Hello, my name is Imara, and I cannot stop reading foodgawker.com

Any of you who are friends with me on Facebook know that I have been posting extremely delicious photos and recipes off of a little website called foodgawker.com. Can you say internet crack? I cannot cannot cannot stop paging through their insanely large archive of photos and recipes. Today I somehow managed to complete all of my to-do list. Crazy, because I think I bookmarked like five more recipes today alone. I really want to be one of those food bloggers who can more or less buy all their own ingredients and just cook all day and take pictures of it. Oy.

Maybe I shouldn't be all stressed out about my education and what I'll be doing with the rest of my life. Maybe my newfound obsession with all things cooking and baking, and an enjoyment of household tasks, means that I'm just going to get married and stay at home with my eight million babies and cook and bake and clean and play and that's all. That sounds like a nice life.

This isn't very feminist of me, but I'm gonna need a really rich husband.

Anyways. Let's talk about the food that I actually cooked, and not the stuff that I am dreaming up. I didn't actually prepare three meals like I said I was going to. I already caught you up on my enchilada adventures. The next night I had the staff orientation for my teaching job, and so my mom and brothers got burgers while I was in the meeting. Then I had penne rosa from Noodles. (That's a recipe I should make up myself: a spicy tomato cream sauce, feta cheese, some good chicken or other protein, fresh spinach, maybe some basil...mmm)

We had sausage and peppers the next night, which I played no part in making. Which is silly, because all you have to do is grill the sausages and sauté bell peppers and onions up in a pan for a while.

But the night after that, I had my friend over to help me bake for another friend's graduation party. We made funfetti cookies and cream cheese brownies. All from a box. So nothing really ambitious or challenging, but hey, it's food and it went over great at the party.

Funfetti cookies are amazing. You just make them with Pillsbury Funfetti cake mix. The recipe is on the side of the box, and I know you can find it online. One box makes about 3 dozen, depending on how large you make the balls of dough. We tried the trick where you lay down brown paper bags on the cookie sheets to keep them from sticking (see my chocolate chip cookie post somewhere below), but it didn't seem to work here. :( But they did take well to the whole piece-of-bread-in-the-container thing, which kept them from drying out over three days. And then we got to the party, and our friend's friends (who we didn't know) just took the container and ate them all. Awesome!

I do have a recipe for cream cheese brownies from scratch, but I didn't feel like bugging my parents for another trip to the grocery store for all of the ingredients. You can totally just use regular boxed brownie mix. Find a recipe online for cream cheese brownies, and pretty much all you do is mix up cream cheese with softened butter, sugar, and eggs until it is a liquid. Drop it all over half the brownie batter in the pan. Then pour the rest of the brownie batter on top. Run a knife over it to make it all swirly and pretty.

Mine could have been prettier. Also, softened butter means softened butter! There's really no good way to soften butter (without melting it) besides letting it sit out all day. We did not soften the butter, so I had to resort to my family's Braun hand mixer, which I think was meant to be used to make baby food. It made really gross squishy, slurpy sounds as it mixed that goop together. But it finally worked. Also, we had a lot of extra cream cheese filling. We thought of trying to use it as a frosting, but it had raw eggs in it, and cream cheese frosting (and any frosting, actually) never has raw eggs in it. If I'd had graham crackers, I would have improvised a cheesecake. But alas, we had to throw it down the sink. The brownies were delicious- moist and really fudgy.

Mom went out to dinner with a friend that night, so I cooked for my brothers, my friend and myself. I made linguine with shrimp cooked in garlic and oil. Photo time!

Seen here is the pot of salted water getting ready to boil, and a pan heating up some olive oil. Once the oil was fairly hot, I stuck about three and half teaspoons of minced garlic (equivalent to three cloves) in the oil and let it become ever so slightly golden brown. DO NOT LET THE GARLIC BURN OR GET BROWN: it will be bitter and yucky and gross. I managed to avoid this, thank goodness.

(I'm just a little afraid of overcooking things. And yet I'm also afraid of E. coli and salmonella and cross-contamination. It's a delicate balance.)

Here is the shrimp. I love shrimp. I was terrified of screwing up the shrimp. The stuff cooks really really fast if you have the heat on high. So keep that in mind when you sauté shrimp: all of your junk has to be ready to go once that shrimp is in. I may have overcooked it just a tad, but not so badly that anyone really noticed besides me.

Pasta in the boiling water! I used linguine for this recipe. Set your timer for the recommended time on the box (usually it's less than ten minutes) and check it about a minute or two before it's done. Why? Salting the water doesn't actually make the water boil faster. It actually does the opposite: the addition of a compound with a higher boiling point will make the water boil at a higher temperature than normal. That means that the salted water is hotter than the normal boiling point. So your pasta will probably cook a little faster than the box time. You want it to be tender, but not mushy. That's called al dente, and it is beautiful. 

That is the finished shrimp with the garlicky oil from the pan. Shrimp are done when they are pink and just firm. Really, it doesn't take much on high heat.

My plate. Blah presentation. Could have used some color.

The whole table. I set out grapes and baked some frozen garlic bread. My friend and I had Sprite in wine glasses just to feel fancy.

My recipe needs some troubleshooting. I used a mix of recipes and some freestyling to put it all together. The major complaint/suggestion was that it needed more sauce and more garlic. This can be solved very easily by adding more oil and garlic to the pan (duh), maybe tossing in some white wine, and reserving some of the pasta water after the pasta has been drained. Some chopped parsley would have added some nice color and a little more taste to the plate as well. But all in all, not a failure. Very basic and solid and satisfying.

I've been making eggs all the time for lunch lately. Scrambled eggs and wheat toast. Sometimes a fried egg in a sandwich. Or a cheese omelet. This is what a typical lunch of mine looks like:

The fiber from the toast and the protein from the eggs keep me full for quite a while, which helps me to snack less in the afternoon- big plus. It's an awesome breakfast if you plan on going through a pretty tough workout before your lunch, or if you just have a long time between your breakfast and lunch. Eggs are not that hard to cook at all. Don't be afraid of them!

Anyways. I didn't make burgers like I'd planned. We'd just had them recently and I didn't want to bore anyone. I helped cook beer can chicken, but I did not do it myself nor did I get pictures. Super easy, though: butter up a whole chicken, season it (including its cavity) with salt, pepper, and chicken rub, and stand it up on a beer can with about a quarter to a third of the beer poured out (so 2/3-3/4 full), and holes pierced near the top. Stand them up on indirect heat on a grill for about an hour. And voila: juicy, tender chicken with crispy, delicious skin. The leftovers also make for great chicken salad.

Here's some of the music I listened to during my cooking adventures:

Judas, Lady Gaga

You've Got the Love, Florence + the Machine (and other selections from Florence; my friend needed to be introduced)

I'm in Love (I Wanna Do It), Alex Gaudino

Back to Where I Was, Eric Hutchinson

Run and Tell That, Elijah Kelly (from the Hairspray film soundtrack)

I know this is a long post, but stick with me; it's been like a week since I've posted and I've had "blog" on my to-do list every day since, but I just keep getting caught up with other things. I've picked up again a lot better with working out. I have run 3.1 miles for two consecutive days now- a big thing for me, since my regular running routine in years past has never gone further than about 2.7 miles, excluding benefit races. So I think I'll be in a good place for racing this summer! Our first one of the season may be this Saturday morning- so if we register, I'll let you know how it goes! 

I'm also trying to stay on board with core work and weights/resistance bands. I just want to get toned. That's all! Oh, and I did the Plyometrics workout from the P90X video series. Holy crap. I've been doing the yoga video every few days, and I really like it. It is definitely a good workout for anyone who wants something not too heart-pounding, but that still gets the job done. So then I figured, I'm in decent cardio shape- let's try Plyo! I don't know if I've ever sweated that much indoors...ever. Certainly not without the use of a machine. Plyometrics is all jumping and squatting and dancing around like a crazy person. It is intense. I made it through everything but the very last sequence of exercises because I could feel my sugar crashing and I didn't want to pass out. And then of course the next day I was very very sore- right in my quads, up by my knees (it's a very high-impact workout. Not recommended if you have knee or lower back problems.). And that's when I decided to run 3.1 miles. If my father can do it, so can I. If I could do Plyo, I'm definitely ready for a 5K. And I did it! Just keep telling yourself to run a little bit farther, to do one more rep. You'll be surprised- unless you have underlying health problems, your body likes to be pushed. That's how you really get results- at least that's what I keep reading...we'll see how I look in a few weeks or so!

In other news, I have actually been reading, which is always a plus. I finished Jonathan Franzen's ginormous and incredibly complex novel The Corrections, which I had started over last winter break. It is mind-boggling and depressing and discouraging, but an admirable work of writing nonetheless. I do not recommend it if you are looking for something frou-frou, uplifting, and mindless. Not at all. I also plowed through Maeve Binchy's Tara Road...not because I was so enthralled with the characters and the story and the writing, but because I had had it sitting by my bed for a while and I wanted to read it and finish it. Seriously? That was an Oprah's Book Club selection?? The writing was clumsy, sometimes abrupt, and rarely poetic, and the characters were often one-dimensional and fairly pathetic, or at least incomprehensible in their dependence, blindness, and simplicity. So now that that's over with, I'm going to start Franzen's next novel, Freedom, followed by John Steinbeck's East of Eden, and hopefully Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead if I can get my hands on a copy. 

I served at a meal program for the St. Vincent dePaul Society this evening. Service is always such a moving experience, especially when it's direct interaction with a poor and vulnerable population, like the one served at this meal program. First, you learn a lot of lessons about race and poverty, especially in a segregated city like my own. Second, you see that a notable number are mentally ill or disabled- which I know to be a truth in my city because its public mental health system was largely dissembled a decade or more ago. Third, you realize that the people coming through are certainly not bad people. Au contraire. I think that the criminals (who are a minority, of course) people associate with the inner city make their money somehow and don't need meal programs. Good people, on the other hand, are actively looking for work, trying to get promoted, and trying to feed their kids, and just cannot scrape together enough for a meal. (Side note: want to learn more about that? Read Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. Yeah, she's a little biased to the left. But she's not lying.) Everyone I served was friendly and thankful. Get out there and get in it- that is the only way you can really learn about the realities of poverty and urban America. At the very least, give thanks for what you have- that you have the resources to access the Internet and read this blog, that you ate a couple meals today, that you have a place to sleep and shower every day.

Almost done, guys. Thanks for sticking around! This is what's coming up: a very good friend's birthday is this Wednesday. Tuesday I may be helping her bake healthy chocolate and peanut butter cookies for her to bring into work as a birthday treat. Then on Wednesday I will be joining her for dinner, cake, and bingo at the local casino. I'm supposed to bake brownies with a dear elderly friend of our family later this week. I would like to make pizza, tomato sauce and meatballs, and apple crisp/pie/crumble soon. The apple pie is actually slightly urgent, because ideally I will bake an apple pie for the Fourth of July, and I don't want that one to be my first time with it. Oh, and Father's Day is Sunday, and my dad's favorite cake is a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. I will be attempting it from scratch! :) More grad parties are coming up as well, so we'll see if I can put any of my foodgawker bookmarks to use there.

Blessings on you and yours. Hope that the weather is satisfactorily summery out your way. As always, please comment and contact me with regards to the blog. I really appreciate and need your feedback.

Love,

Imara

Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters, 1999
US writer (1962 - )

Guess what's cookin'?

Sorry. I thought that title was clever. Because this week, I am cooking dinner at least three nights. Tonight, I made my first meal. Chicken enchiladas.

I didn't make them totally from scratch. Meaning that I used canned red enchilada sauce instead of making it myself. To make it myself would have been a little labor intensive. Simmering onions, garlic, pureeing canned tomatoes, etc. Mostly I was scared that I would add too much chili powder and no one would be able to eat it because it'd be too spicy for everyone's taste. So I just bought a big can of La Victoria red enchilada sauce, heated it up, and followed this recipe:
http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/moms_chicken_enchiladas/ .

Here are photos of the enchilada-making process:

That's the big can of red enchilada sauce. It was just barely enough. So if you like your enchiladas really saucy, you'll want to make your own sauce or buy a larger can, if your store has it.

Heat up the red enchilada sauce. Not very sexy.

Cook the chicken breasts before you shred them up and toss them in sauce (obviously; you can't really shred raw chicken). That's what parboiled chicken looks like. Definitely not sexy.

Get corn tortillas and shredded cheese. Try Monterey Jack, or a Mexican/Taco mix. Taco mixes come seasoned, though, so if you don't want that, just pick something else. You could probably even make your own shredded mix if you want.

I think there are recipes for enchiladas using flour tortillas out there, if you don't like corn tortillas. Corn tortillas do have a different flavor and texture than flour tortillas. I would have preferred corn tortillas from our local Mexican grocery store, because they make them on site.. Unfortunately, it's not actually that local to me and I had no choice but to go with what they had at the supermarket.

I didn't get pictures of the tortilla preparation, because I was trying too hard not to get burned from oil and letting the tortillas get too dark and keeping the tortillas from falling apart in the sauce. Do this after you prep the chicken (see below). Heat up about a tablespoon-ish of oil in a pan. When hot (and really, make it pretty hot), stick a corn tortilla in there until the edges get crispy and the tortilla starts bubbling a bit. Flip it and do the same on the other side. Then dip each side of the tortilla in enchilada sauce.

After the chicken is parboiled and has cooled enough to handle, shred it up with forks. Toss in about half a cup of sauce (or whatever you think is enough; that's what it took for 3 chicken breasts) and maybe half a cup of cheese (again, depends on your preferences). Mix it up and set aside.

Slap a couple spoonfuls of chicken into the saucy tortilla. Roll it up, stick it in a pan.

Snug as a bug in a rug. :) Slather with leftover sauce and dump cheese on it. Bake at 350F in a glass dish for ten minutes.

Look at that. Look. At. That. A little bit cheesy, a little bit saucy. Deliciousness. I used mild sauce. It had basically no heat and was just savory. If you like things a little bit hot, either make it yourself, try to find medium or hot sauce (they didn't have it at my supermarket), or add chili powder a teaspoon at a time until it suits your taste. I would suggest serving it with rice. However, we actually didn't because apparently we were out of rice and I didn't grab it at the  store when I ran in. So we had enchiladas with cut up fruit. Yummy.

I also made brownies. From a box. So no great achievement there. A friend of mine is having a graduation party this weekend, so I am planning to make more baked goodies for her. On the docket: cream cheese brownies. Chocolate chip cookies (yet again). Funfetti cookies (from a box mix). So nothing terribly daring, but I can make them in large quantities, fairly easily, and they're crowd pleasers. Keep that in mind for parties: make lots of things that lots of people like. Especially if you're just a bunch of teenagers. Save the lofty aspirations for stuffed grape leaves, cherry clafoutis, and kale salad with lemon feta dressing for when you're older, have money, and know people who really like that stuff.

(I've been reading a lot of food blogs lately. Mostly from foodgawker.com. I'm a little obsessed. Actually, a lot obsessed. That's where I got the cherry clafoutis and kale salad from. I can't even tell you what a clafoutis really is, but it looks delicious, and I saw a lot of them because I guess cherries are in season someplace.)

Dinner tomorrow night: either burgers, for which I want to sauté mushrooms and onions as toppings, or linguine in garlic and oil with shrimp. I'm thinking maybe the pasta because you cook that stuff inside, and we have a heat advisory out here from noon until 8 pm. Which means I need to finish this soon and get to bed, because I intend to be running early in the morning tomorrow, before it gets too hot. When it's supposed to hit 75 at 7 am, you know it's gonna be hot and you need to hang around in the air conditioning. Or stay in your pool.

In other news, I have a job offer! Today, as I was just starting to get really desperate, I got a phone call from the theater academy where I took classes for basically my whole life. They offered me a job as a teacher's assistant with first through fourth graders for a month. I am very excited about it and hope that it works out. Go figure, I did not apply for this job. It may have been a conversation I had over the weekend with a friend who works there, in which I may have mentioned (like I have been to everybody, of course) that I was jobless and poor. It may have been the fact that my Facebook status was: "all the places I have applied to: Please hire me. I promise that I won't spend the money irresponsibly. 3/4 of it will be going straight into savings. Really! I am friendly and hardworking and I like people. You won't be wasting your money on me." Given that I am Facebook friends with a couple people who work at the academy as well, it is possible that someone took pity on me and suggested me to the man who is hiring for the summer, whom I actually don't know, of course. I'll go over the reasons why I didn't apply there in the first place. But for now, I'm going to attend the teachers' meeting tomorrow, check out the pay, and hopefully sign on!

Right now, I've been doing a lot of praying and reflection and trying to look for signs and figure out what this all means, if it even means anything. I hope you have a happy, wonderful week. If it's hot out by you, please drink lots and lots of water and try to put off your outdoor workout to the early evening, or get up and do it in the morning. If I want to do the latter tomorrow, I have to get to bed now.

Love,

Imara

Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.

Emile Coue
French psychotherapist (1857 - 1926)

Progress? Maybe?

Hey kids,

It is Friday. Hip hip hooray! Hope you're all looking forward to a weekend partying with friends, enjoying (hopefully) beautiful weather and the arrival of summer, or just relaxing if you are fortunate enough to have a job and are getting a break this weekend. I am sitting out on my deck right now, basking in a warm, breezy, sunny afternoon with my music and my calendars and my book.

Still no job. This is very frustrating. And it's really getting to be summertime, when I need to start having money available to go out and enjoy my city. I feel very lucky, though, that I am not a provider for my family or for anyone else. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be jobless and not just need it to build up your savings, but also to feed, clothe, and shelter others. So every time I start complaining about not having gotten any calls yet, I say a little prayer for those who need work a lot more than I actually do. On the bright side, a lady in my neighborhood has one little one, and another one due next week, who needs babysitting, so she'll be calling me once the next one has been born. She is also going to do me the favor of referring her sister and her busy family to me. So I am expecting a little money coming in soon. In the meantime, I'm just laying low, checking my email obsessively and praying for my phone to ring.

(It actually did ring for me today, but it was a collection agency asking about some old doctor's bill that hasn't been cleared up yet. Those dudes are scary! No worries; the bill just probably got lost in the shuffle of my parents' stuff. Anyways...)

I really miss having a desk and a planner and a space of my own to have as my home base and to keep things organized. My big mirror dresser and night stand are just not cutting it, nor are iCal and Stickies adequate replacements for my planner and its minimum three Post-It notes per day, and my wall calendar and planner calendars. I feel really disorganized. I have come to realize that I like having structure and a schedule. I am not motivated enough to just get stuff done unless there's a deadline.

But what you really wanna know about it is the food I've been making, right? Of course you do. Actually, the only thing I've made since I last posted was another batch of chocolate chip cookies and banana chocolate chip bread. I decided not to taunt you with more pictures of the cookies, because they were monster-sized and uber-gooey and deadly. After I baked them, my father specifically requested that I stop. Too bad, Daddy! I have lots more things to make this summer, and you're going to love all of it.

So I made banana chocolate chip bread yesterday. I was really craving something sweet to eat, and we had bananas that were getting really ripe and unappealing- really soft, very strong-smelling, black skins, etc. Those, my friends, are perfect bananas for variations of banana bread. I made banana chocolate chip bread. Just follow a basic recipe for banana bread and add chocolate chips to the batter. You can also add nuts. Or not have any chocolate at all and just nuts. Or no extras and just bananas. In that case, have some big bananas, because that will make it really sweet and soft and moist. I skimped a little bit on the sugar because bananas are incredibly starchy and sugary (the only downside to bananas; they're a serious superfood), and I figured they could probably make up for my sugar measurements being a little bit short.

Moment of panic: when I just threw all the ingredients in the bowl and started beating it with electric beaters, before stirring all the ingredients together first. It started getting all crumbly and doughy, and I knew that was very, very wrong, because I've made banana bread before, and the batter is usually pretty mushy and wet, like a brownie batter, almost. With quick breads and muffins, you have to be SUPER careful of overmixing, because that will kill the chemistry of the ingredients and make your product hard. Like a doorstop. That's what I was afraid of happening, plus I wouldn't know what the heck to do with banana dough, so I turned the beaters off and started mixing with a wooden spoon. Then I used the beaters for just a few seconds to smooth it out, folded the chocolate chips in, and baked it.

Result:

Mmm. Nice, crunchy crust, with sweet and chocolate-y insides. I always feel better about eating banana chocolate chip bread than other desserts because a) it's bread. Not cookies or cake or pie. Bread isn't dessert. ;) ; b) it has bananas in it. And bananas are really good for you. ; and c) you can eat it for breakfast. This wasn't the moistest banana chocolate chip bread I've made or had. It may have been the bananas. I used two medium-large ones, when you're really supposed to use three medium or two to three large. Also, it may have been the whole beating-before-mixing, overmixing thing I worried about. But as a whole, still perfectly edible, delicious, and bread-like.

Here's some of the music I listened to while baking:
Take On Me, a-ha
It's Five O' Clock Somewhere, Alan Jackson
We've Got It Goin' On, Backstreet Boys
Everyday, Dave Matthews Band
Drumming Song, Florence + The Machine (have I discussed how in love I am with her music?)
Dancing with Myself, Glee Cast Version
Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy, Glen Hansard (from the soundtrack to the movie Once)
Amigone, Goo Goo Dolls (which I strongly recommend to anyone who secretly likes the Goo Goo Dolls but prefers harder stuff: find their early albums and anything that Robby Takac sings lead on)
Save Me, San Francisco, Train

I have had a pretty disciplined week as far as eating and exercising go (thank goodness, considering I was out of town at a party and ate like crap for three days). I'm trying to eat cleaner, avoiding processed foods as much as possible, or choosing less processed options, and drinking lots of water and a cup of green tea in the morning to boost my metabolism and get extra antioxidants. Healthy food is expensive, though! I asked for whole grain bread, and it cost probably double what the regular white and wheat options are at the store. Really?? And then only way I can get berries is on sale. I may have to chip in for my foods this summer. People talk a big game about trying to eat healthily, but seriously, where do you get the money to feed a whole family organically? Just check out the cost of whole grain bread compared to store brand white bread, or the cost of a pound of vegetables to a couple bags of chips. There is clearly a problem with food pricing in this country. People don't necessarily eat what they want or what is good for them; they eat what they can afford. And I think that that is a very, very large part of the obesity problem plaguing the United States.

All right. Rant off. Back to happy things. My dad is going out of town next week, so my mom has allowed to make a few meals while he is gone. That's great, because I'm trying to play catch-up from last week when I did nothing new. I will be making:
Pasta (linguine) with sautéed shrimp, garlic, and oil
Beer can chicken
Burgers (simple, I know, but I have pretty much no experience with a grill whatsoever)
Oatmeal cookies
Cream cheese brownies
Probably some more cookies for various events
Assorted sides to accompany the meals
I promise that I will post photos.

Live it up this weekend! Be with people you like and who like you back. Get caught checking out a hot guy or girl and give them a smile. Break a sweat.  Take a deep breath of fresh air. It's June!

Love,
Imara

"I have learned that to be with those I like is enough."

Walt Whitman, 

US poet (1819 - 1892)

What Rejection Does to a Girl

Hello readers,

So, one of the many things that happened while I was not writing the blog regularly (so basically, from February until now) was that I was nominated by a professor to apply for a highly prestigious and selective undergraduate research program at my school. I was highly attracted to the program, and so I asked this professor if she would write the recommendation letter necessary for the application. She agreed, and asked for my application essay so she could keep it in mind as she wrote her letter. Not only did she want the essay for that purpose, but she also wanted to be able to look it over and offer me suggestions. Additionally, she sent me a Word document full of guidelines for writing the essay. We met to discuss it, and she told me all about how she saw me as doing research in the future, being a great candidate for a Fulbright research fellowship, teaching at the university level, working in the field continuing research as a profession, et cetera. So she helped me completely reform my essay, and I figured I was getting a pretty glowing recommendation letter from her, in addition to the nomination, and she's a fellow in the program. She wholly approved of the essay, and so I sent in my application and hoped for the best. The one thing I was worried about was my first semester grades. They weren't fabulous, to say the least. Simply put, I should not have been in Chemistry or Calculus II for Engineers (I'm a languages and arts girl. Come on. What was I doing?!), and I should have worked harder in Philosophy. But I hoped that they would wait for second semester grades to come along, since I knew that they would a) show off what I'm good at, and b) be much, much improved.

I'd been anticipating news recently since a few of my friends who had also applied reported that they'd been rejected via email, and I had not yet received any emails or correspondence. Yesterday, I received word. I had been rejected, but invited to join the program as an affiliate, which seems like a weird in-between distinction where you're invited to the special events and whatnot, and you get guidance applying for other programs this group offers, but you don't get to do the paid research and work with a mentor-professor- which was the big draw of the program. It's not bad, since just to be an affiliate was a selective process as well, and it's better than nothing. But really? Special guidance with applications and invites to certain events? That's what I'm getting?

Readers, in case you can't tell, this was a blow. My father had told me, not unkindly, that he didn't think I had a shot because of my first semester GPA. My mother told me that they'd had no expectations (meaning that they weren't disappointed in me at all), and neither should I have had any. I so badly wanted to prove them wrong and prove that I am worthy of all the kinds of special distinctions and opportunities that I've had up until now in my education and other things. I wanted to have a special place in college and make things like they used to be. I'm not unhappy where I am, but I really wanted this. What's more is that I had started to dream up possibilities and plans and figure out where I was headed next, based on my getting into this. I didn't consider myself "in," but...

And then I know a girl from my high school who also applied to the program. If she gets in, pardon my language, but I will be royally pissed. I knew her all throughout high school. Nothing about her strikes me as passionate or committed. Sure, she's very intelligent. But come on. What does she really care about enough to put in three years' of research and then use it to make a difference? I have passion. I know what I want to research, and I care about stuff enough to put in that kind of work and make it valuable.

But I digress. Those were the kinds of thoughts running through my head last night. My classmate is a perfectly nice girl, and I don't actually know her that well. Maybe she does have passions. Maybe she does really care about stuff. I shouldn't judge her like that. But it is extremely frustrating. Things are just not going according to plan, and lots of stuff just keeps changing. I feel like I'm having a bit of a quarter/fifth-life crisis.

Then last night, I had a bit of a revelation. This will probably show you how privileged I've been thus far, and that I've had it relatively easy, but bear with me; I have something to say. First, I had to remind myself that there are far greater tragedies than an upper-middle-class girl being rejected from a prestigious research program at an elite university. Reality check. Then, I realized that I was just gonna have to work my ass off harder than I ever have before, plain and simple. This is the start of a new girl, the Imara 2.0, if you will. This is a test. How determined am I to prove myself and make myself a better, smarter, fitter, wiser, stronger person? How will I create my own opportunities? How will I distinguish myself from the pack? This Imara will go back to school having read more and knowing more than the rest of her peers. This Imara will go back to school healthier, leaner, and dare I say, sexier than she was in May. This Imara will know herself better than she ever has before. And this Imara will be a better student, friend, athlete, sister, and worker than she was last August when this all started.

Enough of talking about myself in the third person. Every day is another all-important step on the journey. Sure, mistakes will be made. And I welcome them as learning opportunities. But the time is now. The time is now to get up, get going, and move forward. The time is now to take my goals seriously, push myself, and accept the challenge. Every day I want to try and accomplish something new, or at least advance towards achieving one of my goals.

Here are my new mantras: Push yourself. Accept the challenge. Never settle. Make it all count.

Love,
Imara

P.S. In other news, I made cookies again, and my father specifically requested that I stop baking so much because "we really don't need it." That just means I'm really good at it and he can't resist it. :) Also, I jumped rope and did an unexpectedly very hard yoga video. I have a feeling that I will be sore tomorrow. Tough, because it'll be the last chance for me to go running before I have to take a few days off to go on a trip.

Music and fish

Hey all!


I know I just posted yesterday, but I forgot to include a selection of the songs I found myself listening to when I was baking. I basically just put my entire iTunes library on shuffle, and these are some of the songs that came up:


Rip Your Heart Out, Acute
Hometown Glory, Adele
Ventura Highway, America
Shadow, Ashlee Simpson (please don't judge me)
Black Water, The Doobie Brothers
Girl with One Eye, Florence + The Machine (does that make up for the Ashlee Simpson?)
The Second Time Around, Frank Sinatra
Eleanor Put Your Boots On, Franz Ferdinand
Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy, Glen Hansard (from the soundtrack to the movie Once)
Serious, Gwen Stefani
Curbside Prophet, Jason Mraz
Dancing in the Moonlight, King Harvest
Give Me Anything, The Maine
Put Your Head on My Shoulder, Michael Bublé
Giddy Up, NSYNC
City, Sara Bareilles
No Man's Woman, Sinead O'Connor
Atomism, White Light Riot


Overall, it was very chill, thoughtful music, leaning towards a little sad. Which was weird, because my first choice for baking/cooking is either something happy, funky and oldies, or folksy but upbeat. If you have suggestions, please let me know! I hear Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver are pretty good...


Tonight I was left to cook dinner for myself and my brothers. I went with individually packaged frozen tilapia in a lemon pepper marinade, to which I improvised and added a light Parmesan and panko crumb crust. All seemed to be going well, until a) I realized after the fish was almost done that I forgot to turn on the rice cooker, b) I almost gave myself a steam burn, and c) the fish was not done after the minimum cooking time, nor the maximum. It took nearly 20 minutes. And for tilapia, that worried me, because it is a very delicate fish that does not require a lot of baking. But eventually it seemed cooked enough, my brothers did not complain about any cold or slimy parts in their fillets, and no one has gotten sick yet *knock on wood*. No pictures because by the time the food was all ready to eat I was not going to run upstairs for my camera. 


Tomorrow may involve yet another batch of chocolate chips cookies, because an elderly family friend (basically, my surrogate grandmother) has requested half a recipe's worth for herself and her gentleman friend. The last cookies of last week's batch have been gone for a few days now, so we'll have another 3 dozen for a little road trip this weekend. Then I think I'll have to hold off on the cookies for a couple weeks, for the sake of my waistline and my parents'/my wallet (I am going to plow through ingredients like a madwoman if I keep this pace up). I'm also hoping to make pasta with pesto sauce for dinner tomorrow night. I will try to have photos of the process for that one. 


I applied for six jobs today, bringing my application total up to 8. I really hope that something comes through for me, and soon. I worry that I may be getting addicted to applications, though- even after I knew I'd exhausted my best options for the evening, I kept looking. Ack!


The word for tomorrow is efficiency. I spend a lot of time dallying and sitting on my butt when I could be doing lots of things- sending my résumé to a contact of mine who offered to pass it around if she heard of anything, returning my rented textbooks to their original online site, emailing old teachers and mentors, journaling, exercising, and so on. Hopefully tomorrow I can get up and get moving and get off this beautiful Mac of mine.


Good night, lovelies!
Imara


P.S. Here's a quote to keep you going, especially if you've encountered any difficult or challenging things lately: 

Things are only impossible until they're not.

Jean-Luc Picard, 'Star Trek: The Next Generation'

Adventures with Baking

Hello, readers!

In the past week, I have already accomplished three things on my baking list of resolutions. Yay! I've been fairly attentive to the news, using Time magazine as a way to catch up in detail on various big issues. I'm almost to my limit of NYTimes online articles for the month- :(. I am honestly considering accessing the daily paper through the archives, which I can get into via my school's research resources. A little bit backwards, but hey, I gotta get my news. I've applied for two jobs so far,  apparently my parents hooked me up with a babysitting gig in the neighborhood (yay cash job!), and I'm still looking for something that will get me big tips. I started reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen again. I'm almost halfway through it, but it is so dense. But I guess without having a job to speak of, I have plenty of time on my hands. I've also been going to bed early and getting up early. It feels great to have the whole day ahead of you. And I've more or less kicked my morning caffeine habit! My parents switched to decaf coffee in the house and I didn't even know it, so I think it had a placebo effect, and bam- no more headaches. Haven't gotten around to learning the piano yet, and the brothers are still in school, so haven't quite gotten to those resolutions yet. But everything else is more or less in progress.

So, now I'd like to detail some of my baking adventures. Last week, I made chocolate chip cookies, bread, and an incredibly delicious thing called blueberry buckle. The chocolate chip cookies are from a recipe that my mother got from a friend. The catch with these cookies is that you use instant pudding mix in the batter. If you'd like the recipe, please let me know. Somehow it makes them super-soft and chewy or something. Also, the trick to keeping the bottoms from burning and getting all hard is to cover the cookie sheets with undone brown paper bags (grocery bags work, as do lunch bags. One undone brown paper lunch bag actually covers one normal-sized cookie sheet) and then drop the dough on top of that. It  must help distribute the heat evenly or something. Don't really know why, but it does work! The cookies are incredible, especially when warm. To keep them soft, store them in an airtight container with a piece of bread (it's a great use of the heels of a loaf of bread, if no one in your house eats them). The bread gets hard, but the cookies won't. These cookies are so so SO good. I have a really hard time when I try to stop eating them. And they are NOT good for you (although my dad did say that they are good for your mental health). They are made with a whole pound of butter and a ton of brown and white granulated sugar- trust me, I creamed the two together myself. But the recipe makes 6 dozen- that's 72 cookies. So seriously, share them with people.
Here are some pictures of my cookie adventures:

 Yeah, you do need a REALLY big bowl when you combine the butter, sugar, and egg mixture with the flour mixture.

A couple days later, I baked bread. From scratch. Without a bread machine. WARNING: To all amateur bakers, bread is not something that you can just make when you've got a little bit of time. Maybe it was because I'm a first-timer, but it took me the better part of an afternoon. But if you don't screw anything up too badly, it is well worth it. I thought I may have horribly screwed it up when I didn't mix the shortening and the dry ingredients together before adding the yeast and very warm water. But, no way was I wasting 3 1/2 cups of flour plus two packets of yeast and 2 tablespoons of shortening and starting over. So I just mixed it all up with an electric mixer, and it turned out just fine. I love the smell of yeast- a local freeway went right by a yeast factory for a long time, and that smell means I'm headed into my city and going home. Unfortunately, the yeast factory closed, so now I am left with baking bread to get my kicks. Anyways, you should know that kneading is a pretty big effort- ten minutes solid. You have to knead a lot to activate the gluten. And you have to let the dough rise twice- once after kneading, and once after you've let the loaves rise in their pans unbaked. And then you finally bake it up. And boy, is it good. One loaf and probably 3/4 of the other are gone. Which is a good thing, because unless you're storing it, homemade bread will not last long because it has no preservatives. So eat it up and enjoy it!
More photos:

Mmm. Crusty, buttery, thick goodness. It makes great toast. It's just a Betty Crocker recipe, so if you have either the red or the really old orange Betty Crocker cookbook, it should be in there.

Bread was probably the crowning achievement of my week because yeast is a little fussy to work with (they're not kidding when they say the water must be between 120 and 130 degrees Fahrenheit, by the way- too cold, the yeast won't activate; too hot, you'll kill it. You'll know when your dough doesn't rise.) and it was so time consuming. Also, the house smelled incredible. But a very special thing I made was a blueberry buckle. I first made one last summer with one of my best friends when we went to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan together for a week. Since she's going to El Salvador for the summer and starting to save the world, we had to get together before she left to make this together. It's a Martha Stewart recipe (you can find it online), and it's actually not that hard. It does seem helpful to have extra hands though, so try making it with a friend! It's a very dense dessert, a cross between a cake and a cobbler. It's packed with blueberries, which are a superfood, so rationalize it that way when you want a slice with every meal.
Photo time:

Oh yeah. :)

I would love to tell you that I've been a Superwoman when it comes to making delicious food AND controlling my impulses to eat said food AND work off the delicious but more or less unhealthy food. But that has not been the case. Last week was a pretty bad week as far as exercising and food went. As the food intake and production went up, my exercise output went down. Waaayyy down. I like to blame it on the weather. My beautiful Midwestern state cannot decide if it wants to be summer or the bummer that is the early Midwestern spring (i.e., forty to fifty degrees and rainy). I honestly will go running if it is sunny and between 55- all right, 60- to 85 degrees, with not much wind. Yeah yeah yeah, I'm fussy that way. But I'm detoxing this week (see one of my early posts for a definition of my detox- little to no processed foods and a lot of water), and hoping that the weather holds out or that I can find a suitable alternative to running. Maybe I'll just have to suck it up and wear gloves when I bike in the cool weather. The most important thing is just doing something, especially on the days where you really have no motivation. You'll be very happy that you did afterwards, even if you weren't very happy while you were doing it.

Well, my darlings, I hope that you are having a lovely almost-summer and that you have set goals for yourself this summer- even if it's just to do something nice and relaxing for yourself. Keep in touch!

Love,
Imara

P.S. On deck this week for food: tilapia and pasta with pesto sauce. Also, HEALTHY pumpkin cookies and maybe cream cheese brownies. :)

Blog, Take 2

Let's try this again, shall we?
I set a big old goal for myself of blogging once a week. I didn't make it past February. BUT I'm going to restart it this summer!
I just moved back home for the summer. I think I had a very successful second semester- a BIG improvement over fall semester, thank goodness. I am a much happier person. I did not encounter the panic attacks and stress-induced insomnia that plagued me first semester. My grades are much better. I have a solid group of friends who help make my life better. Overall I kept up a healthier lifestyle than I had been living. So life is good.
Of course, that doesn't mean that I'm just going to sit around and let things pass me by this summer. I have big plans, and new resolutions. See the list below:
1. Work out and stay in shape. I have a habit of falling apart as soon as I move home and don't have the same routine I did when I was at school. No more. I will be utilizing my handy dandy to-do list almost every day this summer, and a workout will almost always be on the list. The gratification of crossing stuff off is that big a motivator for me.
2. Cook. I have compiled a list of recipes that I would like to try my hand at. The list has grown to the point that I probably need to do about two meals a week in order to have them all completed before I go back to school and lose all the convenience of a well-stocked kitchen and an accessible grocery store. So I will have to get moving.
3. Bake. This is separate from cooking for me. For me, cooking generally involves non-dessert items. Cooking is for meat and vegetables. Baking is for all that sugary stuff that you can't eat a lot of but you do anyways because it makes you happy. I am going to try to master some basics (chocolate chip cookies, apple pie, bread, a cake), and then move on to more fun stuff (lemon ricotta cake, ricotta pineapple pie, fudge, cinnamon pull-apart bread). All from scratch. I will post photos for this and the cooking resolution so you can see my progress.
4. Read the news. My beloved New York Times now requires a paid online subscription for unlimited access. :( So I will be attempting to read the majority of my local paper, and deciding whether or not the Times is worth my money.
5. Teach myself the piano. My dad received a DVD set of a learn-by-chords method, and I think I will give that a shot in the evenings.
6. Get a job and make all the money I spent this year at school back, plus some savings. ...good luck to me!
7. Read. I never had any time to read for fun at school. I am compiling a reading list for myself, including Water for Elephants, The Corrections, Love in the Time of Cholera, Half the Sky, The Fountainhead, and The Help. If you have suggestions, please put them in the comments below.
8. Play with my brothers and family more. It will get me active, out of the house, away from my beloved MacBook Pro, and forge a deeper bond with a couple of guys that just can't seem to stop getting bigger.
That's the list for now! If you have suggestions/encouragement/comments in general, PLEASE leave them below. There should be a way to comment as a guest if you don't have a Google account or are not on Blogger.
Happy Summer, everybody! Keep your eyes out for new posts.
With love,
Imara