lookie!  We still have to figure out how to make a better looking transition from corner of wall to brick, but I LOVE how this looks!  I apologized to Joey for having almost no faith in this project but he was right and it looks great!  We were going to pull some leftovers from the fridge, but my parents called me around 5 and invited us to dinner and that sounded like a much better plan 🙂

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We went to a new place — Jonesy’s Eat Bar — and were severely disappointed.  We got a free order of truffle fries for checking in on Yelp! (which gave this place 4/5 stars?!) and they were delicious but it all went downhill from there.  No one was wowed by their food and my mom was served a po boy on a HAMBURGER BUN.  That’s sacrilegious.  It also wasn’t cheap so I think it’s safe to say we won’t be going back there.

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Did I mention I lost my ID at the mall last weekend?  I swear the 20-year-old American Eagle employee I gave it to for a return never gave it back to me and she’s now out enjoying life as a 24-year-old.  We had planned on going out to see a band but instead we spent the night trying to locate our passports, which we found underneath an old laptop at the bottom of a box of DVDs.  By that point, we were over going anywhere else that night.  Instead I ate this piece of King Cake and watched SNL.

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Today has been half productive, half relaxing .  We staked out at the breakfast joint in our neighborhood and got some wedding planning taken care of — according to our wedding book, there’s lots to do in the 8-6 month period — then came home for football and an at-home manicure.  I feel uncomfortable every time I take a manicure picture, I swear I’m not trying to show off my ring I’m just right handed!

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Now I’m scrolling through the millions of Broncos-related Facebook statuses and wondering if we’d be expected to put up Broncos decorations if we threw a Super Bowl party.

Happy Sunday!