Happy weekend!

My dears, what's on tap for the weekend? We're throwing a little dinner party tonight after work, we're seeing a concert at the Rothko Chapel tomorrow night, and then supposedly Sunday we're going on a hot air balloon ride. Although currently the forecast says it might be raining, so I'm trying not to get my hopes up. You may recall that the balloon ride was my birthday present from CM in October 2011. We're still trying to make it happen. If we can't go, at least the Oscars should heal the pain.

While I'm crossing my fingers for sunshine, a few links:

This post really hit home with me. Can't imagine why.

Not a particularly sexy link, but I always forget to get my free annual credit reports (so important), and we did it last weekend (after organizing all our 2012 tax stuff—big day). Get yours here!

After eyeing it for ages, I finally bought a Clarisonic (the Mia 2 in Emerald). I've only been using it for a few days, but I swear my skin feels smoother and cleaner.

LEGO Michael Jackson. Cool.

Oh, this looks delicious. And it's Whole 30 friendly!


Here's Lola in the fruit basket, then and now. She's so big!

Hope your weekend is full of clear weather, lazy couch time, and red carpets! xoxo LMB

Oscars 2013

Will you be watching the Oscars on Sunday? I'm very excited, although since we no longer have cable I don't actually know where we're going to watch them... We'll figure that out.

We've been trying to see as many of the movies as possible in anticipation, since that always makes the ceremony more enjoyable. We haven't done as well as I would have liked, but we have seen the following:

5 Broken Cameras
Animated shorts
Argo
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Brave
How to Survive a Plague
Life of Pi
Silver Linings Playbook
Skyfall

We might have time for one more before the ceremony itself. What should we see? Lincoln? Amour? Les Miz?


A few Oscar-related goodies from the interwebs:

EW's interactive ballot

Between Two Ferns with Zack Galifianakis Oscar Buzz Edition Part 1 and Part 2 (SFW if you use headphones)

Funny moments in Oscars history

Whole 30 Day 10

About a year ago I got interested in the Paleo diet, which led me to Mark's Daily Apple and a pile of books about food and nutrition. Which inevitably led me to the Whole 30, a 30-day strict Paleo regimen that cuts out all grains, sugar, dairy, alcohol, and legumes. I completed my first Whole 30 on March 19 of last year, and I can honestly say I had never felt better. I didn't even find it particularly difficult—I'm definitely an abstainer, not a moderator. CM and I ate mostly Paleo for a while afterwards, falling off the wagon spectacularly during our 2 months in Europe and never figuring out quite how to get back on.

Fast forward to 2013, with both of us feeling sluggish and plump. We decided to try a Whole 30 together, and now we're 10 days in! Mostly it's been pretty easy, although we do miss stopping in somewhere for cocktail hour on the way home from work.

Here's what we've been eating:

In the mornings, we start with coffee (duh). I drink mine with some coconut milk frothed in the Aeroccino, and CM drinks his black. With our second cup we eat eggs of some kind—scrambled, omelettes, etc., with vegetables or avocado or a side of berries.

For lunch we generally have leftovers of meat and veggies from dinner the night before. If we feel like getting out of the office, we go to Chipotle for salad with veggies, meat, salsa, and guacamole on top (no dressing, beans, or rice) or we get a no-bun burger with veggies instead of fries. Yum.

We've been cooking dinners at home a lot, experimenting with recipes from the Well Fed cookbook or throwing things together. Mostly meat with vegetables, trying to mix it up with different kinds of each. Occasionally I make green juice for both of us, and CM is a good sport about drinking it.

We haven't quite fallen out of the habit of snacking, so we're well-stocked with nuts, almond butter, fruit, coconut for coconut chips, and Lärabars.

It feels great to know everything we're putting in our bodies is real food, and mostly I don't miss the other stuff (although I had to forbid CM from making cookies on Day 4 because I knew the temptation would be too much for me). The Whole 30 isn't designed to be a long-term way of eating, but it's the perfect reset to remind us of healthy habits.

Would you try it?

My shameful secret

Confession: there are enormous gaps in my knowledge of world history and events. ENORMOUS. I try to keep up with the news as it happens, but because my understanding of the background is so spotty, I often don't quite get what's happening beyond the basics.

Case in point. Last night we were watching 5 Broken Cameras, an incredible Oscar-nominated documentary filmed by a Palestinian villager in the West Bank, chronicling his village's conflicts with Israeli soldiers starting in 2005. We got about a minute into the film and I had to pause it to have Israel/Palestine explained to me. CM actually knew the exact year the State of Israel was created! 1948, by the way. It was humbling. Throughout the film we had to keep breaking out the iPad to Google different elements of the conflict. (How is it possible I did not know the word intifada???) I've already ordered this book to begin to remedy the situation.

And while we're sharing, I am also pretty shaky on the following: The India/Pakistan conflict. Tibet. Provinces of Canada. Gangnam style.

Perhaps I should spend a bit less time reading historical fiction about the court of Henry VIII. That might help.

Anything you should know but don't? Come on, make me feel better.

Date Nights in Houston: Oxheart

Last month an article came out in the NY Times: "The 46 Places to Go in 2013." We were pretty excited, because Houston was #7, but then we looked closer and realized that the new museums they were talking about as the major selling points for Houston making the list? And the new restaurants? Yeah, we hadn't been to any of them. Oops.

When I'm home, we tend to be anti-social hermits, holing up in our house surrounded by cats and cozy blankets. We don't get out much.

I'd like to change that. I'm gone so much that it's hard to remember what the city has to offer outside the walls of our home, but Houston is a great city, and not only because of its low, low, very low cost of living.

So, I'm launching a new feature: Date Nights in Houston, in which CM and I try new things or rediscover our old favorites.

First up, one of those hot new restaurants mentioned in the Times: Oxheart. The dining room only has 30 seats, so early reservations are a must (they start taking reservations on the 1st of the month for the following month, so if you wanted a table in April you'd try on March 1st). Oxheart is in the Warehouse District, East of downtown in a historic factory space.

The menus are seasonal, focusing on local ingredients. There are 3 tasting menus to choose from—a 4-course vegetarian option, a 4-course option with meat, and a 7-course menu. We chose the 4-course "Winter Menu" (meat included) with wine pairings. Everything we ate was delicious, and Justin Vann, the sommelier who was also our waiter for the evening, did a fantastic job explaining what he brought to the table.

Including sunflower seed soup:

And housemade English muffins with lard:

And a fish course we ate too fast to photograph. And chicken cooked 3 ways:

And a delicious dessert:

And housemade marshmallows with our coffee, just because:




For such a trendy restaurant, farm-to-table mission statements and filament bulbs galore, Oxheart does not have an ounce of pretention. Every member of the staff we encountered was friendly and knowledgeable, each dish was served up with care and pride, and we felt immediately comfortable. We'll be back.

Houstonians, where else should we go for date night?