Keeping in Teutsch

A few years ago when I had Juliette, we had the luxury of people bringing us meals for a solid week. (Which followed the luxury of my mom cooking all of my favorite dishes in one week--just thinking about that makes me want to have another baby!) We were introduced to some phenomenal bread from a little meat market/specialty store called River City Market (or something like that) in West Monroe. It was a french bread that had lots of cheese on it with olives and it was awesome! Over the last few years that we were in West Monroe, I would occasionally pop in and buy a loaf to go with dinner (or to just stand over the oven and eat as it was cooling). Shortly before we moved, though, River City Market closed down and I've been craving some of that bread ever since.

Back in November, when I received the copy of the Pioneer Woman's cookbook, I ran across a recipe for Olive Cheese Bread in it that looked similar to the other bread and since then I have been wanting to try it.

This past Monday, while I was off for President's Day, I went to the store and got the ingredients I needed to make it. I was very disappointed...there was major olive overload. It tasted like I was eating a muffaletta without the meat. It wasn't bad, bad...if you like olives and prefer that to be the overriding taste, than you won't need to alter the recipe at all, but I would prefer more bread and cheese and less olives, so next time I'll be using only half of the olives. Click here for the original recipe. Also, just a side note: instead of hand chopping the olives, just stick them in a food processor...it's much easier that way!

Any one care for some Over-the-top Olive Cheese Bread? I've got more than half a loaf in the fridge...

We took Juliette to her first Mardi Gras parade today and she got quite a few beads and even some cups and coins, or "money" as she called it. Lafayette has a carnival set up for Mardi Gras and the parade route goes right by it AND it's only a mile from our house, so we walked up there for the parade and then went to the carnival for lunch--corn dogs for me and J, hamburger for Matt and then french fries for all three, cotton candy for J and then a funnel cake to top it all off! Good thing we walked up there and had to walk back! :)
We bought a few tickets for Juliette to ride some of the rides. She rode this one twice and then rode the merry-go-round. She was starting to get tired, so we just called it a day since she didn't seem that interested in any other rides.
We had fun on our little Mardi Gras outing today. Side note: Almost everyone was wearing Saints shirts and one person yelled out a "Who Dat" while walking through the crowd at the carnival. Juliette yelled back "Who Dat," but I was the only one that heard her! I thought it was pretty funny! The Saints fever is still going strong down here!

We awoke Friday morning to snow, although it was nothing like the "great blizzard" those in North Louisiana experienced! Lafayette was actually not even predicted to get snow, so it was quite a surprise to walk out of the house Friday morning on my way to work and find this going on. It was snowing pretty hard for about an hour or two and then it stopped and by the time I got off work at lunch, all traces of snow were gone.

Juliette and I drove Friday afternoon up to Minden and got to see some pretty stretches of snow on I-49 between Alexandria and Natchitoches. By the time we hit Coushatta, though, the sun was coming out and there wasn't much snow left, so we just had to settle for looking at pictures of how pretty my parents' Winter Wonderland had been.

One of the reasons we came up for the weekend was for Juliette to attend my friend Amanda's little girl's birthday party. Ella Grace is a V-Day baby and turned 4 this year. She had a Tinkerbell themed party at the Jungle Gym in West Monroe.
Sunday morning we went to church with my parents and brother. There just seems to be nothing like attending a large Southern Baptist church in North Louisiana. We like our church in Lafayette, but the worship just doesn't seem to be as passionate as we are used to. I enjoyed being able to attend church with them!
My mom--always thinking ahead--had saved a Walmart cookie box in case she wanted to make cookies or something else and give them to someone later. It was the perfect thing for me to use for my strawberries. Mom had already torn the label off of it, so I just made a tissue paper heart to cover that part up and then stuck some red tissue paper in the bottom of it. I thought it turned out really cute.

I hope everyone had a good weekend! I'm enjoying some days off from work (for President's Day and Mardi Gras), so it was nice to be at home today and not really have anything to do.

Today Juliette and I worked on finishing the goodie bags for her preschool class. Last night she helped me sort out the candy, put them in bag and put the stickers on them. Today, I just had to write with a paint pen on the shovels and tie the bags onto them.

I'm always looking for new ideas for the holidays, as I like to do something a little extra then just give the kids a bag with candy in it--but I also need to keep it inexpensive since she has 17 classmates. I saw this idea on the Family Fun magazine's web site and was able to order these little red shovels from iparty.com for really cheap. You're supposed to use small clear pastry bags for the candy, but I couldn't find any at Target last night and the traffic around this place is HORRIBLE (Mardi Gras stuff going on), so I just had to use what I had on hand because it's just not worth fighting the traffic. I definitely think they would have looked better using the pastry bags, but they are still cute.
These stickers came from a blogger's sister. They were just a couple of dollars for a sheet of 24. This is probably the only time in my life I've actually thought about the holidays early enough to order anything from online and also the first time I've had it put together earlier than the night before!
If you are still looking for ideas for your child's classmates, take a look at the Family Fun website. They have some cute ideas on there for not only Valentine's Day, but any holiday.

Fridays are the best...and I'm pretty certain that most people love them as well. Aside from the obvious reason for loving Fridays (the start of the weekend!), I love Fridays because I get off at 12:30 pm and because Juliette gets to join me for a few hours at work while Matt teaches two classes. I was a little worried at first of how she would do being in my office, but she has been great so far and has actually helped do a few things.

Today she put address labels on about 40 packages for me. Sometimes, though, she just colors or does puzzles. Here she is below working on a 100 piece puzzle that she actually put together all my herself!
I bought this cookbook (the author/cook is a well-known blogger, which is how I knew about it) back in November as a "congratulations-for-finally-landing-a-job" present to myself. I have had it on the cookbook stand on my kitchen counter since the first week of December and have yet to cook anything out of it. Matt, however, looked through it the other day and has been drooling over these things called "French Breakfast Puffs" for about a week now. Turns out that we had all the ingredients for it, so we had breakfast for dinner and he fixed the french breakfast puffs and I fixed a potato recipe from the book that turned out great. (Pics are below.) We also had bacon and eggs, except Matt decided to go all Julia Child on me and poach the eggs and I refused to eat them because they just didn't look too appetizing. I'm more of a scrambled egg girl (and so is Juliette)!


Click here for the recipe for the French Breakfast Puffs. Matt followed the recipe to a tee, except he left out the nutmeg since we don't like it. Also, we didn't have any shortening, so he just substituted margarine...don't freak out, the Internet told us it was okay! :) These are good, but you shouldn't eat too many because I'm pretty sure The Pioneer Woman is channeling some Paula Deen with this recipe--you drown the baked muffins in butter and then roll them in cinnamin. Good, but I'm pretty sure these aren't healthy! (I just had one!)

Click here for the potato recipe on The Pioneer Woman's web site, although I do need to say that I made these with red potatoes (because that's all I had on hand), I didn't use the bacon fat (because I'd rather not have a sudden heart attack and because I don't fry bacon), I skipped the onions (because I didn't have any, and frankly, I don't care for them in my food unless they are teeny, tiny and undetectable to the human eye) and I used Tonys. Basically, I'm not even sure if that can even be considered her recipe now...oh, well...it's potatoes...hard to mess them up! Just do what you want with them and it's pretty hard to go wrong. The main thing is just to make sure you brown them in a little bit of oil (canola if you are being health conscious!).

We had an enjoyable evening cooking together in the kitchen (while Juliette folded her Valentines and put stickers on them). Hope your Fridays are just as enjoyable!

One of the blogs that I read--Kelly's Korner--did a post today on the simple pleasures in life and asked everyone to join in, so I thought it would be fun. Here are my simple pleasures in life:

*sleeping while it is raining or storming

*getting to put my cozy pajamas on and sit down after a long day

*Juliette crawling into my lap and cuddling with me

*watching a movie with Matt and Juliette all cuddled up together

*getting emails from friends and family

*hanging out at my parents' house just doing nothing--it's not the house I grew up in, but it's still home because they are there

*an M&M Sonic Blast

*getting to sleep late

*finding a really good sale

*a really cold Diet Coke first thing in the morning

*an evening walk around the neighborhood with the family

*a clean house

*having absolutely nothing to do on a day off

*soaking in a the tub while reading a good book

*making something really cute

*blog comments

*Juliette's cute little faces

*tickle matches with Matt and Juliette

What are your simple pleasures?

I keep waiting around for the creator of these 52 Questions to post the cute little tag graphics for these, but she hasn't, so I figured I should go ahead and answer them before I get too far behind! The questions are starting to lighten up, as you can see, so no telling what you're going to learn about me from future questions.

This past weekend, Matt and I took a little post-anniversary/pre-Valentine's Day trip to a cabin/B&B in Natchitoches. We stayed in the Cedar Suite at the Starlight Plantation B&B, which is on the Cane River.





Overall, we had a nice, relaxing weekend and enjoyed the chance to get away!