Move in day!

I have a new home for yet another year! Sometimes being a college student is really annoying...especially when you can't seem to stay in the same house for more than one year. However, after this house I am never going to want to leave. Too bad I'm in my last two semesters.

Moving in came at a really bad time though. All I want to do is design and decorate my room, but instead I need to be studying for my Japanese final. The joys of school work.

End of training means zero work hours.

Trying to grab bus routes before someone else is practically impossible. As a result, I have had way too much time on my hands, and no money to do anything with the time. It seems like most of what you think about when working is vacation and days off. When you actually have those days off...well they are only nice until the money stops flowing and you go broke. No more restaurants and movies for me. As much as it hurts me to say this, school really needs to start up again. I need to work.

On a happier note, I tried to make a picture with my bento today:

The bottom part is supposed to be something like the sun coming up over the trees. I thought it was kind of cute.

おべんとうはたのしです。
おべんとうを食べていますか。
わたしは おべんとう を作っているのが大好きです！

Antipasto.

Summer is almost over! Where did it go? I feel like it just started, but now August is almost here and school will be starting all over again.

I have this posted on the wall in my room. It's just a little reminder that I like to look at every now and then :)

べんとう！

今日のひるごはんはパスタサラダ！

Today's bento came from the left overs of last night. My sister's delicious antipasto salad is one of my favorites. I added in some green grapes with a walnut cup in the middle too. It was a good thing I have such small bento, otherwise I would have probably packed the entire container of pasta for my lunch. It is so good!

Long weekend!

I am running on less than four hours of sleep. What is wrong with me? I guess it is just something about summer and being in college that makes me follow through with poor decisions like that. Most people have really crazy stories behind nights where they were out until 4:30, but not this girl. It was just a relaxing, fun five and some odd hour conversation with a friend. I made snickerdoodle brownies, we watched a movie, and just kept talking after that.

Have you ever had nights like that? You only plan on being out for a couple of hours to finish the movie, and then suddenly time has flown by and it is barely an hour from sunrise. I was tempted to just stay and watch God's work, but since I needed sleep before going to church this morning, I decided it was best to head on home. It is fun doing random things like that sometimes.

I tell you what though, the message hit me hard this morning. I love it when I a sermon is convicting. I don't know if you think that is weird or not, but I just think it helps me to realize the path I am on, and how far it may have strayed from what God has planned. So amazing! We went to lunch after church, and I got to talk to a girl who just got back from six weeks in Turkey. She had a heart for the people and God allowed her to do something about it. We talked a little about her experience, and then got in to my desire to serve at a coffee shop in Tokyo. We'll get more in to that another time. I love talking about it, so I could go on forever.

Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of the brownies that I made, but the recipe I used was from a blog called My Own Sweet Time. They were really soft and yummy. Give them a try when you get a chance ;)

White Russian anyone?

I absolutely love going dancing! Especially when my friends come to visit...they actually know how to two-step unlike most of the people who are still in town for the summer.

Yesterday was definitely fun, and we ended up at an Irish Pub to enjoy a good Guinness. Although I do not know how my friend can think any Guinness in the US is good after having tasted multiple glasses from Ireland. I would have been spoiled. Anyway, prior to the beer, I ordered a White Russian. If you have not had one, you should check it out. They are really good when made by the right bartender.

On that note, I have a recipe for those of you who are 21 and up:

White Russian Cupcakes and Kahlua Buttercream
(I got this wonderful recipe from Baked Perfection)

Cupcakes

1 1/4 cups all purpose flour

1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup sugar

6 tablespoons butter, softened

1 large egg and 1 egg white

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 cup milk

1/8 cup Vodka 

1/8 cup Kahlua, divided

Preheat oven to 350F. Line a cupcake pan with paper liners.

In a large bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside. In a separate bowl, beat together the sugar and butter until combined. Add egg and egg white, one at a time. Then add the vanilla, Vodka, and Kahlua. Gradually add the flour mixture in three additions, alternating with the milk in two additions, ending with the flour mixture.

Bake 17 -20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle of a cupcakes comes out clean. Remove from pan and cool completely on a wire rack before frosting.

Kahlua Buttercream 

1 stick of butter, softened

3 cups powdered sugar

pinch of salt

3-4 tablespoons Kahlua

Beat butter until creamy, then add salt. Add powdered sugar 1 cup at a time, beating until combined. Add Kahlua 1 tablespoon at a time until you reach desired consistency.

You should try this out as soon as possible! Irish Car Bomb cupcakes are great too. Maybe I will have to post those up here soon. And I promise I do not usually  have nights like that one :)

Busy, busy, busy!

These last two weeks have been really busy for some reason. However, I am finally done with my first session of summer classes! Thank goodness. The second round starts tomorrow, but this time it will just be Japanese to go along with my job. Let me tell you, driving a bus is a lot more fun than I thought it was going to be. Every time I get back in my truck I feel tiny though. It's weird.

I went to visit my friends at camp this weekend! I love going to see them, but things are definitely different this summer than last year. I suppose that is pretty typical though. Anyway, here are some snapshots of the weekend:

Summer Sunflowers in Oletha, TX

Pistol! - My riding buddy

Sunset on our evening ride through camp.

A mug from the best diner in Van, TX - The Dinner Bell

After the weekend I had to come back and scramble to study for my final while writing a paper, but it was worth it.


Oh and I made another bento for lunch on Monday. Be warned though...it is really sad looking and plain. I wish I would have spruced it up a bit more, but I am short on supplies at the moment. Never fear, one day soon I will have more colors to put into my bento again!

 Green beans on the left, Ramen and a fried egg on the right. The best part is the panda face. Everything else is just sad. Oh well, you work with what you have right? Hopefully the next one will be better.

Be looking for some discussion about grape jelly too. My mom made a batch, and one of my friends made some too. I was allowed to benefit from both, so you might see some photographic evidence on here soon.

Get out of the fish bowl!

I love weekends. This one was particularly fantastic because I got to spend it with some friends that I haven't seen for months. Oh and there was dancing and horses involved. If you have never participated in a good Texas two-step, then you are seriously missing out. Find a guy/girl that knows what they're doing and get on it. The experience is so much fun with the right person.

I also got a bit of good advice from a speaker on the radio when I was driving home.

"Let God take us from our fish bowl and put us in the open ocean."

Get out of the fish bowl!! The speaker was talking about how a fish can only grow as big as the fish bowl he lives in. When you put him out in the ocean though, he has room to grow as big as he was intended to be. I don't want to be confined to a fish bowl...do you? Think about those poor fish they sell in little cups. How confined is that life? No thank you.

 Oh! And I made cupcakes last night :)

 Mint Chocolate Cupcakes (adapted from the chocolate recipe here)

 2 cups sugar 

1 3/4 cups flour 

3/4 cup cocoa 

1 1/2 tsp. baking powder 

1 1/2 tsp. baking soda 

1 tsp. salt 

2 eggs 

1 cup milk 

1/2 cup oil 

1 1/2 tsp. peppermint extract 

Mix the first six ingredients together. Then add the eggs, milk, oil, and peppermint. Mix well.

Preheat the oven to 350F and bake cupcakes for 20 minutes. Let them cool and then frost them.

Chocolate Frosting

12 Tbsp. butter, softened

5 1/2 cups powdered sugar

1 cup cocoa

2/3 cup milk

2 tsp. vanilla

Add butter to bowl. Cream.

Then add about 1/3 of the powdered sugar. Mix well.

Then about a 1/3 of the milk and vanilla. Mix well.

Next 1/3 of the cocoa. Mix well after each addition and scrape down the sides of the bowl.

Repeat until all is added.

 

Even though I am not a huge fan of mint chocolate, I really like these cupcakes. The original recipe calls for vanilla in the cake instead of peppermint, but my cabinet could not supply me with the needed ingredient at the time. Thus the mint was added.

Where is the bento?

There has been no time to make lunch on the go this week. I have been so busy between my actual school work, starting my job, and hang-out time with my friends that this week just disappeared. Honestly I cannot believe that I went out as much as I did. This summer is full of new experiences for me and I am definitely happy about most of them. I say most because the bike crash was a new experience, but it was not an enjoyable one at all.

I have not been able to make up any bento the last few days, but I did cook a pretty decent lunch yesterday. The picture is not very good, but it does get the point across.

Baked Panko-crusted trout with stir-fry. The fish could have used a bit more flavor, but overall I was very satisfied with the result.

 How do you like to cook fish? I was almost wishing I had just pan-seared it instead of baking it. Hind-sight, as they say is twenty-twenty.

Speaking of fish, the first sushi restaurant that I went to in college has now been reduced to a sake bar only. Now my only option is to pay too much money for my fish. Hooray.

Moving on. We went over some new grammar in class today. Locations are fun when you get to draw pictures with it.

いすとテレビの間にねこがいる。

- There is a cat between the chair and the desk -

I am going to be so sad when this class is over! Adams-sensei is so hilarious. I don't think there has been a day where we haven't laughed for at least twenty minutes. It makes me really happy :)

I am going out of town this weekend to visit a camp that I used to work at (finally), so there will be no bento again. I will just have to make up for it later I suppose.

Have a good weekend! またらいしゅう！

Ouch!

Today was the day that the inevitable bike crash tore across my body. Picture this: two sidewalks, a large area of gravel and dirt between them, and two crowds of what appeared to be corps members in training taking up the entirety of each sidewalk. What is a poor cyclist to do? Unfortunately I cannot tell you the correct response, but I can certainly tell you the incorrect one. DO NOT swerve off of one sidewalk into the gravel and expect to make the turn across to the other. It will not work. A road-bike (even a cheap one - no, especially a cheap one) will not operate effectively when not on concrete. My right leg, knee, arm, and cheek are proof of that. Most of the scraping is very minor, but my knee looks pretty banged up. I refuse Hydrogen Peroxide though. And alcohol. No thank you. I just cleaned it with water and doused it with some tripe antibiotic ointment. It looks nasty.

Now with the possibility of a grotesque, road-rash image in your head, we'll move on to the bento.

Congratulations, it's soup!

It may not be homemade, but if you leave some of the seasoning out, store bought ramen isn't so bad. The flavor is good enough to get by on, especially with as cheap as the packages are.

I also put in some strawberries, peach slices, grapes, and a couple of the Fudge Babies I made. They are already almost gone! I want to make more, but I feel as though I should move on to the next recipe. I will certainly becoming back to these soon though! You should try them too.

Oh, do you like my little yellow owl timer? A friend of mine bought it for me randomly, and I love it. Now I can stop using my phone as a food timer.

What a weekend!

As you probably know, this past weekend was Father's Day weekend. I had great plans to hang out with my dad on Sunday, but events of the previous days refused to allow that to happen. My mom and I took a trip to Fredericksburg on Friday to do a little shopping and some peach picking. Everything was going great through Saturday afternoon. We had visited a museum, eaten at a German restaurant (the food was not so great), and had done plenty of window shopping. On the way to go peach picking, however, things changed.

Our first mistake was to follow a GPS. As usual, it lied. While continuing to follow said lying piece of technology, my mom's car experienced a blow out of rubber and we were forced to stop the car and inspect the damage. It turns out the rubber had torn apart, but the tire was (currently) still inflated. I have experience with changing tires, so I figured we could work it out. Well...my mom forgot the emergency brake, so as I was raising the car, it slipped and rolled back a bit. The jack came out of place and the tire hit the ground only to finally pop and nearly explode our eardrums in the process. At this point, we were both pretty annoyed, but God decided to be gracious like He usually does, and He sent us the only people who lived on the road where we were. The man came back, gave us some water, fixed our tire, and entertained us with great conversation while he worked.

It is amazing how differently people can react to a situation based on where they come from. Not everyone would have stopped to see if we needed help, but that man did. I am so grateful for it too.

The process of getting everything situated took a lot longer than we expected though. Walmart was the only tire shop open that late on a Saturday, and they were really busy. We had to stay another night, get to the store right when they opened on Sunday just so we could get new tires. It ended up taking about three hours from the time we got there to the time we left. Needless to say, we missed Father's Day because of the mess.

I will definitely be taking a trip home soon to make up for it.

This is the National Museum of the Pacific War that I visited with my mom. For some reason, wars in the Pacific have always intrigued me. World War II is especially fascinating and terrible all at the same time. They had a Japanese submarine that held only two people, a plane from the Doolittle Raid, and a lot of other parts from different Pacific Wars and fights too.

The first German restaurant that we went to was pretty bad, but this place was actually fantastic. Rathskeller's was small and low-key, but the food was good, and they had live acoustic music too. If you are ever in Fredericksburg, TX you should check it out.

And finally, the bento! I feel like I haven't posted anything about bento in a long time. Maybe that's just me though. The most exciting thing about this box is the little brown balls in the top. They are called "Fudge Babies" and they were created by Chocolate Covered Katie. She is completely vegan, so her blog is great for non-fattening desserts that still taste really good. She even has a lot of single-serving options in her recipes.



Fudge Babies

• 1 c walnuts (120 grams)
• 1 and 1/3 cups pitted dates (220 grams)
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/8 plus 1/16 tsp salt
• 3-4 tablespoons cocoa powder

Toss everything in a food processor and zap it. When it is all chopped, shape the mixture into balls or bars depending on your preference. They are a good option if you want a quick, healthy chocolate fix.

Have you ever eaten a date before? I know I hadn't, but they make these chocolate balls really great.

I want to start taking more pictures and not limiting myself to one post a day. I might start posting pictures with captions and then come back later to make an actual thought post. We'll see what happens.

Have a wonderful day!