Jack and I are watching the Super Bowl for completely different reasons; he for the quintessential guy reason, I for the quintessential girl reason. So far, my favorite commercial was the one for Bud Light with the skydivers; the instructor is trying to coax the last guy into jumping out of the plane, and the guy is refusing to do it. The instructor says, "Not even for a Bud Light?" He tosses a six-pack out the door, and instead of the skydiver jumping out of the plane, the pilot runs from the front of the plane and jumps out. The other two just sit there staring at each other, and then the instructor says something at the end that I didn't catch because I was laughing too hard.

I've been in and out of the kitchen all afternoon making fun Super Bowl food, even though we're not really having a party. I made chocolate cupcakes first, because I needed to frost them with homemade peppermint frosting. I ended up freezing most of the cupcakes unfrosted, and I'll just take them out a few at a time later to defrost so that we can enjoy their chocolatey goodness. I also made little pumpernickel toasts for the spinach dip that's in the freezer, but we haven't eaten that yet. We're too full on the mini-quiches that I made. I'm getting pretty good at working with phyllo dough, so I used that for the crusts and then made bacon (for me), spinach, and plain cheese quiches for some variety. I'm stuffed already.

We went to our first real Mardi Gras parade yesterday. It was the Spanish Town parade in downtown Baton Rouge, and we ran into the people from Jack's office who had been there, eating and drinking, since about 9 a.m. (the parade started at 12). We managed to catch a respectable number of bead necklaces--not so many that we looked trashy like the annoying, loud people in front of us, but enough that we felt sufficiently caught up by the parade spirit. Here's a picture of us in our beads, just so you get the idea:



The floats were fun to see, too. They all had 10 to 30 people on top who were tossing stuff at us, and most had silly little phrases, some more couth than others, painted on the sides. I was impressed with how much thought obviously went into it for some of these groups; they were costumed, coordinated, and really excited to be there. My favorite was a marching and dancing group of people dressed up in chicken costumes, who danced and pushed little fake lawnmowers all through the parade route:



They were dancing this hilarious routine to the Chicken Dance, which involved lots of jumping and even a long kick-line at the end. We were crying from laughing so hard.

We're going to New Orleans, either tomorrow evening or Tuesday morning, depending on which seems wiser for traffic and stuff. We've heard that the hour-and-a-half trip may take three or more hours during the parade season, so wish us luck getting there and back in one piece! I'm excited to see the parade(s) there, especially since the Spanish Town parade was cool, but I got the feeling that the crowd people weren't really throwing their hearts into their outfits and costumes.


Okay, I just saw another funny commerical, this time for Pepsi. They usually manage to have some good ones. This one features a bunch of different scenes with people's Pepsi bottles singing to them (supposedly "their" songs), and one of the people is a teenager who's meeting his girlfriend's parents. His bottle is singing to her, "I don't like your mom! I don't like your mom!" LOL.

Labels: kitchen adventures, Louisiana, observations

• posted by erica 2/06/2005 07:21:00 PM
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