RECIPE | RALEIGH TIMES PORK NACHOS

This recipe represents the height of my culinary success. Daniel and I finally mastered a knock-off version of the incredible (and locally famous) pork nachos served at the Raleigh Times Bar. This recipe was stupid easy, and we ended up with a huge amount of leftover pork which we've been eating on tacos and nachos for a week now. Still not tired of this pork! 

Raleigh Times Pork

One big fat pork tenderloin
Three bell peppers (we use red, yellow & orange)
One yellow onion
One jalapeño 
Spice rub (cumin, red pepper, black pepper, paprika, salt)
2-3 ounces white vinegar 

Rub down the pork with a generous helping of the spice rub. Chop the peppers and onion and drop them into a crockpot or slow cooker. Place the meat on top and cook on low for eight to ten hours. About an hour before the meat is done it should shred easily with a fork. Shred the meat, add the vinegar and stir in the vegetables. Cook for one more hour. Serve on tacos or nachos or any way you like!

RALEIGH | ART MUSEUM PART II

Weekends in our life quickly get swamped with plans, and if we aren't careful we'll end up spending the whole thing a part. Sometimes we have to make deliberate plans to go be together outside somewhere to run around and enjoy family time away from the hundreds of chores that invariably need doing at home. A favorite outdoors spot of ours in Raleigh is the Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art. It's an interesting landscape dotted with large sculptures and plenty of spots to plop down on a blanket to read or play with dinosaurs. Here are just few snapshots from the last warm day we got to enjoy before fall weather struck.

Sarah 

RALEIGH

I walk a few routine paths through the city of Raleigh each day, passing the same buildings, trees and statues, so I recently decided to use those sometimes mundane walks as a chance to be more attentive to the beauty that exists within the unremarkable and unnoticed. Fall has been slowly creeping into the scenes of my daily foot travels, working its way from the tops of the trees all the way down to the leaves on the ground. On perhaps the last warm day of the season last week the sky was a remarkably, cloudlessly vibrant blue and then the next day, mirroring the onset of cooler temperatures, it turned to an endless blanket of chilly grey. I captured the images below as a record of the season changing.

Sarah

RALEIGH | ART MUSEUM PART I

     Earlier this month I visited the North Carolina Museum of Art with Danielle to beat the heat and indulge in some culture. I took my camera to get some more practice with shooting in manual (it's hard!) and thought I'd share the a few of my favorite details around the museum here. Check out the more detailed post about it on twenty somethings: the lost art. 

Sarah

RALEIGH | FARMER'S MARKET FINDS

Here's a round-up of veggies from our weekly trip to the market; I can't wait to experiment! We got sweet potatoes, beets, spinach, the world's longest green onions, heirloom cherry tomatoes, and still-caked-with-dirt mushrooms. Now the real challenge is how to make them taste good ;). I'll be scouring Pinterest and The Splendid Table for inspiration. 

What are you cooking this week?

Sarah 

RALEIGH | FAMILY DATE

Finding kid-friendly dining spots in downtown Raleigh can sometimes be a bit of a challenge, but our no-fail family date option is always The Raleigh Times. Jack orders chicken tenders with three dipping sauces (aka gourmet pre-schooler food) and the adults usually split nachos & a buffalo sandwich. Other menu high points: loaded fries, the Raleigh Times burger (highly recommended), & the tacos (yes, tacos...just trust me on this one). Pro tip: when you visit with a little one, put in the kid food order as soon as you are greeted by your waitress, especially if you have a slow eater like our guy. Sometimes the food wait can be a little long because the restaurant is enormous (four bars and three buildings large, seriously). One of the best parts is the people watching, which keeps Jack totally entertained and keeps the conversation lively. 

Second stop on the family date was the Pop-up Ice Cream Parlour, which as the name implies is a temporary fixture downtown. It is right across the street from the Times, so we didn't have to walk far to get our sugar high on (we wouldn't want to work off any calories on the way to consuming more calories, now would we?). They serve Maple View Farm's ice cream (yummy! and local) and house made fresh waffle cones. They have a kickstarter campaign going on right now to raise funds for a permanent space which is a cause I fully support as an avid ice cream fan. Jack's sugar high antics after this kept us chuckling the whole way home.

Sarah 

FILM PHOTOGRAPHY | LEICA M3

Among the many incentives to marry my sweet husband Daniel was the inheritance of 1960's Leica M3. It's an old school rangefinder that is fun to shoot and a great way to get more comfortable with the technical side of photography since there's no auto anything on this camera. It may take me ten minutes to set the aperture, shutter speed and focus, but I've learned a ton about what makes a good quality photo. Here are a few of my efforts, taken at the Capitol Square in downtown Raleigh.

And here are a few of Daniel's:

Holga scans are coming soon!

Sarah

Date Night: Trophy Brewing Co.

     Last Friday we got to go on a real, outside-of-our-house date night! Exhausted by the parenting battles characterizing the terrible twos, we agreed to keep it casual and started the evening off shooting film photos around downtown. We stopped by Peace Camera to pick up film and ran into a funny sign about Holgas (the camera I was shooting with that day). Never ones to miss out on a chance for self-mockery, we promptly instagrammed it. Next stop was Trophy Brewing Co, a relatively new micro brewery on Morgan that sells beer (duh) & gourmet pizza packaged with the cutest darn branding in Raleigh. We ordered a flight to taste each brew and enjoyed Next Best in Show so much that we took home a growler. Also, the bottle was really cute. Win-win. The pizzas are named with amusing stereotypes of high schoolers, so feeling a natural kinship to the title we ordered "The Indoors Kid." It was a white pizza topped with TONS of arugula. Daniel was in heaven and I dumped most of my arugula on his plate. Service was friendly, atmosphere was fun, and the decor was charming. Great Date!