keeen-wah!!! (i.e. breakfast quinoa)

i love quinoa- its a slightly crunchy, all-purpose grain (but its not a grain..) that i used to pronounce kee-no-a

yummy as a complement to beans and such, but with some honey and raisins, it'd breakfast HEAVEN



here is my recipe:

Breakfast Quinoa


1/2 cup quinoa (whole foods bulk section)
1 1/4 cup boiling water
1 tbsp honey or other sweetener (farmer's market)
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup dried fruit (raisins from sunday farmers market)
1/4 cup nuts, toasted and chopped (not pictured because they successfully hid from me)

1. Rinse quinoa. I rinse by pouring it into a fine mesh sieve and pouring some water over it.

2. Bring water to boiling and dump rinsed quinoa into it. Carefully. No burning yourself.

3. Cover and simmer over low heat until the water is absorbed and the quinoa is translucent, has the little ring around it, and is just a little bit crunchy.

4. Mix in the honey and vanilla extract and stir to distribute evenly. Sprinkle in cinnamon in small amounts, stirring until absorbed. Mix in raisins and chopped nuts (you can also put in the raisins about five minutes before the quinoa finishes cooking in the water, which makes them plump up almost like grapes).

Makes for about two servings of breakfast at one cup each!

eco-adventure of the day: lotion making!

I was looking for a recipe to make my own conditioner and stumbled upon a recipe for homemade lotion. The ingredients were oil, beeswax, and water and my mind began spinning on the possibilities of locally sourced, chemical free, fully customizable body care...

There's an olive oil booth at my sunday farmer's market, but I wasn't sure about local beeswax.. so I made like a geek and researched it.


Found it at Honey Pacifica and almost jumped off of my floor cushion when I realized their warehouse was two blocks away from my school. It smells so strongly like honey that I nibbled off a piece to see if it tasted like honey too. It tastes like wax.

ooo pretty ingredients and vintage brooch in there for no good reason

My mom got interested in the mess I was making at this pont, and she took over by throwing things into the microwave and ugly bowls in bad lighting, so there are no more ingredient glamour photos =(

Lotion/ Cold Cream for Dry skin

1/2 cup Olive Oil
1 tsp Jojoba Oil
2 tbsp Beeswax
1/4 cup water
1/8 tsp borax (optional, I didn't mix it in. no chems, please..)
*you can probably substitute other oils or waxes in with no problem, just puh-lease stay away from fossil-fuel based ones (mineral oil, paraffin)

Grate beeswax block until you have two tbsp. Melt beeswax into oil in microwave or in a water bath on a stove. Heat water to almost boiling in either of those two methods. If you are using borax, stir it into the water. Pour oil/wax part into either bowl or blender. Add a few drops of water at a time while you whip the oil, do not add any more water until the drops added are invisible. Whip for another ten minutes after all water is absorbed. If you want it to have a scent, add a few drops of essential oil to the mixture while it blends. And, ta-da! You will have beautiful, locally-sourced, customized lotion! Play with the recipe until its the perfect lotion for you.



*homemade olive-oil based lotion in a re-used glass mason jar from the Treasure Hunt thrift*

i made a 'le sac' dress =DDD

copied from an american apparel design

this piece of fabric had been floating around my craft room for about two years in the form of a thirfted skirt. i had no idea what to do with it until i picked it up last night and said, Gasp! "Le Sac!"

i love sewing. 38$ dress for like.. $4

oh, procrastination, you Siren, you...

-_-

i am coming to the end of my twentieth trip around the sun on wednesday, which means that i will soon be in my twenties. i dont feel prepared.

i love watching myself change over time, so for my future self reading this, or for friends who stumbled upon my blogs/notes, here are some realizations and wisdoms i came across since "april 22nd, 2008"

romantic love is not a object. 'love' is a dedicated action AND a state of mind and heart. {thanks, hope for creating/ relaying this philosophy and ken for being the primary guinea pig for it =P. love y'all

no, you don't always have to be the best of the best, or even 'better'. the rat race makes you trip over your own feet, and plus you'd rather be hiking some forested mountain than running in rubber gravel circles.

the purpose of your life is to try and save humanity from the environmental apocalypse it is ensuring for itself

get over yourself. other people may have it more figured out than you. allow yourself to learn from them!

the world isn't as mean as you thought it was. sometimes its meaner. but it can't do more damage to you than you would do to yourself if you were to paralyze yourself in fear.

when good people are waiting with open arms, don't be stupid. accept their love.


that last one i'm still working on. "nineteen" was most definitely the best year of my life. sometimes it seems too good to be true.

'Who doesn't want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?'

-Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir by Nick Flynn

i woke up with a strange sense today, like a creeping crawling up my spine and nausea in the back of my brain. i felt uneasy in my queen sized bed piled with warm blankets and pillows, suspicious as i stepped into some flipflops and trudged across our redwood floors to draw the curtains open to the blinding light of day. i watched my movements as i swung open the refrigerator door and reached for a cold box of factory produced soymilk, processed with essential vitamins and minerals, and poured it into a mug. i tried to concentrate on the mug as it turned round in my lit microwave and tried to lose myself in its heat and steam while i sipped it. i booted up my computer and ran through my ritual, checking email, facebook, myspace, livejournal subscriptions... it would have been an average morning.

the soymilk hadn't satisfied my hunger. i found myself pulling the fridge door open again, and scanning it for something to eat. my hand reached for a brown plastic bag of whole grain bread. usually, my reaction would've included something about 300 million year old ferns trapped in the banal evil of water-tight packaging, but this time my thoughts were fixed on a spot a bit beyond the juices sitting on the top shelf. amid burgandy and purple liquids, in a sterile glowing white theatre, a television screen appeared. i watched it, mesmerized, as it advanced through fractured, saturated images, an informercial staticy after travelling through years of time. baked orange Earth hosts malnourished, large bellied children that forget to bat flies away from their faces//dark skinned mothers cry over infant bones in little bags of skin//five year old children hold up an empty bowl to me with a pained look in their sunken eyes//white-faced good christians ask me for pity, mercy, and help. i closed the fridge door i'd been hanging on to and popped brown slices of bread in my toaster. a girl's gotta eat.

it is not reason never to yield to reason

from "Antigone"

"I beg you, do not be unchangeable;
Do not believe that you alone can be right.
The man who thinks that,
The man who maintains that only he has the power
To reason correctly, the gift to speak, the soul-
A man like that, when you know him, turns out to be empty.

It is not reason never to yield to reason!

In flood time you can see how some trees bend,
And because they bend, even their twigs are safe,
While stubborn trees are torn up, roots and all.
...
Forget you are angry! Let yourself be moved!
...
The ideal condition
Would be, I admit, that men should be right by instinct;
But since we are all too likely to go astray,
The reasonable thing is to learn from those who can teach."


if only i had listened to this earlier. *sigh*

MIDTERMS MIDTERMS MIDTERMS!!!!

necessity has no law

-william langland

a few of you know, most do not, that my dad was jumped by a gang when i was six, about a block away from my home. he spent two or three weeks in a coma and survived with mild brain damage and a few psychological issues.

i haven't really thought about how that event affected my life. i refused to think that the thoughtless actions of a few idiotic street thugs could even touch me.

it actually made things extraordinarily difficult for my family. my mom and dad had never gotten along, but after the beating, my dad became very emotional and easily angered, and also clinically paranoid. my mom could never understand why he changed and blamed his character on an unwillingness to be well. there was a year and a half were i didn't speak to my dad because of an emotional burst he had towards me, even though we lived on the same property. i'm a sensitive girl, not the kind of person who could be immersed in such a stressful home environment and NOT be affected by it.

but i don't blame the gang members. my family suspects that my dad was a target because he was fighting gang activity in our neighborhood. he was making business harder for the gang in its own ghetto.

necessity has no law. the people of the ghetto are there because they are denied the resources they need to live safely and comfortably. life in the ghetto is a constant competition for resources, and if the average man can't get what he needs by honest work, he will turn to fists and guns.

i don't blame the people. i blame the system, for denying secure shelter, food, and safety to groups of people based on their bad luck to be born into those groups. i blame a society that expects the poor to secure their resources on their own, without making as much help available to them as is needed.

what happened to my family is unfortunate, at first glance. it is mere chance that it happened to us- we just happened to be in a desperate neighborhood, with desperate people in a desperate time.

i inherited an indomitable tenacity from my mother, a need for independence and strength, and a love for justice and independent thought from my father. i have not allowed the system to make me its victim. it has influenced my family, making them afraid of its oppression and vigilance, and they have fallen victim to its empty symbols of wealth and prestige.

i feel uncomfortable claiming superiority over my parents, but i have so far been able to escape these extreme approaches. i can see the flaws in the system, and how they affect humanity. i can see what is useful in the system and what must change if we want to keep our society from self-destructing. i am using what resources and influences i have come across to subvert and re-create the system to work for those who came from necessity, but were not as fortunate as i.


there's no silver lining in a terrific thunderstorm, but that storm will disperse eventually
when it does, the Earth will be nourished, anew
you can abandon the land in fear that thunder will strike twice
or stay and cultivate the new Earth
and reap the benefits of your labor