Comfort Food Weekend!

This weekend was a great, lazy weekend with lots of hanging out with friends. Oh yea, and the torrential downpour that happened yesterday.... We started off our weekend by going out for crawfish with friends. Jonathan and I hadn't had crawfish in at least two years since last year we were pretty busy around this time with the whole getting married thing. We wanted to make sure we didn't miss it again this year. I tend to avoid going out to a restaurant for crawfish. To me, a crawfish boil is the most fun if it's in someone's backyard with tons of people just chatting, drinking beer and eating as much crawfish as possible. If you've never had crawfish before it's kind of a lot of work because you have to break off the tail, peel the shell, and then you're left with a fairly small amount of meat to eat. Some people don't think it's worth it but I think they're delicious! Plus, I love that it makes for a very social event. You're spending more time peeling than eating so there's lots of time for good conversation! So anyways, I have been lucky enough to have been invited to many a crawfish boil but I didn't want to take any chances missing out this year. (Although, I won't turn down an invitation if any friends are reading this!) I was looking up which are good places to get crawfish in Houston and to my surprise there were tons of websites on this. Take this one for instance! We decided to go to Woodrow's in the Heights and it was great! We even got a group of 7 of us to go which made me impressed since we planned this the day before haha. We had a great time and ate as many crawfish as we could!

They're cute and tasty!

Colleen planned on eating then with fork and knife apparently, good luck with that...

That's 5lbs of crawfish. We ordered 12 in total. You can eat more of those suckers than you think!

Colleen made a friend!

Saturday morning we continued with the Louisiana cuisine without realizing it. We had a craving for Beignets and headed to Crescent City Beignets. It had been years since I'd gone to a beignet place in Houston so I must have just had New Orleans on the brain. They were sooo good and I paired mine with a frozen mocha. Jonathan paired his with a chicory coffee which is more authentic. Chicory coffee is much more bitter than regular coffee which is supposed to pair well with the sweetness of the beignets. I don't like coffee without lots of sugar and milk anyways so chicory coffee isn't really for me. I also apparently overestimated how hungry I was because I didn't even finish 2 beignets and ordered 3 haha.

Have to layer on as much powdered sugar as possible!

He ate most of his before I could take a picture haha.

Sunday, Jonathan told me that he wanted to go to this new restaurant called "Maine-ly Sandwiches." If you recall, we went to Cape Cod for our honeymoon and became obsessed with lobster rolls while we were there. (Apparently Jonathan has been constantly googling for lobster rolls in Houston since our honeymoon because he's been that obsessed haha.) We were ecstatic to find a place that served them in Houston! It's pretty far north of Houston so we headed there right after church this morning. When we stepped into the place it was like we had gone back to New England! There were pictures and paraphernalia from Maine all over the place. I've never technically been to Maine but it reminded us so much of Cape Cod. The lobster rolls were spot on too! We both had ours with the clam chowder and they serve everything with salt water taffy. I highly recommend this place! They're very new so it's hard to find online but they're at 45 and West Rd.

I will definitely be ordering the half lobster roll because the whole was huge!

I did not expect this weekend to be full of so much comfort food I never get to have but it was a blast! O yea and that whole torrential downpour that I mentioned...not quite as fun. Yesterday Colleen and I were out shopping when the sky opened up and it literally rained so hard that entire intersections flooded within minutes. It was pretty scary and we had to drive around some flooded roads but we made it back safely. Once it let up some we both headed home immediately and stayed in for the rest of the night. I was pretty exhausted so Jonathan and I spent the evening on the couch watching Bunheads and SNL. I later found out that the Rice area, which is where we were shopping, got 6 inches of rain. Crazy! We do really need rain but I think the ground was so dry from us being in a drought that it just couldn't take in the rain fast enough. Hopefully we'll continue to get rain but in normal amounts and without all the flooding! It seemed to make for a beautiful Sunday. Blue skies and lots of sunshine!

-Chelsey

Our First Anniversary

Where has the time gone? Last weekend Jonathan and I celebrated our first anniversary! It seems like our wedding was just yesterday. We've had a great first year of marriage! We decided to celebrate by spending the weekend in the Museum District. We stayed at Hotel Zaza which is where we stayed after our wedding. It's walking distance to Hermann Park and the museum district. We wanted to stay there for our anniversary since we were a little too busy to enjoy the area the weekend of our wedding.

We started our wedding weekend by going to dinner at Oxheart. It was an amazing dinner. The place had maybe 10 tables and the chef presented most of the dishes to us personally.

A lot of the dishes had these beautiful edible flowers. So cool!

Best carrots ever!

Quail breast on the right and thigh wrapped in turnip on the left.

Smoked beef leg with cucumber, herbs, and a something made  from seaweed  on top.

Fennel mousse, delicious!!!

Us all dressed up!

After dinner we headed back to our hotel and cut into our wedding cake. We fortunately got a new fresh cake instead of eating a year old defrosted cake. Since the baker got the filling wrong in our wedding cake they made us a fresh top tier with the correct filling: cream cheese icing! Yum! It was delicious. We opened some champagne, watched our wedding video, and reminisced about our wedding day.

Our cake! They did a beautiful job.

Yum!

Saturday we went to the Museum of Fine Arts and saw the special Picasso exhibit as well as the main exhibit. I didn't realize this but I guess I'd never been to the Museum of Fine Arts. It's a great museum. The Picasso exhibit was awesome and the main halls had Monets, Van Goghs, Picassos, Cezannes, etc. Afterwards we walked through the sculpture garden and walked around Hermann Park briefly before going to dinner.

This is a cool light installation in the tunnel connecting the two MFA buildings.

This scultpure moved and I thought it was cool!

We walked through the whole park before realizing that this was a sculpture!

We ate at Roost for dinner.

Sunday was our actual anniversary, April 14th! I was still in shock that it was already here but that wouldn't keep us from celebrating! We had brunch at Monarch in Hotel Zaza and spent the afternoon at Hermann Park. Lucky for us the Japan Fest was going on in Hermann Park! We walked through the rose garden, watched Taiko drummers, walked around the lake, and found a comfortable spot to sit along the lake while listening to the musicians. It was pretty perfect. I may have gotten incredibly sunburnt in the process but it no biggie haha. 

There was a great view of our hotel from the park.

Hermann Park is one of my favorite places in Houston!

Married for a year!

Drummers!

They started along the reflection pool and marched up to the stage.

The flowers on the pool were also part of the festival and glowed at night.

So after the festival we headed home and just planned on relaxing and getting ready for the work week. However, we have the best friends in the world and we came home to this:

                                   

Colleen and Rachel are the sweetest ever! We loved our surprise dinner while listening to the music from our wedding. It was the perfect ending to our weekend and we were blown away by how thoughtful our friends and family are. We received so many congratulations, phone calls, and cards. Thank you to everyone for making our wedding so special and for all the happy words you gave to us on our anniversary. It's been the best year and we have many more to come! I love you Jonathan! Thank you for being my husband and always standing by my side!

-Chelsey