We're off to the market...Soulard and Urzi's, that is.

Well, before we start our St. Louis adventure, I have to mention that we actually started our St. Louis trek on Thursday night. We left Lees Summit at the end of the work day and headed to Columbia to revel in one of our favorite restaurants of all time - Shakespeare's Pizza. We ordered the cheese garlic bread for a much needed starter (since we were saving up our hunger most of Thursday). Then the main event - an 8" cheese pizza for the girls and a 12" Masterpiece for us. And believe us - it's a masterpiece. Delicious! We also saw Gary Pinkel; I thought that was a good omen for the game.

Anyway, Friday morning took us to a couple of our favorite stops in St. Louis: Soulard Farmers Market and Urzi's Italian Market in The Hill. When visiting St. Louis, we typically hit Soulard Market on Saturday morning with the rest of the crowd but this time around we thought we would try it on a Friday morning. Still as cool as ever with great veggies, fruits, and flowers but we missed the freshly made mini-donuts. We were so bummed as we had forgone breakfast at Union Station for the mini-donuts. We still managed to find something for breakfast - a giant chocolate chip cookie (what can I say, we're on vacation) and an apple thingy at the Soulard Bakery. We also picked up some cherries, bananas, and beautiful fresh spray roses for the Lyngs who we were visiting later that day.

Next stop was Urzi's Italian Market located in The Hill neighborhood. We discovered this wonderful market when we lived in St. Louis over 12 years ago (yikes!). If you love to cook and are looking for wonderful seasonings and visit or live in St. Louis, this is a must-see shop. Even if we are just passing through St. Louis, we make it a point to take stock of our spice inventory in case we need to stop at Urzi's. In the past couple of visits, we've picked up bread dipping seasoning, pizza seasoning, fajita seasoning, and other goodies. This visit we're trying their pizza sauce and a hunk of parmesan cheese - should be yummy.

After Urzi's we headed to an afternoon visit with our friends, the Lyngs. We spent the rest of the afternoon catching up and boating on Lake St. Louis before heading back downtown for dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory at Laclede's Landing. While walking around the landing, we saw plenty of people donning their true colors - black and gold - and got a couple of "Go Tigers!" along the way. We saw some of that ugly orange and blue stuff too (thumbs down as Molly would sign). Oh it's going to be a fun atmosphere!