Townhome Tuesday: Picture Shelves

Today I want to share our charming floating picture shelves. Besides being a pain to install (since it's hard to get them to hang flush against the wall without scratching the wall while installing them), they went up pretty quickly and provide a unique way to display pictures.

Food Friday: Sugar-Free Banana Pancakes

Zach and I are creatures of habit, especially when it comes to food. We have a few food traditions that we've stuck with for years: 1) we eat out at Thai once a week for lunch every Thursday (and we always order the same thing), 2) every Wednesday morning we break away from our traditional green smoothie (for me) and oatmeal (for Zach) breakfasts to eat bagels, and 3) every weekend I cook banana pancakes. On this food Friday I want to share my delicious, near-perfect pancake recipe that Zach and I have enjoyed every weekend for over three years. It's easy to put together, has no added sugar or fat, and tastes great.

Banana Pancakes

makes 8 pancakes, vegan, sugar-free, fat-free option

Ingredients

1 cup oats

1 ½ cup almond milk

2 small bananas*

½ cup whole wheat flour

1 T flax meal

4 t baking powder

½ t salt

¼ t lemon extract (optional)

Coconut oil for cooking (you can use another oil, but coconut definitely tastes the best; leave this out if you want fat-free pancakes and have a really good non-stick pan)

Blueberries (fresh or frozen)

*The size of the bananas has a huge affect on how thin or thick the pancakes are. If you only have large or medium bananas, add an extra 1 T of flour for every large banana used.

I consider these bananas "large," so I added an extra 2 T flour to my batter when I used these.

Instructions

      1.       In a blender blend oats and milk together.

      2.       Add in bananas, flour, flax meal, baking powder, salt, and lemon extract and blend until smooth.

      3.       Let batter sit for 5 minutes.

      4.       Cook in non-stick pan with coconut oil for extra yummy-ness. Drop blueberries on top of pancakes while they are cooking.

Here's the batter in the blender. It's good to let the batter sit for 5-10 before cooking.

This is my awesome pancake cooking station. Complete with easy to access batter and coffee for energy on the right, non-stick pans on the stove, and coconut oil and berries on the left.

I add frozen blueberries to the top but chocolate chips would work if you don't mind adding a bit of sugar to your breakfast.

Here's the finished product. I eat them without any topping, but you can also top with peanut butter and honey - which is what Zach does - or maple syrup.

Food Friday: Mexican Veggie Bowl

I really enjoy cooking and usually I don't mind laboring in the kitchen for hours prepping yummy meals from scratch. But lately the weather has been so nice and it's resulted in me losing my desire to cook elaborate meals because I'd rather be walking around outside. I made up this recipe because it's good for lazy people and it actually turned out really well considering how easy it is. There is a bit of work upfront since you have to chop a lot of veggies, but I just prepped everything on Sunday and then all we had to do on the weeknights was throw everything into a big bowl. Yum.

Mexican Veggie Bowl
4 servings, vegan, low-fat, low-sugar

Ingredients

2 portobella mushrooms, sliced

3 bell peppers, sliced

1 large onion, sliced

1 jalapeno, sliced

2 cloves garlic, chopped

2 T fresh thyme leaves, chopped

1/3 cup sherry cooking wine

2 cans black beans, drained and rinsed

2 tomatoes, chopped

2 avocados, chopped

1 bunch cilantro, chopped

1 bunch green onions, chopped

2 limes

Lettuce

Tortilla chips (optional)

Instructions

1.       Sauté mushrooms, peppers, onion, jalapeno, garlic, and thyme leaves in sherry.

2.       Serve grilled veggies in a large bowl with beans, tomato, avocado, cilantro, green onions, lime juice, and lettuce.

3.       Top with tortilla chips if you want to add a little crunch.

Grilled veggies - I cooked them all ahead of time and just heated them before serving.

Finished plate with all of the add-ins.

Thursday Travel Tales: A Unique Food Trip

So there’s this fancy restaurant in Salt Lake City that Zach and I have been obsessed with since we found out about it. It’s called Forage and it’s so fancy that they don’t even have a menu. The chef prepares a 13 course meal each night and he just makes what he wants and you, as the customer, are supposed to deal with it because he knows better than you what’s good. Also, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, the restaurant is very expensive (about $300 for two people with the wine pairing and tip). For months Zach and I have been making little bets about what would have to happen for us to go to Forage. A friend of mine from college asked me to recommend her for a job at our company out of the blue. If she got the job I would have received a $1000 referral bonus, so we said if that happened we’d go to Forage, since that would be unexpected money. Zach also bet that if we both won our company’s wellness competition (which has a reward of $7000 and is very unlikely because there are a lot of other competitors), we’d go to Forage. And our bets went on like this for about a year. Then finally one of our bets came through and we earned some unexpected money, so we went to Forage to celebrate!

This restaurant was incredible. The food was amazing and was definitely the prettiest food I’ve ever eaten. I’m including this meal in my “travel tales” section because Zach and I both agree that eating there felt like taking a special food journey rather than just going out to eat. Here are some shoddy iPhone pictures of each course (minus one dessert course which I ate before taking a picture of it).

Pumpkin soda with cilantro salt on the rim. I know that some people have soda makers at home, but I'm not friends with any of those people so this is the first time I had homemade soda and it was great.

Quail eggs on a buckwheat patty. I had never had quail eggs before and these were nice - they have a more delicate flavor than normal eggs and these particular ones were cooked perfectly.

Those black strings are walnuts and the white things are pieces of cheese. 

Roasted beets with a stem sticking out of them to make them look earthy (the stem wasn't edible).

This was a fermented summer bean from last summer served with an egg yolk sauce.

The first part of our main course was smoked trout. It was simple but really yummy.

Really yummy salad with frothy mozzarella on top and a fancy cracker that you can see in the background.

This is a very sophisticated version of shells and cheese. There was also hen there, which tasted like really tender chicken.

Lamb tartar with carrots and beans. The lamb was ground and raw (hence the tartar part). It was a little crazy eating raw lamb, not my favorite thing in the world, but not so bad.

This was the best dish of the night. On the side there were potato dumplings served on old book pages. And the bowl had a yummy potato puree topped with roe and some trout broth.

Sturgeon and leeks, very fresh.

Perfectly cooked elk.

Time for dessert! We started with iced beet on top of a cream sauce. The earthy beets actually mixed well with the sweet cream.

This is acorns topped with a frothy cream. The acorns were surprisingly amazing - now I know what the squirrels are flipping out about.

(Like I said earlier, I missed one of the desserts because I ate it so quickly. It had rhubarb and ricotta meringue).

They brought these edible rocks out with the check (only the top two brown ones were actually edible).

 So dining at Forage was an awesome, memorable experience. I definitely want to go back, but I want to wait awhile so that going there remains a special treat that feels just as unique as traveling and exploring a new place.

Townhome Tuesday: Hidden Corkboard

Today I have a super short post to showcase a recent organization tool Zach and I installed in the kitchen. 

I didn't really have a good space to keep all of my paper stuff that requires action (like coupons, recent mail, receipts to be split in mint.com). This is stuff that I want to keep close by and in sight (so I remember to do something about them), but they are also messy looking. I used to hang them with magnets on the side of the fridge, but it looked all cluttered and gross.

I didn't want to add clutter to the fridge and take the focus away from my pretty homemade calendar.

To solve this problem I went to Michaels and got cork board panels for less than $10, then Zach used the staple gun to attach them to the inside of this cabinet. Now I can keep all of that paper mess close by, but hidden. Yay!

This is a frequently used cabinet so I see this stuff all of the time, which is good so I can remember to actually use all of the coupons I save.

Food Friday: Buffalo Hummus

Zach and I are obsessed with hummus. We always have it in the house, so a few weeks ago I decided that we should probably learn how to make it so we can save money and doctor it up however we like. We've been through a lot of iterations of this recipe and our buffalo version this hummus is the winner so far.

Buffalo Hummus

serves 4-6 (the picture below is 1.5x this recipe)

Ingredients

3 T lemon juice

¼ cup tahini (I use the Trader Joe’s brand)

1 small garlic clove

2 T olive oil

½ t salt

½ t cumin

1 15 oz can chickpeas, drained and rinsed

½ red pepper, roasted at 400 degrees for ~15 minutes

Frank’s hot sauce to taste

Instructions

1.       Cream lemon juice and tahini together in a food processor or blender for about 30 seconds.

2.       Add in garlic, oil, salt, and cumin and blend for another 30 seconds.

3.       Add in chickpeas and red pepper and blend until smooth.

4.       Add Frank’s hot sauce 1 T at a time until the hummus tastes delicious to you.

I brought this hummus to a party recently and served it with grilled pitas and broiled cauliflower (cauliflower becomes deliciously buttery once cooked and provides a nice change from traditional veggies and hummus) - it was super yummy.

We can do it Wednesdays!: Top 100 Book List Update 1

At the end of last year I made a long term goal to read all of the books in the top 100 best books list. I read often and consider myself a well-read person, but I hear references to famous books I’ve never read all of the time, so I guess that means I’m not as well well-read as I thought. When I stumbled across the 100 best books list on the internet and discovered that I’d only read about 5 of the books, I decided that I needed to tackle the entire list.

At first glance this list seems great – it includes authors from all over the world and a wide variety of genres and story types. After living with this list for a few months though, I’ve begun to realize that this list is cheating a bit; the amount of reading on this list is much larger than 100 books worth. For instance, it includes the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe, Hans Christian Andersen, Paul Celan, and Doris Lessing, but it counts each of these as one book each. The list also includes two novels from Wikipedia’s “longest novels” list: Remembrance of Things Past (3,031 pages) and War and Peace (1,440 pages). So my point is that getting through this list is not going to be easy. My goal is to read 10 books a year so I can finish before I’m 40 years old.

I’ll take time to review the books I’ve read on this blog after I finish a group of four (here’s the first group):

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (258 pages) | Rating: 5/5

·         This is the only book on the list they I had previously read and chose not to re-read as part of this large reading endeavor. I’ve read this book about three times and love it. It’s a quick read that tells a beautiful, charming story using beautiful, charming language. If you haven’t read it yet, you should.

The Complete Tales by Edgar Allan Poe (842 pages) | Rating: 4/5

·         It took me about three months to get through all of Poe’s stories. Some of them are pretty dull, but it’s worth reading all of them to get to the truly great horror stories that made him famous. Full disclosure: I skipped his literary critiques, poems, and novel because the list said “complete tales,” so I stuck to short stories only (I know his novel technically counts as a “tale,” but by that point I was ready to be done with Poe, and his novel didn’t get great reviews anyway). I would definitely recommend his top 25 stories (here's a list); you can skip the rest of his stuff since it's a little dense and boring.

Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren (160 pages) | Rating: 3.5/5

·         I listened to this book on tape and finished it in a few hours while driving to Las Vegas. This is really easy to read because it’s a children’s book that includes a series of light, cheery stories about a peculiar orphan named Pippi Longstocking. It’s an easy read so I’d recommend it if you also want to read all of the books on the top 100 list or want to read something fun to kids – otherwise there’s nothing really special about this book.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (209 pages) | Rating: 4.5/5

·         I was surprised by how much I liked this book but you have to listen to it on tape like I did – otherwise the names are way too difficult to pronounce and you’ll get caught up trying to keep track of all of the characters and places while reading. This is a story about an African tribe during the time when English missionaries started moving to the area. I learned a ton about African culture and would recommend this book mainly for that reason. The story is also very rich and simply told. You should definitely listen to it if you get a chance.

That’s all I have for now. My first few books were pretty easy to read and quite enjoyable. We’ll see what the rest of the books are like…

Belated Thursday Travel Tales: Various Wasatch Hikes

Today’s focus is on mini-trips (AKA hikes).  I LOVE hiking and I’m so glad it’s finally warm enough in Salt Lake City for us to go into the mountains and explore. Zach and I started our hiking season off with the most intense trip ever through the Subway at Zion National Park. Keeping with this theme of starting off super difficult, we decided to hike Mt. Olympus as one of our first hikes in the Salt Lake area. The day after Mt. Olympus we did an easier hike with some co-workers to Donut Falls and some Mines in Big Cottonwood Canyon. Then this past weekend we tried to make it to Thaynes Peak via the Thaynes Canyon trail in Millcreek Canyon.

Mount Olympus

Total Distance: 7.75 miles | Altitude Gained: 4100 ft | Time: 4 hrs 30 min | My Rating: 4.5/5

Notes: This hike is SO HARD! It’s incredibly steep and when you’re going up you keep thinking, “I must be to the top now, there’s no way this could keep going,” but it does keep going until you’ve given up on life, and then the trail opens up and you’re at the saddle. At this point you can actually see the top of the mountain, but there’s a 0.5 mile scramble to the top which is much harder than the hike up to that point because you have to use your entire body to hoist yourself over the boulders to get to the top. But once you’re at the top you’re rewarded with an amazing view, a nice cool breeze, and an enormous sense of accomplishment. The only reason I didn’t give this hike 5 stars was because this trail attracts rattlesnakes (which keeps me on edge while hiking) and it’s very exposed for a large portion of the trail (so you have to start early in the day).

Zach eating lunch at the top.

Donut Falls & Cardiff Fork to Mines

Total Distance: 7 miles | Altitude: 1350 ft | Time: 4 hrs | My Rating: 3/5

Notes: In general I think both of these trails are super lame. They’re both easy and flat, so they attract way too many people (especially families with loud, annoying children) and there’s no awesome view at the end. We went early in the season and couldn’t see much of donut falls, so maybe it looks cooler after all of the snow has melted and you can hike up to it. The trail to the mine was mainly covered is snow, so it took us forever to get there and I was wearing sandals so walking through snow and crossing ice cold streams was quite unpleasant.

This is the closest I could get to donut falls.

There was so much snow on the way to the mine.

Finally made it to the mine!

Thaynes Canyon Trail to ???

Total Distance: 6 miles | Altitude: 2500 ft | Time: 2 hr 45 min | My Rating: 2/5

Notes: I hated this trail so I’m not going to write much about it. Zach and I were trying to make it to Thaynes Peak, but after the trail split from Desolation trail about 3 miles in, the Thaynes trail disappeared and we couldn’t figure out where to go from there so we headed back down. The trail was terribly eroded causing Zach and I both to slip and fall about 5 times each while walking down. For how steep the trail was and how difficult it was to travel on, I was hoping for a nice view at the end, but we didn’t even get that, boo.

We encountered the prettiest part of the hike just 0.5 miles in.

The loose rocks on the trail made going down terrible.

I was not enjoying the trip down...

Townhome Tuesday: Easy to Install Pull-out Pantry Shelves

I've always gazed upon pull-out shelves in the kitchen with awe, but I never really thought it was something I would be able to enjoy in my first home. Well it turns out they are super easy to install and I'm not really sure why we waited so long to put them in. Our pantry used to have just regular shelves, and while they were huge and deep, all of the food in the back was inaccessible and it was hard to keep everything organized. Then we installed awesome pull-out shelves and our lives changed forever. We are able to store a ton more food and keep everything looking great and organized. Check it out:

Now our tiny pantry easily fits all of our food.

All you have to do is buy the shelves from Lowes or Home Depot. Then you can screw the new shelves right into the old shelves.

These little pins were key to the success of our project. After the new shelves were installed, once we pulled them out the weight of the stuff would caused the white shelf (original shelf) to tip. We attached these pins on top of all four corners of the white shelf to keep the shelf stable.

The last part of this project was putting place mats at the bottom of each wire shelf to keep things from falling through - plus they look pretty. 

Belated Food Friday: Asian Pizza

Sorry this post is late, last week was crazy busy. Pizza is by far my favorite food because you can change up the ingredients to make a variety of pizza flavors. Here’s a recipe for an Asian pizza that Zach and I love:

Asian Pizza
vegan option, low fat

Sauce Ingredients:

½ c rice vinegar

½ c water

¼ c brown sugar

1 T minced ginger

2 T peanut butter

4 garlic cloves

1 T canola oil

½ t red pepper flakes

Pizza Ingredients:

Trader Joe’s Whole Wheat Pizza Dough – we used ½ of the dough to make a thin crust and save on calories

1 c shredded mozzarella cheese – we used Daiya to keep the pizza vegan

1 c chopped carrots

1 c shredded purple cabbage

1 c chicken, cooked and chopped – we used soy chicken to keep the pizza vegan

1 bunch green onions, chopped

1 handful chopped cilantro

Instructions:

1.       Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

2.       Heat all sauce ingredients over medium heat in a sauté pan. Cook, stirring frequently, until sauce is thick. This takes about 10 minutes.

3.       To assemble pizza, roll out dough, sprinkle on cheese, then spread on sauce, then top with carrots, cabbage, and chicken.

4.       Bake in oven for 15 minutes. Sprinkle on green onions and cilantro before serving.  

I like this recipe because it's easy to put together and requires minimal prep work. Also, it's delicious.

Here's Zach prepping the sauce. We didn't have brown sugar so we tried to sub in pureed dates (that's the brown pile of mush you see in this picture). That was a mistake - please don't do this. If you don't have sugar sub in honey, that's what we ended up topping the pizza with to make it palatable.

This is the pizza before baking, you actually put the cheese on the bottom of this pizza, it's yummier that way for some reason.

Ready to eat!

We can do it! Wednesdays: Walk Breaks at Work

So I tried a new thing at work last week. Usually every time I hit a stopping point when working I’ll go online and surf the internet for a few minutes. This past week I exchanged those breaks with walking one lap around our building outside (that’s about 0.4 miles). I ended up walking around the building about two times a day – once right after lunch, and another in the afternoon around 2:30pm – and I love these walks. Here are the major benefits I saw this past week:

1.       Walking around and getting away from my computer allows me to think clearer about any problems I’m encountering that day. So I’m actually pretty productive on these breaks.

2.       Getting a chance to enjoy the good weather definitely brightens my mood, which is a nice pick-me-up if my day isn’t going so well.

3.       It feels good to exercise. There are so many articles that say sitting down all day will kill you, so it feels nice to get up and walk around every so often.

I like the walks and I’m going to stick with them, but there are a few bad things about them:

1.       I think it’s really awkward when I see other people while walking, they always look at me weird because I think they’re wondering where I’m going. And even when I don’t see people I feel guilty the whole time, like I’ve broken out of prison. I’m hoping this will go away with time. I’m sure eventually enough people will see me and come to realize that I just walk around the building every so often, no big deal.

2.       I’m not sure how I’m going to keep up with walking when the weather gets crazy hot. Also, in the winter I’m sure these walks won’t be as pleasant. I could always walk around inside the building, but then we get back to people seeing me and it being awkward, especially when they notice that I’ve passed by them a few times.

All in all I think the walking experiment was a success. I’m going to stick with it and maybe increase the frequency to 3 times a day (morning, lunch, and afternoon). 

Thursday Travel Tales: Greece & Turkey Part II

Last week I left off in the middle of our Greece and Turkey trip. We had just got off a boat in Turkey and managed to get visas to get into the country. We were in the city of Ayvalik and our plan was to get on the next bus to Istanbul. Unfortunately, there was an issue with getting bus tickets. Figuring out the nature of this issue was incredibility difficult because no one at the bus station knew English, so we had to resort to hand gestures and pointing to Turkish words in our guidebook to communicate. Eventually we managed to figure out the problem: the next few buses leaving for Istanbul did have enough seats for us, but the open seats were next to other men. Per Turkish customs the ladies in our group were only allowed to book seats either next to Zach  or another lady. So the next bus with enough open seats to satisfy this requirement didn’t leave until 8pm that night.

This was a little hiccup in our plan, since we now had to spend the entire day in the small city of Ayvalik, but since there wasn’t really anything we could do about we walked around the town and tried to enjoy ourselves. The town was small and pretty boring, but eventually we made it to 8pm and boarded our night bus to Istanbul which ended up being the strangest, most uncomfortable bus ride of my life. This is why:

1.       Absolutely no one on the bus knew English so every time we stopped (which was often since a lot of the passengers demanded smoke breaks) we were all confused about where we were, why we were stopping, if this was the stop we were supposed to get off at, etc.

2.       This bus ride was about 6 hours long and since it was nighttime, we were supposed to sleep on the bus. The problem was the seats were super uncomfortable and the constant stops kept waking us up.

3.       In the middle of the bus ride the bus boarded a ferry! Then we were in the cargo of some ferry where it was pitch black and very rocky. This was unsettling because it was completely unexpected and we were worried we had been taken for the duration of the boat ride until we saw light again.

By some miracle we survived the bus ride and managed to get off at the correct stop in Istanbul. From there we took a taxi into the city and checked in to our hotel, took a nap, and then started exploring the city.

Istanbul was great – it’s definitely one of my favorite cities. It’s the first (and only) predominately Muslim city I’ve ever visited, so the routine call to prayers and mosques on the skyline were a nice change. On our first day of exploring we met up with one of Eden’s Turkish friends who showed us around the city, brought us to the best restaurants, and translated for us along the way. Funny thing: Sinan (Eden’s Turkish friend) and Kate (the other friend who was with us on this trip) ended up getting married – you wouldn’t have been able to tell on this trip though. Sinan had another girlfriend in Turkey and Kate, Eden, and I spent a lot of time on the trip making fun of the crazy things she said - like how she loves drinking water while showering and also how she got kidnapped once but they let her go because she said her dad was the Vice President of America).

Anyway, the next day we went to the bazaar and had a lot of fun. Zach got yelled out by a few vendors for insulting them during haggling, but other than that we had a good time.

Our flight home was pretty eventful. While taxiing to the runway the plane veered off abruptly which tipped the airline off that something was seriously wrong with the plane. We all had to deplane and wait for a new part to arrive – which wouldn’t be until the next day. The good thing was Delta put everyone up in an insanely nice hotel, so we got to enjoy one more day in the city on Delta with luxury accommodations. Thankfully our next flight out was much less eventful and we made it home safely. Here are some pictures from the trip:

While eating dinner in Ayvalik the waiter offered Zach a sweater because he looked cold.

Here's Zach being silly in the Hagia Sophia.

The ladies had to don head covers before entering the mosques.

Zach and I in front of the Hagia Sophia.

Hookah!