By Julie on 8/28/2009 7:59 AM

Lavazza

On our trip to Chicago this summer, we utilized the coffee shop attached to our hotel on a daily basis. The coffee shop was called Lavazza and it also served the most delicious Italian gelato ever. My daughter was so enamored of their espresso gelato that she ate it twice a day. And I loved their coffee.

I know that sounds like bad parenting to let your child eat large cups of gelato that contains caffeine twice a day. But we were on vacation and it was hot outside. So I indulged her.

Since we've been home, she has mentioned that gelato wistfully about once a week. I got busy and checked to see if there is a Lavazza in the Houston area. Turns out there is not ... Read More »

By Julie on 8/27/2009 7:15 PM

I have been crazy busy juggling too many things this week. But I wanted to share this picture I snapped while in Mississippi recently. This is the back row of graves in the family cemetery on my mother's side of the family: the old Nunley Cemetery.

These graves are fascinating to me. They are from sometime in the 1800's and have no carved markers. They are make of large flat pieces of the local sandstone. They look like some old Celtic graves from Ireland or Scotland I have seen in books before.

By Julie on 8/24/2009 8:07 PM

Many apologies to all my loyal readers for my lack of blog posts the past few days. I have been busy with work and also with a personal project that i am working on. While I was in Mississippi visiting I took lots of pictures in Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. I am assembling those pictures along with my research for my next book. The book is tentatively titled "Old Places" and will be available mid-September if all goes well. This will be my first hardback book to publish so I am pretty excited.

By Julie on 8/20/2009 2:57 PM

Last weekend we had dinner in Counce, Tennessee at a catfish restaurant along highway 57. I believe the name of the restaurant was The Catfish Pond but there was no name on the building and the sign out front was in pretty bad shape.

The building was quite interesting. It is an older building that used to be a garage of some sort. The original garage door was still on it and you could see out between cracks that didn't get caulked. The dining room is heated in the winter by a really old wood stove and cooled by window unit airconditioners. The table cloths were unhemmed pieces of denim fabric.

But none of that mattered because they serve the most divine smoked catfish in the world. This restaurant is hugely successful despite the crazy building and people come from all over the place to eat there. This could definitely be classified as a "hole in the wall" restaurant. I think I'll let Read More »

By Julie on 8/18/2009 7:04 PM

School is about to start back again in our area. I took  my daughter to buy school supplies yesterday. And today I went to her school for the usual massive paperwork session they have right before school starts back.

I am very much looking forward to school starting again. I lose my schedule during the summer months while my daughter is home. My job is such that I work from home via a virtual office. My hours are a bit flexible. So when my daughter is out of school and hanging around the house all day, I have to deal with numerous interruptions from her, as well as having to fix her meals and give her some attention.

But when school starts back, I resume my normal schedule of getting up very early, cooking my daughter a good breakfast, driving her to school, and then beginning my workday. I am very productive at my work when she is not here since I don't have to deal with lots of interruptions.

And I will miss her. Sometimes during ... Read More »

By Julie on 8/17/2009 6:36 PM

I returned last night from a trip to my hometown in Mississippi. On Saturday, my mom, my brother, my daughter, and I spent the day driving up the Natchez Trace Parkway in Tennessee. Along the parkway there are many historic sites and hiking areas.

Here are a couple of pictures I took at hiking areas along the way:

 

The Natchez Trace Parkway is maintained by the National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. It stretches 444 miles from the Mississippi river in Natchez, Mississippi to just south of Nashville, Tennessee.

The Natchez Tr ... Read More »

By Julie on 8/11/2009 6:52 PM

 

The Bourbon Orleans

On my old blog of years ago (which was hosted by a service that suddenly went down and took all the files with it. Yes, there were many angry bloggers using that service who lost their archives too.) I wrote a series of blog posts featuring the view from hotel rooms I stayed at on my travels.

So here I am in New Orleans and I took this picture from our hotel room window at the Bourbon Orleans Hotel:

Not a bad view at all.

The taxi driver was a real case, though. We grabbed a taxi from the Amtrak station to our hotel. When I told the taxi driver which hotel we were staying at, he replied, "Oh, that's in the rainbow section."

Me: "Huh?"

Tax ... Read More »

By Julie on 8/10/2009 6:58 PM

This is one of those really busy Mondays. I'm packing for a trip and also working my full-time job. I have not resolved things with AT&T over the big internet-switchover fiasco. More on that later.

I had to relate this funny thing from our recent trip to Chicago. My daughter, like me, loves to keep her toe nails painted nice colors. We have a rather large collection of nail polish. One of our favorites is from a couple of years ago. It is an OPI polish called Lincoln Park After Dark.

When Toot found out that Lincoln Park is located in Chicago, she insisted that we paint our toe nails with the Lincoln Park After Dark polish so we could "fit in" in Chicago.

Read More »

By Julie on 8/7/2009 8:04 PM

Friday Night Pizza

Earlier this afternoon we decided that pizza was in order for this evening. And beer for the grownups of our household. After a quick trip to the grocery store for a few more ingredients, I made the homemade pizza dough and left it to rise for an hour or so. The dough recipe I used was from the original Silver Palate Cookbook for the Pizza Pot Pie recipe. I tripled the dough recipe.

Toot made a pan pizza with basil pesto sauce, fresh mozzarella, and pepperoni. I made a flatbread pizza with fajita steak, sun-dried tomatoes, corn, black beans, and mozzarella. Dan made a Chicago-style deep dish sausage pizza.

But the true star of the evening was the extra pizza Toot put together. She made us a dessert pizza. It was absolutely delicious. I do not have measurements for the ingredients but here is what she pu ... Read More »

By Julie on 8/6/2009 8:14 PM

The dinner I cooked tonight turned out very well. I made fajita tacos and used a recipe for toppings from Everyday Food. Here's what I made:

I thinly sliced half of a red cabbage then seasoned it with the juice of 2 limes, salt, pepper, and 1 clove of fresh garlic finely chopped. I put this in the refrigerator to sit while I prepared the rest of the meal.

I seasoned a 1.5 pound piece of fajita steak with salt, pepper, ground cumin, and chipotle chili powder. Then I grilled it to medium rare. I sliced it into thin slices.

I heated flour tortillas.

Finally I built the fajitas: on each flour tortilla I placed a few slices of the fajita meat, topped it with the cabbage slaw and then some shredded cheddar and monterey jack cheese. I served the fajita tacos with a side of beans.

I should have taken pictures but we wer ... Read More »