Blog Purge: to unfollow or not to unfollow

Tonight I went to add another blog to my reading list in Blogger, only to recieve a notification that I could not follow any more blogs, and to please delete some.

So it was time for a Blog Purge

I've been blogging for years now. So some of the blogs on the old follow list have been there for years. And as I clicked through them, I found that some of them hadn't posted anything in 3 or more years. Clearly they could be let go.

It's not that I had been holding on to them all this time, it's just that they have been out of site out of mind, if they don't post, they don't show up in the reading pane, and you eventually forget they exist.

Unfortunately when I clicked the little gear wheel to manage my reading subscriptions, it just wouldn't load (probably a result of following too many blogs). So I thought about other ways I could go about following the blogs I want, and purging the ones that were not longer active (or interesting to me).

In the past I had tried following blogs through RSS feeds, or though bloglovin or google+. There are some I follow through twitter more or less, and others that I follow through 20sb, but I have always loved having the reading list right in blogger.

With that reading list failing me now, I thought I'd go unessesarily old school with things, and just create a word document full of links, and organize the blogs into categories like: Bloggers, Canadian Bloggers, Knitting and Crochet, Inspiration, Health and Fitness, Food, Fashion... etc. And just give that a try for now.

In the mean time, how do you follow peoples blogs? Leave me a comment to let me know how, and I'll add you to my word document!

Thanksgiving Dinner in 4 Hours

It's Thanksgiving Weekend here in Canada, and Kevin and I celebrated with a break in our very busy schedules by roasting up a chicken along with all the good side dishes you could want. Like I said tho, very busy (I was in the lab all day today, and all morning yesterday and Saturday, but such is grad school), so I blocked off one afternoon to do an entire Thanks giving dinner for the two of us.

Here's how:

Shopping list:

-1 whole (fresh not frozen) chicken
-1 acorn squash
-2 large potatoes
-2 sweet potatoes
-1 bunch of celery
-1 onion
-1 pack fresh cranberries
-5 mushrooms
-2 boxes of stove top stuffing
-1 packet of instant turkey gravy
-1 can cranberry sauce
-2 heads of garlic
-1 bunch of asparagus
-pack of fresh baked dinner rolls
-1 bottle of red wine
-1 pecan pie
-1 tub of hagen das

Timeline:

2:00 Preheat oven to 350', cut acorn squash in half and scoop out seeds/pulp

2:20 Bake squash face down, mean while cut the tops of one head of garlic, drizzle with olive oil, wrap in tin foil and put in oven

 2:50 Take Squash out, flip over, put 1tbsp brown sugar and 1tbsp butter into each half, put back into oven

3:00 Remove garlic from oven, spoon cloves out into bowl and mash with fork, add 1/2 softened butter, and chicken seasoning herbs, mash together (this is your chicken rub).

 

 

 3:10 Spoon the rub into space between chicken skin and breast, and rub liberally over outside of chicken. Place half an onion and some cloves of garlic into the chicken body cavity. Put four celery stalks on the bottom of your roasting pan, and some more garlic cloves. Add 1 cup of water and sit chicken on top of the celery.

 3:20 Remove squash from oven, and turn oven up to 375'. Once squash has cooled, scoop out from shell into bowl (along with buttery goodness from center of squash) and mash together with a fork.

 3:30 Put your chicken into the oven, cover with a tin foil tent.

 3:50 Peel your potatoes

 At this point things got busy, and I forgot to take any more picture of the process.


4:10 Put a large pot of salted water on to boil. Chop your potatoes into medium sized chunks.
4:20 Add potatoes to boiling water.
4:30 check on your chicken, add more liquid if needed.
4:35 Chop one half onion, remainder of celery and mushrooms
4:50 Drain potatoes, add 1/3 cup of butter, 1/2 cup milk, 2tbsp minced garlic and 1/3 cup Parmesan cheese, mash together, transfer into serving pan, and garnish top with Parmesan cheese
5:10 remove chicken from oven, pour juices into a sauce pan for gravy
5:20 Spread asparagus onto to baking sheet, drizzle with olive oil, garlic and parmesan, put asparagus and potatoes in the oven
5:30 Saute celery, onions and mushrooms in a large pot until soft, on second burner, heat chicken juices and adding enough water to bring volume up to 1 cup, stir in gravy packet when boiling
5:40 add cranberries and 2 cups water, cover (they will splatter when they burst), remove asparagus and potatoes from oven
5:50 stir in stove top stuffing, remove from heat and let sit covered for 5 minutes, fluff with fork and serve
6:00 Serve everything to the table, sit down and enjoy

So there you have it, an entire thanksgiving dinner in 4 hours, in one tiny apartment kitchen. You could adapt the timeline to accommodate a turkey (if it's a smaller one), but the chicken done this way was great (especially for just the two of us). After dinner we packed up lunches for the next three days each, because really the best part about a turkey dinner is the leftovers.

What did you cook up this weekend? Happy Thanksgiving Canada!

Pulled Pork for the People

I have to admit, Kevin and I were in Wendy's last weekend, and we looked at the pictures of the pulled pork sandwiches and thought "no way".

But that was before I saw this video.

It was one of the pre-roll ads on YouTube (I think before Good Mythical Morning earlier this week) and it was the kind with the option to skip the ad after the first 5 seconds. But I couldn't hit skip, I had to keep watching. May it was Stone Cold (who just didn't get the career break the Rock did), maybe it was the line about Calgary and Toronto, but likely it was the whole thing.

This is one of the best ads I've seen in a long time, and I just had to share it with you all. Will it make me go out and buy pulled pork at Wendy's, probably not, but it did make me smile.

Books to Read: Lev Grossman's The Magicians

I am a book junkie.

I think we've established this here on my blog.

Some of my earliest childhood memories are of my dad reading to me before bed, particularly the books: Charlet's Web, The Secret Garden, The Boy Next Door and this big old 365 days of fairy tales book.

By the time I was in grade three I was hooked on the Hobbit and Narnia. Later came the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Heralds of Valdemar.


Today my own personal library (and I think I have to call it library and not just collection) is well over 300 books.

This past week, I crushed another 3 (one of them in the last 24hours).

They are Lev Grossman's

The Magicians
The Magician King
The Magician's Land

They drew me right in, and wouldn't let me go until I finished them.

So why did I start this book review off by telling you about my favourite childhood books? Because if you are going to read these books, you need to have read and loved The Chronicals of Narnia and Harry Potter. Lev Grossman pulls these two worlds together and drops the mal adjusted Quentin Coldwater into them.

Quentin grew up reading the Fillory books (basically a twist on Narnia) and when, midway through his last year of highschool, he is accepted into North America's only magic school, Brakebills; he feels like he has finally found his own Fillory adventure.

However magic isn't the solution to happiness, and when, after 4 years of hard studying Quentin and friends graduate into the real world. They quickly find themselves throwing their lives away into drugs, alcohol and debauchery. Things are getting pretty bleak until they find a way into Fillory, which turns out to be real after all and more importantly, not as happy and wonderful as the children's books made it out to be.

Over the three books, with Quentin at the lead, Grossman explores what it means to find happiness and purpose in life and what people will sacrifice in the pursuit of it. This is Harry Potter and Narnia's dark and twisty and grimy older sibling. And if you've ever found yourself wishing you could escape your life and run off on a magical adventure, these books are for you.

20sb Cooking Challenge: Pumpkin all the things!!!

So I have a confession to make.

I don't really care for pumpkin. Or Pumpkin Pie, or Pumpkin Spice Lattes. Or PSL.

So of course Jenna's video from a week or so ago cracked me up (language/NSFW!).



But the 20something blogger cooking challenge this month was to cook something savory with pumpkin.

So here are my Pumpkin Ricotta Ravioli with Maple Butter Walnut Sauce. (we had to keep it to 10 ingredients or less).

Ingredients:
1 cup all purpose flour
3 eggs (used in 3 places)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 cup pumpkin puree
1/2 cup ricotta cheese
1/4 cup parmesean cheese
1/4 tsp nutmeg
4 tbsp butter
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/2 crushed walnuts

Step 1: the Pasta

Put 1 cup of flour, 1 egg and 1tbsp of olive oil into a bowl.

Kneed it together with your hands until it just holds. Dryer is better. And if it's still lumpy, that's ok, it'll come together when you roll it out.

Cut dough into four pieces and get your pasta machine out.

 Roll the past out into sheets on the thinnest setting.  And set aside, covered.

Step 2: The filling.

In a bowl mix 1 cup of canned pumpkin puree with one egg, 1 half cup of drained ricotta cheese (drier is better), 1/4 tsp of nutmeg and 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese. Mix together until smooth.

Get ready to assemble. You can do it without the ravioli mold, but definitely invest in one (for like 10 bucks) because it saves so much time. You'll need the egg white from the 3rd egg as well.

You can read my post over here all about making ravioli,. Each one gets about 1 tsp of filling.

Throw them on a plate while you get the water boiling. They can go directly into bioling water, and take about 4 minutes to cook (they should be floating easily).

Step 3: The Sauce!

That's right, start with a heaping chunk of butter. 4tbsp, in a pan on medium heat. You can make the sauce while you bring the water to a boil and cook the ravs.

Add in a quarter cup of maple syrup and a half cup of crushed walnuts. Cook on medium, stirring frequently until the sauce turns a nice brown.

Multi task like a champ, and when everything is good to go you can serve them up one of two ways.
 

First option. Toss drained ravs with some of the sauce and serve, for maple buttery goodness.

Option two: throw the drained ravs right into the pan with the still cooking sauce and let them crispy fry in the butter sauce. Then serve.

There you have it, basically autumn on a plate. Enjoy!

Yoga Headstand Fun Times

Last month Krista and I posed for this photo.

Sorry did I say posed?

What I should have said was Kevin held our feet and posed us, then ran out of the frame while the camera snapped rapid fire shots and we desperately tried to hold it for a second or two.

Thank goodness for the ability to crop Kevin out of photos.

At the time I was just getting back into yoga, practicing pretty close to daily, but I would have said proper headstands weren't anywhere in my near future. I should also point out that headstand and hand stands even have were never in my past either. I was always the kid who kicked up into a hand stand and flipped all the way down onto my back. Fun as a kid playing on the lawn, terrifying as an adult.


Fast forward a week, to a community yoga class in Vancouver with Blissology's Eoin Finn, and he says ok everyone hand stands. So naturally I sit back into child's pose. Because you know, I'm terrified.

Well that wasn't an option with Eoin, and he came right over and assisted me right up into my first handstand, and held me there waaaay longer than I wanted. But importantly, long enough for me to get a sense of what it felt like through the core, shoulders and arms to support you body weight upside down.

More importantly though, he held me up there long enough to get past the fear, and I came home determined to get inversions (well more inversions than just shoulder stand) into my practice.

If you want to learn anything in yoga, there are two ways to do it, in class and online with Kino MacGregor, so I watched her videos on headstands and practiced hard in my Ashtanga classes.

Now I am strong enough to lift up into headstands on my mat in class, unsupported by the wall! (Although when I practice at home I still like to work on them about a foot away from the wall, just in case.)

Next on the yoga bucket list will be developing the core strength to lift up straight legged into the pose. So practice, practice, practice.

Liebster again!

 Just got another nomination for a Leibster Award... you can see my first one, from way back in 2012 here.

This nomination comes to me from the very lovely Nikki at Travels with Pen and Paper, so thanks a tonne for thinking of me for this.

For those of you who are interested in playing along, I nominate you: here are the rules

The Rules:

1. Post 11 facts about yourself.
2. Answer the 11 questions provided by the person who nominated you and then create an 11-question set for the next group of nominees.
3. Choose up to 11 (or more or less depends on the rules you follow) bloggers to nominate and link them in the post!
4. Let your nominees know that they’ve been tagged- and no tag-backs!
5. Nominate blogs under 200 followers

But since I've already done it before, I'm just going to post 11 facts about myself and answer Nikki's 11 questions for me.

Let's do this!

11 fun facts about Sara

1. It turns out I am horribly allergic to rats...or more likely rodents in general. I now have to wear a darth vadar style mask when I handle them at in the lab.
2. I love animals, and also do animal research as part of my graduate studies on cardiovascular disease. I don't think that the two are incompatible, in fact I think being an animal lover leads to my having greater respect for the animals we work with.
3. I don't currently have a pet, due to the conditions in my lease, but I can't wait to get one, specifically I can't wait to get one of these guys:
   
4. Kevin and I have yet to agree on the amazing-ness that is the Chinese crested dog, and he swears that if I get one he will never love it.
5. There are a few words that I spell incorrectly every time I write/type them, and subsequently have to fix my errors. I don't mean I make typos, I mean I have a mental block on how to correctly spell the word. One most common error I make is spelling schedule shedual.
6. Nothing makes you more proud than teaching your 18 year old cousin how to use a pipette when he comes to visit your lab before starting University, and then learning that he aced his first lab assignment by pipetting with the lowest error, less than half a percent, in his group!
7. I can't wait to finish my experiments today, because 1: then I get to go to the early yoga class at 4:30 and 2:we will have finished the second week-long cohort of my current study.
8. I am in fact writing this post while running pressure myography experiments on two rigs, it's the kind of science that requires close enough attention that you don't leave the room for very long, but only require that you do something every 10minutes (unless things go wrong).  Perfect for blogging.
9. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people stop to have conversations in door ways.... having conversations on stairs is a close second and walking side by side on the side walk, when you see someone coming is a third.
10. I always have at least 4-5 knitting/crochet/sewing/crafting projects on the go. So recently I decided to throw some of them up on etsy...you can buy some of the things I make here. 
    
11. I decided to name my Etsy shop the Pinapple Farm PhD, because I constantly threaten to quite gradschool and begin growing pineapples... I subsequently began crocheting pineapples.

OK now to answer the 11 questions from Nikki

1. What was your worst job?

Hmmmmmm, not sure if it was my worst job, but definitely my weirdest... I worked one summer for Sea Lamprey Control... which meant we traveled all around Ontario and Michigan hunting and killing lamprey. If you don't know what a sea lamprey is, think eel with suction cup mouth full of teeth that live by sucking the blood out of real fish.

2. If you could teleport, where would you choose to live?

Probably somewhere along the Amalfi Coast in Italy. But really if I could teleport, why pick only one place?

3. What fictional world do you most want to be a part of?

Hmmm maybe an embarrassing answer but definitely in Mercedes Lackey's Velgarth, I mean who doesn't want to be a Herald?

4. What was your favorite childhood toy? 

Most definitely Clifford, my big red stuffed dog, who still lives in my bedroom, btw.

5. What's your favorite vegetable?

This is a tough one... maybe broccoli tho to be honest.

6. Would you rather have a live in chef or live in maid?

A maid for sure, I love to cook, and hate to clean, bonus if the maid will clean up after me in the kitchen.

7. If you could have any animal as a pet, what would you want? 

Any animal? maybe if someone could figure out how to make polar bears stay tiny....that is what I would want.
 

8. Townhouse, farm, or cabin in the woods?

Farm! With sheep, for wool. And chickens and ducks... like a hobby farm really.
 

9. If you had a time turner, what moment would you change or relive? 

I don't know if I would change much... but maybe I'd win myself a big lottery with it.
 

10. What was your dream job as a kid?

I for sure wanted to be a veterinarian, until I figured out they had to put animals down too.

11. What's your favorite blogpost?

Hmmm this required looking back through my blog and picking the first awesome one that came to mind. I went with this one from this summer, because I was super proud of the results.

So that's all for now, thanks again to Nikki for the nomination!