Snow Storms and Spices

Well hello! We're almost through a very snowy January - tonight being a very snowy night in particular. Actually, I'm wondering how concerned I should be that the weather channel keeps upping it's accumulation prediction  for Manhattan every time I check. Should I be stockpiling antibiotics and protein bars, hightailing it to the public library and burning chairs for warmth? It's getting a little chaotic looking down there on 9th avenue.

I'm warm and cozy inside my apartment, making tea and cooking away.

I've been really sticking to my healthy eating (for a healthy me!) plan and experimenting with some great new recipes. There have been some failures, burned Brussels sprouts, beeping smoke alarms and gooey gummy carrots, but I'm mastering it along the way, right?

Basil Maple Apple and Barley Stuffing

I'm also slowly acquiring fancier cookware, which is making me giddy. So the gummy carrot episode was tolerable.

Spiced chickpeas with yellow peppers and brown rice

Now that I have chairs around my table in my new apartment, I can probably stop pretending to be a sad excuse of a grown up and have my friends over for dinner. It was a long stretch without chairs. But hey - I made due! I now know that you'll never truly appreciate the idea of chairs until you've eaten your breakfast while sitting on a plastic storage bin every morning for three months. 

Stuffed Butternut Squash

I also am learning to love my new luxury of the... microwave. Yes, that's right. I lived for over two years without a microwave and a stove with 1.5 out of 4 working burners. It was a time of forgotten left overs and charred stir-frys. But 50th Street is a story for another day. Now I have a microwave and I can make popcorn all day every day until I'm full of microwave popcorn up to my eyes.

Okay, I won't do that. But I could. If I wanted to.

Sweet potato and Quinoa cakes with Blackberry Jalapeno salsa.

What I will keep doing is cooking up a storm! Maybe that's a terrible metaphor to use during a blizzard. It is getting terrible out there! Every time I look out the window I get a little more worried that we're in a War of the Worlds type emergency and I haven't caught on yet.

Anyway, I'll keep on with the new recipes. And I'll keep up with the yoga. And my resolution to be more Zen. And I'll keep making a lot of arts and crafts projects. And staying up really late with equally Type-A friends playing hilariously competitive games.

I should probably work more on the whole "a little more Zen, a little less type A" thing.

But hey, tomorrow is another day.

Adventures in Queens

So I'm sorry if this post looks a little strange, my laptop has come down with computer appendicitis and I've resorted to writing on my iPhone (first world problems, am I right?) I tried to fix my it myself, and now I have a broken laptop with a few keys missing and tech guts hanging out. Turns out, computer surgery is not my specialty. Big surprise there.

Braden and I decided to venture out to Queens to see the Queens Art Museum... And we made a stop at the 1964 World's Fair along the way.

We then spent the rest of the afternoon wondering the museum, which (among other awesome pieces) is the home to this giant panorama of New York City. All of the buildings in the 5 Burroughs is represented to scale... And they have a touchable representation on the side where you can run your fingers over the brownstones in Greenpoint to the Empire State Building in Midtown.

After the museum, we thought it'd be a great idea to hop on the subway and hop off at a new stop we've never seen before.

We found ourselves on Roosevelt Avenue - picked a random direction- and ended up eating the best plantain empanadas on this side of the border.

Well Queens... it's been great!