happy valentine's day

Quinoa, cooked love apples, and tofu marinated* and sauteed in soy sauce, sesame oil, and clover honey**.

Truth: I am my own best valentine. Saucy.

*Usually I'm pretty terrible at coming up with the right ratios for ingredients in marinades, but this one turned out quite nicely! Unfortunately I don't have specific measurements for you so my general advice is to make incremental changes and be sure to taste along the way. Add more soy sauce than sesame oil and enough honey so that you don't feel like you're going to bloat up and die from a sodium overdose. Good luck!

**Speaking of honey, check out the most perfect card for this blog: C'mon, honey. Bee my valentine.

Cards available for purchase from Magnolia Press for Tiny Prints and Etsy.

dobbs ferry cowl

Back in October, I discovered this local yarn store down in the Commons, where I picked up a lovely Rowan wool yarn. You can't tell very well from the photos, but it's a very pretty deep evergreen color with blue-gray flecks embedded. I decided to use this yarn for the Dobbs Ferry Cowl from Lion Brand Yarn (if you have a Ravelry account, you can check out my project here), which I gave to my sister for Christmas.

The pattern is originally from Lion Brand Yarn but has also been made available on Martha Stewart's website.

My mom likes being mentioned on my blog, so this is a shout out to her for modeling for my pictures:

diy gift wrap

Just one final exam stands between me and the last month long Christmas holiday I'll ever have. Naturally, I've been procraftinating and watching A Charlie Brown Christmas and drinking coffee to avoid studying.

It's working pretty well.

On Tuesday, I made wrapping paper and gift tags with some of the fly femmes at the Cornell Women's Resource Center. I'm convinced that this is the best DIY project I would never have done on my own.

With just a handful of supplies, such as...

• a big roll of butcher paper (okay, granted, I have no idea where one purchases butcher paper unless you're a teacher but I suppose you could always improvise with brown grocery bags),
• stamps (or make your own with potatoes and vegetables - the possibilities are endless),
• ink pads (I'm really in love with the metallic gold ink I used... it didn't go on very smooth but you know, as Jamie Oliver always says, I like it a bit more rustic anyway),
• glitter glue, stickers, maybe even some scrapbooking paper if you're feeling fancy

...you too can say goodbye to commercial gift wrap! Perfect for the wrapping paper savers in your life.

 

miscellaneous meals

 
 

1. Cashews, pepitas, and smashed avocado on couscous.

2. Soba noodle soup with purple baby bok choy (which anticlimactically turned green upon being cooked) and bacon.

3. Thanksgiving buttermilk biscuits - not as good as the drop biscuits I normally make but definitely healthier. We had roast duck instead of turkey, so the little guy in the center was our stand-in.

4. Most satisfying meal ever: creamy avocado sprinkled with salt and pepper, a bit of crusty sourdough bread lightly drizzled with extra virgin olive oil, and mozzarella cheese.

Did you know that... the human body is roughly 70% water, 20% avocado, 10% cheese?

pumpkin bread pudding

 

While surfing this great food blog a few weeks ago, I encountered the masterpiece that is pumpkin bread pudding. Naturally, I forwarded the link immediately to my friend Jo (with whom I also made the butterbeer, carved the pumpkins, and attempted to make ghost cake pops which sort of failed and floundered into sad-looking cake "truffles").

Over the weekend we decided to take on this bread pudding recipe with some minor adjustments. Most notably, we left out the ginger, cloves, and bourbon - only because none of these were on hand at the time. We also used plain white sandwich bread this time around, though a much better option would have been challah. The bread pudding was still delicious, but there are a lot of small ways you could make it even more decadent and special.

Next time you go to a potluck, sign up for dessert and bring this dish. I mean it. Everyone will gush over your incredible cooking skills (while secretly thanking God that it's not another plate of brownies), and you can sit back and twiddle your internal mustache and marvel at how smooth you are.

Pumpkin Bread Pudding
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen

1-1/2 cups milk (not sure what kind... it was swiped from the dining halls)
3/4 cup pumpkin puree
1/2 cup sugar (could easily reduce to 1/3 cup)
2 large eggs plus 1 yolk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
5 cups bread, cut into 1-inch chunks
3/4 stick unsalted butter

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Put the butter in a baking dish and place into oven to melt.
Whisk together milk, pumpkin puree, sugar, eggs, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg in a large bowl.
Once butter is melted, remove from oven and toss with bread.
Pour custard mixture over bread, making sure everything is coated well.
Bake for 25-30 minutes until set.

halloween pumpkin-carving

I've been involved in pumpkin-carving activities exactly three times in my life. The first time was in pre-school, and my job was to take out the pumpkin guts with my bare hands (it was cold and gooey and seriously traumatizing). The second was over a decade later, during my freshman year at Cornell, when GCF held a pumpkin-carving contest. I don't remember it clearly - I know there was a lot of pumpkin-hacking going on. Mostly I watched the action from a safe distance.

This year I participated in APO's Halloween pumpkin-carving event. Pumpkins upon pumpkins upon pumpkins were provided, along with some really legitimate pumpkin-carving tools. I worked with three other girls and this is what happened (ghosties and Harry Potter pumpkin! - we were so proud):