Friday Eats

For fun today I'm linking up with one of my favorite bloggers, Shea of Shea Lennon, to share some of our weekly eats.  I have talked often on the blog about how Nate is an amazing cook.  He pretty much makes all of our meals and he is not afraid to experiment and make recipes his own.  Today I thought I'd share two examples.

First up we have Bechamel Asparagus Pizza.  Nate uses both the pizza dough recipe and bechamel white sauce recipe from the blog Food Wishes for his base.  From there though we've kind of made this creation our own.  We add some blanched asparagus and some Colby jack cheese.  You could stop there, especially for my veggie friends.  We often times leave it there in fact.  But this week we decided we wanted a little protein so we added some prosciutto as well.

The result is a delicious, rich flavored white pizza.  I wouldn't go overboard on adding toppings if you were to try this one because it is pretty rich.  Ollie loved the extra asparagus with a little bit of the sauce mixed in, so you could do it without the pizza crust at all if you wanted!

Next up is homemade chicken caesar salad.  We used to go the lazy route and do the bag mix of caesar salad whenever we wanted one.  Then we started doing a semi homemade version where we got fresh lettuce, but still used store bought dressing and croutons.  Then Nate decided, heck, let's just make the whole thing from scratch.  So he started making the Original Cesar Cardini salad recipe after he found it over here on Food.com.  He also makes homemade croutons when he can, we often will make this salad when we have had bread with a wine and cheese night, he'll use the leftover baguette bread and turn it into croutons with a little garlic, Parmesan cheese and olive oil.  He also seasons the chicken breast and fries it up in a cast iron skillet in winter or grills it in the summer and then we add that to the salad as well!

It is so delicious, it has pretty much ruined me for making caesar salad any other way.  We tend to eat this more in the summer because it's a nice light meal for a hot day, but we had it this week because we had the bread to make croutons and it just sounded good!
So there you go, two unique things that Nate likes to make for us on occasion.  I am so spoiled by a man who loves to cook, I never take that for granted!  I am a good wife who takes on the fun things like clean up then, aren't I sweet?  Figure if he feeds me the least I can do is take care of the mess!
Have a great weekend!!

Thrift Style Thursday - Winter White Out

Thursday again?  The week is just flying by!  Anyway, welcome to Thrift Style Thursday!  This week's theme, chosen by Megan of Ecleticity is Winter White Out.  I decided to check out the thrift store and see if I could find a pair of white jeans, because I actually wouldn't mind having a pair.  I didn't find straight white, but I found something close and kind of built a "whitish" outfit around them.  I also attempted to take pictures in what little snow we have left around here, it's been unseasonably warm and everything is melting!

I have a hard time doing straight on all white.  It's nothing against white - I'm actually a bit of a messy person, as it was, I did end up spilling a little bit of Ollie's dinner on these pants before the end of the day.  Oops!  Better find my Stain Stick!!

Sweater - Gap (thrifted), Jeans - DKNY (thrifted)

Boots - Target, Necklace - Stella and Dot

Hair flower - from Secret Santa swap 

Overall I liked how this nice neutral feeling look turned out.  I had originally thought I'd do something white and black for this day, but I like the soft, feminine feel of what I came up with instead.  I look forward to styling these fun new pants in other ways too! 
Be sure to check out other white out styles from the other Thrift Style Thursday gals at their blogs below!

Sweet dreams are made of this

Back in November I wrote a post about Ollie's sleep - or lack there of.  You all showered me with such love and support and I felt a lot better about the fact that he wasn't sleeping through the night and I just accepted it and kept reminding myself, it was a season in life.

I'm happy to report an update today that we've made huge strides in his nighttime sleep - most of it within the last week here - and we're all getting so much more rest than we were before.  

I was all set to start kind of doing some more sleep training with him after his first birthday, but then we hit a couple of bumps, first in finding out about his slight milk allergy and then when he got norovirus.  The week he was actually sick he slept a lot, but then after he was recovered he really regressed in his sleep for a bit.  There was one early Saturday morning in late December that he and I even just slept out on our couch because he wouldn't lay in his crib for anything.

We got past that little bump, but he was back to waking more than once a night, mostly twice, sometimes as much as three times though.  I wouldn't necessarily nurse him all three times, sometimes I just needed to pat his back, hug him and lay him back down or sometimes he just needed to complain for a bit and then put himself back to sleep, but he was definitely waking up a lot.  About a week ago we had kind of a bad night and I decided to look into sleep advice again.  I found an e-book for the Kindle written by a pediatrician that was just released called My Child Won't Sleep: A Quick Guide for the Sleep Deprived Parent.  It is a very short guide to helping kids of all ages sleep better.  So I downloaded it, was all set to follow his tips and advice, talked to Nate about it and we had a plan of action.  But as fate would have it, we didn't even need it - that very night was the first night Ollie finally started sleeping better without us really even having to try anything.

So he can now pretty much sleep 6-8 hours without interruption which is amazing compared to where he was.  He was doing 3-4 hours before this week.  We put him to bed at 7 (still early, he gets up so early during the week unfortunately) and now I can go to bed whenever I want without him waking up and needing me around 10:00 like he used to.  He'll wake up somewhere between 1:00 and 2:00 for just a few minutes then goes back down and sleeps until we get him up in the morning.  I'll take it.  Yes, I did just say he still wakes up once, but you know what, compared to where we were, it's not that bad at all.  I think he'll start phasing that little wake up out pretty soon too but right now I don't mind.  I'd probably be getting up around then for a bathroom break anyway!  

Overall I feel much more rested than I have in quite some time.  I'm not so naive to say that things are going to be perfect from here on out, but I really do feel that we're finally in a good pattern and on the road to having a good sleeper and for that I am pretty thankful!  And hey, how cute is a well rested baby with bed head??

Tuesday Thoughts....

Or I could title this "Deep Thoughts by Bethie the Boo" (Old school SNL anyone?)  Well, really this is just a phone it in type post because I have an early morning physical and this is all I can really come up with today!  
~I am addicted to Boom Chicka Pop in Salted Caramel.  I am not usually a caramel fan, but then Nate got this awesome caramel popcorn from his co-worker's son back before Christmas and we have long since run out and I've been missing it so I thought I'd see how this stuff is.  It's good.  Too good. We'll leave it at that.
~I'm in denial that Parenthood is truly ending on Thursday.  I haven't been this emotionally vested in a show and it's ending since Friends ended.  I just don't even want to talk about it.  It's inevitable though and life will go on! (My friend Samara wrote a little article for our local paper here that I think sums up why fans feel the way they do about this show.)
~I'm a pretty big Neil Patrick Harris fan and have been since his "Doogie" days (can we say first crush?  Yeah, I just said that) but I have to say, I'm mildly disappointed in his book so far.  The Choose Your Own Adventure concept seems fun but I'm finding I get confused, even using a bookmark, when I stop reading at night and try to pick it up the next day.  
~I put nail polish on last week for the first time in months and I remember why I kind of stopped wearing it now.  It has nothing to do with Oliver.  I am horrible about taking it off.  Chipped nail polish is totally on trend right?
~I downloaded the Stylebook app and I'm super excited to try it out, but the concept of photographing all my clothes seems very daunting right now.  Probably necessary because it'll force me to get rid of stuff but yeah.  Maybe I can pay someone to do that for me?
~Speaking of tasks that seem daunting, my Christmas tree is still up in my basement and it feels like a huge chore to take it down.  The ornaments are off, it's just a lighted tree.  This is the latest I have ever left it up.  Ever.  I was joking with Nate, we could just decorate for all holidays, why not?  Valentine's Day Tree, here we come. (Or I'll take it down before his parents come over to watch the Super Bowl with us this weekend.  But I can dream!)
~And finally I want to wish a very happy birthday to Sara from Writing with Bangles today - she's been a wonderful supporter of my blog since I met her last year and we've met up once in real life recently and hopefully it wasn't for the last time!  She's a great friend and has wonderful and witty posts.  Check out her thoughts on aging here and wish her a happy birthday while you're at it!
And there you have it.  A look inside my mind, which can be a very scary place, but it wasn't so bad today right?  Right?  Is this thing on?

The Beer Dabbler

So it's no secret to readers of the blog here that Nate and I are pretty into beer.  We're lucky that the craft beer industry is absolutely booming here in Minnesota.  There are quite a few festivals throughout the year that we have enjoyed going to and this year we decided to try one we hadn't before - The Beer Dabbler at the Winter Carnival in St. Paul.  The event was this past Saturday and we had a blast!  We decided to splurge and get "VID (Very Important Dabbler)" tickets and that was the best decision we could have made!  We got in a half hour early and got to start drinking beer right away, we got free hats, free food, access to a heated tent and no lines for bathrooms - yeah, totally worth the extra price!  Anyway, I thought I'd share some pictures here (if you're Facebook friends with me you've already seen these, so apologies for the double post in that case).

Above I'm drinking my first beer of the day.  You'll notice too that this event was outside.  Normally in Minnesota you'd be crazy for going to an outdoor festival in January, but we lucked out and had a day of warm weather - it was actually in the 40's, so I got by with a sweatshirt and a puffy vest!

Of course I had to take a selfie with my favorite person.  We don't look at all excited about the fact that we had a babysitter and could be out of the house drinking beer together do we?

You could choose which color hat you got as a "VID" ticket holder.  I chose a pink/blue/purple one because I'm such a girl.  Nate chose a maroon and gold one (Go Gophers I guess!)

No beer festival is complete without a lineup of food trucks.  I was SO excited that one I've been wanting to try for ages was there - O'Cheeze, a gourmet grilled sandwich truck.  Yep, sign me up!!

We had some sort of chicken chipotle grilled cheese with cheddar and pepperjack cheeses.  Sounds like it would be super spicy, but it wasn't too bad.  Another awesome thing at this festival was that they had meat and cheese samples available for free inside the Colosseum (this event took place at the MN State Fairgrounds) - so we ended up spending close to an hour in there sampling cheeses.  There were some beers being poured in there as well so we didn't have to go without!

These last couple of pictures are just me being silly.  Above I was showing off my dorky necklace that was very useful - it holds your beer glass so you can be hands free.  However, somehow mine managed to fall out of the necklace in the mud, so I was sad panda thinking I was done having any beer, but Nate said "come on, let's just ask for another one".  I didn't think there was anyway they'd give me one, but when they saw we were "VIDs" they said we could have one.  Um, score!

One of the MN Breweries, Dayblock Brewing, also has bacon, so they had a giant bacon strip outside their booth, so I was like, I need a picture with the bacon.  Because bacon.  I love bacon.

We didn't partake too much in the free booya stew we also got as VID members, we could have as many bowls as we wanted, but given the food trucks and cheese samples, we pretty much filled up on that and didn't need the stew.  Also, it was just not that cold out, so we didn't feel the need for that to help warm us up.  As for the beers?  There were good ones out there, we found a lot of the breweries weren't stepping outside the box too much, but I will say the two best ones I think I had was Stir Crazy (winter ale) from Indeed Brewing that had peppermint added and then Summit had their Oatmeal Stout with cinnamon and vanilla on cask - that was quite delightful!  Overall we had a great time and I would definitely consider going to this festival again and I would absolutely pop for the VID if we do.  Our next big beer event won't be until the summer more than likely, so I'm glad we did it up pretty big for this one!  
Hope you all had a great weekend too!  If you're on the East Coast, I'm thinking of you, hunker down and stay safe in the snow!