Here you will find an archived weblog of my food, travel, and creative pursuits which I kept from 2010-2016. Please note both that the travel information contained here may outdated and that these logs were created on a prior version of this website and may not yet be optimized for the current version. If you’re looking for specific content, use the search field below! <3
Well, I'm back.
It's been a much slower return to blogging than I initially anticipated. After our 3 week trip to Europe, where my camera broke, I came back to a computer that had some major repair work to be done. Then I was off to Denver and Portland. And then there were other important things that took priority in our transition back to life at home.
Those of you that follow me on twitter or instagram will know that I'm a knitter. And those of you that remember my 30 Before 30 list, one of the items was to attend a life/creativity retreat.
Well, the stars have aligned and I am so thrilled to attend Camp Mighty next month! One of the things I love about the Camp Mighty event is the group fundraiser that we all participate in to raise money for charity:water. An amazing organization that brings clean and safe drinking water to communities in developing nations.
How does this relate to knitting? Well, one of the items on my life list is to open my first Etsy shop to sell hand knit items and since I needed to fundraise it seemed like the perfect time to cross that one off.
So, I would now like to introduce my very first Etsy shop!
For our honeymoon, my husband and I were fortunate enough to visit one of my favorite places in the world - New Zealand. The stars seemed to align just perfectly with rounding together enough funds and getting approval for over 3 weeks of time off from our relatively new jobs. Even with all that time, we still only covered a portion of the two islands that make up this beautiful country. So here it is, our 21 days in New Zealand (in pictures of course!).
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I started out this trip to Washington, DC feeling totally uninspired with my research into my eating options. I had a list I'd developed last year and plenty of places I felt comfortable with eating - but it's just that nothing really sparked my interest.
That was until I actually got to DC and did a little more digging to find some new eats. I ended up with four new gluten free friendly spots - three of which I will most definitely be returning to.
Since moving away from San Diego in 2005, I'm always struggling to find good Mexican food. When I moved away from California in 2010 - it's become even more of a challenge! Just recently I've been frequenting the small chain of Cactus Restaurants in Seattle. I first visited the original location in Madison Park - such a fun and warm location. It doesn't hurt that you can just walk right outside to the shore of Lake Washington either. Their newest location in South Lake Union is also great and just a short walk from the downtown area.
Before we built our raised beds for our edible garden, we subscribed to a couple different Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs. We canceled one after the produce was consistently poor and the other when we had just too much of our own produce!
So when the folks from Oxbow Farms approached me about participating in The Oxbox Box Project - I was excited to spread the word about a fantastic CSA. If you can't grow your own produce, subscribing to a CSA is great way to support local farms and have a kitchen filled with top quality fruits and vegetables. The Oxbow Box Project provides local bloggers, cooks, and writers with a box of produce and invites them to write a post sharing what they made with their produce.
After picking up my box at the ridiculously charming Melrose Market, I opted to use my fresh goodies for a variety of quick weeknight meals. In my box I received a bunch of chard, red leaf lettuce, green lettuce, spring onions, red beets, carrots, patty pan squash, zucchini, and red plums.
I sort of dream of moving to New Zealand one day, although I'm not sure how we'd get our pup there, so reading about a move to Paris makes my wheels turn.
Our tomato plants are massive, so I'm anticipating a pretty good harvest and may have to make this tomato butter.
I can't believe it's August already! The summer has just zoomed by and our plants have gone crazy. In fact the first bed has done it's part in contributing, so we've harvested all the remaining goodies. That includes the 2+ pounds of carrots you see above, golden beets, lactino kale, lettuce, garlic, and leeks. In order to preserve some of our goodies for later in the year, we blanched and froze the carrots and lactino kale.
