Pinterest Inspiration: Citrus

Ashley's Pinterest post inspired me to write about something that I've currently been trending with on Pinterest lately: citrus. Since Christmas, we've come to find out that my lactose intolerance has ramped it up a few notches, so the past few weeks I've found myself looking for every alternative to dairy.

When it comes to sweet things with dairy - ice cream, etc., luckily more citrus and fruit flavored things are dairy-free. It's also the time of year that blood oranges, one of my favorite fruits, pop up.

Here's a few citrus recipes I can't wait to try:

Blood Orange Loaf Cake 

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Lemon Rosemary Cake

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We've also had a few mild days recently and I can't help but think of spring days outside drinking this:

Frozen Coconut Limeade

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I'm already dreaming about spring, gardening, and time outside. What about you?

NOLA

It's been a great week or two, but I've also been sick with a cold/bronchitis stuff, so I've fallen behind!

We've had a movie filming here the past few weeks about James Brown and I was lucky enough to get them to film on campus, so it was fun to be a part of the movie filming. The actors have been great to the city, with concerts at local restaurants/bars and Dan Akroyd even signing his vodka at a local spirits shop in town!

 Last weekend, since it was a long holiday one for us, we took a trip to New Orleans to celebrate Paul's birthday that had been on the 13th.

NOLA is one of the last close Southern big cities that we hadn't gone to together, so it was fun to show each other our favorite places.

I had to take him to Maspero's in the French Quarter. So good!

 View from our hotel room. A little scary being 30 stories up!

Walking around the French Quarter, we found these street performers across from Jackson Square. By the time they started their performance, there were easily 1,000 people standing around!

 The next morning we took a peek at the river before our cooking class.

 The New Orleans School of Cooking is one of my favorite things in New Orleans. (Past story here) It's demonstration style and the "chef" tells you stories and the history of NOLA food while they cook. Probably the highlight of the trip! We had gumbo, jambalaya, bread pudding, and pralines.

 Later that day, we took the street car down St. Charles and stopped into District Donuts Sliders and Brews. Coffee was great and their donuts were interested. We tried chocolate glazed, cookies and cream, and maple bacon. Bacon one was by far my favorite.

 That night, we went down to Freret Street to check it out. The guys that helped revive the street and started a bar down their called Cure (which is nationally recognized) helped our friends here at Brent's create Apothecary. We met them while they were here and they loved our neighborhood because it reminded them of Freret and where they wanted it to go. So, we had to make a trip down there. We heard rave reviews about Company Burger and decided to try it out.

This place was phenomenal. I'm not a big beef burger person, but OH man was it good. They have a condiment bar with 8 handmade mayos to try from. I had the garlic mayo, which was great.

They also offer Cathead Vodka as their house (a friend of our's vodka that's made right outside of Jackson), so we had to try their drinks. Really great place.

 We also went to the sculpture garden at City Park. Such a pretty day to be at the park!

As you can see, we had a great time. (Look at that beard!)

 On the way home, we went through Baton Rouge so we could go to World Market and Trader Joe's. We say this exit sign on the way back. That's a new one...

 Have a great week!

Bye Bye, Christmas

Christmas has come and gone, which makes me a little sad. I've had a good time at home and I miss it when I'm at work. 

 But, we had a great time over the holidays, including Christmas Day lunch with my family.

 Here's one of my favorite Christmas presents from Paul - a coffee mug from one of my new favorite potters, Sam Clark. His full time job is being the potter that makes all of the items for Mustard Seed and helps run their studio.

 During my holiday break, I scored some great thrift store finds right after Christmas. Everyone is unloading all of their unwanted things, and it's a perfect time to swoop in!

I found this plant stand at one of our favorite junk shops, Odds and Ends. Miss Evelyn, who owns the place, drives a hard bargain. Lucky for me, her daughter was working the day after Christmas. When a lot of the things I picked up didn't have tags, I probably got a much better deal than if her mom had been there! This plant stand was only $10 and I found a set of 15 soup spoons for my mom for only 25 cents each!

 I have to admit, I spent a fair amount of time doing nothing, which KT enjoyed.

 I also found some time to try some new recipes I've had pinned on Pinterest forever. This one is Crunch Cashew Thai Quinoa Salad with Ginger Peanut Dressing. It was pretty good. My "resolution" of sorts for this year is to be much more intentional about meal planning, having things like quinoa and chicken already cooked for easy meals, and not immediately throwing up my hands and going out to eat. I bought this visual meal planner from Anthropologie (I had been eyeing it for a while) and it's been helpful for me to visually see the week.

 The Christmas tree came down this weekend, but the mantle has been refreshed with beautiful milk glass that I found on my thrift store excursion. I totaled it up and I think I spent $20 on all the milk glass. Not too shabby. Mom had found some eucalyptus over the holidays to decorate their door with, so I got to deconstruct one of the sprigs. I'm really happy with it.

Christmas + Soltice

I can't believe there's only a few days until Christmas. Especially with this unseasonably warm weather, it just feels a little weird!

Probably one of my favorite Christmas gifts (Well, I thought it was a Christmas gift and then Paul says it's just a happy) so far are my new-to-me soup spoons. I found them on Etsy and have loved having them to eat with for soups and chili.

 We've gone to some fantastic Christmas parties over the last few weeks, including dinner at Walker's. Paul got the filet and I got the Redfish Anna. So good! The paper slips on the right are "Arden-ism" or sayings that our friend Arden says all the time. We had fun going around the table saying them out loud. 

 I was over at MG's the other day and I told Daphne that I wanted a picture of her. This is all I could get. What a weirdo!

 Speaking of weirdos, our cat loves the outdoors. So, I decided to go ahead and buy her a cat harness and leash (yes, there is such a thing). She's finally getting used to it.

 I'm really happy with how our front door turned out this year. This is the first year I've had my own door that was really worth decorating. 

 Every year, my family always gets together with the Woolverton's for Solstice. This year, we had it at our house! 

 (Can you tell I'm playing with my new iPhone fisheye lens?)

MG and Ryan made creme brûlée. It was so good.

 Chris, in addition to our dessert, drove into the foot long Rice Krispy Treat Paul and I gave him for Christmas...

Merry Christmas!

Time is Flying!

Time is flying. I can't believe it's already the middle of December!

We got our house decorated for Christmas and I'm in love with our Ball jars.

 Paul and I both said when we moved into the house that we couldn't wait to have a Christmas tree. The cat is interested in sitting under it, but we haven't had any casualties yet (except for some chewing on a few bags... oops!).

 It's hard to believe, but we've passed the one year mark on our marriage! We ceremoniously took out the top layer of our cake from the freezer and found that it hadn't been wrapped or anything for an entire year. #fail It honestly wasn't good, but I ended up sharing tiramisu from Amerigo that night, so I can't complain.

 It's been so pretty outside lately, especially on campus. Only three more days until I'm done with work for the year!

I have gotten to have a few fun days at work, especially with finals week. Campus does a lot of fun things to keep kids active and taking breaks from studying, like bringing dogs to campus to pet. This is one of them that loved nothing more than dressing up as Santa and having his picture taken with students.

 One day I came home to find that Paul had converted one of our ornaments into a wrecking ball. Well played. She's still on our tree.

 Our dinners have been really random lately - always last minute trying to figure out what to make, but have been surprisingly good. I'm really glad for our Sam's membership, because buying meat in bulk and freezing it has been a lifesaver.

I had to show a picture of our dinner last night, which was so fantastic. We love nothing more than a good salmon night. Fresh Market had salmon for $6.99/lb and we knew we had to pick some up. It was heaven.

Here's to a happy Sunday and me finishing my Christmas shopping today!

Food Pics… What's New?

Sometimes I feel like all I post is food photos. But, hey, what's new?

Jackson has had a bunch of great new restaurants open lately, so it's been really exciting to try them out. One of them is The Manship, which is inside the new Belhaven building. Our friend is the pastry chef there, so we were invited to try out the entire menu on a soft opening night. The restaurant specializes in wood fired cuisine from Italy to Lebanon. 

 We tried hummus (our favorite), wood fired pizza, salmon, brussel sprouts with pancetta, parmesan frittes, pancetta mac & cheese, tiramisu, and chocolate mousse cake. 

 Incredible menu. We also have to try a new Italian place downtown and Iron Horse Grill is about to open.

While we love eating out, we've been trying to be intentional about eating in and controlling our portions. We've made some really good recipes lately:

 Mexican Black Bean Pizza. Recipe: here. (We did everything minus any meat)

 Slow Cooker Quinoa Chicken Chili. Recipe: here. I was telling this to Ashley the other day, but I have in my mind if I can make just one slow cooker meal a week, it's a lot of pressure off me. It's done when I get home and usually makes a lot. We loved this recipe.

 Pioneer Woman's BBQ Comfort Meatballs. Recipe: here. (We did it with ground turkey.)

Yesterday I went over to MG's house and it's always fun to see her dogs. I love that Dupree always takes over the big dog bed. Daphne doesn't know what's going on.

 This week our coffee table we ordered finally came in. I'm really digging it. Now we only lack our headboard we ordered!

One thing I haven't been so happy about design wise is the colors of Christmas ornaments. Why does everything have to be royal blue, purple, pink, or glittery? So, I saw this DIY article and thought, "I can do this." I grabbed all I needed at the craft store (for only $14 - paint included) and went to town. I'm really happy with these and the colors are just what I wanted.

Hope you are having a great weekend! We head to Memphis Monday for Justin Timberlake. Too excited!

Where Does the Time Go?

Sometimes I don't feel like I get a break. We're so busy all the time!

But, I'm so excited that it's fall. I love the cooler weather and all the changing leaves.

 A few weeks ago I finished up a pottery class I've been taking through Millsaps' community enrichment series. At the last class, we fired our pottery and sat around and had a party until the items were ready.

 The type of firing we did was raku firing, which means once the pottery comes out of the kiln (like below), the glaze still has no color. You throw the pottery into something that will smoke (a trash can with wood chips, pine straw, or newspaper) and the smoke is what gives it its color. Very cool! I'm going to photograph my pieces and I'll post soon!

 We've had a lot of construction going on at our house. Our landlords are taking care of some deferred maintenance (mostly fixing some areas of rotting wood and repainting the whole exterior of the house) and we agreed to fix some old boards on the deck that had seen better days. Thanks to MG and Ryan, we got it done in no time! They were a huge help.

 We also got a new door leading on to the kitchen from the deck, which doesn't seem that exciting, but it makes such an impact on the room. If you can't tell, this is a door that has blind built into the window. We have been wanting this since the day we moved into the house. We had investigated inserts and all kinds of things, but never pulled the trigger. The guys had to replace the door frame because of rotting wood outside and when the new frame went in, the old door didn't fit. We told them that if they had one with this type of window in stock, we'd pay the difference. Luckily, they did. 

 This brings in so much light, but we can close the blinds off when we go to bed. The cat has been enjoying it too.

Of course, I couldn't have a post without posting a photo of her. She's decided the recliner is her chair...

Hope you have a great rest of the week!