Illinois Day

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Posted by Nicole

The trip has been perfectly relaxing so far. We didn’t really have any set plans for the trip, and it’s been nice just going with the flow.

Already today, I have gone horseback riding, to another one of my aunt’s houses, to visit my grandma, to see my uncle’s new house, and to the pool at another one of my aunt’s houses. Did you know that my mom is one of fifteen kids? Yeah, lots of family to visit!

It keeps it interesting because there is always someone to see or something to do.

Some pics from yesterday and today…

We journeyed through the country land and stopped at my Aunt Rose’s house.

She has lots of horses, two cats, and a dog… and she used to have a donkey and some miniature cows!

My godsisters like to call the cats, “their cats,” because they are not allowed to have any at their Chicago house. It’s adorable.

We celebrated my Aunt Linda’s belated birthday with the most delicious homemade carrot cake ever.

That little cake was definitely not enough for my sweet-toothed family! We had this whole spread, too.

It was delicious, as always. Gotta love vacation and amazingly talented cookers/bakers! I was exhausted and fell asleep after about half an hour of reading.

This morning, I woke up nice and early, showered, and went downstairs. There was a box of donuts! Custard filled and amazing.

At 9 o’clock, I headed to my Aunt Rose’s house for some early morning horse riding. The weather is high 90s this weekend, and we wanted to get some riding in before it was extremely hot.

I rode with Sam and Rose rode with Mia. The one hour ride was lots of fun.

Back at Rose’s, we ate some fresh watermelon and cooled off in the house. We left in Rose’s Jeep… I’m feeling more and more country as the day goes on…..

We drove to visit my grandma in the nursing home, went to my Uncle Tony’s house, and then to my Aunt Marilyn’s. (Literally, there are 12,000 members of my family.)

We had leftovers from the cookout.

Leftovers included leftover dessert ;)

And now I’m off to go shopping and whatever else the day has in store.

- Nicole

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A Quick Recap

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Posted by Nicole

Talk about MIA! All week, Lauren has been asking me when I am going to update the blog and today is the day :)

Not much has been going on in terms of fun/fitness/cooking, but there’s a good reason for that!

This was the first week at my internship, and I absolutely loved it. The team I am working with is very fun, everyone is nice and helpful, and I am learning a lot……. and I even got some red velvet cake. Costco does it so so well.

My nights have been pretty laid back… working all day is actually pretty tiring haha.

One thing that has been bothering me this past week is not being able to run. My left hip/butt area has been hurting since the hill run two weekends ago, and I literally haven’t run in 7 full days. It’s killing me.

According to the chiropractor, my right L5 was out of place and it was inflaming my left piriformis muscle, which upsets the sciatica. Uuhhhhhh ya. Translation—

It hasn’t been fun, but I’ve still been able to bike without pain. I’ve been icing, rolling on a tennis ball (hurts so good), and taking anti-inflammatory meds. Slowly but surely, I’ll be back and running.

Last night, I flew to Chicago with my mom for Memorial Day weekend. We stayed the night at my Aunt Cindy’s house (the one with the supercute twin daughters) and drove down into Southern Illinois this morning.

Today we are relaxing by the pool, enjoying the sunshine (and humidity), and having a cookout. Speaking of… I should get back to tanning.

Hope you all have a lovely weekend :)

- Nicole

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WIAW 5/23: Portland’s Whiskey Soda Lounge + Bar Crawl

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Posted by Lauren

Where to begin?? How about with the clock? It’s really late on Tuesday night and the stupid Dancing With The Stars finale kept me side-tracked until 11 pm – I don’t even watch the show. WTF is my problem? I spent all night looking at car stuff on Craigslist, US News Rankings, and Fuel Economy.gov that now my brain hurts. Add a little bit of apartment hunting and you get one sleepy, lazy blogger who would rather let your imagination run wild with a collection of photos.

Oh, and then Picasa didn’t want to work for me when I tried cutting corners while making a collage. Maybe I should just send you over to Katie’s blog where her co-blogger, Kelly, wrote all about her family dinner at Pok Pok.

Except, shoot, we didn’t technically eat there.

In the spirit of Jenn‘s WIAW, I give to you our story from Friday night – my first night in Portland visiting Katie and Doug – where we ate and drank the night away!

Restaurants/bars featured include:

  • Whiskey Soda Lounge – 3131 SE Division St, Portland (Website, Yelp)
  • The Secret Society Lounge – 116 NE Russell Street, Portland (Website, Yelp)
  • The Fixin’ To – 8218 N Lombard, Portland (Website, Yelp)
  • Slim’s Cocktail Bar – 8635 N Lombard (Yelp)

Now about these:

Ike’s Vietnamese Fish Sauce Wings – six extremely addictive chicken wings coated in fish sauce and love and perfection. Andy Ricker is the brains behind both Portland staples Pok Pok and Whiskey Soda Lounge (he won the James Beard award for best chef in the Northwest in 2011). The two neighboring restaurants both serve this popular dish and I’m so glad I had a chance to try them. I wanted to walk around the rest of the night with chicken wings sticking out of my mouth like a walrus just so I could suck up all the flavor!

Alex Yellan’s 2010 article about Pok Pok explains how the two restaurants make over 2,000 pounds of Ike’s chicken wings each WEEK:

“They now have a vacuum tumbler to reduce marinating time from 24 hours to one. Instead of carrying the wings upstairs to cut, then downstairs to marinate, then upstairs to fry, then back downstairs to cool (only to return upstairs to freeze) they’re all prepped in one place in massive fryers and wheeled to the nearby freezer.”

I’m going to scour the internet for copycat recipes and attempt to make my own version! On a delicious food scale, I’d place these Smoke Eater wings in last place and the Whiskey Soda Lounge/Pok Pok ones light years ahead of them in FIRST PLACE.

Alex also explained how they make their “jelly beer,” which wasn’t as frozen as we had hoped:

“Outside the kitchen on the other side of the bar, they have two ‘bia wun’ or ‘jelly beer’ machines. Two plastic barrels made to look like wood, with elephants carved into them, are attached to a base with a motor that makes them spin. Bottles of Singha beer get submerged into water, ice, and salt until they’re frozen a few minutes later. Tap the bottom, open the top, insert extra long straw and voila ‘bia wun’ or ‘jelly beer.’ The beer goes opaque and slushy, a 22-ounce bottle was great to pass around the shaded back patio.”

That’s all for now. More Portland recaps to come!

-Lauren

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