Heil Seitan!

For quite a while I have been embracing and incorporating vegetarianism into all parts of my lifestyle. This gradual shift wasn't intentional. I believe it was fueled by the amount of work involved in properly preparing meat. This reasoning was later replaced by the fact that our sources for food in the United States is not safe. E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria and more are COMMON amongst meat and eggs. The CDC estimates that each year roughly 1 in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases. I also believe that eating a vegetable rich diet allows one to skirt most, if not all, of these maladies. While there have been outbreaks of food bourne illnesses amongst cantalope and spinach, it is the exception, not the rule. Millions of Americans each day eat raw vegetables. Can the same security really be said with eating raw meat?


Anyway, I was reading all these recipes that called for ingredients I had never heard before. "Oh great," I thought. "Now I have to track down a health foods store, track down my stuff, and may an obnoxious price for it probably." Then I had the idea to just google on how to make seitan. I dabbled with making my first batch and it's marvelous! I feel so independent and liberated from Boca burgers/crumbles. Seitan is commonly called wheat meat or mock duck. It is made from wheat gluten. Here is an absolute gem of a recipe on how to make it. 


Tonight I made a taco dinner using homemade seitan tacos with guacamole! Here is the guacamole recipe I used in case you were interested. In the recipe I substituted red pepper flakes instead of the cayenne. It gave it a much more pungent flavor. It was awesome!

My guac and pan fried seitan! The seitan doesn't look that perfect because it was the first batch I ever made: user error. 

The coolest thing about seitan is that you can freeze it! Make up a large batch, divide the "meat" up into freezer bags and toss them in your freezer. You are good to go for a month. I highly recommend everyone, even non-vegetarians, giving seitan a go. I can imagine it in soups, stews, skewered on the grill, and more. 

Rolling stone

So Jason and I have been talking for a while about travel. I told him that it has been my lifes dream since I was 15 to travel. We agreed on saving towards a year of travel. We are thinking of one day traveling the globe with our kiddies in tow. Athens, Moscow, Tokyo, Perth, London, Paris, all of it. You know me, I'm a planner. I am right now diligently planning pages and pages of things to see, packing lists, health concerns, etc. just for this trip. I know though that when we have our 2 or 3 kids with us and we are all sitting in the back of a keep on safari and I am shooting pictures of lions in the African sun that I will have fulfilled most of my dreams.

I *HEART* Twinkie Chan

So for quite sometime I have been a fan of Twinkie Chan. I even got her book and have been following her blog/webpage/etsy/ravelry constantly. Suffice to say that I have a huge fan. I, sadly, cannot crochet. I can knit but I simply lack the skill to crochet. Anyway I want to show you all some of the most amazing things Twinkie Chan has made and to also tell you that she is having a giveaway!

She MADE that popcorn garland! Isn't that freaking AWESOME?! You can buy her pattern for it at her etsy store here. 

To win some of her awesomely crocheted stuff join in on her giveaway! Go here

New Hair?

I am utterly bored with my hair. It just looks lifeless. The color is fine but I haven't really had a decent cut in forever. I am thinking for spring and summer I want to try something different and go with short hair. Something like one of the following cuts:

This one is way too short for my tastes but I love the edginess.

I think this looks so nice.

I love this cut. It's my favorite style out of these. It feels really edgy and sexy. Plus I think the length is perfect.

I like this but there just isn't enough edge to it. It almost feels too polished for me. It needs to be messier and pomade'ed up a bit.

I want my end result to look like this (including the turquoise, dark blue, and magenta color):

Love

Love. Love is something that always changes. It's always different depending upon the relationship and the person. Love can be strictly sexual or violent, innocent, ethereal, tantric, or unrequited to name a few.  Love, like hope, springs eternal. We are not often conscious of what causes us to love someone. Many times we are acutely aware that the object of our affections does not deserve our love like a high school crush who overlooks you entirely or a cheating boyfriend. Every love that we have though does manage to teach us something. More often than not it's something which toughens and hardens us. "Don't be so trusting." "If a guy has done something once, chances are he will do it again." "Don't ever just give your heart away like that again." Through these experiences we become wiser beings. We become self sufficient and more able to forge turbulent waters which may lay before us. Through everything though I've realized that it's the love that teaches us something amazing that is the love you want for life. This kind of love betters you every single day. It undoes all the lessons you've had to learn to be harder. It penetrates you. It changes you at your very core on your most basic levels. I've also realized that if you lose that kind of love and the person who made it happen, nothing ever quite matches it again.

Roast Chicken with a Side of Life

First, the chicken. Lately these past few months I have been feeling very Martha Stewarty. Baking cupcakes. Finding recipes. Trying new foods out. Crafting. Today was no different. I slept in till 1, as I usually do, jumped out of bed and said "By golly, I'm going to make a roast chicken for dinner." To the kitchen I scurried with great determination. I gathered parsley, rosemary, and thyme. Sadly, I was out of sage. I cleaned the chicken and stuffed betwixt the skin a most curious concoction of the aforementioned spices with the addition of butter. If there is anything I have learned from cooking, everything is always better with butter. Biscuits. Popcorn. Noodles. See? I chopped up some carrots and potatoes too then tossed them in the broth. It reminds me of a stew! Straight away into the roaster it went at 375. And such brings us the picture below, of roasting chicken with carrots and potatoes.

And now... to life.

I have been truthfully growing restless these past few months. Lack of a true job, lack of true direction for a master's degree, and lack of much of anything has led me once again to dream of traveling the world. I have discussed with one of my friends the plausibility of us traveling together at some point in the near future. He's apprehensive to say the least. Understandably so since we've only known each other for a couple years and he is very much rooted to his pace of life as it is. I think long term travel (4 months or more) scares him. I have always had that call though. I have always had the ability and want to just pick up and go. I like the day to day differentiations in the sights, the people, the food, and the weather. I long to feel the throb of culture around me. Culture different than my own at least. So I suppose I shall see what shall come of this dream that has been with me since the age of 16. I wait with baited breath to see what is cresting upon my horizon.

My Before-I-Hit-The-Big-3-0 List

1. I want to travel across the entire globe. I want to see everything there is so see in every country. I want to take pictures of amazing sights to have them hang in my home later on.

2. I want to bungee jump.

3. I want to rock climb.

4. I want to white water kayak.

5. I want to sky dive.

6. I want to get married.

7. I want to have kids.

8. I want to scuba dive.

9. I want to surf.

10. I want to ski.

11. I want to own a boat.

12. I want to snowboard.

13. I want to amass 1000 books.

14. I want to sleep on the beach with someone I love.

What do you want to do before you round off another decade?