And then I threw an impromptu engagement party.

Fresh off my spectacular weekend in Chicago celebrating Melissa's wedding, I got to step back a few events in the whole wedding-planning/celebrating cycle and throw an engagement party for my book club friend Anna and her fiancé, Kevin! 

Not going to lie, I've felt a bit...saturated...lately by my overwhelming social schedule. Throw in a weekend road trip and less than 48 hours to pull this all together, and I was doubtful whether I'd pull it off or not. Fortunately, everything came together just beautifully! Without further ado...

I made sangria, which isn't pictured, in addition to these lemon bars (please PLEASE note the totally Pinterest-worthy engagement rings): 

And caprese skewers, which are a Schwegfam favorite.

I also picked up a cake (Lund's fudge buttercream frosting is officially too decadent to resist)...

...and plenty of engagement-themed serveware! 

Given the beautiful weather we've been having, it seemed asinine to not make use of my building's rooftop space. We quickly migrated out there, caprese skewers and lemon bars in tow, to catch up on all the details of Anna's proposal, planning and (short!) engagement...with a wedding date this October, they're definitely taking the fast lane!

We enthroned the bride-to-be, crown and all, in a something-blue-appropriate rocking chair...how cute is she?!

As sunset crept closer and Kevin arrived, it seemed opportune to do what basic white girls do best and have a total rooftop photoshoot. See below: 

I claim the above as my genius work. I'm basically a wizard with an Instagram filter. We also made use of one of my favorite additions to the party...I'm a sucker for balloons and couldn't resist these darling "Bride" and "Groom" bunches at Party City! I think they made for pretty adorable props, if you ask me...

It was so much fun to get the book club girls together, especially as our book club has unanimously met with a not-so-tragic demise at the hands of our very busy schedules and inability to discuss a book for more than five minutes without getting distracted by wine and/or our love lives. Oops? 

Of course, that cake wasn't going to eat itself....

Congrats Anna! You're pretty cute, and we're pretty excited for you. 

Looking forward to celebrating constantly until October rolls around! 

Oh, and if my Martha Stewart-conquering credibility was still in question? We ate everything...including that last lemon bar. BAM. 

Hi! Whoa. It’s July.

June was a pretty huge fail of a month over here for me, largely due to the fact that my social life all of a sudden exploded early in the month and hasn’t slowed down since. I’ve been at home at night a grand total of twice since the 8th, and out of town multiple weekends in the month. That said, lame excuse, I know, heaven forbid my fun get in the way of my chronicling of fun.

A quick smattering of what June held…

A banquet with this guy…

Featuring this guy…

A little brewery-hopping with this girl…

A black-tie gala with my mama bear…

A lot of celebrating a pretty special engagement…

A fantastic stolen weekend up north…

A Father’s Day reunion of the Five Schwegs…

A Guthrie trip that blew my mind…

A heartfelt invitation to be a bridesmaid...

A trek to Chicago to see this girl…

And a wedding full of love and long-lost friends.

Lots of detail to come, but July isn’t starting off any slower than June so far, and I desperately need to chronicle Paris for posterity before I dive in too deeply. Here’s to playing catch-up and savoring summer!

Saturday morning miscellany.

While it was still cool and breezy in the Cities this morning, I opened up my bedroom window and made myself a coffee and read for an hour. The sun and the air coming in couldn't have felt more relaxing or summery.  The coffee...well, I didn't get the Stevia totally perfectly mixed, so it all sank to the bottom and the last few sips were teeth-hurtingly sweet. The reading? An old favorite I'm loving revisiting. 

My pretty corner apartment has been a bit of a mess this week. Meal planning, workouts, and a busy social calendar kept me from cleaning it up for far longer than I'm proud to admit. Now, though, everything's dusted and sparkly and freshly-washed, and the whole place smells elusively like Lemon Pledge and Pinesol. 

I finally figured out what I want to do with my artwork from Paris, and I can't wait to take it over to Posters on Board and get it all framed and matted and ready to go. Perhaps another peek at the apartment is due...things have changed so much since my first mini-tour in November!

It's so nice to know that I have a great day ahead. Quick workout, meeting Kelsie for a brewery visit, and a fantastic dinner tonight at a place I've wanted to try FOREVER with my mama bear before a quite-fancy and fabulous little gala party... 

Happy Saturday!

Summer Snapshots: Brewery Touring

As I mentioned earlier, this summer has been a bit hefty on libations. While my beverage of choice will always be a gin and tonic when the temps hit the 90s, I discovered a new hobby I love this summer: touring craft breweries and taprooms!

Minneapolis has a large population of great local breweries, and I have a secret weapon: my bff of a decade, Kelsie, is a taproom expert. Her roommates used to brew their own beer, and she's got a wealth of knowledge of the best places to grab a pint. 

We paid our first breweries a visit very early in the summer with a planned brewery crawl! Kels and her delightful sister Jamie, as well as Kels's friend Maren, started our day at the 612 Brewery and Taproom, which opened up in February of 2013. I started my day off with a super dark nitro-charged stout, which was delicious, as were the pulled pork barbecue nachos we all split while enjoying the sunny weather on their expansive outdoor patio!

We then trekked the short half-mile to Indeed Brewing Company, which has graced Northeast with its presence since 2011. I personally preferred the atmosphere of Indeed to 612...their taproom was cozy with rich woods and large warehouse windows, and their back patio, though smaller than 612's, was festooned with café lights and fragrant flower boxes. Here, we sampled the "LSD" summer brew, a "kaleidoscopic combination" of lavender, sunflower honey, and dates. The beer was unlike anything I've ever tasted--smooth, sweet without crossing the line into cloying, and incredibly refreshing. 

Our next stop on the tour departed a bit from our beer adventures, as we headed to Sociable Ciderwerks. Located just a little over half a mile from both Indeed and 612, Sociable specializes in hard ciders. We couldn't even come close to picking between the eight (!) different varieties of hard cider and beer, so we did two samplers and split them among ourselves.

Favorites included the special, a cucumber-infused cider that totally hit the spot, as well as the Freewheeler, a classic dry apple. We weren't as crazy about the Hop-A-Wheelie, a hopped cider that overwhelmed a bit, or the jalapeño-spiced cider. 

A few weeks later, we hit another new Northeast brewery, Dangerous Man, for an afternoon of board games and beer. I LOVED Dangerous Man...their Vanilla Rooibos Red Ale and their Dark Chocolate Stout were both beers I would order again with no hesitation. 

I liked Dangerous Man so much I took my dad back a few weeks later! I had a blast drinking beer and people-watching with my favorite dangerous man. We actually met the head brewer's wife and darling toddler daughter, who seemed to have acquired an early taste for beer foam...too cute. 

To round out our beer-heavy summer, Kels, Jamie and I gathered up a great conglomeration of my Twin Cities friends from all eras and hit up the Northeast Brewers' Block Party! Hosted by all the Northeast breweries, the inaugural year of this event was home to a little over a dozen different summery beers, four food trucks, and...oh yeah...7,500 other beer fans. Fortunately we arrived early enough to get a few rounds in before the lines stretched to over an hour long, at which point we bailed to go soak up the beer with some nachos in a less crowded environment. That said, I'm already looking forward to next year--hopefully the kinks will be ironed out!

The coolest part about the Minnesota brewery scene? We've barely scratched the surface! On my list for the coming months: Bauhaus, Day Block, and Fulton in Minneapolis, as well as Bang! Brewery and Vine Park in Saint Paul. I'd also love to organize a weekend trip to check out some other locations...Lift Bridge in Stillwater, Leinenkugel in Chippewa Falls, WI, and Bent Paddle in Duluth, perhaps? Let's be real...I'm not going to stop until I see this actually happen in real life: 

Summer Snapshots/#98: State Fair

Another day, another 101 in 1001 checked off! Across the rest of the country, the word association for phrases like "on a stick," "deep-fried," "butter princess," and "mini donut beer" conjure confused looks and the occasional "WTF." Here in my beloved land of 10,000 lakes, they mean only one thing: it's State Fair Time. 

The Great Minnesota Get-Together runs for around 2 weeks at the end of every August, and this year, my family attended on the most crowded day of all time...or at least since they've been keeping attendance records. Saturday dawned warm-but-not-hot, overcast-but-not-rainy, and we packed up and headed to the Fairgrounds around 10am. By 4pm, 252,000+ people had embraced the same plan, and we were completely overwhelmed and ready to be done. But in those six hours...oh man, get ready for totally epic exploits. We ate food. We (well, some of us) rode rides. We drank beer. We people-watched with the best'of'em. In short, we completely dominated the fair. 

Imagine, if you will, a morning that starts off with deep-fried cookie dough on a stick for breakfast. Then pair that cookie dough with a cinnamon bun the size of your head, dripping in sweet lemony icing, and you have our first food consumption of our State Fair morning. (Yes, I took pictures of almost everything we ate. No, no apologies.)

Being totally honest, getting to the fair a bit earlier in the day probably saved/made the whole experience for me. It wasn't as hot as later, and there was still room to move without getting someone else's...Pronto Pup...all up in your face, if you know what I mean. We headed in the general direction of the Mighty Midway, with a pit stop along the way to pick up some Comet Corn from the Blue Moon Drive-In. It was...interesting. 

Caramel corn dusted in pretzel crumbs and cheddar cheese powder, then "fried" in liquid nitrogen? It tasted like Corn Pops but had this weird, mouth-singeingly cold inital shock. Super different. I wouldn't eat them again, but I'd recommend trying them for the sheer weirdness. 

Then we hit the Midway...

Dad's fascinated with this launchy ride that throws you up in the air and bounces you around until gravity has its way with you again. I'd HATE it. 

Dad was super excited for the Midway. Em, on the other hand, made sure to thoroughly verify that she was tall enough to ride all the rides. We scoped out our options...

And after passing on the holy-shit-that-looks-freaky Kamikaze, which flips you upside down at least 8 times, Dad and Em settled on the straight-from-the-70s Bobsled Blitz. Mom and I selfied...

...while Em maintained her cool and Dad's facial expressions made my entire life. MY ENTIRE LIFE. 

We also got snowed by one of those classic rigged Midway games that nobody ever wins. As this particular game entailed throwing pingpong balls into glass bowls, Em insisted she'd dominate because she's so good at beer pong. After two games, neither Em, Dad, nor I had made one. single. ball. But our consolation prizes were super cute (we later gave them to the cutest little toddler ever just to get rid of them).

The Fair opened a whole new area, the West Market, this year. It's home to the Blue Barn, proprietors of The Lowry, Highland Grill, etcetera, and it was heralded as having some of this year's best new food options. We tried the blueberry basil lemonade along with the DELISH blue cheese corn fritters...which were unanimously our entire fam's favorite food of the day. I could've eaten an entire order myself. So good. We also sampled, but I failed to photograph, the "World Famous Salty Tart Coconut Macaroons." They were yummy, but I'm curious to verify their fame on my upcoming travels. 

I'm going to take a break from my regularly-scheduled, chronological recap to analyze two major titans of our fair day: the hot topic of 2014: Mini Donut Beer or S'mores Beer? The former, brewed by Lift Bridge Brewery in Stillwater, MN and served at the Ball Park Café, captured my heart instantly with its cinnamon-sugar rim and sweet, not bitter, caramely flavor. The latter, served by Giggles' Campfire Grill, satisfied my sweet tooth with a chocolate fudge and graham cracker crust rim, and a floating, beer-soaked jumbo marshmallow. The win totally goes to the Mini Donut. It was to-die-for. 

While we enjoyed our second Mini Donut Beer of the day, the daily fair parade came by and we were treated to a firsthand glimpse of Princess Kay of the Milky Way! For non-Minnesotans, Princess Kay is the winner of the annual Fair Pageant for girls who grew up on Minnesota dairy farms. She's one of the fair's official ambassadors, but the truly big deal is that she gets her head carved in like...100 pounds of butter or something insane like that. See below: 

I can totally see the likeness. Can't you? We munched on Pronto Pups before the parade...did you know Pronto Pups are the original corn-battered hot dog on a stick, and originated IN Minnesota? Magic, folks...and after, we split a chocolate-covered Salted Nut Roll (another family favorite, I'd call this a don't-miss for 2015). 

At this point, though, things were getting uncomfortably, claustrophobically crowded. Pronto Pups all up in my face, crabby people elbowing us, and so. many. weirdos. We hot-footed it to Machinery Hill, where Dad admired cars and snowmobiles while we admired the cute guys admiring machinery, and ran into some family friends! After a long chat with them, we decided to leave, but not without one last stop. 

It's a tradition. They're so trashy and so to-die-for that I didn't even stop to take a picture before we inhaled them. And with that, our State Fair 2014 experience came to an end. We walked 12,000 steps per Em's iPhone pedometer, and we ingested 12,000 calories...before noon. It was, all in all, an epic success. Here's to the Great Minnesota Get Together!