This weekend is a busy one over here at Beneath the Crust. Maria is off in California hiking with a childhood friend (at 28 weeks pregnant, mind you)! Her energy and commitment to staying active is truly remarkable. If you missed it before, here's a crash course in Maria's approach to fitness.
Read MoreIf you've noticed how quiet we've been this week, it's because we're all a little burned out by Easter preparation. It doesn't seem to matter how well I schedule my time or how much I do ahead of time, when the day after Easter rolls around I. am. beat. All I want to do is sit and read and eat jelly beans. (Which is a little what I did.) This week has been a good decompress, but it's time to get back to normal - meal plans, grocery lists, dinners more involved and nutritious than mac and cheese. But I'll take full advantage of the weekend first. :)
Read MoreAs you'll notice from the links below, we're kind of obsessive about holiday baking. The list of links for this week could easily have been solely food interests. And even still, we really had to hold ourselves back!
For us, holidays sort of completely revolve around food. It's not a celebration unless the feast is decadent. In some ways, it can pose a problem, like when we overstretch ourselves, or when we are consumed with food preparation and forget to enjoy the company of our family and friends. But in so many more ways, the centrality of food in celebration is a good thing, a great thing. It creates a sense of history and tradition (especially when you begin to associate certain foods with certain celebrations--Sophie has some great thoughts on this subject). It can be a way to connect with your cultural heritage.
Read MoreHappy St. Patrick's Day to you all! May his life be a real inspiration in our lives!
Now, while you're waiting around for the parade to start, or the pub to open (jk! please be safe today), here are a few little tid bits to help you pass the time. Oh yeah, and in case you missed it, we've got some boozy Guinness Bailey's brownies up on the blog, and Sophie's got you recipe conundrum covered with an Irish Soda Bread bake-off!
Read MoreWe are back again with this & that, a round-up of some fun and interesting things on the web! We've been hammering out how we want to format these lists of links, and it's still a work in progress. This week's new development? Breaking the links down into categories. Enjoy!
Read MoreChanging things up this week (ok just feeling lazy)! I'm going to group the links together according to which sister submitted it. No weaving together some kind of pseudo-narrative between truly random links this time!
Read MoreYesterday, we went on a walk to "reset" a bad morning. The palm trees were rustling in the breeze, the water was rippling, the birds were singing. An alligator swam towards the shore, so we scooted along the path a little faster. Vultures were soaring in the sky above, scooping down right over our heads, and then taking off again. “Come back, birds!” Catherine was calling. We passed the bridge where there are usually fish, but the water is really low this time of year and we couldn't see any swimming. There was a set of desolate trees with a group of crows in and around them, calling out with their grim caw. It seemed like the opening shot of a horror film.
Being out in nature has a way of resetting your attitude, of helping you put things back in perspective.
Read MoreOkay, so it's Saturday again and we've got a list of fun stuff for you to browse!
Read MoreWe are starting a new series here at Beneath the Crust!
This & That is a Saturday round-up of the things we found interesting on the web.
Read MoreWhen we chose the title for our blog, we didn’t exactly hash out all its implications to precision. We loved the images it summoned - crusty breads, flaky pies, sweet and savory pastries - but we also liked its suggestion of substance being interior, something concealed but exposed when cut into, divided, or, well, shared. It sounded good enough, so we went with it. But the more we’ve developed the blog with that idea in the back of our minds, the more we’ve come to see just how good it is.
Read MoreI'm always behind on New Year's resolutions. New Year's day comes along each year, and every year, I realize once again I've failed to think beforehand of what I'd like to tackle in the new year. So, very unsurprisingly to myself, a week into 2018, I'm finally coming up with resolutions.
Read MoreMy little Florida family just returned home from traveling for the holidays. We took a crazy road trip up to the DC area for Christmas, driving the 20 hours straight on the way up. (On the way back we were older and perhaps a little wiser and stopped for the night.) Our vacation with family in DC was wild and busy and fun and filled with SO much love, especially because all our siblings were together for a reunion in celebration of our dad's 60th birthday. Sophie was there with a gorgeous glow, snuggling her 2-week-old newborn girl. Maria blew us all away with her strength and endurance as she navigated holiday baking and cooking with a first-trimester stomach (yay for more babies! boo for morning sickness)--all while still managing to SMASH out those workouts.
Read MoreEven if I had all the time in the world, and I examined every artifact, and meticulously read every label, would I remember any of it in a week? A month? A year? Probably not. But if I picked out one item and examined it closely, thoughtfully, there was a higher chance I would actually learn something from it. Having a toddler forced me to be selective about my consumption. Having a toddler actually increased the odds that I would remember something from this trip.
Read MoreAs I mentioned in my last post, we recently took a family vacation up north to New Hampshire. The White Mountains specifically were my family's vacationing destination growing up. We went there every summer we could. A couple years, we did winter vacations instead. Philip and I went by ourselves in October when expecting Edith, right at the start of gorgeous autumn foliage. But going in November was quite a different experience.
Read MoreLast week I took the kids to a completely random little town in Texas (it may be that most little towns in Texas are completely random and I just haven't lived here long enough to learn that) to visit an even more completely random Medieval castle. I knew four things about this place going into it: one, that it was a castle; two, that it was somehow associated with Newman's Bakery & Deli, also in Bellville; three, that the guy who built it actually lived there; and four, that the children get to reenact storming a castle. The first and last things alone justified a visit. I'll admit, the fact of the guy living there puzzled me. I just couldn't imagine what kind of place this was! The puzzlement never really cleared up - this place remains one big (amusing) puzzle to me.
Read MoreHow and why I squeeze a workout in every day.
Read MoreI just finished reading John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath for the first time. Talk about depressing! It ranks among the most wretched books I've ever read (right up there with Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage). It's one of those books that just hits you in the face with its unrelenting misery, one of those books which continually drops not-so-subtle hints that things are only going to get worse--and they do. Pushing on, I would alternately cry, shake the book, yell at the characters NOT to go do that very thing they were inevitably going to do because doom was the forecast from the start. I found myself five pages from the end, wondering how on earth the misery was going to wrap up, when suddenly, on the second to last page, a glimmer of hope, an ending so strange, so appalling, yet so transcending that it flirts with the sublime.
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