If you’ve been on my Flickr lately, you know I just uploaded a whole bunch of new pictures.  They show my birthday surprise at the Taste of South Boston, a friend’s bridal shower, and of course, Bermuda.

Two weeks ago, I also had the chance to show one of my high school friends around Boston for the first time.  Showing off Boston to newcomers is one of my favorite things to do, especially in the spring.  It reminds me why I fell deeply in love with this city.

It was a wonderful spring weekend to visit.  The sun was shining with a crisp breeze in the air.  The tulips were blooming in the garden.  The growing memorial on Boylston radiated the city’s pain, pride, and strength.  Haymarket was bustling.  Harvard Square was buzzing with MayFair festivities.  The Somerville Open Studios let us tour converted warehouses and sun dappled home-studios and peek in on a different kind of life.  My candlepin bowling skills were as mediocre as ever.

It was a truly beautiful weekend in Boston.  Check out more pics on Flickr.

In March, Brian & I went to Bermuda to take advantage of my last Spring Break before I finish school.  (That’s in 85 days, by the way, not that I’m counting.)  Bermuda was beautiful and relaxing, but also a little strange.  It’s a tiny island and you can explore all the main areas in just a few days.  The food is very expensive and the locals are very friendly.

Bermuda’s two main industries are international business and tourism so it’s hard to get a sense of the local culture.  It’s kind of hard to explain, but it almost felt a little like Disneyland, with a distinct and beautiful look, but an oddly commercial and international feel.

In terms of relaxation, Bermuda was a great choice.  It was easy to navigate the islands by bus and our hotel room was right on the beach, overlooking the amazing teal water.  We explored a cave, enjoyed the aquarium, and drank the obligatory rum swizzle.

You can find more pictures of our trip on Flickr.

A few weeks ago, I started our Boston Organics deliveries back up. We only get the smallest box every other week, but I love cooking with my organic food, especially now that I’m on break for a few weeks. I’ve been working on updating my No-List and really making this box work for us.  Inspired by a friend from college, I wanted to share how I’ve been doing using our box.

This week, our box contained 1 apple, 3 bananas, 3 beets, 2 green bell peppers, 1 lb. carrots, 2 kiwis, 3 red onions, 2 blood oranges, 1 pear, 3 sweet potatoes, and 1 bunch of kale.

I promptly roasted the beets for future beet & goat cheese salads. The bell peppers turned into stuffed peppers for tonight’s dinner, filled with kale, carrots, and red onion from the basket as well as barley, mushrooms, zucchini, and ground beef. Two of the sweet potatoes, I baked into delicious spiced french fries, which were a cinch to make. I also used some red onion on the accompanying burger. (I end up putting the red onion in everything, just like I usually would a yellow onion.)

We generally have a lot of trouble using all the fruit because Mr. B isn’t a big snacker, so I end up freezing a lot of it to make healthy smoothies for myself. I try to fill these with a good combo of fruits and veggies so they are packed with lots of vitamins, not just lots of sugar. The one pictured above had kale, cucumber, carrot, kiwi, banana, and pineapple juice. I don’t know if it sounds it, but it was delicious! I am dubious about the health benefits of nutitional supplements, but occasionally I toss some wheat germ in my smoothies too.

I’m only 3 days into this box and I’ve already used up most of the veggies! If I keep this up, I may need to switch up to a weekly box or maybe a slightly bigger one with 2/3 veggies and 1/3 fruit. I can’t wait until we start getting fresh herbs and berries in the coming months.  Yum!

It’s nice when others are able to express the things we do not know how to say. My initial reaction to Friday’s manhunt was a lot like this:

Compassion for Dzhokhar? Call Me Crazy.

Then, on Saturday, I visited the memorial on Boylston – a tangible representation of pain and tragedy. These grainy cell phone pictures don’t have a fraction of the power of that sight. I know what I felt in that moment, but about Dzhokhar, I still don’t know what to feel.

Describe the Fauna

August 30 will mark my 7 year anniversary of moving to Boston. I chose to go to college here and then to graduate school and now Mr. B and I are looking to buy a house (a house!) just 4.5 miles outside of Boston Proper. I love this city. I love the snow in the winter. I love the festivals in the summer and the gentle buzzing turned into a roar as the college students return in the fall. I love to hate the sticky heat and the one way streets and the red line that has closed down for repairs on more weekends than I can count. I love the bustle of Back Bay and the way the sleek blue Prudential building juts into the sky right next to a 300 year old stone church. The people dont say hello as you pass them on the street, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t kind. They are often raucous and ridiculous in a way that I have rarely been, but they make me feel like a part of something. I chose Boston as my home and my community and I plan to stay here for a long time.

Boston Marathon 2010

Monday afternoon, I was writing up a report in the SLP office at Mass General Hospital when I got a text from a colleague reading, “Bombs at Boston marathon finish line.” I wasn’t sure what to think, but a quick internet search confirmed it.

Boston Marathon 2010

I tend to respond to all sudden and highly emotional events in a very level way. It’s something I’ve perfected, actually. When everyone jumps because the fire alarm is suddenly blaring, I look around calmly and rarely flinch. When I got some extremely happy news recently, people kept asking me if I was excited and they were confused by my lackluster response. And if you were in that tiny office when I heard about the Boston Marathon Bombing, you might have seen a brief glimpse of surprise cross my face, and then I was calm and collected and quickly Google-ing.

Describe the Fauna

I take things in, I seek out information, and I sit with it. It’s only later, after I’ve had a chance to process the event, that the emotions set in. Other Speech-Pathologists and students were there and we talked and sought out the latest news. I stayed calm as we tried to contact friends and colleagues at the race. I waited to hear if we would need to stay late at the hospital to help with the injured who were being brought in for care. The ambulances whined outside the office. I was thoughtful as I left the hospital that night, walking with friends so I wouldn’t need to take public transportation. And at home I watched the news intently and it started to hit me.

Source: The Atlantic Wire

See that little red dot on the left side of the map? That dot is where Brian and I lived from 2009-2010. All of the pictures in this post were take right near that spot. All of the pictures were taken within a block of where two bombs went off on Monday afternoon. I kept imagining the scenarios. What if we still lived there? What if I hadn’t kept knocking cups off the shelves in that shoebox of an apartment? We would have been there. We would have been watching the marathon. We would have been trapped or evacuated or worse and we would have been really really scared.

Boston Marathon 2010

And that’s the moment that I realized that I already was scared. I was scared and hurt and sick. This disaster was happening to me, not to tragic strangers in Newtown or Aurora, but in my town on a street that I have walked a thousand times. The wounded were coming to my hospital and their grieving families were waiting my hallways. Those other events were terrible and they made me pensive and sad and briefly paranoid. This event made my stomach twist. This one made me sob in the dark in the living room in the middle of the night.

Describe the Fauna

I felt sick that first night. I couldn’t turn off the television. I needed to get homework done, as I always do, but I couldn’t focus. I still can’t actually. Mr. B told me to turn off the tv and go to bed. “There’s no more news right now,” he said, and he was right. But that didn’t mean I could turn off my mind.

Boston Marathon 2010

I woke up before my alarm the next day and I still felt sick and sad and a little scared. I usually only wear headphones when I run, but I put them on that day. I was blocking out the world. That day, I didn’t want to look strangers in the eye. Work was still work and I was going through the motions. I had lunch outside with my colleagues, just to talk and feel the sun and be together and alive. I kept pressing through the day and by the end I felt a little better. I was distracted by work and life was moving forward.

I woke up feeling okay today, but the sick moments come and go. I’ll read an article or hear an update and I am overcome again by the horror of this event. I didn’t lose anyone and I wasn’t injured in the blast, but I was hurt by it all the same. I want to make excuses about how I don’t deserve to feel this way, but this tragedy is mine and I am experiencing it. All I can do is keep moving forward and the sick moments will be less and less.

I already knew that people were capable of terrible things and I don’t need to place blame. I just need to keep living my life in the city I love.

I have been on a loaf baking kick lately.  Loaves are less fussy than cookies or cakes and you can totally get away with eating a slice for breakfast.  Goodness knows I am always looking for a quick breakfast before I head out the door.

Last week I made a rich banana bread (with added chocolate chips) created by local pastry chef Joanna Chang.  Tonight I made a sweet potato loaf*.  This loaf is good, and I mean really good.  It’s warm and spiced and sweet, but not overly sweet.  It’s incredibly moist from the sweet potatoes and it has a delightfully crisp edge.

I know that this is breaking a major baking taboo, but I don’t always pre-mix my dry ingredients before combining them with wet ones.  It dirties a bowl, but it has never made a difference in my final product.  This recipe is no exception, so I slimmed it down to one bowl.  I also ran out of white flour so I substituted some wheat flour and I was excited that it didn’t weigh down this loaf at all!  If you, like me, decided you would buy the big bag of wheat flour (because you could use it in everything and be healthier and no one would ever know the difference), but then you realized that it’s definitely not the same as white flour, I can tell you that this is one place where it works very well.  In this recipe, you can use all white flour or all wheat flour or any ratio in between, as long as it adds up to 1 & 3/4 cups.

Spiced Sweet Potato Loaf

Adapted ever so slightly from TasteOfHome.com

Ingredients

• 2 eggs
• 1-1/2 cups mashed sweet potatoes (about 2 medium)
• 1/2 cup canola oil
• 6 tablespoons pineapple or orange juice
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup wheat flour
• 1-1/2 cups sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

Directions

• In the bowl of a stand mixer, combine the eggs, sweet potatoes, oil and orange juice. Add in all of the remaining ingredients and stir briefly, just until moistened.
• Transfer to a greased 9-in. x 5-in. loaf pan. Bake at 350° for 60-65 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean.

*My loaves always come out a bit distended in the middle because the only loaf pan I own is silicone and the loaves always stretch the pan as they bake.  I should probably get around to fixing that, especially if this loaf kick continues.

Monday: Chicken marsala, spaghetti squash, and parmesan herb green beans.  The spaghetti squash was so delicious, especially when I tossed it with a little olive oil, salt, pepper, red pepper and parmesan.  It’s slightly sweet and very filling.  I definitely want to cook it more often.

Tonight: Steak salad with blue cheese, tomatoes, homemade dressing (with a secret ingredient), and crispy fried onions.

Both were super delicious and I can add them my list of relatively healthy weeknight meals that satisfy both Mr. B and me!

A few weeks ago, it was Mr. B’s birthday, and it was quite chocolate filled!  I took him out to Max Brenner for dinner fondue.  Plus there were those decadent leftover truffles I made him for Valentine’s Day.  And then, that weekend, there was his cake.

I decided on a Chocolate Kahlua Cake that combined these three elements:

Devil’s Food Cake
Kahlua Frosting
Powdered Sugar Topping

I think it was a winner; fudgy cake with a dense crumb and a rich, spiked frosting.  Except next year I need to try to remember to make a cake that’s a little bit smaller…

I love taking photos in New York – especially in Times Square.  It’s so frantic there that you can get right next to people and they don’t even know they are the subject of your photo.  Creepy?  Perhaps.  But there’s nowhere else in the world that I feel this comfortable doing it.  Take a look at the photos and decide for yourself.

As you probably know, I have been struggling with being a healthy, active person for a few years now. Last semester and I let my health concerns slip aside, but I’m trying to turn that around. I decided to look to technology for some inspiration. After all, the Weight Watchers app worked for me for a long time, until I realized that I didn’t agree with a few of their philosophies.

In my stumbling through the app store, I came across a pretty cool app called Thryve.  With this app, you take pictures of your food (which y’all know I already do) and then you tell it what was in the food and in what proportions.  The app then provides you with a score depending on how close your breakdown is to the Harvard Healthy Eating Plate.  I’m not terribly worried about the gamification of my eating habits, but I do like how it keeps me accountable for everything I eat and helps me target healthier choices.  I can also easily visually track my eating trends over time.

As you can see, it’s got a nifty design, and though it has several minor flaws, the developers seem to be working on some excellent updates.  As a bonus, if you’re trying to find out if you have an intolerance to certain foods, the app checks in about an hour after each meal to see how you’re feeling.  You can use this info to figure out which foods don’t like you.  Check it out!