Pumpkin Spice Cupcakes

Last month, I discovered Pinterest.  It is a fantastic diversion.  I love to browse all of the recipes, craft ideas, apartment decorating, colors, adorableness...  The emphasis on the visual makes my eyes happy.  Incidentally, you can follow me here.

Lately, there has been an impressive array of October-related pins on Pinterest.  Autumn is my favorite season, and I grew up in a household that celebrated Halloween with as much gusto as Christmas, so I am very enthusiastic about October, with its pumpkins, cats, owls, and witches.  Pumpkin, in particular, brings me much joy.  So, when I ran across a pin for pumpkin spice cupcakes, I knew it had to happen.

The biggest challenge about this recipe?  Finding canned pumpkin!  Apparently, there is some sort of pumpkin crisis afoot.  I scoured Safeway for a good twenty minutes before asking a manager, who told me that Safeway has been out of canned pumpkin for two months because it is stockpiling it for Thanksgiving.  I had a hard time keeping a straight face as he told me this with an acute sense of conspiratorial urgency.  Leaving Safeway, I thought to myself, there is no way that Trader Joe's has a corporate contingency plan that involves the stockpiling of canned pumpkin in the event of a crisis.  Sure, enough, I was able to find plenty of organic pumpkin at Trader Joe's.  Panic setting in at the thought of TJ's stock running low, I found myself compulsively buying three cans.

The other reason I wanted to make cupcakes was to use my lovely Halloween cupcakes wrappers with owls and ravens, which I found at Michael's:

The recipe is simple enough.  After extensive research, I chose my favorite recipes from two different blogs for the cupcakes and the frosting, and they paired quite nicely.

Live Every Week Like It's Shark Week

I'm officially in love with 30 Rock.

Don't get me wrong, I had always liked 30 Rock, but I had never loved it.  I think my problem has been that I didn't start watching it when it first came on the air, so I never really understood the inside jokes and subtle character play.  Every time I caught an episode, I thought it was amusing and fast-paced, but it wasn't something I felt driven to watch weekly.

However, after I read Tina Fey's biography, Bossypants, I learned a lot about what the show meant to her, and what she was trying to accomplish, and I knew I needed to give it another chance.  Bossypants was a fantastic read.  Tina Fey's writing was not only comical, but also insightful, both to her own experiences as a woman in a male-dominated career, and in terms of self-deprecating awareness of her own shortcomings.  I appreciated how down-to-earth she was, and how important her work is to her, but not to the detriment of some pursuit of work-life balance.  As Tina observes after describing a weekend jam-packed with her first time playing Sarah Palin on SNL, shooting an episode of 30 Rock with Oprah Winfrey, and her daughter's third birthday party:

"By the way, when Oprah Winfrey is suggesting you may have overextended yourself, you need to examine your f***ing life."

So, after I finished the book a couple of weeks ago, I logged onto Netflix, and was thrilled to discover that 30 Rock is available for internet streaming.  Score!  With Conan, Jon, and Stephen all on hiatus for much of the month, I definitely had a smart comedy television void to fill.  I just finished the first season, and am loving it.  There are so many inside jokes that I simply did not understand because I hadn't seen it from the beginning.  This is a show that has character progression, and needs to be seen chronologically in order to fully appreciate what is going on.  Also, how fantastic is Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy?!  Now, I have to pace myself through seasons two through five, because season six doesn't start until early 2012 due to Tina Fey's pregnancy.

Health Kick

Despite the somewhat misleading fact that my last post was about cookies, the reality is that I have been on a post-bar health kick.  Being back in the suburbs means that I don't have a multi-mile walk built into my daily schedule anymore, and studying for the bar exam didn't exactly lend itself to exercising and eating right.  However, the bar exam is over, and I have lots of free time, so a health kick is underway!

While I wouldn't consider myself to be on a "diet" (see above re: cookies), I will say that I am trying to make healthier choices.  When I was at Cal, some of my PE classes (yoga, step aerobics) required us to keep a log of our eating habits, to make us more aware of our choices.  I found the practice to be a very helpful form of accountability.  Before eating, I found myself thinking, "Do I really want to have to write down that I ate that many cookies?"  As a result, I would make better choices while keeping the log, and felt better about how I was caring for myself.

There is a great iPhone app called Lose It! that is a sophisticated tool for keeping track of your food and exercising habits.  I like it because it has a built-in library of thousands of foods (including brand names), so you can just look up a food, add it to your log, and then have a ton of information recorded about your nutrient intake!  Plus, the app has a great user interface.  I especially enjoy the cute little icons next to the different types of food and exercise.  You can also set up a free account and use their website, and create goals.  I highly recommend it if you're looking for an easy way to have a bit of accountability to make healthier choices.

I have been trying a ton of new recipes, mostly from the Cooking Light Complete Cookbook that I bought a few weeks ago (courtesy of the Borders bankruptcy, so sad).  Salads, tomato-basil soup, glazed carrots, garlic red potatoes...  It has been fun to learn some new recipes, as well as how to change recipes to make them healthier, while still flavorful.  Next up on my to-do list: panko oven fried chicken and eggplant parmesan lasagna!

One of the biggest exercise challenges is that, now that I am done with school and am not living in a fancy apartment complex, I no longer have access to a nice gym.  I confess, I didn't use the gyms to which I had access in DC in VA nearly as much as I should have; nonetheless, the ability to exercise regularly seems even more daunting without access to cardio equipment, a weight training circuit, and yoga classes.  I could spring for a gym membership somewhere, but I don't think it would be financially wise given my employment status.  Plus, I don't have a car, so getting to a gym would be inconvenient--and, knowing my weak proclivity for gym usage, it has to be convenient for there to be any chance that I'll use it.

Instead of the gym, I've decided to make my bicycle my main source of exercise.  I've always loved bike riding, and my favorite types of exercise are those disguised as fun.  Plus, there are a ton of bike lanes and paths in the South Bay, so I won't get bored.

The exercise aspect of my health kick has been off to a rocky start the past couple of weeks, because I fell off of my bike only a few days after tuning it up, which led to a terrible infection in two big scrapes on the top of my left foot, and a third scrape on my left knee.  It felt a bit ridiculous that I fell off of my bike for the first time in perhaps 15 years, and immediately got an infection.  My skateboarding brother always has some sort of open sore festering on his body, and he has never gotten an infection!  So not fair.  The infection required a week's worth of oral antibiotics, as well as an ointment applied three times daily.  It took six days for a real scab to start forming.  And, the antibiotics made me extremely sensitive to sunlight, so I ended up breaking out into delightful sunburn hives for a couple of days.  Not exactly conducive to exercise.

Thankfully, I am now fully scabbed over, and the hives are fading, so I can resume exercising as a complement to healthy food choices.  I started off with a five-mile ride through my neighborhood to gauge my level of endurance, and didn't find it very taxing, so I think I'll up the ante a bit.  My goal is to be able to ride from my house to Baylands Park, which is about 16 miles round trip, and follows a great designated bike path separated from auto traffic most of the way.

Sugar & Spice Owl Cookies

I have a bookmarks folder for recipes that I want to try.  Since last March, I have been hoping for the right occasion to make Sugar & Spice Owl Cookies (which I learned about via My Owl Barn).  Well, when I learned about the potluck to wish farewell to Amanda J., who is a smartypants starting an MPH program at Boston University this fall, I knew this was my chance!

I followed the directions in the recipe link precisely, and they came out wonderfully.  So, I won't rehash the directions here.  However, I did want to post some photographs from the process...

How Now Brown Cow

For years, I've been avoiding yogurt.  I just didn't like the way it tasted, its texture, its smell...  There was no redeeming quality to sustain me through an entire serving.  I was jealous of all of my friends who ate yogurt like it was an amazing treat--why couldn't I be like them?  What was I missing?!

Well, all of that changed last week, when I discovered that my problem was buying the wrong yogurt.  Whenever I had given yogurt a chance in the past, I bought Yoplait, or the grocery store brand.  Last week, however, I found myself in a Sprouts, looking to purchase some vanilla yogurt for a chunky strawberry topper recipe.  Incidentally, Sprouts has a fantastic selection of bulk foods, including over a dozen types of granola.  I recommend their strawberry vanilla hemp granola.

I wanted a container of yogurt with a lid, because the recipe only calls for four tablespoons, and I knew I would be making the recipe repeatedly.  So, I grabbed some Brown Cow nonfat vanilla yogurt, and hoped for the best.

It is delicious!  I licked the spoon after I measured what I needed in my recipe, and I was very pleasantly surprised.  It's different than the other yogurts I have tasted.  The texture is less goopy, and more soupy, which I find far more palatable.  The taste actually brings to mind vanilla, albeit with a tangy finish.  And, when paired with granola and fruit, it provides just the right amount of creaminess and substance to create a great breakfast.

I'm somewhat finicky when it comes to food.  There are a lot of foods on my "ew, gross" list.  It's situations like this that make me glad that I give those foods a second chance.

Do you like yogurt?  What brand, and how do you like to eat it?

Banner Revue

In honor of my most recent blog layout update, I thought I'd do a post looking back at my banners from the past three years.  Ah, memories...

July 2008
My first banner, in honor of St. Thomas More.

November 2008
SCOTUS: symbolic not only of the first semester my legal education, but also of blossoming love of DC.

March 2009
From a neat brick building in Rosslyn, VA.

August 2009
I love this photo from the Korea War Veterans Memorial.

May 2010
When I think of my blog, this is still the banner that pops into my head.

April 2011
Revelations--get it?  From the Lawrence Caltrain platform.

May 2011
The train motif was a good symbol for barreling toward the bar exam.

July 2011
Alibi's pensive stare reflects my own curiosity about the future...

Loyal reader, is your blog in need of a new banner?  Comment with an idea or photo (and the desired size) and I'd be happy to try my hand at making you one, what with all of my newfound free time!

It's Over

I finished the bar exam!  The past three days haven't been too bad.  The essays were fair--nothing out of left field--and I even got a couple of topics that I was hoping for (though, I also got my least favorite topic).  I always enjoy the performance tests, because it reminds me of my past internships.  The big question in my mind is the MBE--I can never tell how I did on the multiple choice.

Yesterday, a fire alarm went off at the Santa Clara Convention Center (where I took the bar exam) with a half hour to go in our morning MBE.  It was pretty ridiculous.  First they told us to evacuate, then they told us to stay put.  It only took a few minutes to get the alarm to stop, but the flashing lights continued for an additional ten minutes.  And, the proctors were all buzzing about, trying to figure out what was going on.  It was rather distracting, but thankfully I only had a couple of questions left at that point, so I wasn't upset when then didn't even give us extra time to make up for the disruption.  I was rather amused that the incident made Above the Law.

At any rate, it's over, and now I can relax and wait for the results (mid-November).  Thanks to everyone for the ongoing support.  Your prayers and encouragement have meant a lot to me these past few months.

I'm excited that I'll be taking a small bar trip with my mommy this weekend to Los Angeles.  I scored tickets to Monday's taping of Conan, and I am really looking forward to it!  I have been a fan of Conan for so long...  It will be great to see him in person!  Plus, Harrison Ford is one of Monday's guests.  We're staying at the Millennium Biltmore, which looks like a swanky place.  I wish I had time to visit SoCal friends while I am in town, but I'll be spending all of my time with my mom, so I guess I will simply have to make time for another LA trip soon.