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On Monday, we’ll be embarking on a belated honeymoon! We’re pretty excited about it. Where are we headed? Well, I’ll get to that in a second. First, you have to know a few things. One: we won’t be making any blog posts next week, so you’ll have to make due without us. Two: we’re planning on doing some great blog posts on our return, which will recap our adventures.

We’re starting our trip by driving down to Nashville, where we’ll be doing some touristy things like visiting the Country Music Hall of Fame, but we’ll also be seeing Jack White at the Ryman Auditorium. After a few days in Nashville, we’ll be heading east to Dollywood! Sarah loves Dolly and rollercoasters, so this is a must. Finally we’ll be breaking up our trip back by stopping in Louisville and hitting up a few Kentucky distilleries on the way. Honeymoon, here we come!

{ Untitled by mexico rosel }

{ Ice Out by Greg Hargreaves }

Well, we did it, folks. PGA (Please Generate Art) opened last Friday, and for 6 hours that day, hundreds upon hundreds of people wandered through the whimsical, mini-golf inspired art exhibit. Between shuttling people through Sound Collective, the section that Caitlin O’Meara, Laura Bock, and I created for PGA, and re-filling our balloon wall (you’ll see later), Brian and I managed to take a quick break to run through the course ourselves. I snapped a few photos so that I could take you through the magic, too!

After grabbing a golf ball and club at the Pro Shop, we started the course at Identity Registry. Giant watercolored walls filled with fun, child-like drawings provided the backdrop for a canvas of thumbprints. We each added our thumbprint to the registry.

Next, we went Down The Rabbit Hole. This installation, created by Dance/Movement Therapy & Counseling graduate students, Emily D’Annunzio, Courtney St. Clair, and their friends, was dark and creepy and disorienting. And amazing. We had to carefully maneuver the course, which was crawling — literally, crawling — with dancers covered in glow-in-the-dark body paint. Quite surreal.

Once we putted through all the holes in Down The Rabbit Hole, we pushed our way through the curtain to the next section and found ourselves staring at one enormous eye, blinking and looking around as it was projected onto the curtain walls. Our good buddy Sarah Newby created this voyeuristic section. So cool, Sarah. So cool.

Next was one of my favorite sections — We Generate Our Own Environment by Master of Arts in Teaching candidates, Danielle Holtz and Sarah McHugh. They created a giant cardboard city, which participants could alter by adding stickers or projecting different colors, patterns, and textures onto the walls. The end result was just beautiful.

After adding our stickers to the cardboard city, Brian and I wandered through Balloon Consume. To pass through, we each had to blow up one balloon and add it to all the other balloons that had been added before us.

In addition to orchestrating much of PGA (Please Generate Art) throughout the pat year, recent Master of Arts Management grad and our fun friend, Lucia Palmarini, put together her own section for the exhibit. Throughout the last semester, she collected art, photos, stories, and poems from friends, family, and strangers. On the big day, these bits and pieces were strewn together by PGA participants, creating new, changing narratives as the day wore on.

Next up: Town Crier. Boy was this one amazing! It was like a non-virtual twitter feed. We wrote down brief sentences on index cards and handed them to the crier who proceeded to read our “tweets” aloud through a megaphone for all of PGA to hear. After being announced, we tied our “tweets” to pieces of yarn that hung from the ceiling and left our words to mingle with everyone else’s ideas, opinions, and silly thoughts. Our favorite “tweet” of the day was the very first one: “I need soup!”

Next up was Paint Blast. It was definitely a blast. We dipped golf balls in paint and rolled them across a canvas on the ground. Messy, but so much fun.

And finally, we found ourselves at the last section — Sound Collective, created by yours truly and my crazy-awesome classmates Laura and Caitlin. We had a giant rainbow colored xylophone, a glittery metallic tunnel filled with tiny jingle bells, and the magnificent tambo-ring of fire. (Disclaimer: We didn’t actually set this on fire. That would have been crazy. Too crazy.) We putted through the tambo-ring using special tambourine clubs and then rounded the corner to the big finale — a game of darts with an enormous wall of balloons. Some balloons had noisemakers inside! People loved this.

By the end of the day, our balloon wall had seen hundreds and hundreds of people. We went through 1,000 balloons, folks. I consider that a measure of success.

Also a measure of our success: we be such good friends now! And I gotta give a special shout-out to all the artists, administrators, and volunteers who made PGA happen: Lucia Palmarini, David Marts, Brandea Turner, Jessica Weisensell, Carolyn Sybesma, Alistair Porter, Sarah Schwartz, Sam Funt, Caitlin Duerinck, Stephen DeSantis, Katie Collins, Emily D’Annunzio, Danielle Holtz, Sarah McHugh, Courtney St. Clair, Michael “Hoodie” LaHood, Chris Naka and the Workroom staff, Jefferson Godard, Kari Sommers, Building Services, DEPS, The Recycling Department, The Graduate Office, Student Organization Council, Xerox, Ace Hardware, Jo-Ann Fabrics, and Home Depot. It took a village!

{ Untitled by Jack Toohey }

{ The More We Wander by Monica Canilao & Kyle Ranson }

{ Sidewalk by Michelle Fleck }

{ Triangles off Boundary Street by Jonathan Winstone }

The Pegu Club was a gentelman’s club for British officers in Burma, which was set up in the late 1800′s. The signature drink of the club is the now classic Pegu Club Cocktail, which for one reason or another I had never made. But with the weather heating up, it seemed like a good time to give it a go. If you’re a gin fan, I’d suggest you try it as well.

Pegu Club Cocktail

2 oz London Dry Gin

3/4 oz Orange Curaçao

1/2 oz fresh lime juice

1 dash Angostura

1 dash orange bitters

Combine all ingredients in a shaker. Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a lime twist.

(from Bitters: A Spirited History)

{ Untitled by Philippa Leith }

{ Untitled by Thomas Prior (via Booooooom) }

{ image via Pinterest }

Morning folks! I’m sorry for the radio silence last week. Between finals, Manifest, and working at commencement, I could barley find time for personal hygiene, let alone for blogging. Don’t worry–I DID find time for showering. And on Sunday, I finally found time for a little R&R. So now we’re back! In between catching up on laundry and emails this week, we’ll tell you all about our exciting plans for next week. We’re finally taking our honeymoon, folks! I bet you’ll never guess where we’re going. Check back later in the week to find out!

{ Untitled by Julia Hoffman }

{ Long Time Now by Stefan Kürten (via Booooooom) }

The first time I had Cochinita Pibil was in a west side Chicago neighborhood restaurant called Xni-pec and I fell in love with it. A whole pork shoulder wrapped in a banana leaf and braised. In a soft corn tortilla with a generous spoon of your preferred salsa, it epitomizes everything I love about Mexican food. It is a beautiful balance of rich tender meat, fat, bright citrus and spice.

In thinking about what I might do for my second “Sunday Ritual” post, I let the weird weather we’ve been having dictate my decision. In March we had a long stretch of some summer-like weather but in the past few days we’ve gone back to chilly, damp and blustery. It definitely feels like we’re experiencing fall rather than spring. So instead of dreaming about early summer strawberries or light tomato salads, my mind is back in roasting and braising mode. Luckily I have a few pages photocopied from the braising bible All About Braising by Molly Stevens. Paging through my recipes binder, I found one for Cochinita Pibil I had saved! Oh Em Gee. It sounded perfect for a Sunday roast and it didn’t sound very complicated aside from a few steps I had never done before. Hell yes I was up for the challenge!

Luckily I live very close to a large Mexican supermarket so I went and got some specialty ingredients ( which you can also get at a Whole Foods or a more gourmet market if you don’t have a Latin market near you). I went home, prepped the meat, stuck it in the oven and 6 hours later, I had Cochinita Pibil. I mean, its a whole roasted shoulder so I’ll have Cochinita Pibil for days (weeks, possibly a month). Bring it on!

P.S. This recipe requires some forethought as you need to marinate the meat overnight. Of course, I did not anticipate this and I only marinated for 2 hours. It turned really delicious so if you do this the proper way, you will probably have something even more mind blowing.

Cochinita Pibil

adapted from Molly Steven’s All About Braising

The Spice Paste:
4 large garlic cloves, crushed
1 Tablespoon coarse salt
2 Tablespoons of ground cumin
1 Tablespoon of oregano
2 dried red chiles, crushed or 1 ½ teapsoons crushed red pepper flakes
2 Tablespoons achiote paste (optional)
2-3 tablespoons cider vinegar

The Braise:
2-3 large fresh or thawed frozen banana leaves, rinsed and dried
One 7-9 lb bone in Boston butt or picnic shoulder, skin on or off

1. Mix all the ingredients for the spice paste and set aside.
2. With a pair of scissors, trim off the fibrous center rib that usually runs down the length of one side of the leaves and save it to tie the roast (you can also use kitchen twine. I used both.). Sear the banana leaves by passing it 2” above a burner flame on high. This makes the leaves more pliable. Set aside.
3. If you bought a skin on roast, score a cross hatch pattern on the skin to reveal the fat underneath. Rub all over with spice paste.
4. To wrap the pork with the banana leaves, lift the meat and place on one leaf and wrap it around several times. Lift the wrapped pork and place it on another banana leaf and wrap the meat perpendicular to the way you wrapped it the first time. Tie securely with saved leaf rib or kitchen twine. Set on tray and marinate in fridge from 12-24 hours.
5. Heat your oven to 300 degrees F. Let the pork sit at room temp while you wait for your oven to heat up. Place a little steamer rack (or if you don’t have one, an upside down plate would work too) at the bottom of a large dutch oven. If you have a roasting pan with a rack, that would also work. Fill the bottom with a couple of inches of water and place the banana leaf wrapped pork on top of the rack and cover tightly with lid or foil. Place in oven.
6. After 3 hours, turn the pork over and then roast for another 3 hours.
7. When the Cochinita Pibil is ready, shred it with two forks and serve with tortillas, salsas, onions, cilantro, wedges of lime. I made a quick red onion pickle . I also roasted some jalapeños just over a burner on my stove until they were blistered and black — just remember to de-rib and de-seed them if you don’t want them so spicey.

Have some banana leaves left over? Here are some other things you can make with them.

Editor’s Note: this post is part of the series “A Sunday Ritual” by guest blogger Debbie Carlos.