9. Chinese Cabbage Salad and Chocolate Almond Butter Macaroons

Two new recipes! The first is an Chinese Cabbage Salad that has a little crunch to it from adding uncooked Ramen noodles. Feel free to substitute wontons or add chicken or anything else you desire. The second recipe is one that I make for a quick chocolate pick-me-up, with the added bonus of protein from the almond butter. Bon appetit!

Chinese Cabbage Salad

Makes enough for four people

Salad

10 leaves Chinese Cabbage, rinsed and chopped about ¼’’ wide

1 Daikon (or substitute parsnip or carrot), julienned

1 mango, sliced into ¼’’ strips

1 package uncooked Ramen noodles

 

Dressing

Note: Be aware that this may make more dressing than you may actually use.

¼ cup canola oil

¼ cup apple cider vinegar

1/8 cup (or more to taste) agave nectar or honey

3 tablespoons soy sauce (or more to taste)

Salt, to taste

Black pepper, to taste

 

Combine Chinese cabbage, mango, and daikon in a large bowl. Crumble the ramen noodles into the salad. In a separate container, mix the ingredients for the dressing, stirring so that the ingredients blend together. Pour dressing over salad and toss.

 

Chocolate Almond Butter Macaroons

Individual Serving

1 tablespoon almond butter

2 tablespoons dried shredded coconut

1 teaspoon agave nectar or honey

1 teaspoon unsweetened cocoa powder

 

Mix ingredients in a small bowl. Consistency is thick, and you should be able to roll the macaroon into a ball (if you so desire; I usually just eat it with a fork). Since quantities are approximate, experiment until you find a balance of ingredients that is palatable to you.

Firsts this week:

• Two new recipes
• Getting hit in the ribs with a badminton birdie (it actually hurts!)

8. DIY Hair Bow

Hello!

This Thursday I was sick, so I took a day off from school. To occupy myself, I read a lot of DIY blogs and was inspired to create this little hair bow from some spare fabric I had around the house:

I used this tutorial, which gave step-by-step sewing instructions. Many thanks to A Beautiful Mess for the idea!

Firsts this week:

• DIY Hair Bow
• Wore three-inch heels to school. After more than 1.5 miles of walking (without getting sore feet!), I can proudly say I am ready for corporate America. Heels and suits here I come!

Common Sense

This list was loosely based on semi-real events that I may or may not have been a part of.

Common Sense Scenarios

1. Don’t stick your finger in a fan, blender, or other rotating object that could injure you.
2. Don’t touch hot objects with your bare hands. Be especially careful when taking glassware out of the oven. You will burn yourself, break the container, and smash all of your freshly baked cookies.
   1. Corollary to the Rule of Hot Objects: Don’t touch the stove to check if it’s hot.
3. Don’t dance in the shower. Water + soap + bare feet = slippery. If you want to be able to dance elsewhere, don’t hurt yourself by dancing in the shower.
   1. Corollary to the Shower Safety Rule: When singing in the shower, don’t swallow the water. Not only won’t you be able to hit the high notes, but the water may end up coming out your nose.
4. Don’t throw an iPod to a person standing on a ladder. No matter how much the person on the ladder may trust your throwing abilities, don’t overestimate yourself. Just don’t do it.
5. When going to sleep, don’t leave a chair in the middle of your room. Should you need to get up in the middle of the night, you will bump into it. To prevent this, push the chair (or other obstacle) to the edge of the room, or else keep night vision goggles on your bedside table.
6. Don’t place a freshly painted board in the middle of someone’s path. They will step on it.
7. Parallel roads do not intersect. If they intersect, they are not parallel.
8. Don’t wear your favorite high heels on a plane. Should an emergency occur, your heels will get ruined by the dirt or water at the end of the inflatable slide, provided that you don’t pop the slide in the process of escaping from the plane.
9. Don’t read while you’re walking. You’ll live longer.
10. Use good judgment. Please.

“Common sense is not so common.” ~Voltaire

7. Circuitry for Beginners

Hello! I hope you’ve had a fabulous week. Recently I’ve been especially enthusiastic about school. This is because a) we have not yet had a full week (amidst Labor Day, half days, etc.) and b) I have really interesting classes. So, as the skeptical daughter of two people with degrees in electrical engineering, I was initially nervous about my Intro to Robotics/Engineering class. In all honesty, I was expecting a room full of seasoned programmers who know their way around microcontrollers and coding. And in this nightmare, I would be stuck with a partner silently brooding over my programming ineptitude.

There was no such nightmare to be found. I was already too preoccupied exploring the contents of the orange box I had received, packed with a carrier board (called the “Board of Education”, or BOE), various resistors, lights, and cables to submit to my overactive imagination. After identifying the contents of the orange box, we jumped right into learning the PBASIC programming language to write our first program. On the breadboard part of BOE, we inserted a green LED (light emitting diode) and resistor to their respective parts of the Vdd and Vss (positive and negative parts of the breadboard). We set up our program so that the LED would blink on and off once per second continuously. As simple as it was, running our “Blink!” program gave me immense satisfaction. Never has it been more fun to turn on a light.

Firsts this week:

• Learned resistor code
• Learned the difference between ohm and om: ohm is the unit of resistors; om is a yogic breathing technique
• Learned some PBASIC programming language
• Wrote a program
• Read about Shakespeare authorship controversies
• And for the record, I started listening to Nutcracker music on Sept. 10. Ballet=life

6. Frogs and Green Lemonade

In between baking cupcakes, juicing sour cherries, and starting my senior year, nothing new I did this week was very profound.

I have a confession. This new thing is something I hope not to repeat. Unfortunately, I believe I may have hit my first animal while driving. Yesterday evening I was driving when I thought I saw a leaf in the road. When I was about a yard away from the leaf, it hopped. Unable to stop, I swerved a bit, hoping the frog would go in between the tires. I kept driving, and then another frog hopped in front me. I was about to go into hysterics when my father said a) if I hit a frog,  I wouldn’t be able to feel it pop under the tires and b) I had better get-my-eyes-on-the-road-missy. If I killed either of these creatures, I’m sorry. The moral of the story: small creatures, please look both ways before crossing the street.

Hopefully you’ve reserved your judgment. I assure you, I am nothing like the driver in the clip below, who seems to think hitting toads is a recreational sport.

Skip to 2:38

And now, for those of you who were able to survive this post, some refreshment: Frosty Basil Lemonade, from Whole Food Recipes by Vitamix. My brother made this for me this week, and it was surprisingly good. The basil gives it a fresh green color, and the consistency is similar to that of a slushie.

Frosty Basil Lemonade:

3 cups water

1.5 lemons, peeled, halved, seeded

1/4 cup sugar

1/2 cup fresh basil leaves

1 cup ice cubes

Directions: Place ingredients in a blender; blend until desired consistency is reached. Sweeten to taste, as this recipe may be too sweet for some (like me) or not sweet enough (for those with a sweet tooth).

Firsts this week:

• May or may not have hit frog(s)
• Drank basil lemonade
• Started my senior year of high school
• Made various recipes with the sour cherries in my yard, including juice and chocolate-cherry sauce, which I enjoyed with family and friends