Montreal or bust

Adrian and I are taking off for the great white north. Why did I agree to go to Canada in December/January?!?!?!

eating poorly

I've been eating really poorly since finals started. I haven't really cooked in weeks and I am really feeling it. The boyfriend made something delicious though, so that's the recipe I'm posting. Dating him is making it hard to stay vegan. He buys delicious cheeses. I'm going to try to stay strong though.

Mushroom Risotto-
1 cup arborio rice
4-5 cups vegetable broth (you probably don't really need that much, but it's better to have too much than too little)
1 onion, chopped
1/2 package of baby bella mushrooms, sliced
1/2 package of porcini, sliced
1 dry morel, sliced
1 sun dried tomato, chopped up
salt

1. Bring the vegetable broth to a boil, then reduce heat and leave to simmer.
2. While water is heating, lightly saute the fresh mushrooms
3. Put the dry rice and onions into a large skillet or sauce pot, and put over low-medium heat.
4. Add one ladle of broth to the dry rice, cook until most of it is absorbed into rice, stirring frequently. Repeat twice.
5. Add the mushrooms and sun dried tomatoes.
6. Add another ladle of broth, and repeat until rice is cooked.

Anyway, despite not eating well, I've been having a great week. This weekend was particularly great: I finished my first semester of my PhD, saw Tron Legacy completely stoned, went to Northampton where I saw Abby and Charlie, bought Adrian a watch, saw Harry Potter 7, got a blender for x-mas, and got a hair cut. It was a great weekend, and then today I discovered peppermint chocolate soy milk and it blew my mind.

I also made delicious smoothies and pesto in my new blender.

Smoothie-
1 cup frozen strawberries
1 cup frozen mangos
2 bananas
1 tbsp vegan vanilla ice cream
1 1/2 tsp powdered spirulina
1 cup water or vegan milk

Put it all in the awesome blender that Adrian got me, and liquify. Warning: It will be green.

Pesto
3 cups basil
5 cloves of garlic
1/2 cup sun flower seeds or walnuts
1/2 cup nutritional yeast
1/2 cup olive oil
1 tsp salt

Put the basil, garlic, sunflower seeds, nutritional yeast, salt in the food processing attachment on the awesome new blender I got, and process first on a low setting and then move up. After the other ingredients are well processed, add the olive oil and process again for a short time. Freeze the pesto you don't end up using (which should be almost all of it).

Happy Holidays!!

You can take the girl out of Texas... and you can take Texas out of the girl, too, actually...

Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I had never left Texas. I miss it, sure, but I don't really like to think about that.

comprehensive exams

they are the bane of my existence right now.

plus, I have a not fun cold.

I'd almost kill for pierogis today

every little thing's gonna be all right

This last week was insane. I wrote a 10 page paper for Tuesday, wrote a 4 hour essay exam Thursday, had my final presentation on Friday for my seminar, and now I have 1 more 23 page article to read for my systems class before I start studying for my neuroanatomy exam next SATURDAY. Suffice it to say that I was stressed. I went to therapy Tuesday a complete mess. My therapist told me that it was painful to watch me talk. He really wants to put me on drugs, but I don't want to take them, so I went to the gym this morning like he has been trying to get me to do for months. I feel great. Exhausted, but great. Less anxious about everything I have to do. I might go again tomorrow. I'm very happy right now.

In other news, grad school is a weird place because the people you work with are kind of your friends/school-mates and very definitely your colleagues, so maintaining a professional relationship with them is very difficult especially when you're dating one of them and the others want to gossip about it and ask questions. I don't want to share this with all of my colleagues. It's not their place.