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

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Oh, snow.

Hey, happy Sunday!

Crazy weather happening over here right now. It's the first snow I've ever seen in Maryland, and it's a strange scene. I associate this place with summer, so it's kind of unsettling to see it looking so wintery.

Before work in the parking lot:

After work at the apartment:

It was a stressful drive home. I've certainly driven through worse, but my car hasn't. It didn't get much traction on the slippery road and I worried about the hills and turns on the back roads home (there was no way I was taking the beltway in this weather). Luckily, everyone else in Maryland seemed to be just as confused and terrified by the snow as I was - no one was driving over 20 mph. Also luckily - this is the worst weather Maryland gets.

Work was slow. I don't think we've ever had so few customers, but since our normal state is so chaotic, I'm always grateful for a slower day. Another workday bonus? These free goodies:

Dry shampoo, facial cleanser, makeup remover, keylime scented body oil, vitamins and supplements galore. I'm so excited to try everything out - maybe I'll review some of the products (what do you think, Char?). The freebie bin ties with the daily free lunch as my favorite work perk. 

When I got home, I was itching to create something in the kitchen. I had a huge jar of salted cashews from Costco (which I admittedly should not have purchased in the first place) that I've been dying to find a use for. I thought about making cashew butter, but I found a recipe in my Vitamix cookbook for granola with cashew coating that sounded way better. 

It came out beautifully, and the apartment smells like heaven. I was a little nervous since the last recipe I tried from that cookbook (for zucchini pancakes) turned out to be nothing short of an abominable failure and an hour of my life I'll never get back. We'll both be eating this for breakfast tomorrow, if we can pry ourselves away from it tonight. 

Have a great Sunday night!

xo

Testing the cast iron

Hello out there! Having a good Saturday?

I started my day with week 6 of Body Revolution, and it was sweaty and awesome. These DVDs are my workout of choice lately. They're only 30 minutes (but afterwards I feel like I worked out for an hour), so the workout and shower take an hour, total. It's so much faster and more efficient than going to the gym, and I've found that I can handle them in the morning before work. I haven't been following the schedule that comes with the DVD series because it's an extreme weight-loss program, and I'm not trying to lose weight. I like them as a total body workout and will usually do two a week.

When my husband got back from his workout, we cleaned up and headed out to run errands. PetSmart, Trader Joe's and lunch at a Neapolitan pizza place we happened to walk by.

Spinach, caramelized onion and egg for me, sausage, bacon and egg for hubby. We both have a special love for gratuitous eggs atop meals - it reminds us of Spain, where an egg goes on everything (but they don't eat them for breakfast. I never got used to that.)

My husband heroically agreed to babysit his cousins tonight, so I'm chilling here at the casa with the cat. I would have gone with him, really, but he won't be home until after 11 and I can't go to sleep that late when I have work the next day. For dinner, I decided to test out the new cast iron skillet I got on Black Friday:

(organic chicken with mustard, lemon juice, kalamata olives, a little honey and 21 spice salute)

(an unseasoned piece for the cat)

The verdict? The pan was heavy, hot, and the food stuck to it horribly, despite my having seasoned it three times using this technique. I scrubbed at it with a stiff brush for 10 minutes and rubbed it with kosher salt before giving up and using soap to wash it, which I know is a big cast iron no-no. I can't see any benefit to using it, besides the lack of potentially toxic chemicals that are rumored to exist in nonstick cookwear. I still need a new everyday pan, and I have my eye on this nonstick beauty:

(source)

I might clean the apartment tonight, if I get a burst of inspiration. I love how quickly I can clean this little apartment, but I hate how quickly this little apartment gets dirty. For some reason, our kitchen has two states: 1) I just cleaned it and 2) filthy, disgusting, horrible. There is absolutely no in between. 

Have an awesome Saturday night. Mine looks like this:

xo

Back in the swing of things

Hello world!

It's great to be back after a blogging hiatus. This wasn't like my last blogging hiatus where I was wasn't blogging because I was sad. I've just been busy getting back into the swing of things around here after my little Thanksgiving vacation. Work has been crazy, and we've been erranding, cleaning and catching up for the past few days. Here are the only pictures I have of my trip:

A snapshot of our GPS as we were driving through Connecticut

(I don't know why, but I really like that picture)

The outlet mall at 6:00 am on Black Friday (and my husband's arm, I think)

Also, our cat recently decided to stop using her litter box, so that's been fun. We took her to the vet last night to rule out a medical problem, and I was more than a little disappointed when the vet didn't find anything, since a medical problem would have been the easiest to fix. Now we have to watch her like a hawk, and it feels a lot like potty training a child. Luckily, the women at the shelter we adopted her from have been extremely helpful and attentive. I didn't realize that by adopting her from a shelter, we were getting access to an entire cat problem-solving support team. Fingers crossed the issue goes away very soon, and apologies if that story was way too much information..

Anyway...

I'm spending the morning relaxing with the hubby. Neither of us has work until later this afternoon, so we made pancakes for breakfast and stayed in our PJs.

That's the sweet potato casserole I made a few days ago at the top. As soon as it came out of the oven, my husband informed me that he wouldn't be eating any because he ate too much sugar over Thanksgiving weekend and wants to avoid it for a while. So now I'm left to eat this entire casserole myself, or let it go bad. It's delicious, but I feel like that kid from Matilda who had to eat the entire chocolate cake himself. I also tried to be cute and crafty and poured the pancake batter into star-shaped cookie cutters. As you can see, they're pretty mediocre. 

I'm going to stretch and chill for the rest of the morning so I'm rested for work tonight. It's almost the weekend, and I'm hoping we can make a trip to Alexandria tomorrow (one of my favorite places around here). 

Have a great day!

xo