Halloween cookies

Happy Halloween (almost)!

Yesterday my dorm threw a Halloween party and I made cookies. Foot-, hand- and bat-shaped sugar cookies.

I also made regular and vegan pumpkin cookies, which aren't pictured. Wow they were so good. I'll make them again and post pictures <3

Recipe found here.

Xo, Kristin

Pumpkin pancakes

Happy October! Here in Massachusetts the leaves have changed colors, there're a lot of gourds everywhere, and it's sort of getting cold.

In celebration of this most fab season, and fall break, my high school friend Allie and I made the pinnacle of all fall foods: pumpkin pancakes!!!

So tasty, so easy, so fall.

Recipe found here.

xo, Kristin

3, 2, 1... FOOD!

I've been wanting to eat healthier, and so I've been trying out new foods. This week I've tried my hand at baked butternut squash from the gardens, onion and garlic turkey burgers made from ground turkey and croutons I found in the dorm's communal food cabinet, and concord grapes.

I had never had concord grapes before, but I always wanted to try then. I've always wondered where grape juice and popsicles get there "grape flavor" from, since they taste nothing like traditional red/ green grapes!

Well that's the flavor of concord grapes. My first time biting into one, I thought I was eating a gummy candy. They have exactly the flavor and texture of grape fruit snacks. So odd! Love it though ♡

xo, Kristin

surPIES!

Pie is just a gift from heaven. I made 3 apple pies today. Two are a surprise for my ex-cross country team, since they have their first meet of the season tomorrow. One was for me to eat with friends. I'm considering eating less carbs. Goodbye pies...

Rating: 10/10 (Who can go wrong with apple pie??)
Total Time: 1hr 15 mins total
Difficulty: 3/10

Also, check out my friend's food blog! Her blog, Eat The Impossible, addresses allergy friendly recipes!

Kristin

Lets be fruity

It's berry season! To commemorate this, I've been eating boatloads of strawberries, and enjoying homegrown raspberries and black berries.

The other day I tried my skill at making perfect oatmeal pancakes. They turned out really good. I topped them off with real maple syrup and some store-bought fresh raspberries. Great and filling breakfast!

Rating: 9/10
Prep Time: 30 minutes
Difficulty: 5/10

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yesterday, a friend that used to live in the grad house dropped off some peaches from the peach tree in her new backyard. I couldn't believe how much fruit this tree produced. There must've been at least 50 peaches in the bag she brought to us, and she said that wasn't even half. Since they were getting ripe fast, and I was a bit skeptical about biting into the peaches, which were topographically not-so-pretty, I decided to make a peach pie.

It's probably a good thing I didn't eat them raw because I found a couple worms while slicing up one of the peaches. I guess that's what you can expect from a back yard peach tree.

It was my first time making a fruit pie with peaches, and so I was kind of nervous at first, but I made it just as I would make an apple pie and it turned out great! I decided to skip any kind of lattice crust because the crust is the best part, and I want to eat a lot of it. Duh! The pie is vegan and uses an oil crust recipe passed along from grandma.

I like this picture because the pie looks like a face going :O

Rating: 9.5/10
Total Time: 1.5 hours
Difficulty: 5/10

Can't wait for apple season. There will be MANY more pies to come.

Kristin

PotLuck

Martin and Debbie have arrived safely in Japan, and wont have internet for a little while, and I am on a month break from school and get to avoid preparing anything more difficult than a bowl of cereal! :D :D

I guess the blog's going to take a couple weeks hiatus. In the meantime, I leave you with some pictures from the potluck party I threw in my dormitory.

The good thing about potlucks is a lot of people bring food, and so you don't have to eat the food you yourself prepared for the potluck. The other people get stuck doing that. Ha ha! Plus, the added advantage of actually throwing the potluck means that you get to keep all the delicious leftovers.

Other people prepping food. That's what I like to see! Here we have pasta, egg plant, melting chocolate, and something green.

Mac prepares a spinach, strawberry, and fetta salad. OMG YUM.

Gorging on food. Sipping wine. Enjoying the Olympics. 

Kristin

Free meal!

Tonight I made myself sauteed kale and tomatoes with rice. Preparation was exactly how it sounds. Not hard. Not impressive. Very delicious. 

The brown rice I bought using my parents' credit card last month at Price Chopper.

The tomatoes I got for free at Stop and Shop because they were mislabeled and I complained about it.

The kale I pilfered late last night from the college community gardens.

Rating: 7/10
Prep time: Set the rice to cook in rice cooker 30 mins before sauteing veggies. Total prep time, 35 mins.
Difficulty: 3/10

Next time I'll cut up the kale into smaller pieces and not overcook the rice (I hope).

Kristin

Salad-y Malady

Once in a while I get a horrid wake up call to the disastrous realities that stem from preparing food for myself. Last night was one of these instances.

Who would think that hotdog, spinach, macaroni salad, avocado, cherry tomatoes, and onion would be an odd combination?

What I got from it was a nauseous feeling.

BUT, I'm not totally convinced yet that it was the combination of foods that made me feel a little sick. While preparing the food, I had to keep sticking my head in the fridge to take out some of the ingredients. Right now, our communal dorm fridge smells rank.

One of my housemates put strongly smelling food in there and it made everything else (even the freezer) smell like her food. Which is not pleasant. Then, my food began to soak up the not-so-savory smell.

SO, it could be the smell and not the food combo giving me this weird feeling. Thoughts? Does this salad sound na$ty?

***

Update (7/22) - The next day I went and ate the leftovers. I ended up taking the hotdog out. Nauseous feeling avoided!

Kristin

Okonomiyaki Dinner Party

For those of you who don't know, okonomiyaki is a sort of cabbage pancake eaten in Japan. Okonomiyaki is relatively healthy, cheap, and ooo so delicious. Hands down it was my favorite food when I lived in Japan.

Not only does it taste AWESOME, but there's a certain social aspect that goes along with eating okonomiyaki. It's a food you eat with friends while sitting gathered around the electric grill to chat and make food together.

Since it's so cheap and easy to make, I decided to do okonomiyaki for tonight's impromptu dinner party.

Now, okonomiyaki can get complicated. You'll see some recipes online that call for special flour, daikon, things that you can only find at Asian specialty stores, etc. These are unnecessary. If you want to eat good okonomiyaki, all you really need is eggs, flour, water, cabbage, and the contents of your fridge.

Tonight's dorm fridge haul included:

tomatoes
onions
garlic

Not so involved, but enough extra ingredients to make a good, vegetarian okonomiyaki. We topped it with mayonaise and tonkatsu sauce and it was awesome!!

Batter and chopped vegetables

Okonomiyaki pancake

Over-ripe cherries

Finished !

Rating: 9.5/10
Prep Time: 1 hour (included frying up a TON of pancakes)
Difficulty: 3/10

Kristin

Martin & Kristin Reunion Special

Martin came to visit me today at school and brought along the things he found in his kitchen pantry at home. We had assumed that all grocery stores were closed on the 4th of July, but found out later that every significant store in the area is open for business...

Anyway, we started out with simple spaghetti and sauce:

Rating: 9/10 (Kristin), 6/10 (Martin)
Prep Time: 10  minutes
Difficulty: 2/10

Preparation took hardly any time at all because although we suck at cooking, we can boil water, to an extent. It was pretty hard, not letting the water boil over, but somehow we made something edible.

Next, since we're really bad at timing and synchronizing our cooking/ multitasking. We had canned vegetables for desert:

Rating: 1/10 (Kristin), 2/10 (Martin)
Prep Time: 1 minute
Difficulty: 4/10

WTF canned vegetables. More difficult to prepare than you'd expect:

Martin & Kristin

Avocado-y Breakfast

This weekend, I learned several things including #1) My mom pictures me someday married to a man at least ten years older than myself. I'm currently 21, and find that creepy.

#2) My mom had a variety of over ripe fruits and vegetables that she expected me to bring back to college and eat "within a day."

This is what it became:

For breakfast yesterday I ate: an over ripe, browning avocado, over ripe cherries, dough-y soft mango, and overly ripe smelling milk from my dorm's communal fridge.

Rating: 8.5/10
Prep time: 5 minutes
Difficulty: 2/10

I'm rating this meal so high because it contains so many of my favorite foods and tasted pretty good despite the dorm fridge-flavored milk (which I ended up throwing out after choking down half).

Kristin

Kristin's Bio

Hi I'm Kristin. I'm a graduate student at Smith College studying Education. I met both Martin and Debbie (my co-bloggers) while studying abroad in Japan our junior year of college.

Both Martin and Debbie are moving back to Japan to teach English, and I'll be stuck here reliving the hell that is being a student.

The difference is, this time I'll have to cook for myself. Even more hellish considering my limited cooking skills D:

I'm currently on the meal plan this summer, but I'll have to fend for myself on the weekends. Occasionally I will cook for myself, or prepare meals, but mostly this summer will detail the weird meals that you can put together from combinations of food stolen from the dining hall/ hoarded from the campus center cafe.

My real updates will begin in August. GET PUMPED YOU GUYS :D

Kristin