Making fruit salsa with Craft Lake City + West Elm

For this month's Craft Lake City workshop at West Elm, Liz from Butcher's Bunches taught us how to make no-cook fruit salsa. They use only local produce, no sugar, and donate a portion of their proceeds to charity. Pure awesome. This was my first time canning(ish) anything. I felt like such a frontier woman.

Fresh Fruit Salsa recipe, courtesy of Butcher's Bunches:

Dice:
10-12 peaches (substitutions and/or additions: raspberries, nectarines, corn)
5 bell peppers (1 red, 1 orange, 1 yellow, 2 green)
1 red onion
1 garlic clove
1/4 habanero pepper, cut into tiny pieces
1 jalapeno pepper, cut into tiny pieces

1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup lime juice
1 cup Slide Ridge Honey Wine Apple Vinegar (local SLC product, can substitute apple cider vinegar)
1 cup water

Dice, dice, dice and mix well. Let all ingredients soak together for about 20 minutes. Pour into canning jars and either refrigerate immediately (consume within 6 months) or boil for 15 minutes (consume within 3 years). Pairs well with salty corn tortilla chips, mild white fish, and chicken.

Follow my adventures on Instagram @fourthirtyam!

Pin, pin, and re-pin. These photos are already on my foodie board. Share away!

Love, 

me

Getting fresh at the Downtown Farmer's Market

It's that time of year. I absolutely live for markets, festivals, and community events. It's the closest thing we have to the town square of yore. The farmer's market in downtown Salt Lake City is outstanding...and huge. Fresh food, prepared food, sexy bearded men wearing baby bjorns, art, crafts, beautiful dogs everywhere, musical performers around every turn, people watching galore. Here are a few highlights from last weekend's opening event. Also, follow them on Instagram for all sorts of great market shots.

Love,
me


Follow my adventures on Instagram @fourthirtyam

Happiness Project brunch, no.4

We ignored Gretchen Rubin this past month, for the most part. Her chapter for April was about parenting. There are a few parents in our group, but we weren't feeling inspired by it. We decided instead to bring something to share that we are passionate about. It spun off from our conversation about careers and working for the man and needing more creativity and such.

Someone brought paintings they've been working on, while another person brought a giant pile of family history and photographs they found in the garage. Others talked about a writer's group they joined and still others shared their difficulty in focusing on just one idea or project to even begin with.

Some people chose not to share or didn't feel they had anything in particular to share. Those that did read the chapter used that moment to bring up the concept of "fog happiness" that Rubin writes about:

[Happiness] surrounds me, I see it everywhere, despite the fact that when I zoom in on any particular moment, it can be hard to identify.

Awareness is always the first step, right? You have to name it before you can do anything else about it. Some friends struggle to name what their passion is, what they would wake up and do every single day if money were no object. There isn't anything particularly wrong with their life, they just can't seem to zoom in and pursue something particular. I don't share that struggle, but since January I have been working on zooming in even more. I've been spending time this year naming and codifying what it is that makes me happy, and what will make me happy when I can get to it. I brought something to share with the brunch group that is still very much in development. It relates to my passions of traveling, writing, photography, and community organizing. If it becomes something worth sharing beyond my living room, you'll read about it here. Send good vibes, will ya? I'm hopeful.

The most significant success of the Happiness Project for me thus far, 1/3 of the way through the year, has been to really understand what Rubin means when she says:

The days are long, but the years are short.

That understanding has started to open doors and shift things for me. It's exactly what needed to happen. The past few months at work have been brutal. March and April are, every single year, overbooked and move at lightening speed. The days may feel long; I come home exhausted, I work 60 hours a week, I let my hobbies and social calendar slide...and yet here we are. We're 1/3 of the way through the year. I'm already starting to wrap up fiscal year end budgets and I'm putting appointments on my spring 2014 calendar. Yes, 2014, you read correctly. Time is marching on whether I come home exhausted or energized. Time will continue to march on whether I'm grinding out 60 hours a week or whether I'm traveling and taking amazing photos. The years are short. I hit my 11 year mark at my institution and something snapped. I asked myself what I wanted to be doing when I turned 40. The reality that the milestone is less than 10 years away sunk in and sunk in hard. I have an excellent job. It's secure. They would be thrilled if I was there for another decade. They have no idea I'm flirting with an exit strategy. But the years are short. I'm starting to spin a number of creative plates and one could spin off into a whole new life or they could all come shattering down tomorrow. I have no guarantees. I only know that what will ultimately make me blindingly happy is not what I'm doing right now.

And...so...anyway...breakfast pizza! I made two different pizzas and while they turned out alright, it was obnoxiously difficult. It seems so simple, but oh no. I purchased pre-made pizza dough, which helped, but I'd also never worked with it before. Anyway, one breakfast pizza was wheat dough, pesto base, grilled asparagus / peppers / red onion / garlic, fontina, romano, mozzarella fresco, with sunny eggs. The other pizza was white dough, maple glaze base, scrambled eggs, crispy bacon, green onion, cheddar, and fontina.

...then 10 minutes on a stone at 500-degrees.

This Huffington Post article was my jumping off point, and then I discovered a lot of different blogs and recipes from this original post.

Happiness Project brunch, no. 3

As far the Happiness Project is concerned, if you'd rather see delicately filtered photos of friends eating brunch awash in sunlight, ignore my previous post and keep scrolling...

The topic for March: Work. Our collective tangent: Manifesting our destinies. No big deal. 

Never under estimate a good scrambled egg. Or two dozen of them. 

I was just getting back into town right before this brunch (which was true in February and will be true in April as well...because "just coming or going" seems to be most all the time for me), so the menu was simple. Scrambled eggs may be quick, but they don't have to be boring. The night before I cooked a lot of extra crispy bacon and crumbled it in preparation for the morning. I also cut up a lot bell peppers and set them in the fridge on a paper towel to dry, otherwise they give the eggs a troublesome consistency. Beyond the peppers and bacon, add to two dozen eggs a few splashes of Half and Half, generous heaps of course sea salt and ground pepper, and you're set. Oh, and lots of shredded extra sharp cheddar cheese. Lots. Again, always remember, dieting is not allowed at brunch. 

@heathengoddess handling the fruit and cheese course, as it were. 

@psychopetals is responsible for this deliciousness. 

I already spun off into a monologue about this month's chapter, but here are a few points highlighted by the group as a whole. These were moments in the chapter that inspired people for one reason or another. I'd love to hear what you think about all this, whether you're reading the book or not. Feel free to comment below. 

Rubin writes: "My research had revealed that challenge and novelty are key elements to happiness. the brain is stimulated by surprise, and successfully dealing with an unexpected situation gives a powerful sense of satisfaction. If you do new things - visit a museum for the first time, learn a new game, travel to a new place, meet new people - you're more apt to feel happy than people who stick to more familiar activities. Because novelty requires more work from the brain, dealing with novel situations evokes more intense emotional responses and makes the passage of time seem slower and richer." 

"We tend to overestimate how much we can accomplish in an hour or a week and underestimate how much we can accomplish in a month or a year, by doing just a little bit each day."  

"One reason that challenge brings happiness is that it allows you to expand your self-definition. You become larger. Suddenly you can do yoga or make homemade beer or speak a decent amount of Spanish. Research shows that the more elements make up your identity, the less threatening it is when any one element is threatened." 

"To counteract fear, I told myself, 'I enjoy the fun of failure.' It's fun to fail, I kept repeating. It's part of being ambitious; it's part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly." Side note: I always tell my staff that if you don't fail at one thing every day, you're probably not working hard enough. 

Our favorite paradox of the day was the arrival fallacy, the belief that once you get *there* you'll be happy. I say "paradox" because we've all set happiness-related goals, which certainly imply some sense of destination. This tension was something we discussed at length. When you overlay that tension on the topic of work and career, it was a rich discussion.

Rubin quotes Nietzsche: "The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable." Creating goals and moving forward with intention must be balanced with an ideal of living in The Now. I'm not sure anyone can ever really master that, but our little troupe of happiness project-ers is trying.

Happiness Project brunch, no. 2

So. Here's the deal. Two Happiness Project brunches have gone by with not a blog post in sight. Why? Because February was weird. Every single person at the brunch collectively agreed. Weird. Most, because they're all my friends and sensitive hippies like me, attributed a degree of the weirdness to Mercury's retrograde. It's a thing. Look it up. We also realized that February is a generally cruel month in the great state of Utah, full of horrible inversions and illness and blah. Not to mention the chapter in Rubin's book: Remember Love. 

Before your mind spins off into cliche visions of bitter suburban book clubs and cat ladies, let me clarify that we are a solid mix of urban singles, marrieds, gays, partners, co-habitators, lesbians, and dating abstainers. We love love. This was not a bitter book bashing. We just didn't love Rubin's chapter. Sure, we found useful nuggets:

Pierre Reverdy wrote: "There is no love; there are only proofs of love." Whatever love I might feel in my heart, others will see only my actions.  

The business school truism: "You manage what you measure."  

Truth: To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth. "Happiness," wrote Yeats, "is neither virtue nor pleasure not this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing."

But overall, we were universally bothered by how she patronizes her husband and, in a roundabout ironic way, infantilizes him as she writes about building healthy relationships. There are lessons to be learned from her writing in chapter two, we simply learned more from workshopping with each other and ignoring her. Mostly. 

Brunchers gonna brunch.

So, before I post the obligatory Instagram photos of the brunch food, let me disclose a modicum of personal insight along the relationship theme. This is a blog, after all. Here's where I landed after reading the love chapter:

I'm intentionally not dating right now. I'm okay with that, see: intentional. I'm working through some stuff that, for whatever reason, I've determined I don't want to work through while also balancing another person in the mix. I go back and forth as to the wisdom of this decision. On one hand, I look back through my dating years and recognize a pattern of thinking I need to have it all pulled together before being with someone. On the other hand, I know that's a false dichotomy. I know I will eventually, as I've done many times over the years, start dating again regardless of my trajectory on whatever imaginary path I've created for myself. Also, I have moments of honest clarity when I realize there's some of that aforementioned stuff that I'd actually like to work through with someone. 

In related news, I really dislike dating. I more or less hate it, actually. It bores me. I don't like the drama and the butterflies and the wondering and the dance of it all. I'm all about the good stuff once that tedium is out of the way. I'm a girlfriend girl. I thrive in partnerships. It's the same reason I suck at small talk. I like to commit and focus and work it out and move on if it's not right. The best romantic relationships of my life have spent significant time in that sweet spot of the hard work of relationships. I'm to a point in my life where I'm pretty solid in who I am and what makes me tick. I would love to find someone that compliments all of that as an equal partner, and clearly I'd do the same for them and compliment whatever makes them tick. I realize you have to, ugh, date, to get there, but whatever. 

Is that enough bloggery disclosure? This could go on for days. No one wants that. Let's look at photos of french toast. 

Not Pictured: Half and Half. Brunch is no place for a diet. 

Teach me, Alton. Teach me. 

I added quite a lot of cinnamon to my version.

Use crusty country bread that dried overnight. Trust me. And Alton. 

Mi madre helping me soak and set the bread.

Griddle, then oven, then mouth. Insanely good. 

You're welcome:

Alton's gourmet french toast recipe.

Like cooking meth, only it smells better.

I've never actually cooked meth. I have no idea what it smells like. I've also never seen a single episode of Breaking Bad. And yet, cultural osmosis tells me there's a comparison to be made when declaring my Wednesday night was a hippie version of AMC's acclaimed drama.

Essential oil lotion...in process.

Beehive Braintree is the brainchild of my friend Dallas (and his friend Paul). Per their mission statement, it's an affordable, grassroots, community-sourced series of courses taught by experts and enthusiasts in Salt Lake City. Two nights a week, a rotating cohort of curious souls gather at Higher Ground Learning (gorgeous loft space on Pierpont Avenue downtown). Classes range from calligraphy to landscape design, maintaining a home bar to artisan marshmallows, and in the case of my first class: Essential Oils 101.

Sea salt + essential oil can be diluted in the bath, to mop the floor, in a humidifier, etc.
Photo by Dallas Graham (c) Beehive Braintree

I learned more than a few facts about essential oils. These are a few of my favorites:

• Pure essential oils are, by definition, 100% organic. They come directly from the bark, leaves, roots, flowers, or fruits of plants. The oil is either distilled out of the plant or cold pressed. To generate a single pound of essential oil it takes 50 pounds of eucalyptus, 150 pounds of lavender, 500 pounds of rosemary, 1,000 pounds of jasmine, and over 2,000 pounds of roses. In other words, rose oil is very expensive and eucalyptus is cheap. 
• Pure essential oils are volatile. Meaning you can test if an oil is pure by putting a drop on a piece of paper. If it evaporates completely, it's pure. If there is any residue, it has additives. 
• Carrier oils keep essential oils from evaporating and carrier oils allow the essential oils to get into your body safely. Any oil you would eat/cook with, is safe as a carrier oil (i.e. almond, coconut, grape seed, etc). The ratio is a quarter-sized carrier oil to one drop of essential oil. 
• Less is more when it comes to essential oils. They are highly concentrated and you never need more than a drop or two. A lotion made with essential oils is not synthetic junk like Bath & Body Works, for example, so the scent will be lighter and you can use less. 
• The safest place to put oils on your body is your feet. Our feet contain a roadmap of our entire body and the essential oil (+ carrier oil) we put on our feet is smart enough to figure out where to go inside our body. 
• Lavender, for example, can calm our nerves and also boost our mood. Our body and the lavender know how to talk to each other and they'll sort it out. Your feet will get it where it needs to be. 
• Essential oils have a time bomb effect because they absorb into the fluid surrounding our cells. They know when to release and when our body needs them to bust out and do their thing. 

The carrier oil we used in our lotion was coconut, which is solid at room temperature. 

We gathered around in the kitchen and all contributed to making a lotion. The lotion was our carrier oil and we could then decide which essential oil(s) we wanted to incorporate. I was surprised how easy it was to make the lotion. The ingredients felt a bit obscure, but our instructor Kindee told us where we can find everything we need. If you're feeling adventurous...

1/2 cup - extra virgin, cold pressed, organic coconut oil
1/2 cup - half sweet almond oil
3 tsp - stearic acid (stabilizer/thickener)
6 - 12 tbsp (depending on desired thickness of the finished lotion) - emulsifying wax (vegetable based)
1 tsp - citric acid
2 cups - distilled water
3/4 tsp - xanthan gum

Mix the first four ingredients in a double boiler until temp reaches just over 100 degrees (photo directly above).

Mix water and xanthan gum using a stick blender (first photo in this post).

Mix oil/wax mixture from the double boiler with a stick blender, then slowly add the water/gum mixture. Continue to blend until lotion cools to room temperature and has a creamy texture. To cool the mixture faster, fill a bowl with ice water and put your lotion mixture bowl on top of the ice bath while blending.

Measure your lotion into containers of your choosing and add essential oils. Remember: one quarter-sized amount of lotion needs only one drop of oil.

www.aromatools.com - lotion containers (or recycle containers you have already)
www.fromnaturewithlove.com - for all the weird ingredients
Costco has the best coconut and almond oil.

Pouring our freshly-made lotion into recycled glass containers.
Photo by Dallas Graham (c) Beehive Braintree

I took home one citrus (happy), one lavender (balance), and one eucalyptus (spiritual openness).

I've used lavender lotion on my feet before, usually before slipping on a pair of socks and going to bed. I can say without a doubt that this lavender lotion is actively doing something to my body. I've put it on my feet before bed every night since this workshop and I can feel the difference in how well I'm sleeping. The lotion is so pure and the oil is so essential and direct, it's like nothing I've ever used (and I'm known for buying artisan hippie products). I swear by this recipe.

FYI: Dallas had a real camera on hand and captured gorgeous moments throughout the night. Check out his full album on the Beehive Braintree Facebook page. For those of you who live in Salt Lake City, check out their calendar of classes and perhaps I'll meet you soon.

Happiness Project brunch, no.1

welcome.

Eight of us gathered at my house this morning to talk about being happy. I alluded to this discussion group in a previous post, but in summary: Throughout 2013 we're partially discussing Gretchen Rubin's book and partially discussing our own happiness projects. Today was the perfect reminder of something I've always known: My friends are amazing human beings. They're smart, funny, creative, thoughtful, and in this case, adventurous. I mixed a few different friend groups to compile the full invitation to 18 people. It's not easy for everyone to discuss something as personal as happiness, habits, and goals when you met some of the people in the room five minutes ago.

You read that I mixed friend groups, right? Well, by way of constant introductions, this happened.

One of Rubin's rules is "Spend Out" - Meaning use your favorite stuff every day, over and over.

Of course I'll never mention anyone by name, and it's not my place to blog specifics of anything outside my own happiness project, but the variety of ideas covered today was fascinating. Rubin's January chapter focused on organization, purging, reclaiming your energy, etc. Collectively our favorite takeaway seemed to be the 60-second rule: Do not procrastinate anything you can do in less than 60 seconds. Tasks that feel daunting because they build up to a lump sum are virtually eliminated if you spend 60 extra seconds doing that one last thing you need to do. For example, why do I have three magazine subscription mailer things sitting on my counter right now? Why have they been sitting there for two months? Two months. That's 60 days, Internet. It would take me less than 60 seconds to renew the subscriptions and move on with my life. Instead I pass them every day and say, "Shoot. Right. Okay, tomorrow." Not tomorrow...do not put off anything you can do in less than 60 seconds. Watch it add up and watch your energy level shift when you don't have little bits of tasks floating around you.

Yes, the glasses say "Happy" and they were actually purchased before I'd ever heard of the book.

We talked about our own successful organizational strategies, but also shared our preliminary individual goals for the month and/or year. On one side of the room I have a friend who translated a year's worth of goals into daily checklists and spreadsheets, and on the other side I have a friend who is currently resisting the idea of anyone telling her what to do (even if that person is herself). I have a friend who has already organized and purged her home room by room, including the dreaded bedroom closet. Another friend joined a writing group and he's working on his memoir. Someone is beginning the process of moving in with a partner, and all the organizational compromise that comes with that, while someone else is settling themselves back into their own home after a long-term partner moved out. The similarities and differences are awesome and I can already tell we're going to learn a lot from each other this year. There were six additional people who couldn't make it to this first brunch for whatever reason, so it will also be interesting to watch the conversations and dynamics shift and different personalities are thrown in the mix.

Conversation starters related to the book, which this particular group did not need at all. 

We left our conversation on the note of "Power Words" -- a single word mantra that will remind you of your overarching goals for the year. A theme word, if you will. Each month may have specific goals, or maybe even a theme, depending on how people laid out their projects; but the power word is a summation of what you want the year to be about. I have an Instagram friend, who I've never met in real life but we're so similar in so many ways, who chose "light" as her power word. Isn't that beautiful? I decided on ABUNDANCE. There are many reasons why I settled on that word, and likely many more reasons I'll discover throughout the year that I don't even realize yet, but that's another blog post entirely. The basic idea is that I want to learn to trust in abundance, demonstrate that trust by taking more risks, and show gratitude for everything I have. Cheers, 2013!

Power Word reminder cards. I hear they're all the rage.

Finally, remember how I don't cook? Well, Dear Reader, that's what potlucks are for. Our spread this morning was particularly awesome. Also, there's one brunchy dish that isn't terribly difficult and I can more or less pull it off. I think it's full of flavor and great for groups. If it's your thing, the recipe is below. Perhaps you might make it and host your own Happiness Project brunch. Spread the love. And the frittatas. 

veg + egg + feta = done

Ingredients (yields about 16, depending on size of muffin pan):

6 large egg
4 large egg whites
1/4 cup water
1/4 tsp table salt
1/4 tsp black pepper, freshly ground
2 cups fresh spinach, baby leaves, coarsely chopped
1 cup canned artichoke hearts, packed in water, cut in chunks 
1 cup crumbled feta cheese
1/2 cup roasted red peppers, packed in water, cut in chunks
1/2 cup uncooked scallions, finely diced
1/4 cup low fat cream cheese, room temperature

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Coat muffin pan(s) with canola oil cooking spray.

2. In a large bowl, beat eggs, egg whites, water, salt, and pepper until blended. Stir in soft cream cheese, then add spinach, artichoke hearts, feta, roasted peppers, and scallions. Mix well.

3. Spoon about 1/4 cup egg/veg mixture into each prepared muffin hole. Bake until set, about 20-25 minutes. Cool in pans on a wire rack for 4 minutes. Remove frittatas with a rubber spatula and cool directly on wire rack for 1 minute before serving. 

(mis)adventures en la cocina

I set a goal for My Happiness Project to tackle one cooking adventure a month. Yes, one. A month.

Listen. Don't judge. I realize I'm a grown professional woman in her 30s. I know this. My schedule and lifestyle just aren't built around the priority of elaborate meal preparations. I don't cook. My relationship with cooking is akin to my relationship with dance. I have season tickets to a number of ballet and modern dance companies in Salt Lake City, but I'm not getting up on that stage. I'm a foodie who enjoys weekend brunch almost more than anything in this world, but I'm not competent in my own kitchen. I'm a patron of the arts, if you will, and cooking is most certainly an art. Perhaps I need to unfollow the posh cooking shows that fill my hulu/netflix queues and stop psyching myself out, but I still maintain that cooking is an art. I can't begin to explain the intimidation.

I mean, seriously. Where the hell do I even start?

Armed with a new cookbook, I accepted my mission: One pot. Surely I can't mess up a single pot of something or other (wait for it). I also armed myself with a cute new pot thing. I was so proud as I headed off to the grocery store with a recipe in hand. Like a real live grownup, with multiple ingredients and everything. I decided on chicken and dumplings because it was the easiest recipe in the dutch oven section of the book. Here's the deal, Reader, I didn't even realize until I was already home with groceries that the cute new pot thing I purchased wasn't even a dutch oven - and - it couldn't actually be used on the stove top. Apparently I'm supposed to bake casseroles inside the oven in my cute new pot. Not my goal. Not relevant to the ingredients I'd just carted home from the grocery store. Great.

Emergency phone call to mom to confirm that stoneware is not meant for stovetops. It's not. Emergency trip to Williams-Sonoma across the street to buy a cooking thing I can actually use for my One Pot Wonder plan. A painful chunk of change later I'm standing in my kitchen trying to focus on the recipe and ignore the un-scripted cash I just dropped. I'm also trying to ignore the fact that most blushing brides simply add Le Creuset to their registry and wait for gramma to pull through. Let it go, let's not add insult to injury. Yet - I felt excited to be chopping veggies and preheating my new fancy cooking pot thing. I was on my way! Look, y'all, I'm cooking!

I used the instructions in the cookbook to know how to chop my veggies propoerly. Yes, I did. 

Once the veggies were chopped I lifted the fancy lid and cried. Cried. Out loud. The little book inside the box told me not to cook anything dry, so I oiled the pot before letting it heat up. The pot was now covered in burnt black weirdness and it was smoking like crazy. In that moment I was like the first cavewoman who ever saw fire: confused and angry and completely out of my depth. I had never seen this one pot cooking process in motion and was convinced I had completely ruined my new toy. Mumblings of "damnit" and "it took all of three minutes to screw up three hundred dollars" and "I should've bought a handbag" and "I knew this was a horrible idea" escaped my lips. I'd been told they were indestructible, but through the haze of burning oil smoke I lost all sense of perspective and logic. I trudged forward and softened my onions.

Burnt mess. 

Once I got rolling I put aside defeatist thoughts of what I assumed was a ruined pot and focused on the experience I set out to have. I then made dumplings for the first time. Which is to say, I whisked flour, salt, baking powder, and parsley together before dropping it in the pot. Oh la la.

Time to make the dumplings...

Thirty minutes later, as I scooped out broth, veggies, chicken breasts, and dumplings, I realized the catastrophically burnt mess was gone. And now masquerading as parsley bits. Oh well. At least I hadn't overreacted like a jackass by crying into my veggies.

ta-da!