Great ideas, bad ideas, Indian food.

Great ideas:

•  Walking to Wawa Wednesday evening and buying Snickers ice cream bars and eating them on the walk home in the 85*, post-sunset, weather.
• Going to hot yoga instead of watching another three episodes of Scrubs, season three, Thursday night
• Late afternoon swimming after a long day at work yesterday
• Jumping on the pizza train yesterday at work instead of eating my kale-centric leftovers for lunch
• An impromptu hot date for some Indian food with my husband and his stepmom (who had never eaten Indian food!) - kebabs, garlic naan, samosas, chicken tikka masala, something with lamb (ew)
• Falling asleep at 9:30 last night
• Buying tickets to see Ben Folds Five and Guster tonight
• Planning to tailgate in our Honda Fit (YEAH HATCHBACK) with Wawa subs and Cheetos
• Barre in an hour (I hope this still feels like a good idea in an hour and a half)

Bad ideas:

• There have actually not really been any bad ideas in the near past, except for possibly...
• ... the Whole30, in its glorious 4.5-day entirety, last week (that's a story for another day, or possibly never)

Indian food:

• I'm not going to tell you how to make chicken tikka masala (can be done, but I haven't thoroughly investigated the matter yet) or how to make naan (cannot be done well at home, and believe me when I say I have thoroughly investigated the matter.) But I have a really great recipe for chana masala, cobbled together between these two recipes: Smitten Kitchen's version, and the Wednesday Chef's version, except sort of lazier than both of those. I like it because it's vegan, and makes you feel all healthy and virtuous, even though it's just a great big old dose of starchy carbs,

Ingredients:

• 2 can chickpeas, rinsed (if you're fancier than me)
• 1 big can of pureed tomatoes
• A few garlic cloves (the more the better, in my personal opinion), minced
• About 1 teaspoon of fresh ginger, minced
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 1 thai pepper (or jalepeno), finely chopped
• 1 1/2 teaspoons paprika
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon coriander
• 1 teaspoon garam masala (easily found in the spice aisle, usually in the fancy McCormick rack)
• 1/4 teaspoon tumeric
• 1/4 lemon, cut for squeezing juice
• Rice, if you feel like it

1. Saute garlic, ginger, onion and pepper in a little olive oil until translucent
2. Throw in dry spices and toast in oil (this makes a weird-looking and -smelling slurry in the pan, don't worry about it.)
3. Throw in tomatoes, mix it all up, let it simmer / blurb for about five minutes.
4. Add chickpeas, cook on low for an hour.
5. Dish up over rice (or not), squeeze a little lemon juice on top.

Comfort food / objects.

Last week was kind of awful. And I don't mean that in a global, political / social sense - though I'm sure there are plenty of things to say about plenty of things of that nature re: last week - I mean like, my week kind of sucked. It was just that low-grade, garden-variety sort of semi-terrible that saps you will to live without giving you anything really juicy to complain about.

(Side note: isn't it the worst when that sort of week coincides with really beautiful weather? You'd think the weather would cheer you up, but it just kind of mocks you and makes everything even lamer.)

The best antidote for weeks like that, I've found, are comfort foods. Slash objects. Do you guys have non-food things that could best be termed "comfort food" non-foods? Like, you could totally do without them, and you normally do, but they give you the warm fuzzies when you indulge?

Here's my list:

1. Re-reading any of the Anne of Green Gables series. I can literally open any of those books in the middle and start reading, and know exactly what's going on and also feel a million times better.
2. Watching Scrubs. Even though it's getting kind of dated, that makes it even more nostalgic-y and warm-fuzzy-making, for some reason.
3. Listening to Simon and Garfunkel.

In terms of food, though, here's my food list. Sadly, I couldn't eat any of these last week, due to starting (and quitting, but that's a story for another day) the Whole30. I have big plans for this week re: eating/this list, though, especially if things don't start looking up:

1. Bagel Bites (name brand only, any flavor, microwaved please.)
2. DoubleStuf Oreos.
3. Velveeta Shells and Cheese.
4. Roasted sweet potatoes and carrots all mixed up.

I feel like you guys can probably figure out how to microwave some frozen mini bagel pizzas, but here's my best recipe for the roasted veggies, if you're curious.

1. Cut up a mess of sweet potatoes into inchish-square cubes. Throw some whole baby carrots in with them. Put it all in a glass baking dish or cast iron skillet.
2. Toss with salt, pepper, and olive oil.
3. Throw in a preheated oven (400*) for 45 minutes or until your whole house smells good and you can easily pierce the veggies with a fork.
4. Take them out, eat them straight from the pan while burning your mouth because it smells/tastes really, really good.
5. The end.

Summer mix, Whole30, pensive miscellany.

I drive a lot. I have never not, except for when I lived in New York, and then I just took the subway for a similar amount of time. But my point is, my commute is loooong... but I've never really cared. Long commutes are the best for giving an excuse to create really elaborate music mixes, to listen to over and over again. They're particularly awesome really early on summer mornings, when it's kind of foggy and warm enough to keep all the windows open.

I recently started a new job, and while I can't stress enough how much I love it, I'm finding it a little stressful. The pace is quick and it's more cerebral than I'm used to, at least more than I'm used to for eight-hour stretches. The long, long commute is kind of a plus in this situation, because it gives me time to kind of "ramp up" in the morning, and wind down in the afternoon. I made this mix last week for these long, pensive-in-a-good-way, drives back and forth. It's like the best of this summer plus the best of the summer after your senior year of high school, all rolled up in one.

(Sorry, I don't know how to do that thing where I can somehow magically give you links to free music with each song. You'll have to look them up yourself on Youtube, I'm too lazy for that.)

• "Lonely People" - America
• "Across the Sea" - Weezer
• "The Rock and the Tide" - Joshua Radin
• "Neopolitan Bridesmaid" - Tarkio
• "Everything You Want" - Vertical Horizon
• "For Once in My Life" - Stevie Wonder
• "Boys 'Round Here" - Blake Shelton
• "I 4 U & U 4 Me" - the Decemberists
• "Bad Moon Rising" - CCR
• "I Want You" - Bob Dylan
• "Blurred Lines" - Robin Thicke
• "Mushaboom" - Feist
• "The Dog Days are Over" - Florence + the Machine
• "Band of Gold" - Freda Payne
• "Emmylou" - First Aid Kit
• "Stolen" - Dashboard Confessional
• "Sweetness" - Jimmy Eat World
• "Semi-Charmed Life" - Third Eye Blind
• "Friends in Low Places" - Garth Brooks
• "Palm of Your Hand" - Ingrid Michaelson
• "When I Write My Master's Thesis" - John K. Samson
• "Summer Girls" - LFO
• "The Sweetness Lies Within" - Hefner
• "Thrift Shop" - Macklemore
• "Die in Your Arms" - Justin Bieber
• "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" - Looking Glass

I'm a little bit embarrassed by this mix, but it's so good for driver's seat dancing / pondering the meaning of life during morning commutes (and evening commutes, and weekend drives to the store, and...) that mostly, I'm actually not.

In other news, tomorrow morning, my husband and I are starting a Whole30. I'm not going to go into many of the details here, because this is never going to be a healthy eating blog, but it basically entails abstaining from booze, dairy, grains, legumes, and all added sugar for thirty days. It's supposed to be a kind of nutritional reset. If you google it, you can find all these blogs about these people have amazing sea changes in their lifeview, which I can nearly 100% guarantee will not happen to me. But with all my food allergies (anaphylaxis to any kind of shellfish and any kind of fish, plus blueberries, plus oral allergy syndrome to apples), and foods that I'm not allergic to but make me feel kind of awful (eggs, dairy, carbs), it'll be kind of nice to see if anything positive physically comes out of it. I'm personally not interested in losing weight, but I know a lot of other people are? Anyway, have you done one? How did it work out for you?

Pensive-ish miscellany that doesn't deserve a whole paragraph:

• I've been slowly giving up caffeinated coffee over the past couple weeks and am pretty surprised to find out there are zero physical repercussions, other than being totally disgusted with the taste of decaf.
• As my brother-in-law recently brought to our attention, the "Will Smith" station on Pandora is the best possible summer pool party (or any party) mix you could ever hope to create; check it out.
• I have been getting up at 5:00am for only about two and a half weeks now, but I'm already unbelievably sick of it. I know this is a novel emotion to possess.
• I need suggestions for end-of-summer reading; any ideas?

Rest-of-summer bucket list.

Let's not talk about the months since I last posted, or the fact that a summer bucket list is best crafted before summer is half over (which, no, ugh, it can't be), or how quickly spring and summer pass when you no longer have a "summer break" and summer really only happens on the weekends, with weekdays being the same as always (just maybe still daylight when you fall asleep.)

Let's just talk about how friggin' amazing the rest of the summer is going to be.

Things to Do Before Labor Day:

• Spend an entire "pool day" at the in-laws'. (Reading trashy magazines / drinking margaritas or PBR at the same time optional, but highly encouraged.)
• Pick peaches.
• Can pickles.
• Go hiking in the local greenbelt.
• Go to Rita's for ice cream.
• Play mini-golf (and I play to win.)
• Make boozy popsicles.
• Go to a flea market.
• Clean out the house.
• Make a salad with vegetables from my garden.
• Make a summer mix tape.
• Spend an evening making crafts.
• Take lots of pictures.
• Go to a local museum.
• Go to a real farmer's market.
• Have a date night downtown (local or one of the two nearby big cities!)
• Register for language classes at the community college (I loved Arabic in college, but I've always wanted to learn Polish too!)
•  Go to a concert.
• Go antiquing.
• Watch the sunrise.
• Make macarons.
• Learn to do a cartwheel (goal in progress, three years and counting.)
• Start a paper journal / scrapbook.

 What are you guys up to this summer? It's ridiculous, how fast it's going, right? Ugh, summer! Stop and stay. Forever.

(A friend and I did go strawberry picking. We've managed that, so far, and jam-making.)

Changes, the vagaries of aging, and basil buttercream: my new obsessions.

So! You may have noticed a rather dramatic change to this blog, if you are one of the 4-5 people who have read it on a semi-regular basis. Changes include: a new title, all former posts erased, a format overhaul. Basically the only thing that has stayed the same, guys, is my hatred for feta cheese; I feel pretty comfortable saying you can continue to rely on that for the long haul.

What happened is, my friend had a blog, one that featured many adorable pictures of her little family. Then all of a sudden, right about the time I published my last post, she found another adorable blog - written entirely in Portuguese - also featuring many adorable pictures of her little family. Yes, of her little family.

So that's a pretty huge cautionary tale, and I grew terrified of ever using a first initial on this blog ever again, let alone publishing a photo of an actual human being in my life. I quit writing entirely for fear one of you guys would be totally creepy.

However! A big catalyst in the other direction is the fact that I have a) finally finished graduate school and b) not had much luck finding a job, as of this moment. So I sort of need something to pass the time. LUCKY YOU. So anyway, yes! Welcome back to my life, readers.

***

In other astonishing news, I turned thirty on Friday. No! I'm still having some issues with this. I am not a person to get too worked up about age, but I am having some strong feelings about no longer being a twenty-something. Mostly, they involve my deepening wrinkles and increasingly frequent gray hairs.

To combat these emotions, I took a pretty solid break from carb avoidance to bake a chocolate cake with basil buttercream, a recipe I have been obsessing over for the past two months. It turned out AMAZINGLY, if I do say so myself. I am not going to recopy the recipe I used here - instead, feel free to follow the impeccable directions and drool over the gorgeous pictures here on the Vanilla Bean blog, like I did.

But I will close with a super hip Instagram of my warming basil as a consolation prize for your having to click over for the recipe.

So artsy.