Funny.

I just got home from my weekly ritual of getting my nails painted. (SIDENOTE: I would say overall I am a pretty low maintenance gal, I often leave the house with no make-up on and mismatching sweatpants, but my finger nails are the one thing I have to have perfect all the time or it makes me crazy. And only polish changes, I'm much too impatient for manicures. The funny thing is I really don't even like getting my nails done, but it looks like a 5-year old painted them if I do it myself, so I shell out the $6 a week plus tip so I don't look like I tended to my fingers after polishing off an entire bottle of wine. FIN) This wasn't for bringing that up...


If there is one place in Sammamish you can always count on running into someone you know, it's US Nails. (Or the Pine Lake QFC, but I'm there less often. That makes it sound like I'm nails > food, but there is one closer to my house.) Last time I was there, I saw someone that worked at my middle school. Today, I ran into a mom of someone I used to play soccer with. This woman literally watched me play soccer every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday for all of high school. It's just funny.


The notion of running into people. If you really sit down and think about it (which most of you probably don't because you arent overthinkers like moi) what are the chances of running into that one person at that one single location at any given time of day? I mean, mathematically. The answer  is I am bad at math so I don't know what the probability is, but I am guessing it isn't that big. So it always strikes me as interesting when I run into someone, especially someone that was recently on my mind, as was the case with this woman. I was thinking about her and her family, she lost her husband about this time four years ago, and it just so happens that I was thinking about that the other day as I brushed my teeth. I just started to wonder how they were doing, how the kids were, about how everyone felt this time back then. It's funny when the answer to your wonderings is provided by a random run-in. 


Sometimes, it almost seems like it was meant to happen. I often think, because I believe in fate and religion and a higher power (but also, as I covered before, because I am an overthinker) that there are no such thing as coincidences, and that often when you run into someone, there was some reason that both of you decided you needed a caffeine fix and went to Starbucks at 3:17 PM on a Thursday. One thing I always think of when I talk about this is something that happened last year. One of my best friends was having an awful day, for reasons I can't even remember now, and I decided that the perfect remedy was sugar (nature's therapy) and a trip to the pumpkin patch. As we were walking through the rows of muddy & moldy pumpkins - I think it was around October 28th, we may have gotten there a bit late for the cream of the crop - I spotted a blonde-haired little boy and commented on how absolutely adorable he was. She started laughing when she realized that the boy was actually her nephew. We ended up running into her step-brother and his family, and the timing of that just struck me as poignant. Often when you are having a bad day, all you want is people that really know you, and thats what she got. Of course, her step-brother asked what in the heck we were doing at a pumpkin patch since we aren't parents and didn't have any little kids with us. Obviously he doesn't understand that growing up isn't necessarily a part of getting older...


Things like this, like much in life, just make me stop and think, and make me feel such a sense of community, both in my hometown and in the world as a whole. It's so much smaller than we give it credit for, and in a world full of 6 billion people, you are never that far away from someone that knows you. 


Pretty comforting isn't it?


♥mb.

Halloween is English for Sugar.

It must be approximately 20 years of eating sugar around this time of year that makes me crave treats when I can smell Halloween in the air. I have a Pavlovian response to anything chocolately & bad for me when the calendar approaches October 31st. All I want is a bag full of Reese's, but alas, my digestive system's relationship with milk is complicated.

When I first discovered all of my food sensitivities earlier this year, anytime I got discouraged or didn't know what to eat, I would bake. The Babycakes NYC and Gluten Free Essential Baking cookbooks became my best friends, and I am willing to bet that for a solid month I lived off mostly sugar and empty calories (or I guess if I was cooking from the Babycakes book, agave nectar and coconut oil, gotta love that alternative-vegan thing!) I then of course realized that my jeans were fitting a little tigheter and decided to shift my focus from treats to unprocessed foods like quinao and lots of fruits/veggies, but that wasn't before many entire pans of brownies and cookies devoured by yours truly.

Last night I felt compelled to recreate one of my favorite childhood Halloween treats with a bit of a twist. My mom used to make these peanut butter bars with chocolate topping and put those candy corn pumpkins on the top. I remember bringing those to share with my elementary school classrooms on more than one occasion, so its no surprise that I always crave this in October. The strange thing is that I remember them as being peanut butter rice krispy treats, but they weren't. I am incredibly partial to rice krispy treats (I can't tell you how many of these accompanied my lattes while studying at Starbucks in college) and I never feel terrible about eating them because they are "healthy".

Right...the cereal might be on its own, but add a little butter and sugar clouds aka marshmallows and you've got yourself a verifiable sugar bomb. That is of course improved upon by a gob of peanut butter, candy corns and melted chocolate chips, which I lovingly refer to as "the lazy man's frosting". Dump some of these little bittersweet morsels in a Pyrex bowl, microwave on high for 1-2 minutes, give it a little stir, pour it on whatever you want to frost and VOILA! A delicious chocolate topping that hardens to perfection.

Needless to say, after creating a pan of these delicious treats, I rediscovered my lack of self-control when it comes to sweets, and have subsequently devoured about a third of the pan by myself in the last 24 hours. I ate one for breakfast. Don't judge me. It's Halloween...so its justified...right??

So if you are anything like me, your mouth is watering imaging taking a bite out of one of these treats. Lucky for you, I am giving you the recipe. They are so gourmet & hard to assemble. Not. If you have 15 minutes and a stove, welcome to chocolate peanut butter nirvanna. And if your stomach is like mine, rejoice! The following recipe can be adjusted to be gluten-free and dairy-free, if you need. If you don't, enjoy the glutens from Rice Krispies. (Yes, believe it or not, Rice Krispies are NOT gluten-free, they are sweetened with barley malt. Who would have thought that rice cereal, one of the grains allowed by those of us gluten sensitive individuals, would not be GF? Kelloggs...FAIL!!!!)

Hope you enjoy :D and Happy (almost) Halloween!!


♥mb.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Rice Krispy Treats

1 bag mini-marshmallows
1/4 cup butter or margarine
1/2 cup peanut butter
1 cup chocolate chips (I used Trader Joe's semisweet - GF & DF!)
1 box crispy rice cereal (I used EnviroKidz Koala Krisp, GF & also chocolate!)
Candy corn for garnish

1. Melt butter & PB together in a saucepan
2. Pour in marshmallows - coat them in melted butter/PB, cook until gooey & melty
3. Dump cereal in a bowl
4. Pour the melty mixture over the cereal, mix until good & gooey
5. Press into a 13x9 GREASED pan (emphasis on the greased, you will not be able to rescue your treats from the pan if you forget this step, and that would be tragic!!)
6. Let set until they are cool to the touch
7. Dump 1 cup chocolate chips in a microwave bowl & microwave in 30 second increments, stirring in between, until all chips are melted
8. Smooth chocolate over the treats
9. Put as many candy corns on top as you want
10. Let cool until chocolate hardens, cut into squares (or little slivers every time you walk by the pan) and enjoy the sugar rush!!!!!!!

New.

Hi :)

So I'm not completely sure why I created this. Kind of for fun, but mostly because I find that I am happiest when I am sipping on some herbal tea (my favorites being Tazo Calm & peppermint) jotting down my thoughts on paper. Or in this case, online paper. Sometimes I think I made a mistake in majoring in marketing. (Not that I am using my degree yet, other than simply trying to market myself to various companies & networking leads in attempts to find a way to use my hard-earned skills.) But really, my true love in life is writing. Thinking, realizing things that seem so simple but take a long time to dawn on me, appreciating the things in life that are so small but make such a big impact. And writing them down so that on a day when the sun (literally or figuratively) doesn't seem to be making an appearance, I can re-read things that add a little warmth to my gloom.

Something you will quickly learn about me (if you don't already know) is that sometimes I get fixated on the small things, about how integral they are to life, and how overlooked they are. Like water. I am a water-addict. Literally. I have to have it, all day, every day. If I don't have it for a couple hours, I feel like my cells are drying up. Maybe it's OCD, maybe I am half-amphibian, but one thing is for sure - I can't live without water. And no one can. And sometimes, I just really appreciate that it exists.

So welcome to my new adventure in crafting my sometimes complex & crazy thoughts into words that hopefully do the English language and the feelings of people everywhere a little justice. You can expect random. You can expect sad entires, happy entries, entries that entirely consist of song lyrics (probably the repeat song of the moment), lots of pictures of my dogs and maybe even every once & a while a recipe conquest.

Just a Pacific Northwest dog-lover trying to become a yoga pro, be a good friend, navigate the world with a sensitive tummy and find a way to make sense out of everything life throws at me.

Glad you stopped by.


♥mb.