Apartment hunting and things of lately

Hey there bloggies :)

I think it's about time I get back into the blogging swing of things. Work got crazy, and I started school, so I haven't had much time to blog (or do any interesting things to later blog about). I'll make an effort to change that!

I had a glorious Saturday with my hubby. The weather was 65*, sunny and gorgeous - a well-deserved break from the hideous winter we've all had. Of course, the forecast for Monday is 27* and snowy...as my husband put it, it's winter's last middle finger to us all as it makes its exit.

We spent the morning walking around Bethesda and looking at potential apartments for our move in August, and we may have actually found one! It seems like a long ways off, but since June is only two(ish) months away and residents in these buildings are required to give notice 60 days before they move, the timing is actually perfect. I can't believe my favorite part of town might be right outside my door pretty soon! We also had lunch in the area, and I stopped into a salon real quick to get my hair shampooed, since I've been dealing with this for the past 10 days:

That's not the most recent picture (the splint is out now), but I'm not about to show you guys the gory details. One little slip of the knife while cutting kale at work = 11 stitches and a ridiculously long recovery time. It's been frustrating to have limited use of one hand, especially in my line of work. I can get the stitches out tomorrow (which I'm hoping they'll numb my finger for..), but the healing might take a while longer. So naturally I jumped at the chance to get a $5 shampoo at a cheap salon and save myself another pathetic attempt at washing my own hair with just one hand <-- harder than it sounds. 

Kale massacre aside, work has been pretty good. Busy, though. Every week I think my work load will lighten up, and every week something unexpected pops up and my work load just increases. I'm in the middle of setting up new software which will enable me to calculate the nutritional information and do the costing for all our recipes. In theory, very exciting. In reality, I have no idea how to set up software. And to make matters more complicated, the company this software comes from is in Australia, so I can't even reach them to beg for help during my normal business hours (middle of the night over there). I may have to stay late one night this week and use up all the Skype minutes I bought with the company credit card until someone answers in the land down under.

In other news, here's a cute but terrible thing my cat does now:

Whenever I have a glass of water out, she finds it and drinks out of it. File this under the "I definitely shouldn't let her do that, but I think it's cute so I don't want to stop her" category. I even gave her her own glass the other day, since I always have to dump out the rest of the water after she drinks out of it (because ew). I should probably put an end to the bad behavior sooner rather than later. 

So that's what's going on over here. What's going on with you guys?

xo

Just a few home remedies

Happy Saturday morning!

Hope you're all having a great weekend so far. Mine has been lovely. I had planned to do an Insanity workout yesterday, but a 9.5-hour work day on Thursday without any real break left my poor feet seriously sore. Needless to say, Insanity wasn't going to happen, so I went to a yoga class instead. I'm planning a series of low-impact workouts this week, like spinning, Pilates and yoga, to give my body a chance to recuperate.

Speaking of work, I have a home remedy to share with you guys. My nails have been falling apart lately. Literally, falling apart. I spend a lot of time at work doing dishes, not because I'm the only one who will do them, but because I actually love doing them. Playing in the soapy water reminds me of bathtime as a little kid, and it's a chance to think and have some semblance of alone time during a busy work day. Yes, I could wear dish gloves, but they slow me down and suck all the fun out of playing in the bubbles. Anyway....my hands have been in rough shape from all the harsh detergent/sanitizer/hot water. Here are the recipes for the homemade hand scrub and cuticle cream I've been relying on:

Scrub:
1/2 C brown sugar or raw sugar
1/2 C coconut oil

Looks nasty, smells nasty, works like a charm. I use it on my hands every few nights, followed my the cuticle cream and a thick moisturizer before bed, and it leaves them super soft. I've used it as a body scrub, too. 

Cuticle cream:

1 T Shea butter

Few drops lavendar oil

Few drops geranium oil

Few drops cedarwood oil

1 t coconut oil

As far as the thick moisturizer is concerned, the best one I've found is Aveeno Eczema Therapy. It's not greasy at all (my biggest hand cream pet peeve) and it seems to work for a while - not just until the next time I wash my hands. It's a personal preference, though. I know a lot of people love the look ma, new hands lotion from Bath & Body Works - I might look into that one when my Aveeno runs out. 

Now, let's move on to an edible home remedy. I've been waking up with a stuffy nose lately, so this morning I decided to give my own Vitamin C Smoothie recipe a whirl. You can find a bunch of recipes like this online, but this one is my own combination of vitamin C-rich fruits and a lemon, ginger and turmeric wellness shot I've been obsessed with lately. 

Ingredients:

1 C mixed berries

1/2 C pineapple

3 clementines 

Juice from 1/2 a lemon

1 Thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled

1/2 t turmeric

1/2 t cayenne pepper

Enough coconut water to cover all the ingredients in the blender. 

Blend on high.

It was actually pretty tasty! It was pleasantly spicy from the ginger and cayenne, and the sweetness of the pineapple and berries balanced it nicely. I'll definitely make it again. 

So there you have it! Some natural, homemade remedies for ya. 

We're planning some errands for the day, and we may or may not go out to dinner tonight. It's restaurant week and my hubby made reservations at a Spanish restaurant, but we have so much food here, I'm wondering if we should stay in. I planned three meals for last week, but the 9x13 pan of baked ziti I made on Monday somehow ended up lasting us ALL WEEK. 

Have a great weekend!

xo

Enchis & labels

Good morning all! 

I'm blogging before the sun is up, for a change. I started a slightly different work schedule this week - I'll be working from 10 to 5 or 6, depending on how busy we are around that time. I'd like to be able to better supervise/help the night crew, and staying later in the day is the best way to do it. Bonus - getting morning workouts in will be easier, and once I start classes, I'll have time to study in the morning, when I'm the most productive and alert. I've never worked full time and gone to school before, but I imagine trying to study after a long day at work isn't very effective.

I've got an enchilada recipe to share! Partly so you guys can make it if you'd like, and partly so I don't forget what went into it.

-1 whole zucchini
-1 can chipotle peppers in adobo (can be omitted - they were pretty spicy)
-1/2 lb mushrooms
-2 cloves of garlic
-Olive oil for sauteeing
-4 stalks kale, shredded
-1 package of corn tortillas (I think it was about 12)
-2 8 oz cans of enchilada sauce (I used the Frontera brand, and it was exactly two baggies)
-Shredded cheese (I used the Trader Joe's equivalent of fancy blend)
-1 C shredded pre-cooked chicken (also optional)

-Slice zucchini, mushrooms and kale and saute in garlicky olive oil over medium heat until soft. To shred the kale, strip the leaves off the "bone", roll into a tight ball and slice very finely with a heavy chef's knife.

-When veggies are soft, add chipotle peppers and heat until warm. Add shredded chicken. Turn off heat.

-Empty one pouch/can of enchi sauce into a 9x13 pan. Dip each corn tortilla into sauce, covering both sides, and fill each tortilla with veggie mix. Place each tortilla into the pan, nestled side by side.

-When all the tortillas are filled, pour the remaining enchi sauce over the top and cover with as much or as little shredded cheese as you'd like.

-Bake at 350 for 20 minutes or so - check on them after 15. Cheese should be bubbly and browning.

The only pic I have is of the leftover meal I ate the next day:

Next to more garlicky kale. Had to use that stuff up. 

My husband went crazy for them - I think his exact words were: "How does a girl who grew up in the suburbs in Massachusetts know how to make enchiladas like this?" <-- high praise from someone who grew up in New Mexico. I would have preferred them without the chicken, but my husband was happy to eat the pieces I picked out. 

Incidentally, I love that you can add kale to anything and suddenly it sounds healthy. Bacon-wrapped hot dogs on a bed of steamed kale? Healthy!!

Since we're on the subject of eating chicken, I thought I'd share a thought I've had, especially in the light of some recent resolutions. I work at a restaurant that serves all vegetarian food, and we've recently had an influx of resolutioners who want to become vegetarians in the new year.

I love the vegetarian diet, but I wish that instead of resolving to become a vegetarian (or vegan), people would simply resolve to eat less meat. Sometimes I think that when people label themselves, they set themselves up to fail. I can't tell you how many times I've heard things along the lines of: "I tried being vegan, but I could never give up putting milk in my coffee", or "I was a vegetarian for two years, but then I ate some chicken".

This person thought of herself as a vegetarian, and when she ate the piece of chicken, she broke that label. In her mind, she was no longer a vegetarian, and she could go back to eating meat all the time. If she had resolved to eat less meat, she wouldn't have been destroying any label by eating some chicken. She could have avoided the "fallen off the wagon" thing. I've lived by the "eat less meat" model for five years or so, and I think it's been quite successful. I almost never eat meat, but I've never felt like it was off limits.

I think if you eat a mostly vegan diet but have milk in your coffee, you're doing great. If you eat chicken once every two years, you're also doing great. No need to get extreme about it, you know?

Anyway, I'm off to work. I'm trying to get into a blogging routine, so you should hear from me again on Thursday.

xo

Resolutions

Once again, it took me a while to get back into blog mode after my vacation. But here I am. Hi world!

As much as I love the holidays, I'm happy to be back in a routine. I keep telling myself that spring is right around the corner now, but sadly, the weather isn't playing along.

(that 3 kills me!)

I know it's worse in other parts of the country, but I was counting on a milder winter now that I'm living in Maryland. How can a state that gets so miserably hot in the summer also get this cold?? Shouldn't it be one or the other?

My husband and I had planned to hit up the gym early this morning, but we didn't even make it to the car in the bitter cold before I was begging him to work out at home with me instead. We did rounds of single leg deadlifts, single leg squats, bicep curls to shoulder presses and turkish get-ups, followed by 20 minutes of tabata training. It was the best workout I've gotten in a while, and since no one else was in the workout room, I got to play music out of my new speakers and dance around in between sets. 

Anyway..

I've been thinking about resolutions lately. I usually don't make any, because January 1st never felt like the start of a new year to me - September did, because that's when I always started a new school year. This year, it felt like a bigger deal, and I ended up making quite a few resolutions. They're small, so hopefully I won't abandon them all come February:

-Transition to natural cleaning products (you already knew about this one)

-Eat more fermented foods and drinks 

-Get four workouts in per week, minimum. This one has been so hard! I used to live for my workouts, but the truth is, with a full time job, they just seem to fall to the side. I'm trying to change that. 

-Read one book per month. I've been reading, like, one page of my book every few days. And it's Kitchen Confidential - a book I've already read several times. PATHETIC. I need to change that. 

-Count to 10 before I react. At work, and at home. 

-Plan meals for the week every Saturday. I've been slacking in this department. 

-Cut down on the amount of plastic I use. I'm trying to transition to adult water glasses instead of the plastic cups I love so much. 

Speaking of cleaning, I made a cleaning schedule to kick off the new year. I searched and searched for a good one on Pinterest, but none of them were exactly right - most of them included tasks that don't apply to me, like cleaning the garage and mowing the lawn. So I made my own:

It takes me about 2 hours to clean the entire apartment from top to bottom, and I always save it for Friday. I thought it would be great to break it down into smaller tasks to do throughout the week. Turns out, I'm not really a fan of the new system. My husband said it best: "If you assign a cleaning task to every day of the week, you're cleaning all week." Not only did I not feel like cleaning after long days at work, but I ended up doing a big clean on Friday anyway. Oh well. I gave it a shot. Maybe it's a better system for cleaning a house. 

I'm off to dinner with my husband and his family. His parents are visiting, and they requested Ethiopian food. Fine by me :)

What are your resolutions for the new year? 

xo

The end of an era

Can we talk about how it's been 70 degrees here (and elsewhere across the country) for the past two days?

Weather like this makes me want to cry happy tears. We spent my day off breathing in as much of the warm air as we possibly could. Sadly, it won't be around for much longer. 

We walked around downtown, did some last-minute shopping, and shared a milkshake and a bagel (random combo). 

The bagel (white & black with jalapeno cheddar cream cheese) was so good that we decided to go back for more to take home. Only they didn't have any more of the bagels we wanted, or the cream cheese, so we settled on two flavors which turned out to not be very good. When will I learn that I almost always regret food impulse buys? I literally still have all the impulse buys I've picked up since moving here. I eat a little bit and then they just...sit there. Unless my husband jumps on the grenade and finishes them for me. 

We ended the day at Men's Wearhouse, where my husband picked out two new suits for his Christmas present. His new job starts in January <-- really the best Christmas present I could ask for. 

I feel like one (very small) chapter of my life is coming to a close. Tomorrow night we leave for Boston, where we'll spend Christmas with my fam, and when we get back a few things will be different. My husband will be working 40+ hours, with a normal schedule, and I'll be in classes again at the end of January. I'll also be adding a few new responsibilities to my plate at work. Shortly after that, Spring will be on the horizon, and we'll start talking more seriously about where we'll be moving over the summer. This chapter has been extremely challenging, but extremely rewarding, and I'm so, so happy with my life right now. I think the next chapter will also be both, but in new ways. I'm very optimistic, and we all know that's not a word I use to describe myself often :)

I'll see you all from Newton!

xo

That time I made the worst pasta anyone has ever seen.

Hi world!

How's your week going? Mine has been a little rough...I've been feeling under the weather, but I'm confident I can kick the bug.

I feel like I've been slacking in the cooking department lately, so I had a plan to cook more at home this week. I found a couple recipes to try, stocked up on ingredients at work, and gave it a whirl. To put it nicely, some of those recipes came out better than others.

We all take risks in the kitchen, right? Sometimes they turn out really really well, and sometimes they turn into horrible failures. The zucchini pancakes I mentioned in my last post come to mind. The purple noodles I made the other day also come to mind.

I found a recipe online (the source of which shall remain nameless) which called for a pasta sauce made out of sweet potato, tofu and tarragon, among other things. We have these awesome purple sweet potatoes at work right now, and I thought it would be nice to use them instead of regular orange sweet potatoes. I had a vision involving super cool and creative purple pasta.

Not only did the process take forever, but about halfway through, I got a bad feeling about the outcome. I blended the sauce in the vitamix and it smelled completely unappetizing - kind of like dead houseplants. Meanwhile my husband watched, horrified, as I stirred the purple tofuey slop.

It was NOT GOOD. We dumped goat cheese on it, and the only edible bites were the ones that were 90% goat cheese. My husband was completely unsurprised and couldn't believe I had thought a recipe involving blended sweet potato, tarragon and tofu would turn out well. I guess it sounded like a good idea in theory? In all fairness, sometimes I don't understand his food choices, either - like when he grabs a handful of babybel cheeses and dips them into hummus like they're pita chips. 

So you don't have nightmares, here's my attempt at paleo sweet potato brownies, which turned out to be delicious:

I followed this recipe, and I was shocked at how easy it was. In my experience, specialty recipes (paleo, vegan, raw - especially raw,) tend to be very complicated and require expensive ingredients and equipment. This recipe was simple, and I already had every ingredient. Yay! 

So there you have it, one kitchen-tastrophy and one success. I'm just glad my kitchen disaster took place at home and not at work. Not that I haven't had my fair share of close calls there, too..

Have a great night, and I'll be back soon with another post.

xo 

A swiffer makeover/ green clean 2014

Hi guys!

The snow came back today. It was actually pretty bad on my drive to work, but it cleared up by the time I had to drive home. Predictably, work was incredibly slow. One of my coworkers and I used the downtime to deep clean and organize backstock, and I have to say, we were both extremely proud of the result. 

I was at an awesome work event all day yesterday, which I'll get to in a minute. First, a few pics from the night:

My husband has been begging for more veggies at home, so I came through and made this meal of baked shrimp on a bed of lightly steamed rainbow chard, + roasted broccoli and cauliflower. We covered our plates in Thai peanut sauce, which was the real star of the show. 

Of course, I had to bake a special lone shrimp for the cat:

Next, check out this beautiful thing - 

Isn't it incredible? It's a romanesco cauliflower, and you can eat it however you'd eat a regular cauliflower.

I can't stop staring at it. It's like a fantasy vegetable. 

I spent yesterday at a sort of training/education event that my company holds regularly for employees. It's meant to be an introduction for brand new staff, but I never got the chance to attend early on in my "career". In my department, we're so busy that as soon as you sign your paperwork, they hand you a knife, a case of bell peppers and tell you to start chopping. My formal education came just a few months late. 

The goal is to learn about the culture, values and purpose of the company, and I learned some cool factoids. For example - did you know that a dairy cow can be considered organic one year and conventional the next? All it takes for the organic label is 12 months without antibiotics, so cows often go back and forth between being labeled organic and conventional. Something to think about. 

One topic we covered was green cleaning products, which brings me to the real purpose of this post. We only touched on it briefly, but for some reason I got stuck on the subject. As you guys may know, I'm pretty careful about what I put in my body. I've come a long way from the days when I used to frequent KFC, the candy aisle at CVS and Dunkin Donuts on the reg. After learning about green cleaning, though, I realized that I could be using fewer (or no) toxic cleaning products. It would be better for the environment, better for us, and better for our animal, who spends a lot more time on the floor than we do. 

The first thing I wanted to green-ify was my swiffer pads, which I use almost every night but are wasteful and probably toxic. I had the brilliant idea to buy or make a reusable swiffer pad, and then looked online and realized that about a million people have already thought of that. Amazingly, I found two microfiber cloths in my stash that fit the swiffer mop perfectly.

I bought a super green and clean all-surface cleaner from work, and I swiffered the kitchen floor using that and my new microfiber swiffer pad.

It worked unbelievably well - way better than the disposable pads. Look at that clean floor! If only I had thought of this plan before I bought a Costco-sized box of the disposable ones.

So, one of my goals for the new year is to clean up my household products. I'm calling it Green Clean 2014. There are some products I'll never be able to go completely green with (deodorant being one of them - I tried once and swear it made me smell worse than if I had worn no deodorant), and I'm okay with that. It's more of a general effort. 

Any green cleaning tips out there?

Have a great night!

xo