I hope our new apartment comes with a blender because I plan to make these ultra thick and creamy healthy double chocolate malts every morning in the Philippines. Chocolate for breakfast yo.

I’ve gotta be honest with you guys.

Searching for a home abroad (when you’re not physically abroad yet) can be a little weird. Think House Hunters International, but with more marital stress and less money. I mean, I was fully committed to at least three different places all within the same hour and when I changed my mind for the 4th time, Bjork went for a drive to McDonald’s. At least we have some stress management tactics.

To avoid emotional and physical meltdowns at the airport, we had planned to leave all our stuff here and find a furnished apartment that would have everything we’d need. Silverware, desks, espresso makers… that sort of thing.

But then we found out that “furnished” apartments are those that come with refrigerators, stoves, and beds. And maybe air conditioners and definitely not water heaters. Extra sweating and shorter showers. This is turning out to be a real adventure after all.

If someone is going to have to haul my blender over there in a suitcase with a cooler of malt ingredients in order for me to have a healthy double chocolate malt every morning, I volunteer my husband. Because these malts are BOMB. Wait, I think I said that about the pasta.

1. Why am I using phrases from 1995?
2. Annoying.

Here are some pics of our new soon-to-be apartment!

This is the kitchen. And the living room.  And pretty much the whole place.  Small, clean, and perfect.

This is the view that I’ll look at when sipping my third double chocolate malt of the day.

And this, obviously, is making my heart go wild.

I can’t wait to hold this precious little buddy and spoonfeed him a double chocolate malt.  We’re friends already, I can just feel it.

I promise that in all my the malts that I ate/drank/slurped, I did not detect any weird tofu taste.

It was more like 100% creamy, chocolatey, and yummy.

I’m sneaking bites of brussel sprout salad from the fridge every 3 minutes. I think that means I’m a grown up now.

Brussel sprouts in and of themselves are kind of fun, but really, how fun are shaved brussel sprouts? This salad is full of fun things. Like using a nifty mandoline, making your house smell like bacon, and whisking emulsions. Just try saying that. Emuuuulsion.

But it’s not fun to get cut with the mandoline, eat all the bacon impulsively, and whisk dressing onto your new shirt, so don’t do any of that.

DO make this salad and be happy with your crunchy little self, because it is a flavor and texture wonderland. There’s so much to love: smoky bacon, chopped almonds, sharp shredded cheese, citrus and shallot vinaigrette, and those cute green balls of joy – brussel sprouts – shaved into adorable, um, shreddings.

My crazy adorable brothers are proof that this salad is serious YUM.  Even these wild ones looooved the sprouts.

Speaking of new shirts with oil on them, remember that other shirt that I told you about? The Mossimo swim cover-up that I thought was a REAL shirt, and then made fun of myself for buying more Mossimo?  It all came full circle yesterday.  As I was making this salad, Bjork asked me where I got my new (oil-stained) shirt.  After giving myself a minor neck injury trying to see the tag when I really could have just asked him to look for me, good ol’ Mossimo made its second appearance in my life within, like, 48 hours.

Does Mossimo make you think of a suave middle-aged man with dark longish wavy slicked back hair?

I don’t know. I just try to be honest.

Now let’s eat bacon.

In other news, we’ve finally picked our apartment in Cebu!

Pictures on Friday!

This morning I melted butter, vanilla, and brown sugar into a sauce and pretended like it didn’t have full control of my life.

But it was a lost cause and I hereby surrender myself to the butter, vanilla, and brown sugar sauce. And as I’m typing this I’m seeing an ad on my sidebar showing an Under Armour girl doing a yoga and a head stand. I’m sorry for false advertising. I am not doing yoga and headstands today. I am eating this sauce.

This cake is so good.

I wish I had better words for it but my brain comatose with chocolate. If I were to sum up what I learned today, it’s that gooey chocolate cake should always be topped with caramelized bananas and melted peanut butter and that it should be eaten for breakfast.

But what I really learned is that Alex and Sonja (from A Couple Cooks) are on to something here. They pretend to be doing this good-hearted work that’s helping people in Cambodia, but come ON. They’re just in it for the yummy food like this cake.

(I’m totally kidding.)

Alex and Sonja recently went to Cambodia, and if you haven’t already looked at their gorgeous photos, please stop reading. Go check them out.

But besides taking gorgeous photos of this beautiful country, they are working on a unique cookbook featuring recipes from the Green Mango Cafe, which is a vocational program for at-risk women and girls. The cookbook will be a fundraising effort to help support the Center for Global Impact, which is the organization that helps the Green Mango cafe to be thriving place for Cambodian women and girls to learn and work.

I am honored that they would trust me with such a deep, dark, chocolatey, buttery, sugary task such as making and photographing this cake. Rest assured, I take my job as dessert eater veryveryvery seriously.

The Green Mango Cafe: Cooking for a Better Tomorrow will be available for you to buy in just a few short months, complete with gooey chocolate cake recipe. Follow our fearless leaders, Alex and Sonja. They will keep you informed on the cookbook and besides, they’re just plain awesome. Did I mention healthy? Yeah, they’re healthy, too. And local. I mean, they buy local produce.

Awesome, healthy, and local.

Meanwhile, I’ll be eating this chocola….

 

Say it with me now: I love cake. I love cake. I love cake.

I love pasta. I eat mushrooms.

And I buy clearance shirts that are actually swim cover-ups.

How and why could I fall in love with a shirt that’s not a shirt? That makes me nervous.

I didn’t actually discover that it was a swim cover up until after I had bought it and imagined myself wearing it about 50 different adorable ways. Then I spotted the word “swim” floating amidst the pile of clothes on my bathroom floor.  I pulled it out from under my weeks worth of wannabe-summer outfits only to find that my new adorable shirt wasn’t actually a shirt.

And… it was Mossimo brand. Ew.

I thought Bjork would encourage me to keep it and wear it anyways because that’s how cute it was. After telling him the sad story of how my new shirt wasn’t really a shirt, I brought it out to him and waited for him to give his approval.

He commented on the weird fabric instead.

Why and how does my husband care about fabric? Come to think of it, he ate an avocado smooshed on naan and topped with olive oil and sea salt for dinner. If I could ignore how proud I am that my very own man made such a wonderful dinner, I would wonder if everything’s ok with him.

Oh, hey, this happened, too.  Between the “shirt” and the one-shot-photo-shoot, I’m a winner today.

I dunno, maybe it’s all the butter soaked mushrooms I’ve been eating. Maybe it’s the smell of sauteing garlic messing with my head.  All I know is that this pasta is BOMB. I’ve always loved crispy roasted broccoli, and I’ve always loved cheese, but mushrooms?  Dang.

You guys, I would not lie about this. The mushrooms.are.ahhhmazing. It’s incredible what a little butter and garlic can do to make me fall in love with fungi.

 

This is “rustic”, right?

I’m melting.

My heart and

soul are

melting

down

the

pa
g
e
.

See how I did that? That was me melting into an ocean of peanut butter pie filling.

I know a lot of people don’t love showers, of the gifting variety, but I love babies and I love baby showers. All 3 that I’ve ever been to, anyways. My best friend is having a baby (squee!) so this weekend we threw a little baby shindig for her soon-to-be newborn baby boy.

To honor his precious life, we shot cutesy dessert shooters, which sounds way more trashy than it was. It was more classy. More like licked desserts out of mini glasses and ate the Oreo crumbs off the floor. And then sniffed candy bars melted into diapers for a prize. Why is that fun?

In my perfect world, I would pay someone to massage my scalp with one of those little head scratcher thingies that looks like a stick with wire legs while I ate, took, shot, inhaled, licked shooters of peanut butter pie filling.

Then I would pay that someone not to tell anyone about how my face smelled like cream cheese, or about the Oreo crumbles in my hair, or about the way I’d intentionally put less filling in each shooter glass so I’d have extra to lick out of the bowl. And on second thought, I wouldn’t pay them, because it would be my perfect world.

Going now.

 

PS. They’re actually called scalp massagers (thanks Goog), and you should get one. You should also get those dessert shooter glasses. I got mine here.

Almonds and a Diet Coke. That was my sad lunch today.

As someone who feels that lunch is one of the highlights of the day (sandwiched between chocolate snacks and bedtime), having a bad lunch is more than just a little depressing.

To all you out there who can just “forget” to eat lunch, I can’t sympathize. To forget to eat lunch would be like forgetting about that big pile of miscellaneous garage sale stuff sitting in our living room. AS IF.

One of the most glamorous things about a teacher’s job is eating in a teacher’s lounge. Imagine a rainbow of educational goodies on every wall, the sweet music of lunchroom chaos every time the door opens, and the overabundance of smallish plastic sporks, which, by the way, are really good at making you look like you don’t know how to eat.

This is why lunch – the actual lunch – better be seriously good.

When I saw Sara’s yummy salad a few weeks ago, I knew it was the ultimate epitome of lunch. So I made it, and made it again, and made it yet again using a tiny bit more grains for my big lunch appetite.  I love it. Love love love.

It’s portable, it’s healthy, it’s pretty, and it’s loaded with texture and flavor. The bulgur and edamame anchor the whole deal; the grapes, walnuts, caramelized onions, honey, and blue cheese are the crowning glory that makes it all come together. The fresh handful of spinach at the end keeps things feeling fresh and green. I like to feel fresh and green.

Don’t eat almonds and Diet Coke for lunch.

A sweet, nutty, powerhouse salad is calling.

I am going to be taking some time off from ye ole Pinch of Yum next week. Don’t worry – everything’s fine. I just need a few days to do things like put my feet up and eat cookies.

Seriously.

Have a great week you crazy food lovers!

One of my strengths is holding on to unnecessary items.

Unnecessary items of the old jacket, soap holder, throw pillow, Christmas figurine variety.

So it goes without saying that the upcoming garage sale – OUR upcoming garage sale, the one where we get rid of a bunch of our stuff – is giving me hives. And listening to my Brad Paisley Pandora station while pricing my old, unnecessary (but totally necessary) picture frames does not help the cause.

It’s funny how that works out – or doesn’t work out – because I live with a man who is a frequent flyer at the Goodwill. Getting rid of anything that hasn’t been used in a month, even if it was MINE and I was going to use it next month, is one of his strengths. Seriously, though, I was going to use that soap holder.

Like that one time when I was going to make bread in my bread maker but found it to be “missing”. Never mind the fact that I was retrieving it out of the closet, where it lived for most, ok, ALL, of its life. Or that it had a setting to program the time so I could make bread in the middle of the night, which made it the coolest bread maker in the world. Or that I wanted to keep it forever.

It’s probably in somebody else’s kitchen baking cinnamon swirl bread and making their life perfect. I think I hear a Brad Paisley song…

Waaahh!

I’m consoling myself over the loss of my sentimental treasures by making these Cinnamon Roll Pancakes. Because I want my kitchen to sing Brad Paisley songs, even if I don’t have a bread maker anymore.  And the healthy part? Let’s just say I’ve been experimenting with cookie dough stuffed cupcakes and I could use a little health in my life, especially when it comes in the form of gooey, sweet, cinnamony pancakes.

As much as I wanted to bake the cinnamon filling right into them, it just wasn’t happening. I fried, I griddled, I baked, I parchment papered… it just wasn’t meant to be. So I topped the pancakes with the filling instead. And oh my yummers, they were so tasty! The end result: wheat bran pancakes topped with the spicy cinnamon filling and drizzled with sweet glaze. And no guilt! Hallelujah.

Oh, and HEY, how about a winner for that Common Roots gift card? How about… comment #28… Linda! There’s an email coming your way!

PS. I do need a little help – what’s the going garage sale rate for a pair of peep toe heels?

This week I made salmon. Spicy salmon with tons of flavor and good-for-you vitamins. Then issued myself an automatic license to eat 50 leftover Cadbury Eggs. I love salmon.

But really, the salmon. Chipotle seems to always be on the brain these days, which lead me to morph my salmon dinner into a Caribbean Burrito Bol, complete with mango and avocado salsa. Ding-Ding-Ding!

Truthfully, making salmon usually stresses me out. It always gets too burnt on the outside but not cooked on the inside. Maybe I should turn the heat down, or maybe I should start buying skinnier salmon filets, or maybe I should make it more than twice a year, or maybe I should stop playing Draw Something on my phone and start watching the skillet.

Speaking of normal things that shouldn’t be stressful, how about that Monday-morning-pre-work-meeting-mocha? Drive through lines are sweat-inducing and bad for the heart when you’re running late and the whole city of St. Paul would also like a drive-through mocha.

But the salmon.

The beauty of this salmon (other than the deliciously spiced flavor and lightly crispy texture) is that there is no need to be stressed out. You’re going to end up pulling the skin off at the end and stir it all up, which makes the cooking process (for a twit like me) wayyy less intimidating. Once you’ve got your salmon all prettied up, you’re going to plop it on a bed of rice and beans and top it with fresh mango and avocado salsa. Why? Because it’s life changingly yummy, and you deserve it. And because Cadbury eggs for dessert are good.

I would like to live on a bed of rice and beans. Is that so much to ask?