White Devil

Well hello my friends! It has been awhile hasn’t it?

I’ve been up to normal student life events; going out with friends, procrastinating, paying for that procrastination by cursing myself during the midterm!

I’ve also been indulging my student eating habits. Sugar, sugar, sugar has been my drug of choice for the last few days. I’ve just been craving chocolate (and for coffee) like mad, and giving in like crazy. If I indulge in extra coffee I do get decaf, seriously, it’s the taste I like, coffee with a bit o’ cream? Heaven. But usually it’s a coffee and a cookie that I crave.

My sugar has ventured into many aspects of my eating…

 
chocolate chips?! How’d those get there… (shifty eyes)

Why am I craving sugar? I can’t really say… There’s a couple things.

a) I was stressed about the midterm
b) I like sugar, and unfortunately I’m getting in a cookie-before-one-class habit.
c) I’m hella tired.

C is probably the main reason. I’m really tired, and the culprit is not being able to sleep. And why can’t I sleep? I’m not really sure, because I’m definitely tired when I go to bed,but something just keeps me awake. I don’t think it’s completely in my mind, sometimes I definitely just can’t turn my brain off. But the light coming through my windows really bothers me. I might have to try something to block it out. Anybody use those eye cover things people always wear for “beauty sleep”?

Of course, the tired might be because my main source of food lately has been sugar, and that gives you a spike of blood glucose, then quickly drops, leaving you tired and lethargic (oh yeah, that’s right I just finished studying glycemic index thank you very much)…

So maybe it’s a whole twisted circle; I’m tired and my body wants sugar, because that will give me energy fast, then I’m soon tired again… leading me to want sugar! oh no! Whatever shall I do? (just kidding, I honestly think I’m mainly due to sleep deprivation)

What do you do with a craving? Just give in? Or think about what it is your body might be asking you?

PS, you know what’s not helping? Watching Alton Brown cook up some cinnamon buns on Good Eats.

Make Me Smile

Go on. I dare you.

There’s been a few happenings lately that have left me feeling kind of blue. To be completely honest, I think half of it is due to the horribleness that is the Vancouver winter. Let’s just say when it’s been a little too grey for a little too long I feel a little too blue.

But in agreement with my 2010 resolutions, and my reflections on said resolutions, I’ve decided to focus on a few things that are making me smile these days.

Sort of random, but this yogurt is delicious. Mostly just this flavour; lemon. I bet there’s a brand that does it better as this one is a little thin and sour, so I’m going to be looking. Does liberte by chance have a lemon meringue?

(Also notice the SUN in the above picture, yesterday was warm and sunny and that definitely made me smile.)

This is more then just a pretty flower, which hey makes me smile even on a grey day.  But it reminds me of my awesome friends, and good roommates here.

Noodle Box. Spice Peanut noodle box. Possibly one of the best Victoria exports. Deliciousness in a box. Not only that, but well, going to the Noodle Box is a trip down memory lane for me, as it was a thing for me and my roommate back in Vic. And also it’s another good night with good friends.

Another thing that makes me happy? Going for a run, which I’m off to do as I type. (Well after I type…)

What has been making you smile lately?

2010 – One Month In

Well it’s just a typical Tuesday night – with one change. Instead of wasting my time watching Biggest Loser, I’m currently watching some sort of Lost Recap. OMG I watched this show the first season which was like eons ago. Unfortunately life prevented me from watching it in later seasons, and any time I’d catch an episode… well I was confused as hell. The show where you’ll be lost…

Anyway… on to today.

So you might have noticed that yesterday was not only a Monday but also a first of a new month: bring on February.  I can’t believe we’re a month into 2010 already… and I got to thinking about my new years resolutions, and how I had no idea if I was working on them or not…. So instead of just forgetting about them I decided to take a little look at how I’m doing.

Get more ENERGY.
Er, definitely not happening. In fact my sleeping pattern is really crazy right now, it’s not good. I’m tired and my muscles aren’t rejuvenating themselves as fast as I would like. Anyone have any good websites/resources about getting sleeping patterns working?

Keep my grades where they are or higher!
Well I think they’re about the same. At least judging from the one mark I’ve gotten back. I’ve decided to make this goal more structured: I want grades of 80% and higher (85% and higher is the ultimate goal actually). Having an actual number to shoot for makes it more probably something will happen.

Be an awesome prez (do some bossing around yo! )
This is going pretty well. We had an awesome event recently, which I credit to my council and everything. Judging your performance as a leader in and situation is really hard. How much is you, and how much is everyone working together? I’d like to think it’s a combined effort by everyone.

Explore my creative side; maybe take a photography class (if I can afford it)
The one goal I can say ACCOMPLISHED! I started a photography class last night, and even though there was a little technical difficulty for the teacher, I think I can say it will be nice to finally do something creative and push that side of me.

Live on a budget (OMG I am so poor right now, or will be when I pay my student fees)
Sweet, this one I can also say I’m accomplishing. I’ve successfully (maybe a few slip ups) kept all my receipts, recorded totals each week and watched what I spent for the entire month of February.

Get my running mileage up to 1/2 marathon distances
This too is a work in progress. I am going to actually sign up for a Half-Marathon I think, to fully motivate and commit myself to a training schedule and pattern. I’ve successfully been running 3-4 days a week.

Swim, bike, and strength train.
So swimming and biking not so much. Swimming’s too far away, and biking… well it’s wet. I’ve been itching to break out the wheels, but it’ll be a couple weeks yet. Strength training has been happening though, I’m happy to say. In fact I’ve been doing enough ab work that I’ve noticed a difference in my torso. I just do a few moves everyday, and I’ve lost about an inch from the smallest and largest part of my waist.

Do yoga
hasn’t been happening at all. :p

Make actual meals (Means cooking once in a while)
I’ve definitely been baking a little more, and cooking more too. I’ve made a goal of baking once a week, as well as cooking a little. I haven’t really made any amazing cooked meals… but well, they’re better then they were.

Embrace life!
This one too is on-going. Some days I’m super stocked on life. Some days I’m down in the dumps, totally unhappy and grumpy… and just a total all around not-fun person. But that’s how it goes. I’m definitely doing better this term at rolling with the punches.

So that’s how my 2010 is going. How are your 2010s going?

That Fresh Baked Smell…

Back when I lived in Victoria and didn’t seem as busy, I spent many a Sunday baking bread. It started innocently enough, and turned into something I did for the entire year.

It was wonderful to have fresh bread every weekend, and to have it work out most weekends too! The smell would fill our cozy little basement suite, and to this day I can’t bake bread and not think of my roommate and lovely Island Friends.

This Friday my friends and I were down on Granville Island, passing by a bakery late at night… and the smell! Divine. Fresh bread filled the air for almost the whole island.

Well I knew what I would be doing this weekend…

Bread – Even students can Bake it

Bread gets a bad rap of being difficult to make, but it really isn’t. Here’s some tips I’ve picked up over the years. These can be applied to any basic whole wheat or white bread recipe.

Yeast

(Sorry I’ve been so lazy about my nails!) 
The first step to good bread is the yeast. In fact this is the one most crucial step. The temperature of your water must be perfect. You know how mom’s test bottled milk on their wrists for babies? This is also the best temperature for your yeast’s liquid. You don’t want it to burn, but you want it to be warm.

Also place the yeast in the water with some sugar, it needs food to grow. If you do everything right, you should go from this:

To this:
In about 10mins

Look at that fluffy yeast!
Add the rest of your liquid ingredients. Make sure they aren’t too hot, or too cold as well.

Mixing

Now begin to add the flour.
Use a whisk. I know, it sounds weird, but whisking at the beginning gets the gluten (sorry for all you gluten-free folks out there, I don’t know how it will work for non-gluten bread…) going. And it makes for smoother dough.

Kneading

Once you’ve added 2/3 if not all your flour and you have a doughy ball, not unlike this:

You are ready to start kneading!

When I first started making bread back in high school, I was so afraid of over kneading that I usually underkneaded and ended up with bread that just… wasn’t right. You have to knead for a good 10min.
There’s a lot of good videos out there on how to knead bread. And a lot of good websites, books like The Joy of Cooking offer great tips on kneading (actually on the whole bread process).
The best advice I heard: knead until your dough is soft like a baby’s bottom. I don’t touch a lot of babies’ bottoms, but I do know soft dough. It’ll look something like this:

Rising

Into a greased bowl, then covered with a damp towel and placed in a draft free warm area of the kitchen.

Two hours (roughly) later it has doubled:

And if you poke it, a little indent remains in the dough.

Shaping

Now get Violent! Give it a punch or two:

(ew it looks like my nails are really dirty, seriously that nail polish is coming off right after this…)

Do a wee more kneading, a little shaping and put it in some pans. I made two smaller loaves instead of one big loaf:

Then cover with that warm damp cloth and let them rise for another hourish, until doubled in size again…

Baking

Then preheat the oven, and stick a small pan with water in the bottom. Now I don’t know why (though I feel like I should, having taken food science classes and all) but this is supposed to help make good crust. You can also periodically spray the tops of the loaves, or butter them, or coat them in egg, all of which I am too lazy to do.

Look at them bake away!

And hopefully they come out nice and fresh and delicious!
 

I need me a piece of that now! I think I’ll go and make myself some well earned din-din.

If you have any more questions about bread making, send them my way. I am by no means an expert, but I’d say I’m fairly decent at the basic stuff. There is nothing like the smell of homemade bread in a house. Or like the taste of a fresh piece with a little buttah!

Sometimes Smaller is Better

LIke when you’re eating dessert. LOL, who am I kidding?

But when it comes to grocery stores I really love a small store.

Last year this was my main grocery stop. I hated taking the bus to safeway, and well, this wasn’t that much more expensive.

Then Save-On moved in and it’s closer then Safeway, cheaper, newer and prettier, and not much further, so I’ve been going there this school year. But I haven’t had time what with the Fiesta and then midterms and stuff.

So yesterday I hit ‘er up, because I had about an hour and didn’t feel like the trek to Save-On. Plus I’d discovered that Granville Island Produce at the Village, had this:

Extra Big Jar of my new Love Almond Butter (shhhhh don’t tell peanut butter). And since I eat almond (or peanut) butter everyday I wanted a bigger jar, and Save-On definitely didn’t have that.

And then yesterday I discovered they also have this:

YUMMY! This is my favourite “soy sauce”. And it’s low sodium too. I haven’t been able to find it forever! And it’s great on popcorn with nutritional yeast.

Anyway, I bought all these groceries:

It came to 41ish $. That’s not much more expensive really, and considering the almond butter was 11.99$, I mean there’s 12$ worth of it already…

And I enjoyed those veggies with some Bragg’s, Olive oil and balsamic vinegar, roasted for 18min… With a side of Mexican Rice leftover from out Fiesta!

yyyyuuuummmm. It was so good.

Also ate a mango. I have so much trouble peeling/cutting prepping these! Do any of you have some good tips/suggestions?

Alright I’m a gonna try n study. Can’t say it’ll happen.. but the effort will be put forth.

How to throw a Fiesta!

Hello All!

What a weekend! It all started Friday…

When my friend and I went to pick up some decorations…

And Draw Prizes…

Then I had a night of planning, where in I had to calculate food for 80ish people!

Look at that grocery list ^! Isn’t it nuts?! 8kg of ground beef?! lol. Money from ticket sales for the grocery shopping.

Get up ridiculously early on Saturday to go pick up said groceries. 9am we headed out to Costco and Superstore.

Come back for a “rest” where in some more questions/problems and other such rest disturbing occurrences occurred.

Then got decorating!

And cooking!

Look at this fridge!

(not all of this is our food though, like those stale pita bits…)

Yes the vegetarian had to cook some meat. Ew! It was so beefy-juice. Ick.

The buffet!

I totally got busy and didn’t take photos of the end products! Oh well. Here’s what was on the Fiesta Menu:

• Tortilla chips
• Salsa, gaucamole, hummus, and 7-layer dip.
• Cut up veggies
• Build your own Burrito:
• beef, or refried beans (both made from scratch!)
• lettuce
• tomatoes
• cheese
• sour cream
• Mexican-style Rice
• Ice cream sundaes
• Pop
• Virgin Margaritas

This was the most successful event I’ve been a part of. We had 80 people total, and Rits is a small dorm (only roughly 200-300 people), so that’s a huge number of people.

I had been stressing big time about getting enough food, especially since it was so many more  people then we’d anticipated. But it all worked out. We had extras of the rice, and toppings really. Oh and Ice cream, but that we can just use for another rits event! So it all worked out in the end.

And of course there was a wee after party.

I’m definitely having trouble getting anything done today though. :p Oh well. I’ll try and get some things done today, so they’re just out of the way for later this week I think. In other words, do the stuff that only needs half my mind.

Till later this week all!

Coco For Local

Happy Hump Day folks!

How have you been?

This week I finished off the last of my pumpkin muffins.

I made some surprisingly delicious Cabbage & Green Bean Soup:

Hmmm, topped with some uncooked firm tofu and some spice chili seeds. Delicious.

This weekend the amazingness that is UBC Rez Life, had a great event:

It was a whole sustainability informational session. It was really interesting and invigorating. There were a good 20 information booths from companies around Vancouver and BC who all work on some aspect of sustainability.

I attended with my friend from Chemical and Biological Engineering (Chebe pronounced Chee – bee). Let’s just say she knows a lot about the science of sustainability and is constantly asking questions that leave the booth attendees with their yaps hanging open in confusion.

For instance one time we attended a completely different sustainability action day and someone was lamenting about shipping oil across the ocean in tankers and the problem for wildlife and how it has to stop, etc. etc.

My Chebe friend goes, “I agree but how are you going to get oil across the ocean otherwise?” It wasn’t a nasty sarcastic question either, she genuinly hopes that someone will have the answer.

It’s all good to say you support sustainability, are all for going green, blah blah blah, but unless you have an alternative to things what good is it?

Now I don’t know a lot about the aspects of sustainability my friend does, but there is one thing that really gets me excited: locality. Everyone knows about carbon footprints, right? Well buying locally (especially with food) is a great way to really reduce your impact on our environment.

I mean it’s all good to buy organic, but if that organic strawberry you’re buying came from New Zealand it’s probably having a bigger impact then buying a local non-organic strawberry.

Anyways, the conference was a great source of resources:

And I even have a little tree growing pod:

Isn’t it cute?

Anyway, I’m going to try and check out some of the websites and resources I got about local stuff and maybe give you guys some heads up (at least for Vancouver!).

For now I must say au revoir as I have a busy afternoon ahead of me!

A little Wind

Hello!

I’m sorry! I can’t believe it’s been a week since I’ve written! *Gasp* My apologies. The week just got away from me…

Outside there’s apparently winds of 60-80km/hr. Trees are down, electricity is down for some, the ferries aren’t running; it’s crazy! Despite the winds gusting and busting last night, I slept relatively well. Probably because I’ve been sleeping poorly lately and am soooooo tired.

I got up to some more baking this weekend…

Used up some of that Pumpkin in some pumpkin muffin making.

yum!
Not yum:

Dishes are the least fun part of cooking.

In other news I get to cook for fifty plus people this weekend for an event we’ll be having! Woo! I promise to document this.

Other than that, I do not have much news. Angela at Oh She Glows posted an interesting post about getting over your obsession with weight, I really enjoy reading the comments on these blogs, since it’s so nice to know many of us have gone through similar stories.

Alright, I’m signing out! But I promise to be back more this week!

Baking the Weekend away

Well even though I had a crazy busy weekend, I don’t have many good photos to show for it!

I managed to squeeze in some baking, it reminded me how much I really love a little baking. Maybe I can squeeze it in once a week?

May I present some Pumpkin Biscotti.

Recipe is from the amazing Simply Recipes, found here.

I like this recipe because it makes the biscotti a little more moist, and chewy. I’m way more of a chewy cookie person then a crunchy cookie person, but I love biscotti because it’s so dippable!

hmmm.

(sorry for the blur!)

With the left over pumpkin I made myself a little pumpkin oats!

Ate while doing a little reading (not for school though!)

My weekend was definitely full, mostly with fun stuff, and it wasn’t nearly long enough…

Well I’m off to get more prepared for the day.

One Week In

And I already feel behind! Wow, Friday already?! Time flies.

Most of my courses are the usual run of mill sciences courses, but there’s one I’m excited for. Can you guess what it might be?

Let me give you a clue…

Still not sure? ok ok, here’s one more clue…

Think you got it?

Yep, I’m definitely in an Intro to Wine Science. aka, wine tasting for labs.
Guess the alcoholic foodie in me is coming out. I wasn’t originally in this class, but the elective I did have didn’t count as a restricted elective. Instead of fighting it I decided to just find a different course (if one interested me) that would let me in. This one did, and I got in! yay!

My weekend is looking pretty busy… with HOMEWORK. EGAHDS?! is this term starting quickly or is it just me?
I am going out tonight, but just for dinner, and maybe I’ll study up on my wine tasting.

Hope you guys all have more exciting weekend plans then I do.