Coconut & Cacao.

Life is so busy right now. All I do is work and school stuff. No complaints, just how it is until the end of March. At which time I will celebrate not being busy by getting my ears pierced again. This is not what I want to be talking about, so sorry. 


I don't remember where I got this recipe but I'm certain I didn't follow it correctly. 


Coconut butter, raw cacao powder, and coconut. That is a lot of coconut and it used to make me gag but in adulthood, I love it.






































Bananas are always an option to throw in the mix. 

Melt the cacao powder and coconut butter on the stove and pour into a dish over a slice of banana. Add some coconut to the top. Like this:







































It then goes in the freezer and when it comes out it is so pretty and shiny. But I ate it too fast to take a picture. 

Rabbits burrow. Me too.

I finished my first book from my read-all-the-books-on-my-bookshelf project. Book, book, book. Sometimes I write emails at work where I repeat one word no less than 3 times in a 7 word sentence. So what I am trying to say is that my next book is this:

It is about rabbits. So far that's all I've got. But I love it. There is a little history to this book. My mom gave it to me a long long time ago. Like maybe it was middle school era when she brought it home for me and said she thought I should read it. I never did. Instead I was busy trying to stay alive by remaining on the good side of the mean girls and not failing math. Oh and wearing big t-shirts. Anyways I told my mom I had kept it all this time and that I'm reading it...her response was sweet. She was so excited I was reading it and she said a lot of nice things about the book and noted it was one of her all time favorites. Now, I'm even more excited to read it.

On another note, I have been ill for a long time. And it is making me tired. And tea has been my best friend (Henry too). I love this tea, it is unreal. Back to burrowing.

Little White Curry Trees.

I haven't always cared about cooking and baking. Now I do. I love it. But I am so very bad at it. I can have every single ingredient needed and every kitchen tool and still end up using sugar in place of salt. Never fails. But I still love it and maybe I'm getting better at it. Maybe I'm not. Maybe it makes me a better writer? Just kidding. So I got the idea for this recipe (at my age, I STILL cannot spell this work correctly on first try) from a food blog called Scandi Foodie. It is one of my favorites simply because the food is healthy and realistic. So I got really excited when I saw a post about Cauliflower Curry. I got even more excited that I had most of the ingredients I needed. Here is where I sometimes mess up. I will "think" I have everything but I am always missing something. No exceptions this time. I had curry spices in my cabinet so I assumed that I had tumeric. I did not. It doesn't matter, the show must go on, just ask Lupe Fiasco. Here is my version:

Cut the cauliflower into smaller pieces. Trees, if you will.

Gather these spice items: curry powder, cumin, ginger, lemon zest, salt (NOT sugar), cayenne, coconut oil, & I am pretty sure I threw some coriander in towards the end of cooking.

Put the flowers in a skillet with the coconut oil and a tiny bit of water. I don't know why water but I did it anyhow. Then add all the spices while cooking. I think the sunlight helps it cook faster.

Don't cook it until it's mush, that is gross unless you're a baby.

Sorry about the steam in this last photo. It's real by the way so no way around it. Best of luck in all your kitchen mess-ups!

Bird Seed.

I am not one for big meals. I am one for snacks. With that knowledge, here is a recent lunch of mine:

Raw cashews & goji berries. (Raw because really the value of the food plummets to junk when it has been cooked or roasted, especially in junk oil like cottonseed or the like. I think this is important to note, hope this is okay.)

When food is this naturally beautiful, it has to be good for you. All hail snacks.

Walks with Henry. Or squirrel on a leash.

The weather here in the Midwest lately has been mild and beautiful. My immediate response to this is to take Henry on walks. Mostly because I feel badly when he doesn't get to take his 2 inch legs on a hike each day like we do all summer. And also because he starts to lose his mind in the winter and does things like stand on the coffee table and stare at me like this:

Something else about Henry, he loves the sun and any sort of heat. This is how you can tell we are mother and son. If there is even the smallest square of sun, he will find it and lay in it or point his beak towards the source and close his eyes and just stand there. He found it on our walk the other day:

 

However, in two short months he has forgotten how to go on a walk. He ran from side to side, barked at leaves and babies, stopped to roll around in the gravel and tried to eat anything that looked like food. Including poison berries:

Some more photos from our walk.

I dare anyone to say Indiana is not beautiful.

Ann M. Martin, author.

 My parent's attic is amazing. It is full of generations of weird junk that we got rid of once but really it's all still there. On New Year's Day I ventured up to their 3rd floor. It's dangerous; no real floor, some elk heads, & at least 20 degrees colder than anywhere else in the world. Wait, back story....when I was in elementary school, my mom used to go to the grocery store every Saturday and would come back with a book for me. I went through a long phase of only wanting a book from The Baby-Sitters Club series. They were great but they made me nuts. After reading one it was inevitable that I would start talking like the book in my head for the next 3 days. In other words, I narrated every damn thing I did. I am still embarrassed for my elementary self but it's fine. Maybe it made me a better writer. Back to the attic. I was looking for these books because I was sure I saved them. And I did. I can't stop thinking about how Ann M. Martin has to be a huge dork to have written those books but I love her for it.

The best part was finding THIS inside Super Special #11:

Read your books. You smell.

I am a book hoarder. Any garage sale or friend that is moving or thrift store that has a book that I have even remotely heard of, I'll buy it. And I'll never read it. And I'll never get rid of it. 

Actually, I don't want to call myself a book hoarder, it makes me think of my Jr. High librarian for some reason. She smelled terribly because she slept in the library most nights until they fired her 20-some years later. She was also incredibly mean. I feel bad about her and that she smelled and that kids called her awful things but I mostly wonder what in the sam hell makes someone sleep in a Jr. High library? This is making me sad.

Anyhow, the other day I freaked out and decided to go through my books and get rid of the ridiculous. See below.

 

 

I only have one tiny book shelf and so I used to keep my books stacked on and under some chairs and in my not real fire place. Now I only have books on my shelf that I want to read, that I'm excited to read. With that, another project this year that I'm going to document here will consist of me reading every book on my shelf. It is time. I have some great stuff on those shelves and I am wasting good reads.

I will most likely start on the top shelf and just read through them in alphabetical order. That is boring but my brain won't be able to handle any other order. Except I started this year with Mockingjay, book 3 in the Hunger Games series. Young adult literature is where it's at. And though it's weird to start the year out with a book from mid-shelf, I have to finish it. Then I'll start with book one, shelf one.

Sweet dreams all you smelly librarians (not you ericann). 

The Year I Get Published.

I have kept to do lists for a lot of years. "Submit poetry" is one item that has remained on that list for the past 8, never being crossed off or completed. So with this blog it begins. I recently declared to a friend that this is the year I will get published. Maybe I won't. Either way I'm going to keep track of my attempts. I'm going to keep track of some other items too...but more posts on that later.  

The evening of 12.21 (submissions due 12.22) I found my first place to submit some words, the Poetry Society of America. They have annual awards of all kinds for different reasons supported by different people for different prizes and all that. I submitted 4 poems to the George Bogin Memorial Award, "...to reflect the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary and to take a stand against oppression in any of its forms." You should know that George Bogin was a poet, died when I was 6, and was a supporter of human rights and the like. Here is one of my submissions:

Jim Crow for Sheriff 
 
I wonder if Mr. Rice was proud,
pleased he danced on the hearts of "freedmen,"
proud he set the first example for Nuremberg,
pleased he danced on the hearts of the hungry.

I feel the Great Migration in my bones,
I see the left over campaigns of the Crow,
I hurt for the children of God that helped raise us all.

Two cheers for the Poor Peoples Campaign,
Twelve hundred sorries for all the bloody Sundays.

 I'll let you know in March how it went.