The Real Deal

Over Valentine's Day weekend, my brother came back home to St. Louis for the weekend, which usually means a family brunch on Sunday!  We had been talking for so long about trying this boozy brunch out, and we certainly were not disappointed! We started our meal out with bottomless mimosas!  The waitress gives you a bracelet to know which members of the party ordered bottomless mimosas and bring out pitchers for refills instead of having to wait for every time the waitress comes out, which I loved!  We started with a pitcher of the classic mimosas with just champagne and orange juice, and another pitcher of the Wheelmosa, which is pineapple, Sprite, Aperol, and rosé. The Wheelmosa ended up being a favorite at the table, although the original ones were good too! We also started with an order of donut holes for the table.  You can get them with powdered sugar, chocolate sauce, or cinnamon and apple butter.  We got chocolate sauce, and WOW these ended u...

One thing that I’ve always been obsessed with are Charcuterie boards.  Cheese is one of my favorite foods, and all the different combinations on one plate make for a great appetizer.  I’ve even gone out with my mom and all we’ve eaten is the cheese board and been full and satisfied! I’ve been wanting to make our own charcuterie board since over the summer, and we’ve just never had a good time to do it.  My family is very small, so most of our gatherings are very informal and we didn’t want our board to go to waste.  We hosted Thanksgiving at our house this year, and my mom and I thought that this would be the perfect time to finally break out the cheese board.  We did spend quite a large amount on everything for the cheese board, but it was so worth it and it all went over well. CHEESE Brie // This was probably everyone’s favorite out of the entire board.  My mom topped the brie with cranberry sauce (not the jelly, the regular sauce), wrapped it ...

This past weekend, I drove up to my college town, Peoria, IL., to spend some time with some of my friends from college! As I've mentioned before on here, I am on the dance team at my university, and am also on the executive board for my dance team.  Before going home for the summer, we picked the weekend of July 7-8, to come back to school and have a dance workshop.  My entire team ended up being there that weekend, plus some people brought friends from home, making it a big and fun group! It is only a 2 hour and 30 minute drive to Peoria for me, so I left on Saturday morning so that I had time to get there and get settled before I had to head over to start our classes. The teacher of our first day of classes was the former dance teacher of one of the girls on our team.  We are a completely self-choreographed and taught team, so taking classes from a real dance teacher again felt really good!  She taught us four classes on Saturday: ballet technique, jazz ...