Opa!

This weekend we celebrated my dad's birthday by going to the Greek Festival. I had only been once before on a rainy day so I wanted a do-over. This morning was dark and rainy but around noon the clouds parted and the temps dropped to an amazing mid-50s! I have been waiting for this day since the temps moved to the high 90s in June and stubbornly stayed there for over 3 months! So with such great weather we had to head off to Greek Fest. We enjoyed gyros and baklava while listening to greek music and saw Greek dance performaces. It was well worth the trip. 

In line to get our gyros!

We got  the cathedral which was gorgeous.

I loved the stained glass.

So many people!

The dancers!

Their costumes were awesome!

We had a great time. Houston has so many festivals and I haven't found a bad one yet. Coming up next weekend is the Bayou City Art Festival. Hopefully we'll make it out to that one too! Ren Fest (Renaissance Festival) starts up soon too which is a required event for us every year. October's going to be a fun month!

-Chelsey

Channeling my inner Julia

As you're probably well aware I love to cook. On top of that I've developed a random obsession with Julia Child over the years. We have unlimited access to all her cooking videos thanks to Amazon Watch and we even got to see her kitchen on our DC trip a few years ago. I love watching her videos because a) she teaches a lot of great tips that you don't learn anything else and b) she's really hilarious to watch as she sends food flying or accidentally pours sherry in place of oil in a pan. My parents were nice enough to give me "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" for Christmas and I'm excited to say that I finally made one of her recipes! Much to Jonathan's excitement, I successfully made french onion soup. Take a look:

It's pretty easy to make, just a little time consuming. The key is to cook the onions for as long as possible. Julia says to cook them 30-35 minutes. I cooked them down for an hour and a half and they still weren't as browned as I wanted. However, it was 9pm on Sunday night and I wanted to go to sleep eventually. Then you just add either beef broth or a mixture of beef and chicken broth, salt and pepper, and a splash of sherry (although the sherry is optional). Then I broiled some toasted bread topped with gruyere to finish off the soup. Quite tasty! I know what you're going to say, "but you don't like onions!" Well I like the flavor cooked onions bring to dishes. I've always like french onion soup, but I can only eat so much of the onions. So I still enjoyed it and left the really onion-y soup at the bottom of my bowl for Jonathan to finish off. He didn't complain too much haha. 

I'm pretty sure this is the simplest recipe in Julia Child's cookbook. The rest of her recipes look pretty intimidating but I like a challenge. I just need to make the time to get all the right ingredients!

See, we're best buds!

-Chelsey

Houston Restaurant Weeks!

Houston Restaurant Weeks is an event that's become a yearly tradition! It used to actually be just 1 week but then it turned into the entire month of August. Each year, many restaurants in the Houston area participate and they each offer a 3-4 course menu for $35-45. Some even offer brunch/lunch menus for $20! We've gotten the chance to try 3 so far: Bistro des Arts, Sorrel, and Triniti. Of course I forgot to take pictures of any of the meals but trust me they were all great! You should totally check out the website and try a few places: http://www.houstonrestaurantweeks.com/. I doubt there's a single bad restaurant on the list! We had an especially great time at Sorrel celebrating Rachel's birthday! I just told her I would pick her up for her birthday brunch and surprised her by inviting all her friends to join us. My favorite line of the day was when Rachel said, "I love being lied to!" Haha I think that means it was a success. The restaurant was really great too. The waiter wished her happy birthday and even had the entire kitchen wave to her to acknowledge her birthday. We had a great time and ended the celebration by taking a trip to the sculture garden that's across the street from the MFA. (We were going to go to the Houston Craft Museum but turns out they're closed on Sundays during the summer. We'll have to make another trip sometime!)


How amazing!

Look, it's all of us!



Following the rules...

Not following the rules....oops!

 -Chelsey

Galveston Getaway!

Wow it has been a long time since I've written anything! I'm very sorry for being away so long. Work has kept me plenty busy and on top of that my computer completely died. I finally have a new beautiful laptop/tablet! It seems like most of the laptops I looked at had touchscreens so I thought I might as well do a tablet with a detachable keyboard. I'm super excited! Now can someone teach me how to work around in Windows 8?? Anyways, the last I wrote was about the 4th of July. That feels like forever ago and yesterday all at the same time! Well I still have a few things to catch you up on. First of all was a weekend getaway that we spent in Galveston! Us and some friends decided to rent a beach house for the weekend. Best idea ever!! We were 3 blocks from the beach, made all of our meals, and spent the weekend lounging on the beach relaxing. We didn't have to drive very far and we didn't have to worry about having a long list of to-dos like we normally do on vacation.

Our beach house for the weekend!

Beach!

We went to a candy store on the strand and we actually got to see them make taffy!

Jonathan played chess with a stranger while we cheered him on.
There was a zombie walking around advertising a haunted house in the area, pretty random...

Rachel made a friend...

Colleen and Christine excitedly cheered on Jonathan...

and I found a blue tree! Quite an exciting day even without the chess game!



Plus, Jonathan won his game and I caught in on camera!

We ended the weekend at the Spot with a great view of the beach.
It was incredibly windy so I was glad to just have a beach view and not actually be on the beach.

It was the best weekend. Super relaxing and a blast! We might have to make this a yearly thing...

-Chelsey

4th of July Weekend

Long weekends are the best! They're even better if your sister comes to visit for the first time in over a year! (I still can't believe that it's been over a year since our wedding!) It's so weird that we're all grown up now and only see each other on special occasions. Thursday we went to Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens because it was free! It was quite an event. A lot of volunteers were dressed in period costume, there were musical performers, and of course the house was beautiful. (Sorry, we're not allowed to take pictures of the house!) They even had a parade and cake to celebrate our country's birthday but we left before then.

You have to cross this awesome bridge to enter the property!

Jonathan and Carolyn joined in on the musical group!

Learning about why they wore those silly outfits.

It's a butterfly!

A very intense cupid statue.

 



The house is so pretty!

After Bayou Bend we made a quick stop at the Beer Can House since it's right across the street. It's kind of funny how you can see completely differently things in Houston right next to each other. Thank you Houston for no zoning laws! If you don't know about the Beer Can House it's a house that's completely covered in beer cans. Pretty straight forward... Apparently this guy really loved beer and hated mowing or painting so he thought that paving over his yard and covering his house with beer cans would be the perfect solution. He was more creative with it than I expected and it actually looks kind of cool. You can tour the house on the weekends but we just walked around the outside.

After we had spent enough time in the hot sun we headed back to our house to relax for a bit before heading out to Miller Outdoor Theatre to watch the symphony and fireworks. I have literally never seen so many people there before. There were so many people that they were actually backing up to the reflection pool. We squeezed our way in so that we were at least facing the stage. We didn't have the best view but we could at least hear the symphony! The fireworks were beautiful and we even got to see 2 other firework shows from a distance.

We're excited!

Itty bitty symphony!

Fireworks!

Apparently camera phones are ideal for fireworks but you get the idea.

Friday was beach day and, although were slow moving in the morning from being up late the night before, we headed out to Galveston! There were a lot of people visiting the island but it wasn't too crowded. We spent a few hours at the beach and then walked a little bit around the strand.

Check out our sandcastle! It's the tower with the eye from Lord of the Rings.
Can't you tell?

It was a beautiful day!

And I didn't get sunburnt again! I'm getting pretty good at this whole sunscreen thing... Saturday was spent playing games and watching Clue. I forgot how funny that movie was. We also made a quick trip to First Saturday in the Heights. First Saturday is an arts market on 19th street every first Saturday of the month. In the summer it's in the evenings and in the winter it's during the day. Texans are smart about avoiding the heat. There were many different booths with paintings, sculptures, jewelry, etc. It's so nice to walk around and look at all the art and the artists are so nice and love to tell you all about their work. There's also live music so we listened to a folk band for a few songs before heading back home.

Sunday we met up for lunch before Carolyn had to head to the airport. That meant that the rest of the day was spent finishing laundry, dishes, all the fun stuff as usual...

Happy 4th of July! Thank you to everyone who has served for our country and Happy 237th Birthday to us all!

- Chelsey

Canyon Lake!

Last weekend Jonathan and I took a trip to Canyon Lake and spent the weekend with friends. We headed up on Friday and made a stop in Lockhart so we could go to Kreus for some barbecue! Lockhart and Luling are two very small towns that are known for some of the best barbecue in Texas. Jonathan being a huge foodie meant that we definitely had to try at least one of the best known restaurants in the area. Kreus was quite an impressive place. When we walked inside it actually got warmer (if you can believe that in the middle of summer in Texas). After walking down the hall I realized why. The end of the hall opened into a huge room where they were actually smoking their meats. That's where you ordered your meat and then you went into a different room that where you ordered your sides and ate your meal. That room was thankfully air conditioned. The food was pretty good but they were out of brisket. Sad day! I guess we'll have to go back...

It's a huge place!

They have a lot of rules. The no forks rule was a little hard to work around but we didn't mind the no bbq sauce rule!

Check out where you order! Behind the people are where all the meat is in smokers!

Yay air conditioning lol.

Saturday we all went tubing along Canyon Lake. It was my first time tubing so I was pumped to finally cross it off my bucket list. We spent about 3 hours on the lake just hanging out, drinking and snacking, and enjoying the water. I am quite proud to say that I didn't get sunburned! I tend to either forget to apply sunscreen or apply it really poorly and end up with weird sunburn designs all over me. So after 3 hours on the water in the sun we were pooped. We stopped and picked up pizza on the way back to the house and spent the rest of the afternoon being lazy. Check out the amazing view from the house we rented:

The lake was so beautiful. It's such a relaxing place to get away.

Sunday we headed out early to get to church. The church was on the other side of the lake and was in a beautiful area tucked behind a woodsy area. The parking lot was lined with the stations of the cross which was just beautiful. Lucky for us, the overlook park was right next to the church so we made a stop there before heading back to Houston.

Stations of the cross :-)

Even the parking lot was beautiful!

That's the church hidden behind the trees.

Beautiful view at the overlook park. You can walk down the damn but we were too tired to walk too far.

We were pretty exhausted but we did want to make one more stop. We always love going to wineries when we're in the Texas Wine Country. Jonathan gets his BBQ so I get my wine right? Our route took us right through Gruene, TX so we stopped at Winery on the Gruene.

Such a cute place!

Gruene was an adorable town! It looked like there was tons of cute shops and restaurants and there were so many people walking around. It's officially been added to my list of places that I need to go back to. Unfortunately we were also going to stop at Luling Barbecue on the way back but they are closed on Sundays. O well, I'm sure we'll be back again! I think we'll have to go back and stay along the lake again now that I know how relaxing and awesome it is! We had a great and long 4th of July weekend. My sister visited and we had a great time. I'll tell you all about it soon! 

- Chelsey