Tomatoe-Chickpea Hummus {a hummus story}

I had planned to post another recipe first but since I feel like this is rather a summer post and, sadly, summer is definitely coming to an end now, I thought I might just sneak this in before. So here we go!

I have to start with saying: I love Hummus. Seriously. I could eat it all the time. But, and here's the thing, I tried so many times to make my own hummus and it never really turned out in a way that I would be proud to share the recipe or tell anyone in the first place that I tried to make hummus again. (It gets kinda embarrassing). Maybe it's because I never used tahini (it's something I just don't seem to be able to find) or maybe it's our food processor, who knows!?
So the other day (weeks and weeks ago ups), I thought if I couldn't get a 'normal' hummus right, I might just would have to do it the not so normal way (the messy, unusual, Jo-like one. Duh). And may I say so, it turned out pretty good. Guess, we'll just stick to messy around here.

For one one-person-sized tomato hummus, you'll need:

• half a can of chickpeas
• two slices dried tomatoes (those that are preserved in oil)
• 1 large Tablespoon non fat Greek yogurt
• 1 Tablespoon cream cheese
• salt&pepper
• optional: Fajita spices to sprinkle on top

Put all of the above into a food processor and process until it reaches the preferred consistency (and adjust it to your taste preferences with salt and pepper!). Easy peasy!
Serve it with either crackers or raw veggies...or top a salad with it! And I think this might just be the start of an addiction. I mean, stuffing things into a food processor and getting something that awesome and healthy (and easy!!)!? The options are endless! Avocado, beans, yogurt, eggs, greens, potatoes...omg. Yeah. I'm addicted.

And to no ones special interested: Right after I short the pictures, I dug in and enjoyed the thing all by myself not having to share with anyone. Ups. Didn't just say that!
And isn't it funny how hummus already got the 'hmmmmm so yummy' in it! haha go figure.

...also, that picture just makes me notice how pale I was all the way back. Summer definitely did a good job this year considering my tan. Jeez. I'll be back to pale and white in no time though...

Enjoy ;)
Oh, and next time I'm going to attempt those Chickpeas instead of the store bought cans. Tschaka!

Busybusybusy...

I wish this constant state of busy would change for once. I. Need. More. Time. Desperately. 

Anyways, I actually did find some time Friday evening to say goodbye to a good friend of mine, spending the evening with her one last time (for any time soon at least). 

We did it with style!

With a self made picnic!

And late swimming dips

And lots and lots of talking and updating 

Tomato-mozzarella-feta-corn-salad

And a beautiful beautiful sunset

Now, back to reality and work! Here we go.

A different kind of Ceasar Salad

Hey there. Yeah. I'm still alive. Though it might be hard to believe considering my blog posts. Oh well, life is busy isn't it!?

Right now I'm actually all busy getting back into my old time zone, collecting a ridiculous extra amount of work to make up for my extended holidays and getting everything organised for my move in...less than a MONTH!!!! OMG. Considering that I don't even have an apartment to stay at right now, nor a general idea at all...it might make the whole thing quite scary. But at this point, I guess we're used to it around here.
...oh...and I'm also pretty busy with missing certain people around here. Duh. Long distance sucks. (Sorry. I'll mind my language from now on.)

So with all of those messes going on, I thought I might launch into my not posted recipes. They are awesome. And SO easy. You'll love them. So as for today I had one of my I-simply-can't-stop-eating-days we'll keep it light here on the blog.
Here we go with:

Jo's and Jer's awesome Ceasar Salad (inspired by Jer's older brother)
For one dinner sized portion for two, you'll need:

• 1 romaine lettuce head
• 2 chicken breasts
• 1/3 cucumber
• 4 slices Italian white bread
• Parmesan cheese
• bacon (appr. 120gr)
• 3 eggs
• Caesar salad dressing
• (cherry tomatoes)

1. Preheat oven to 400°F 
2. Sprinkle your chicken with seasoning (we had a mix of different spices but this is totally up to you) and place the chicken breasts in the oven for 20 minutes. Turn after 20 minutes and bake the other side for just as long. Slice into small pieces afterwards.
3. Hard boil your eggs and let them cool.
4. Cook your bacon.
5. Slice and cut cucumbers and salad.
6. Cut the white bread (or any other you'd like to use) into small squares and fry in a pan with butter and garlic salt until golden brown and crispy. (Seriously, making croutons is so easy! Don't let it scare you!!)
7. Cut the eggs.
8. In a bowl: Combine the salad, cucumbers, eggs, bacon, chicken, grated Parmesan and dressing and toss until everything is nicely combined.
9. Serve with cherry tomatoes and croutons!

This salad is so delicious, easy and filling, we loved it. You'll love it too, trust me. And with the crispiness of the croutons, the salty flavour of the bacon and the softness of the eggs, this salad is not just yummy but also provides and awesome texture mix while eating. Yeah, I know...I get way to excited about this. Don't even let me start about the colour combinations here ;)
Enjoy this awesomeness of a huge bowl of salad!!!

Peanut Butter Chocloate Coffee Cupcakes (PB triple C's)

This is so me. Instead of finally getting my mail things done...or my schedule organised for the coming month, I'll sit back and write a post about my last Friday. Yeah.
Anyways. But a last Friday post might actually be more interesting than all the mail things because, last Friday, we decided to bake. (Ok. We planned to bake before. Because, seriously? We are just way to organised around here to just do something ;P).
Anyway. It was my turn to pick the recipe so, naturally, we ended up with something with peanut butter in it ;)

Ok. This picture might be confusing. But trust me...I can explain it!

The original recipe is from AbeautifulMess (Emma and Treys wedding shower party cupcakes) and except for a few little tweaks we mainly followed the recipe).

For 20 Peanut Butter Coffee Chocolate Cupcakes (PB triple C's that's what I just came up with anyway), You'll need:

• 3/4 cup softened butter (we had margarine)
• 1 1/3 cup sugar (And I might just use 1cup next time. The recipe made some really sweet cupcakes)
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 3 eggs
• 1 3/4 cup flour (I could imagine that wholemeal flour (1 1/2 cups) also would be great. And more healthy!)
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 3/4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2/3 cup creamy peanut butter (we used "healthy" pb so that one was also less sweat!)
• 1/2 cup Greek yogurt

Our main changes happened in the frosting. It called for 1/2 cup black coffee, but we both had a lot of bad experiences of putting water into melted chocolate. So instead, I made a super concentrated coffee paste (it was still difficult to incorporate, so next time I would make my coffee paste with milk!) and we sued way more icing sugar. So this lists the ingredients and amounts we did:

• 9 ounces (455gr) dark chocolate
• 10 tablespoons butter
• about 10 piled high tablespoons of icing sugar
• "coffee paste" (I used instant coffee powder, as much as I would use for a normal cup, but simply dissolved it in about 1 tablespoon of water. Next time, it's going to be milk!)

1. Preheat your oven to 350°F/180°C.
2. Beat sugar and butter together until light and fluffy.
3. Add eggs one at a time.
4. Add the vanilla.
5. Add all the dry ingredients and mix until well incorporated.
6. Add the Greek yogurt and the peanut butter and mix again.
7. Fill your dough into a cupcake tin lined with paper forms and put into the oven for 20 minutes. (Or until light brown and an inserted tooth pick comes out clean). Let them cool down.
8. For your frosting: Melt the chocolate. Add the coffee and the butter. And, up to your preferred consistency, add the icing sugar. With the coffee-water mixture our frosting got really really thick. It eventually softened a bit with the butter and the icing sugar but I still wouldn't go for any kind of watery-somethings in melted chocolate.
9. For the filling (optional): Cut a small whole into your cupcakes and fill it with peanut butter.
10. Top with icing. We also thought, since our cupcakes turned out super sweet, that some roughly sprinkled sea salt would be really good on those....or caramelised sea salted peanut crunchs on top....omg the possibilities are endless!!!!

And here's where we need a little explanation.

Because my friend and I obviously couldn't eat 20 cupcakes by ourselves (let's just say we couldn't. We actually don't really want to find out...probably: we could!) we also included out boyfriends into the baking planning. And with her and me plus bf's...the thing got interesting.
When it comes to baking I don't really mind if it gets unhealthy. This is supposed to be a treat. I want my treat to be awesome. So of course, it will include sugar. My friend is more the health nut. And her bf is simply super picky. So, at the end, we had four different cupcakes :D
- Yummy (aka unhealthy sugary :P) bb and coffee frosting
- Healthy pb and plain chocolate frosting
- No pb filling (there was still some in the dough though) and coffee frosting
- And...no pb filling and plain chocolate frosting

...and of course, I had to make little signs for all of them ;P

Enjoy your pb adventures! (Oh and my boyfriend told me earlier last week that if you would just read my blog and hear me talk about food, one would think I'm a fat person. How do we feel about that. I guess I'll take it as a compliment that I can talk and write about food like this but that I'm still not fat? Haha. It keeps me wondering...)

Running thoughts

I would never describe myself as a runner. But I do certainly run from times to time. And what I like about it most is what running teaches me about life. Seriously. I guess if I would have to, I would describe myself as a problem runner. Each and every time my head gets too cramped up with things or my body feels like it has too much energy to cope with (which normally is quite correlated to too many thoughts) I go out and run until I can't do it anymore.
Firstly I'll be pondering about stuff while I run, than I'll be too occupied by actually keeping in running and forget about the stuff, but at the end all the tangled thoughts will be straitened out. The magic of running haha (ok I might be dramatic here).

What running also has taught me, that you can't go faster than you actually can. Even if you want to, and you might sprint for a short period, you'll have to take a longer break after that and you'll be just a bit more exhausted. At the end, your time and the distance you left behind will be the same as if you would just have kept on with your steady speed.
But...and that's the cool point. If you go slow and steady for a long time, you'll get faster eventually. So. Go by a pace that you can handle and don't overdo it.

So much to my deep thoughts on running. Haha. And here's my running round right now (with some stalking at the end ;P):

Traditional Vancouver weather

Stretching break in the middle

Stalking someone. Can you tell I'm not good at it?! :D

We're getting there {One last mess before we'll be back to organized}

Before I'm heading into our long weekend I wanted to wrap up on a few other things.
Somehow, and this will sounds really weird, I won't have really settled into a place until this place has its own special blend of coffee. See, I told you this was going to be weird.
But this morning, this place got its own blend of coffee (and I'm on my second already) so I guess I really arrived now.

Having said this, I feel save now to bombard you with a few more random pictures until will get things more organised up from tomorrow on ;)

Earlier last week I went shopping (of course I did. Screw those good resolutions, right?!) and I'm more than happy with what I bought. You might get to see more of the things when I'll post about the weekend.

I couldn't help but share this beautiful muesli I had with you. SO yum. And even after 5 years...I'm definitely not sick yet of my muesli's every morning. This one was: fresh cherries, dried cranberries, almonds, granola (some 5 grain almond granola. Not the healthiest one but it definitely is super yummy) and plain non fat yogurt. But my routine varies every day depending on what I have on hand.

I love the view from this place. So naturally, I keep capturing it at different times of the day.

We went for a really awesome dinner somewhere later last week. You got all your stuff fresh and had to grill it yourself on the barbecue. Along with delicious crispy, saucy, sticky rice and salad. Oh and as a desert we had deep fried cream cheese pockets with vanilla ice cream and a honey cinnamon sauce. I would die for that stuff! 

I also couldn't resist those sweet smelling papayas yesterday...as well as the chocolate. There were SO many flavours!!! I feel like I want to try them all...though that might actually get in the way of me wanting to hold my weight...uhoh.

Mix matching quite a lot right now...

I had half of it today ♥

And sometimes, and that's kind of unrelated to the rest of the post but it just came up, I'm so grateful for all the people who surround me and who remember me that, what really is important is what's on the inside and what of that we choose to project to our outside. Because we all have both. The boring, the ugly, the passive, the discouraged, the impatient. But to focus on the joy, the friendliness, the warmth, the patience, the trust.... and to appreciate oneself and each other, that's what really makes people beautiful.

Oh and I'm totally hooked to the instagram videos right now (well, I'm messing around with them I guess) here is a sneak peak in my morning ;)