what i cooked (and did to my hair) this week

I've been slacking on the food blogging this week. So here's a recap:


This past Saturday I made cornmeal banana pancakes from a Food Network recipe (thanks Emeril!) This particular recipe called for egg whites which gave the pancakes a nice airy texture. It also called from both milk and yogurt, which made them nice and moist. The cornmeal flavor wasn't as pronounced as I was expecting but they were overall quite delish. I definitely plan to incorporate egg whites into some (or all) of my future pancakes.

By the way, have I mentioned that we don't use syrup? Instead, we use a different topping (in the Fall/winter we used a yummy pumpkin butter spread from TJ's...recently we've been using fruit preserves/jam) and always have fresh-made (in Nix's VitaMix) apple sauce. PURE MAPLE syrup is fine but for those of you who use Aunt Jemima or those other "pancake syrups" you may want to check the ingredient labels. Syrup isn't even listed as an ingredient in some....so you're basically consuming high fructose corn syrup. Enjoy!


I also made those muffins I mentioned last week. I just tweaked my quinoa banana bread recipe by adding the following:
- whole wheat flour
- oat bran
- a dried berry mix from TJ's
- walnuts
- yogurt (obv!)

I think that's all I added....they came out really nicely I think. Forgot to take a pic tho! I actually wanted them to be heartier...more like a bran muffin, but I'd definitely need to add much more oat bran for that effect and Nix wasn't really feeling the idea. Next time perhaps.

Nix did lots of baking of her own this week as well! First up, she whipped up a chocolate bread pudding to use up a loaf of french bread that had been in the freezer for weeks. Though she was nervous about it, the end result was quite yummy. With a few tweaks, it will be even yummier!

And the day before yesterday she made her own granola bars! They were great!!! But no pic because I totally forgot...so I'll put one up next time she makes them (hint hint Nix).

We also had to eat real food at some point during the week but nothing too exciting on that front this week. We did have salmon one night with a great marinade from TJ's called Island Soyaki (or something). It was really good!

Ok that's all for food this week. Here's a pic of my hair lol:

No particular reason why...just felt like chronicling the process. I'm a big fan of part- or not-rinsing out the conditioner when I co-wash (condition wash...gettin the lingo down haha) it. It really gives it a better curl and seems to last better throughout the day. Aside from that I've been using the Carol's Daughter hair milk, a gel my stylist suggested (whose name I forget), and.....olive oil. haha

Yay Thursday...and it was actually nice and sunny today!

Today's *big chune* is from my girl Fefe Dobson. I'm generally not a big fan of rockish music, but she just does it for me...and (coincidentally i swear!) she's a fellow Mixie (a Canadian one)...white mom and Jamaican dad. She has a new album coming out this June.


:-D
 

stop being so "alpha"

One of the bloggers I follow is featured in the Washington Post today. It's a cute little article about her positive approach to the dating woes of black women. (In contrast to some of the more pessimistic stories that have been circulating recently.) Here is her advice:

"Now that the weather is nice again and the men are out...I want to do a quick refresher course on how to meet men."

1. "Smile & Say 'hi.'

2. "If you want to meet a man, look like you want to meet a man. . . . Lip gloss and a comb never hurt anyone. Use both liberally.

3. "Men don't notice you across a room because of your brain. Give them something to look out for.

4. "Flatter your best asset. If it's your smile, um, smile. If it's your legs, wear a skirt.

5. "Stop looking for men in bunches like at the club or happy hour. Men are everywhere, on the street, in line, in the elevator, on the train (in fact, I ran up on a superior cutie last night getting off the train. . . . I smiled, said, 'Hell-o.' He took it from there.) When you see someone that catches your eye no matter where you are, say something. ('Hi' is fine. If he is remotely interested, he will take it from there. He's been practicing opening lines since he was 13.)

6. "Go out alone. (But be safe.) I know you just thought 'hell no!' Try it, just once."

 I have to admit, I have a hard time with rule number 1. This is surprising, because I consider myself to be a pretty friendly, approachable gal...but the latter point is important...I'm approachable not approaching (or whatever the proper term for what i'm trying to explain would be...you know what i mean!). I'm not one of those girls who is going to make the first move...just not gonna happen. It often happens to me that I'll see someone interesting/attractive but can't quite figure out how to initiate that first contact. My approach right now is just to make lingering eye contact and a faint smile and hope they take a hint lol.

So, what do we think of this advice? Does anyone actually find it easy to be the "approacher"? Do share your secrets lol.

Today's *big chune* is a group that i initially thought was swv, but is actually called Mokenstef...the opening line gets me every time LOL


:-D

am i being punked?

Last night I'm innocently doing my laundry when the craziest thing happened....


I go to pull open the washer door (it's one of those stacked front-load washer/dryer combos) and water comes POURING OUT! Mind you, my load was supposedly done...i didn't open the door mid-cycle (the doors are locked in-cycle anyway).


So I slam the door shut and at first I'm just like hmm this is unfortunate, there's a bit of water on the ground. Then I realize that the water is STILL RUNNING...the machine is still cycling...but there is no time on the cycle...so it's just running with no end in sight. At this point the door wouldn't stay closed because my clothes had shifted when I first opened the door and the water pressure was too strong. So I'm standing there holding the door shut for *no lie* a good 10 minutes before a maintenance person (I live in an apt. complex) even shows up. (At this point I had also called Roomie so at least i had some company lol.)


The first dude to show up looks totally confused and calls for backup when he realizes the machine is still running. But...get this...he goes into the back room and gets a MOP! Roomie and I are like WTF is that gonna do?! The water was covering the floor and seeping into the back room at this point!


Then the second dude shows up and he looks flabbergasted as all get out LOL. At this point it's been another 5-7 minutes since the first dude came. For another 5-7 minutes they're on the phone trying to figure out how to get the water shut off. Finally they do (and by this point the first dude had gotten a water vacuum) get the water shut off and they tell me to just open the door and let all the water out. My clothes are SOAKED...we wring them out and I have to do 2 dryer cycles...now like 4/7 washing machines are unusable....but it wasn't my fault!


Oh, and my shoes were still wet this morning...quite a crazy 20 minutes!

Today's *big chune* comes from prob my favorite old school male R&B group, Mint Condition. This one is "You Send Me Swinging"


:-D
 

o o o o obsessed

hi everyone! After a cool/rainy week, it's a GORGEOUS day in DC  :-)

Once I get onto a certain "thing" I can get semi-obsessed with it...previous (and some ongoing) "semi-obsessions" include biracialness, reading, cooking/food blogs, psychology, gluten free eating, skin care treatments, happiness, gossip blogs, caribbean literature...the list goes on and on.

Annnnnd these are the things I think about when i'm at work :-/ lol

My most recent obsession is hair!! As you know I'm in the process of growing out my relaxer in the hope of getting beautiful natural curls :-D

I did a half big chop last weekend and I'm counting down the weeks (about 6 - if i make it that long!) until i can go back and have Perry cut off some more. Hopefully it will have grown enough by then that I'll feel comfortable cutting off all the remaining relaxed parts. If not, I should have just a little bit of the awkward in-between hair left.

I've been perusing different natural/curly blogs/sites and I wanted to share a few that i like so far:
http://www.curlynikki.com 
http://www.livecurlylivefree.com/home.htm

http://www.tightlycurly.com


One of the hard (but great!) things is that there is so much diversity within natural hair, that it's been difficult to identify someone who has hair similar to my own. A lot of the natural hair sites I've been finding are for black women. The woman who does tightlycurly.com is mixed, but she'd muuuuuuch farther along (by 10 years and over 10 inches lol) in her hair process so her steps don't all apply to me yet. (Do any of you have other blogs/sites you'd recommend?)


In the end, i suppose it doesn't matter much because every single person's hair is different. What i need to do is continue to experiment and find out what works for me. I've been having what i consider a bad hair week (but I am pretty hard on myself about these things). In fact, yesterday i told Nix i was having an "ugly day." Does that ever happen to you. It's not that I'd done anything different and it wasn't even specifically about my hair. I just felt bleh.


Anyway, I'm not loving my hair today at all. Actually I think I may re-wash (conditioner only!) or at least re-wet tonight before I go out. My curls feel dry and unformed and the top/front awkward part is even more awkward than usual lol.


I'll be putting up Nix's guest post about her hair process soon, she's just making some revisions. I'm also soliciting posts from some of my friends so hopefully I'll have more of those on the way as well.


Today's *big chune* is another one of those songs that i really like but had forgotten about until it popped into my Pandora (i love Pandora for this reason). It's Avant's song called "Sailing"





:-D

homemade tortilla mexican pizzas

I've decided that instead of slipping my cooking and baking into other posts, I'm going to devote entire posts to the different things I make/buy/eat. This will also help when I don't really feel like doing a major post, but still want to share something food-related.

This past weekend, Nix and I bought a rotisserie chicken from WF and were thinking of different dishes we could use the chicken for. On Monday we made chicken pita pockets for lunch, and on Tuesday we really took it up a notch (in my opinion lol). Last week I had come across a recipe (in one of my umpteen food blogs) for homemade flour torillas and decided that chicken fajitas would be super yum. Btw, does anyone else remember when McDonald's used to seel chicken fajitas?? Or was that only in the VI? Either way, they were bomb! lol

Anywho, instead of flour tortillas, I wanted to make corn tortillas. We have a big bag of corn meal in our freezer that I have on-hand to make cornbread so I figure why the heck not? ... Well, that didn't go very well. See, corn tortilla recipes call for corn flour and generally use store-bought mixes. I figured I could just put some corn meal into the VitaMix and get corn flour....but this didn't work at all. The "dough" was a terrible consistency and i didn't end up with a tortilla at all. It was kind of like a corn pastele (fried plantain thing). Not what I was going for  :-/


Determined to make my own torillas, I whipped up a quick batch of regular flour tortillas instead. It was super easy to do! You basically just mix flour, water, salt, and baking powder...work into a dough and let it sit for like 15 minutes. Then, form into individual balls, roll out (or flatten with a tortilla press if you have one - or if you're like me and you lack kitchen tools, flatten them by hand lol) as flat as you can get them, and cook them in a skillet or on a griddle over high heat for about 30 seconds on each side...and Voila!

You can't tell from the pic but these tortillas were rather thick - not surprising because I was flattening them by hand - so they weren't very conducive to rolling like a traditional fajita or burrito. Instead, I decided to layer all my ingredients on top like a Mexican pizza ;-)  Btw, for the chicken, I just seasoned it with some cumin and red chile pepper flakes...cumin is the seasoning that's most "tasted" in mexican dishes like this.

Ok, so I layered the tortilla with mashed avocado, shredded pepper jack cheese, the chopped and seasoned rotisserie chicken pieces, lettuce, black beans, corn, and grape tomatoes. Here's the final product:

It was GREAT!! Not the cleanest and most practical meal, but the taste was awesome. I like the mexican pizza concept, but if I make tortillas again I'll just buy a rolling pin so I can try to get them flatter. If I do the pizzas again I have to figure out how to get the toppings to stay put so it's not so messy. Since it was my first time I used all purpose flour, but next time I plan to use all or most whole wheat flour instead.


Overall a great meal! Maybe not Ultimate Recipe Showdown worthy, but a nice twist on a traditional dish :-)


Coming up I think Nix is going to make cookies from the recipe on our package of Bob's Red Mill 5-grain hot cereal (right Nix???)...and I'm going to whip up some quinoa-banana-bran-carrot-berry-coconut-walnut muffins...no recipe, just gonna wing it ;-D


Oh, and I made another batch of yogurt last night...it's spending the day chilling in the fridge and will hopefully be a yummy snack when i get home from work tonight!


Today's big chune is somewhat different from the usual style of music I like. Everyone knows Vanessa Carlton from her song a thousand miles (which, btw, i can't ever hear without thinking of the scene from White Chicks LOL)...but this is a great lesser-known song of her's, Ordinary Day.



:-D
 

chilli on cheating

My friend T sent me this in an email yesterday - Chilli's comments (via her VIBE blog) on cheating (and relationships in general). I couldn't agree more. (The bolding is my emphasis)

My general feeling on cheating, period, whether it’s a girl cheating on a guy—because they do—or vice versa is that I don’t really understand it. We live in a country where we can choose our mate so if you’re unhappy with your mate for whatever reason, then break up. It’s pretty simple. Cheating takes too much effort. You’re hiding and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. It’s just unnecessary and it’s extremely hurtful. It’s excruciating pain...

 [i'm skipping some of what she wrote]

...I think women are so afraid to talk about things with guys in fear of him leaving, but if he’s going to be afraid from having a conversation, then the hell with his ass! That doesn’t make any sense. I have every right to ask you questions, you have every right to ask me questions. Now if we want to give the answers, it’s up to us but there’s nothing wrong with that because how else will you find out?

A lot of people out there are really good at hiding things and making it seem like everything is normal so you don’t suspect that they’re cheating. Usually things don’t work out, not because of a cheating situation. It could just be just compatibility. Most people, in my opinion, that are together and even married shouldn’t even be together. A lot of times you just have somebody in your life because you feel like you need someone in your life. You feel like you need a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Those are your own insecurities.

When you truly, truly love somebody and it’s a healthy love, you always want to make sure you’re healthy yourself before entering a relationship and give that person your time. That’s why they call it dating. Dating doesn’t mean we’re sleeping together. Dating doesn’t mean I’m your girlfriend, you’re my boyfriend. It means that we are exclusively dating each other trying to get to know each other, figure out each other’s personalities, see if we click, if our morals are intact—all those things. And then you can graduate to the next level of the relationship."

As I said, I really feel her on a lot of this. ESPECIALLY the part about not understanding cheating. The slew of cheating over the past year or is making me realize i don't want to get married really turning me into quite the cynic. I'm not bitter, mind you. Cynicism and bitterness are two different things to me. These days I'd be more surprised to learn a man is faithful than to find out that he's cheating. Seriously, if you want to cheat on me, just break up with me please!!! I'd rather be happily single than in a drama-filled relationship of lies and distrust. And I'd rather not share my man. Is that so much to ask?

Now, I'm not going to blame everything just 99% on no-good men. Ladies, it takes us for there to be cheaters. If you know a man is married/in a serious relationship, have a little respect for the other woman! (I'm looking at you 20-something yr old "babysitter" sleeping with Tiki Barber while his wife is pregnant with twins...and all the other countless triflin you-know-whats.)

Another thing I wholeheartedly agree with is that there are too many people who are in relationships for the sake of being in a relationship...because they don't want to be alone. You know how there are serial monogamists...those people who always seem to be in a relationship? Well, I'm more like a serial single-ist, with good reason I'd like to think. 

Finally, her point about being in a good place yourself before being ready for a relationship is also key. I know a lot of people who seem to jump from relationship to relationship and i'm like dang give yourself a second to breathe. Often, two people's lives become so intertwined that each loses their individual identity...it's like you don't even know yourself anymore apart from what you were as a couple, with the other person. Enjoy being single! Enjoy meeting new people and doing new things! (*ahem RW ahem*)

Today's *big chunes* are going to seem to run counter to everything I've just cosigned on and written about...but it's just music and this song popped up on my Pandora and I remembered how much i like it lol. Sue me! It's Jay-Z with Girl, Girls, Girls and the Remix for it. I think I like the remix better, mostly because of the sample track in the back...you?

Remix

:-D

 

my half BC

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm going natural (growing out my relaxer) and curly. I've tried a few times before but always gave up and just went back to straightening my hair. I've gotta give credit to Nix for staying strong and going natural before me. She's much farther along than me and her natural curls are coming in awesomely! Now that I've gotten a sneak peak of what mine will look like - sort of, because we don't have exactly the same hair - I am much more confident about the process and actually really excited!


On the natural hair blogs they talk a lot about the BC - the Big Chop....basically some people choose to just start with a clean slate, and cut off all the chemically treated hair. Well, I don't have enough confidence to rock that, so I opted for a half BC. I (well, my stylist Perry) basically chopped off the back down to the natural parts and trimmed off some of the treated hair up top. Here's what I'm working with now:

As you can see the back is pretty much my natural, curly hair...the front is the awkward stringy hair :-/ Luckily, though, I can pin it up and it's not too bad. I'm so glad to have the in-between hair gone from the back though! And a huge shout out to my stylist Perry and Bogart Salon on Georgetown. I first went to hum for a huge chop when I had super long hair my junior year at Gtown and decided to cut a good deal of it off. We've been together ever since :-) lol...but seriously, on Saturday he was reminiscing about how far we've come...and all the different phases I've gone through with my hair. Having him do my 1/2 BC make it much easier because I know I was in good hands. I'm going to go back for another trim right before I go home (to STT) in June.


As far as "routine" i don't really have one yet. Plus, as Nix and other have said, it will change as your hair changes. My hair is probably confused as heck right now lol.The key thing about natural hair is to keep it moisturized so it doesn't get all dry and ick looking. It's only been 2 days so I haven't done much yet. In the morning I rewet with a spy bottle with a mix of conditioner and water (lol). I've read good things about Carol's Daughter products - and this video makes me want to buy the whole line lol...her hair is gorgeous!
 Other than that I don't have much yet. My stylist told me don't brush out in the shower, just run your fingers through or whatever. After you get out you can dry a little with a towel, but not too much. Apply a bit of product and basically just leave it so that you don't frizz the curls. You can shake out your hair a bit and just kinda let it fall how it will. Later you can tease it and move things around a bit. Now, this is what he told me but everyone's hair will be different. I know some people like to twist the hair or braid it to get more defined shape when the twists/braids are taken out. Like I said, though, I'm just starting the process so I should have more insight as the weeks go by.

In other news, last night for dinner I made roast lamb with a (homemade) curry/pineapple marinade. I'd never cooked lambed before so I was a bit nervous about that. Aside from the cut of meat we got, which was pretty fatty (lamb is fatty in general), I think it came out well. I wouldn't do that same marinade again though...at least not for meat, maybe for fish, with some tweaks.

By the way, I heart Trader Joe's but their pineapples have nothing on Whole Foods pineapples. The pineapple we got from WF this weekend was AMAZING....So, I also whipped up a lightened version of pineapple upside down cake. I cannot even begin to tell you how good this cake smelled. I was doing laundry and could smell it down the hallway. As far as taste, not gonna lie, I was a bit disappointed. Then again, it's a light version of something so you have to take that into consideration. Nix and I agreed that it was overall more like a big, sqaure cake-shaped muffin than "cake." It was definitely not as moist as we would have liked, so I may add some homemade yogurt next time. I also cut down on the sugar even more than the lightened version called for, so we could probably afford to use the whole amount. I also used dark brown sugar while the recipe called for light brown...but I looked up whether there was a difference and it seems the only difference is in color and bit in taste, but my main problem was texture so I don't think that had an effect.

Having said all that....it was still yummy!! I'd make it again with some tweaks. Oh I almost forgot! I also made sweet potato pancakes this weekend. (Ok all I did was add mashed, cooked sweet potato to our pancake mix.) They came out great! Very moist and thick. I think I'd probably even add more sweet potato next time, to up the flavor.


Coming up this week in my culinary adventures...Nix and I bought a WF rotisserie chicken so we're going to stretch that as far as it goes. Today I used some in a greek style chicken pita pocket (chx, hummus, sprouts, carrots) for lunch. We're also planning to make our own tortillas from scratch, and do a Mexican night this week. And I love making muffins so I'm going to experiment with some more changes to my quinoa banana bread in muffin version.


Today's *big chune* is one of my old faithful favorites. I was obsessed with this song for like an entire year when I first heard it. The video is a hot mess though lol...most caribbean music videos are LOL





:-D