Edited to add:  The winner of the previous contest was Nancy who wanted to try the Ginger Snaps Cupcakes.  (I used a random number generator.  I have emailed Nancy and thanks to ALL of you for entering!  My next contest will be announced tonight or tomorrow.)

Happy Monday to you all.  I’m sitting at home, reveling in the fact that after two months of vacation, Chris has gone back to work (on a Monday, no less, and keep in mind the symphony never works on Monday so this totally weird), and I’m doing busywork and have no work until late afternoon.

I’m recovering from our barbecue yesterday.  Or cookout.  I’ve been over all of that before…in a nutshell, we invited a bunch of our friends over to eat burgers, potato salad, other good food, and to show off our new house.  And also just to have fun.

While Chris was on “mancation” the other week, his friend Norbert taught him how to make Bacon Wrapped Jalapeno Poppers.  He decided he wanted to recreate them for our friends also.

First you half and de seed all the jalapenos.  Be sure to wash your hands really well.  In fact, the following day Chris asked me if I could put in his contact lens for him since the first eye had gotten a little red.  The answer was, in fact, no, I cannot.  I can put MY contacts in no matter what, but I couldn’t do his.

Anyway, after you get all the jalapenos done, slice the bacon in half.  You’ll want half a slice for each half of a pepper.  (I know, this is a really casually written recipe.  It’s basic enough that I am just not concerned.  And it’s more of a method, not really a recipe.)  Take the cream cheese and fill each pepper with cream cheese, wrap it in a half slice of bacon, and hold in place with a toothpick.

Place on a flat cookie sheet, which I recommend covering in foil.

Bake at 425 for some amount of time.  We thought maybe we should have baked them longer as the bacon didn’t get as crispy as I would have wanted.  Nonetheless, these are good no matter what.

They went fast.  We still have some leftover from a batch we didn’t bake yet though.  They were delicious!  I figure they count as vegetables in one’s diet so they are healthy.

Jon brought their baby over, and Sarah Crowder and her husband came as well.  (Can I say how much I love making new friends?  I am finally realizing this, that I truly embrace new friends…I used to think it was hard, but I’ve realized I’m actually pretty darned good at it.  Keeping old friends is a different story, but it’s generally because somebody moves away…)

Sarah and Benjamin

Steve showed off his burger masterpiece.  By the way, we have a ton of meat left.  Who wants to come over for dinner again this week?  Luckily the stuff freezes really well.

It was great to see Vanessa again!  I missed her over the summer.  I’m glad she’s back 🙂

Oh, and I wanted to show off my new purple pants.  You can’t really tell, but they are dark purple, and I got them from Target.  In fact, that entire outfit is from Target (aren’t I a fashionista??)…top, tank, and pants.  I decided to wear pants because I brilliantly realized if I did I could wear my calf compression sleeves underneath them and no one would be the wiser.  (I ran 9 miles in the morning, and then ate at least one popper per mile…I think that works out?).

Basically we had a great weekend!  The party was a success and it was great to see everybody and meet a few new people.  Now the Symphony folk are back to work, and shortly they leave for Europe.  I go to Boston this weekend for my friend Lauren’s wedding (can’t wait!) and then to Paris soon (REALLY can’t wait!).

What are you must-sees in Boston and Paris?  Do you own Purple pants?

Oh, and I’ll be announcing my coffee tumbler giveaway winner later today, and will be back soon with ANOTHER giveaway.

Tuesday is my Monday.  Though I teach a few students on Monday, it doesn’t really feel like the start of the work week until I drive to the school on Tuesday and teach for approximately 5 to 6 hours straight.  But I’ve still got a few hours.  After I finish this I’m out for a run (my running mojo has returned with a vengeance and I am taking full advantage of it) and then I have to prep dinner before heading to teach.

The past two days have been great.  Russell and Vanessa came to visit on Sunday night.  Russell is new and will have to get used to the blog…he refused to allow me to photograph him.  Vanessa was game, however, because she needed to show off her shiny new engagement ring.

We made burgers for them (Chris is hard at work perfecting his burger recipe for our upcoming housewarming party) and then afterwards Vanessa insisted on taking us to Ted Drewes.  If you are from St Louis, apparently Ted Drewes is one of those places that you rave about.  I think it’s like Pizza Inn in Clinton—if you had it as a child you love it nostalgically.  Or I’m just overly critical ;)  Anyway, it was totally fine, I just guess I prefer a creamier texture to start with.  I’m not a "fro-yo" fan either.  Give me a super rich dessert or I’ll just pass.  But it was nice of them to treat, of course!

I instagrammed it before I realized I didn’t love it.  Don’t worry.  I ate it all anyway. 

Monday afternoon Chris mentioned that I looked like I had lost weight.  I decided to throw that all away by going out to dinner with Melissa.  Just kidding.  Well…sort of.  She had heard there was going to be a "pop-up restaurant" in Clayton with fried chicken and pie (and other stuff) and we thought it would be very hip and "with it" (and NEW YORK, she said) to go check it out.  We thought we’d get there shortly after five, which was when it opened. 

Well, by the time we got there, it was an approximate 2 hour wait.  We consulted for a bit, and decided that we just didn’t care enough to wait that long for food.  So we decided to go to a nearby restaurant, called Oceano Bistro, that neither of us had been to.  The menu was basically ALL seafood, which was great.

I decided on the seafood chowder and the coconut shrimp salad. 

They were both good—I wish there had been a few more coconut shrimps on the salad (ha!) but I suppose that could have been overkill.  It also had avocadoes and heart of palm on it, two of my favorite salad vegetables.  The chowder was great too, very full of seafood and creamy. (This is a story, not a restaurant review, and evidently I learned nothing at the Food Media Forum about writing about food).

We were still feeling guilty about having given up so easily on the pop-up restaurant, and Melissa hadn’t gotten her pie, so we figured we should split the bread pudding.  (It was a line of logic at the time, trust me, and we weren’t even drinking.)

Melissa, unlike Russell, really enjoys being on the blog, so she posed for this picture.  I think her expression turned out really well, and not creepy at all. 

The bread pudding was warm and moist, and the ice cream was rich and creamy the way ice cream should be.  The caramel sauce was the perfect complement to the pudding and we debated asking our waiter for a straw to polish it off, but decided since we were in Clayton we should behave in a more civilized manner.

After that Chris and I went to see "The Bourne Legacy."  It was entertaining, and a nice continuation of the series, but wasn’t ground breaking or really up to par with the other movies.  If you really enjoy the other Bourne movies, you’ll like this one though. 

Have you been to a pop-up restaurant before?  Are you more hip and "with it" than I am?

Readers:  Have you entered my “contest” to win a free copy of Running of the Bride?  I recommend you do!  It’s a fun read, and who doesn’t love FREE?

Now…where were we?  Oh yes, Boulder, Colorado.

While we were in Boulder we wanted to do some beer tastings.  One of the days our friends had a double rehearsal (meaning two rehearsals in one day) so Chris and I had some time to kill.  We decided to drive to Longmont to visit the Left Hand Brewery Company and also hit up Oskar Blues Brewing Company, which neither of us had heard of until the night before, but figured two breweries were better than one.  Then we planned to return to Boulder (30 minute drive) and meet our friends at Avery Brewery Company.

If you’re saying, that sounds like a lot of beer, you’d be correct. (Mike gave me a little bit of a lecture today about the beer drinking and whatnot on vacation.  Yes, yes.  I know.)

The more beer I tasted, the more photos like this magically appeared on my camera.

Anyway, we headed northeast to Longmont, getting to travel on a fantastic highway called the Diagonal Highway, which was like the hypotenuse of a triangle.  Oddly Google maps gave us the option of taking the what-should-be-named “right angle” highways, but that would have added ten minutes to our drive.  (And don’t confuse that with he-who-shall-not-be-named.  That’s when the real trouble would start.)

We started at Oskar Blues.  They had a tasting deal, 5 samples for $10 or $12, so we both ordered that.

The bartender was awesome and helpful, and made recommendations.  She gave me an extra sample of her favorite, and then later gave Chris a few more to try.  We ended up at the restaurant rather than the brewery I guess, but there were plenty of beers to try.  I particularly loved the first one, Dale’s Pale Ale, and Chris liked the Deviant Dale’s IPA best, but we enjoyed all of them, even the dark ones, which I usually don’t care for.  (I’m a hops gal.)

Then it was time to go to Left Hand Brewery Company.  That was a different experience, but still nice.  It’s soured a bit by the fact that we ended up leaving Chris’s credit card there (we had to give them a card to hold the tab, then when we cashed out I ended up paying and they didn’t give us the card back, we had forgotten, and ended up having to go back the next day to retrieve it AND discovered they had charged his card for the tab as well as my own…super annoying.)

4 samples for some price.  I can’t recall but it was cheap.  I don’t remember what my favorite was.  It might have been the pretzels, honestly, because by this point I had definitely had PLENTY of beer already.  But we were having fun.

I debated buying a purple tee shirt with a cow on it.  But do I really wear tee shirts?

So, after we finished our samples, we headed back to Boulder.  It was time for our third and final brewery of the day, Avery Brewing Company.  Avery was cool because you could order small sample size beers, just one if you wanted.  I ordered a couple, of course.

Dave and Chris

My beers.  Alls I know is that they were IPAs, or at least pale ales.

What is your favorite sort of beer?  We tried to tell some people at the bar that here in St Louis we have a fancy brewery called “Budweiser” that they should come visit if they like beer.  Not sure why they laughed at us and then slowly backed away.

When you tell people you are going to the mountains for vacation, they generally tend to assume you are planning to do a lot of hiking.  My one issue with hiking is that I have a pretty bad fear of heights.  To clarify, I have a pretty bad fear of falling, and the higher I go, the more that fall is going to hurt.  That said, I wanted to get an "easy" hike in just to be able to tell people, why, yes, I did hike in Colorado.

Leslie and I decided to hike up to the Royal Arch.  The trail started near where the orchestra rehearses, which is at Chautauqua in Boulder.  I had been to Chautauqua in New York before, but didn’t realize the connection until that day.

The sign said to read the important information below so we did.

Anyway, the hike started pretty easy and then got harder.  It was pretty rocky and went pretty uphill.  Here in St Louis I’m used to running uphill, particularly at the ends of races (I’m looking at you Benton Park 5k and Go Half Marathon) but not QUITE as steep.

I made Leslie take a picture of me "Hiking".  You can see the path ahead.  It looks harmless, doesn’t it.

Then it was a bit rockier. Ultimately we were just climbing up "steps" of the rocks.  It wasn’t easy.

The sign pointed that way, so I decided to point.  This picture was more effective in my mind, like most things I do.

 

That’s the sort of rocks we had to climb up.  FUN, right?  (not fun).

View from the top!  We made it!  Now we just have to hike down, right?

Oh, yeah.  That’s the Royal Arch.

The way down was easier, though not EASY.  My feet were hurting…and I was tired…and we were hungry and wanted Taco Bell.

So, yeah, that was my view most of the way.  Leslie’s backside (I hear her backside is her best side though!).  We got to the bottom and decided we needed to get Taco Bell.  I didn’t take any pictures there, but it was delicious.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, the true highlight of the trip was Leslie attempting to drive Peter’s car, which is has a stick shift.  She didn’t stall out but I think she may have run over some pedestrians because she was afraid to stop.  It was hilarious.  And by hilarious I mean frightening.  I offered to drive but I think she enjoyed the challenge of it. 

Later that day we went to a couple of different Boulder restaurants for Happy Hour and then dinner.

Kir Royales at the Kitchen Upstairs.  Very French of us.

Leslie and Peter at the Bitter Bar.

Me being a starfish while waiting for our table at Pizzeria Locale.  Dave and Chris met us there after golf.

Me being fairly normal.  Light pants are not super flattering.

 

Apparently Leslie took a lot of pictures there, because there were about a dozen more on my phone.

Do you like to hike?

Do you like to take pictures of yourself when you are bored?

I’ve had a very exciting and informative weekend at the Food Media Forum (if you follow me on twitter or instagram you’ve seen a bit of that) but I wanted to collect my thoughts a bit before I blogged anything else about that.

Thursday night my favorite photographer (and friend) Sarah Crowder tweeted me asking if Chris and I were available Friday evening to meet at a restaurant called Growlers Pub in Sunset Hills for a photo shoot in exchange for free appetizers.  I thought it sounded like fun, and we were free since we were both on vacation, so we figured why not.  She wanted to get a group of people to help out—Growlers had hired her to take some pictures for their website of the food and of their back patio, and they wanted to make sure they had enough people around to make the place look popular and fun.

Unfortunately all of our friends already had plans or were out of town, but we headed over.  We had no idea what to expect, but the patio was great—it was large and very open, with a bar outside and the serving staff were all very friendly.  The bartender was informative about the beer (and to clarify, I am writing this on my own, I wasn’t compensated for THIS post 😉 ) and Chris and I ordered a couple of IPAs.  I had one of those fun moments where the bartender assumed I would order some “lady” drink, so instead I ordered a Stone IPA.  I told him “I don’t drink beer very often, but when I do, I like a really hoppy beer.”  The weather was gorgeous for once, not too hot, and breezy enough to stay cool in the shade, so we were enjoying ourselves.

I guess Sarah was photographing the food inside, because after a few minutes some of the staff brought out a ton of appetizers and food for us to try—it was the stuff she had already photographed, and it was going cold.  They also brought another beer. They gave us a few plates and took some other plates to another table.

This was all for the two of us.  We didn’t even make a dent since we had dinner plans afterwards.  The wings were tasty though, and the bread pudding would have been really good if it had been warm.

Chris was enjoying some of the flatbread as well.

Sarah and Chris were wearing matching shirts.  Sadly I had not gotten the memo.

Yellow and purple go well together though, right?

Anyway, she took some close up shots of us chatting and drinking, and just enjoying ourselves.  The band was good too—it was the Ali Jaye Duo.  I have no idea how the pictures turned out, or if we’ll end up being on the website, but it was fun.  Chris is really getting good at getting his picture taken.  And Sarah Crowder is always a delight to work with—her enthusiasm and energy is infectious and she is just one of my favorite people!  We have another potential project coming up and hopefully it’ll work out too.