Labor Day Weekend Recap

What a wonderful, busy, fun, exhausting, and (surprisingly) beautiful holiday weekend it turned out to be!  I'm still in Providence for work and exhausted-- probably from the whirlwind of a weekend that just ended.  I'm going to keep my words short here (for once) because I have a LOT of photos to share with you.  I hope you all had a wonderful Labor Day weekend and made it home safely from your holiday weekend travels.  I'm on my way back to Chicago (and my hubby) tomorrow.  And I am definitely looking forward to it.

On Saturday we went on a Chicago Food Planet tour of Wicker Park and Bucktown.  It was a 3-hour walking tour of 6 of the best restaurants in these neighborhoods.  In terms of weather, we got extremely lucky!  I even wore my wellies and it only rained for about 5 minutes on the whole tour.  The tour was really fun and the amount of food that they gave us was really unbelievable.  I could have used a nap afterward!

We started at George's Hot Dogs for a Chicago style hot dog.  Shame alert: I've just celebrated my 4th year in Chicago and this was my first Chicago style dog.

The next stop was Hot Chocolate for-- what else? -- hot chocolate!  Actually, we got iced hot chocolates with homemade marshmallows.  You may remember that we went here for my birthday dinner a few weeks ago and never did try the hot chocolate so this was a great opportunity to do so!

We stopped at Goddess & Grocer next for a little grilled vegetable and goat cheese salad.

Next up was Piece-- a pizza place/brewery that we have always wanted to try.  Check out that pizza above (and our tour guide Kent).  It's HUGE.  We got to sample some of their beer too.  We'll definitely be back for a date night here.

After the pizza and beer we were full.  But there were still 2 more stops to go!  The next was Sultan's Market for one of my favorites: a falafel pita.  FYI they were voted best falafel in Chicago.

And finally, another place I have always wanted to try-- iCream, an ice cream shop where you can create your own flavors and they create them using liquid nitrogen freezing techniques.  Very cool!

I was a little skeptical that this was going to be kind of touristy once we showed up and realized that we were the only Chicagoans in our group, but I have to admit that it was a really fun and new way to see our city.  They offer a Chinatown tour too and seeing as I have never been there (and wouldn't know where to start) I am thinking that it might be a really cool thing to try!

We rushed home on Saturday after the tour and hopped on a train out to the suburbs for our very first Ravinia concert experience.  Super fun-- and again, we were incredibly lucky that it was a cool and clear night with no rain!

 Oh and by the way, we went to see Hall & Oates.  :)

We got up bright and early (really early) on Sunday morning to fly out to Providence for a little down time with the family before my meeting.

We did a lot of lounging by the pool.

 And a LOT of hanging out with baby Maeve while her parents were packing up their house (for their big move to Michigan).  My apologies for the gratuitous adorable baby photos.

Maeve and her Aunt Libby

3x the adorable: Maeve, Tucker, Sully and the crab pool

And as always, Alex spent a lot of quality time messing with my parents' dogs.

And on Monday night we went up to Federal Hill (Providence's Little Italy) for some grilled pizzas at Bob & Timmy's.  It was a goodbye dinner for my brother and his wife (Maeve's mommy and daddy) before they headed west to Michigan.  It's not much of a goodbye for us though-- they'll be a 5-hour drive from Chicago!

That's me and my brave sister Meg (below) at dinner.  She's recovering from some serious back surgery and has been quite the trooper!

On Monday morning Emma requested that we make a big breakfast-- a favorite family activity.  my parents were out running errands and we were anxious to get out to the pool and enjoy the gorgeous day before Alex had to take off the airport so we made some delicious and relatively healthy breakfast sandwiches.

Breakfast Sandwiches

 Ingredients:

• 1 Tbs. butter
• 4 Eggs
• 4 Whole wheat bagel thins, toasted
• 6 strips turkey bacon
• 2 plum tomatoes, thinly sliced
• 4 slices light swiss cheese *it's better to use the deli kind that is more rectangular than square.  If you don't have that, then you may want to use 1 1/2 to 2 slices of square sliced cheese per sandwich instead.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Heat a nonstick pan over medium high heat and cook bacon until crispy.  Remove and drain bacon on paper towels.  When cool enough to handle, break each slice of bacon in half. 

Heat another frying pan over medium heat and add butter. Once butter has melted, break eggs individually into the pan.  Cook until the egg becomes golden on the bottom side and be sure to break up the thick clear whites around the yolk so that the egg whites cook evenly.  Turn eggs and continue to cook until golden on both sides, white appear solid, and yolks are still soft.  These are fried eggs, so if there isn't room for more than 1 or 2 at a time (depending on your pan size) then cook them in batches.

On top of the toasted bagels bottoms add one half of the cheese slice, 3 half pieces of bacon, a fried egg (you may need to fold it to make it fit inside the bagel), 3-4 tomato slices, the other half slice of cheese, and then topped with the bagel top.  Repeat with the remaining bagels and place on a baking sheet.  Bake the bagel sandwiches for about 10 minutes or until the cheese melts.  Serve immediately.