Tag: lazy

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!

Smoky Corn and Shrimp Chowder

Lauren1 Comment

This is how lazy Joey and I are.  When we went to the grocery store on Saturday, instead of buying fresh corn to make chowder with, we almost bought frozen.  There we are, produce bag open, first ear of corn in hand, when we decide having to shuck and de-kernel it ourselves is not worth it.

Luckily, we came to our senses.  I mean, it is corn season after all.  It would be a crime not to take advantage of how cheap and delicious fresh corn is right now.

I made this chowder a few weeks ago and while I wasn’t overly wowed by it, Joey declared it “AWESOME!!”  So I was determined to make some changes that wowed me, while still maintaining the chowder’s “AWESOME”-ness.  I’m pretty delighted by what I came up with.

Smoky Corn and Shrimp Chowder

  • 1 tsp olive oil (plus a drizzle for the shrimp)
  • 1 tsp liquid smoke
  • 6 ears corn
  • 1 medium yellow onion
  • 4 cloves garlic
  • 1 T paprika
  • a pinch crushed red pepper
  • salt and pepper to taste
  • pepper to taste
  • 6 cups vegetable broth
  • 1/2 lb shrimp
  • 1 teaspoon cumin
  • 1 cup plain Greek yogurt
  1. Shuck corn and cut kernels off.
  2. Chop onion and garlic.  Heat olive oil and liquid smoke, then add onion, garlic, salt pepper, paprika and crushed red pepper.  Cook until onions and garlic are soft.
  3. Add corn and cook 5 minutes.
  4. Add broth to the pot, simmer for 10 minutes then remove from heat and cool so you can add the yogurt without it curdling.
  5. While the soup cools, peel your shrimp, then toss in salt, pepper and cumin.
  6. Heat a drizzle of olive oil in a pan and arrange the shrimp in one layer.  Once browned and crispy, flip and repeat on the other side.
  7. Once shrimp are done, stir yogurt into soup, then use an immersion blender (or a regular blender) to puree some of the soup.
  8. Stir in shrimp and enjoy!

Joey was out golfing when I made this, so it was me, the Chopped Grill Masters finale and chowder.  Turns out de-kerneling corn and peeling shrimp is pretty cathartic.  And totally worth it.

Laziness doesn’t create chowder this good.