Feel Good Friday is a small collection of the inspiring stuff I’ve discovered around the web.  It’s all about good health, happiness and the stuff that makes us feel good!  Please leave me a comment if you have a great article or blog post to share in next week’s round-up.

First of all, a link from my friend Ralf (hi Ralf!) about “Ego Depletion”.  Turns out willpower is not just a metaphor, it’s actually a finite resource.  This is a really worthwhile read and made me think.

A great deal of your thoughts and behaviors are automatic and unconscious. Blinking and breathing, for example, need no help from the conscious part of you. Much of your behavior, like driving to work or toweling off after a shower, just happens while your conscious mind drifts off to think about Game of Thrones or how you’ll approach your boss for a raise. If you touch a stove you recoil without thought. Your desire to avoid dark alleys and approach embraces occurs without your input. When moved by a song or a painting or a kitten, the emotional rush comes without volition. Much of your mental life is simply not under your conscious control, and Baumeister’s research suggests once you take the helm every act of volition diminishes the next. 

It is as if the mind is a terribly designed airplane. As long as the plane flies in a straight line, it burns very little fuel, but as soon as the pilot takes over in any way, to dive or bank or climb, the plane burns fuel at an alarming rate making it more difficult to steer in the future. At some point, you must return the plane to autopilot until it can refuel or else it crashes.

Read the rest of the article here.

This is why chocolate is my favourite vegetable!

15 Things you should give up to be happy.  These are the things we should try to quit for a happy and stress-free life:  from needing to be “right”, to living your life to others’ expectations.

This week I learned of a new hazard related to smoking: Third-hand smoke.  Researchers have warned that toxins from cigarette smoke remain in the environment and build up over time.  Like we needed more to worry about!

The chemistry of tea.

What if bone health has more to do with our Vitamin D intake than calcium and dairy?  This study suggests that calcium may only be part of the picture.

Much Too Complex Carbohydrates by Rick London.

And so ends another week!

I’ve been feeling pretty stretched lately, and after a couple of weeks of trying to ignore the problem (and eventually admitting that it’s not going away) I’ve spent a little bit of time trying to figure out why.  Turns out I’m not really doing anything more than usual, I’m just making terrible use of my time!

My suitcase isn’t unpacked from our trip to Apollo Bay two weeks ago.  My laundry is being stored on top of my suitcase instead of being put away.  The whole house needs a vacuum and my bathtub needs a scrub.  We also have a car load of stuff to donate, and we keep shifting it all from the car to the laundry because we can’t organise ourselves to drop it all off!  Ridiculous, right?

So this weekend I have two goals:  sort my house out (if I crank up some music this will take 2 hours, max) and see The Avengers.  Probably in that order, so that I don’t go rewarding myself prematurely.

Hopefully by getting these jobs out of the way my brain will have a little more space for the stuff that really matters – like drawing or painting or tackling one of the 91 uncompleted things from my 101 list!  I haven’t really made any ground so far this month, so it’s time to get serious again.

What have you got planned for your weekend?  If you’re in Melbourne it’s going to be a chilly one, so find a good book and remember to pick up marshmallows for your hot chocolate!

Feel Good Friday is a small collection of the inspiring stuff I’ve discovered around the web.  It’s all about good health, happiness and the stuff that makes us feel good!  Please leave me a comment if you have a great article or blog post to share in next week’s round-up.

I’ve discovered that quinoa divides people into two groups: those that love it, and those that haven’t tried it yet.  Here are 12 things you should know about quinoa!

An excellent summary of the pros and cons of the paleolithic diet which has become so popular.  It’s not for me, but it seems to work for a lot of people.

20 quick and healthy snack ideas (looove apple and peanut butter together, but watch your portion sizes!)

I loved Sarai’s post about cultivating friendships.

40 ways to unwind and relax.  Perfect timing for the long weekend, right?

We all know we should be eating fish, but it’s hard to know which ones we’re supposed to be choosing for ourselves and for the planet.  Here are 6 of the healthiest fish (and 6 fish to avoid, but that part of the article is very US-centric)

Whistle while you work?  An interesting article about RMIT University’s instruction to its staff to be enthusiastic and positive in the workplace, despite obviously trying times for its workers.  Is it a good idea to insist upon positivity on the job?

At an individual level, the power of positivity can’t be denied.  These 21 ways to define a positive attitude made me think about how I can develop my attitude and be a better version of myself.

More on the topic of happiness: a study has shown that people aren’t at their happiest until they reach the age of 33.  (I’m really looking forward to my next birthday now!)

31 ways to brighten your day!

Here’s a guaranteed way to put a smile on your face.  Barry Morgan, from the World of Organs!

Don’t forget to get the t-shirt!

Don’t forget to tell them Barry sent you
Barry Morgan – World famous in Adelaide

Happy Easter long weekend, everybody!  I’m planning a MAJOR de-cluttering exercise here this weekend, but I plan to fit in some drawing and running as well.  Maybe also some top secret work on a Top Secret Project.

Hope your Friday’s good!

Feel Good Friday is a small collection of the inspiring stuff I’ve discovered around the web.  It’s all about good health, happiness and the stuff that makes us feel good!  Please leave me a comment if you have a great article or blog post to share in next week’s round-up.

5 ways to find happiness in nature from Tiny Buddha

Give brussels sprouts a second chance!  This recipe looks amazing, and until reading this article I had no idea that these cute little guys are such a great cancer-fighting food.

Speaking of vegetables, my lovely friend Marieke shared these tips for cooking and storing a week’s worth of veggies in a single afternoon.

Another gem from Marieke: 101 Cookbooks by Heidi Swanson.  Lots of great vegetarian, whole food recipes with gorgeous photography and food styling.  I especially love the way that the posts are categorised – it’s an excellent resource for people who care about food and eating.

Strength training for beginners – not only is this excellent advice, but it’s funny too!

Studies have shown that people work out longer and harder when they have company.  Here are some ideas for workouts for couples.

Lots of good information about nature’s perfect powersnack – nuts.

Last week I reconnected with an old schoolmate of mine (thanks, Twitter!), and we discovered that we’re both bloggers!  Kate had a dig around my list of 101 Things in 1001 Days and she told me that it inspired her to refocus her goals.  Amongst other things, her brand new blog House of Goals is full of stories about her running journey, including the training she did for her marathon last year.  (That’s right, I said marathon.  Way to put my 5km to shame, Kate!)

And finally… this video by Mikhael Paskalev is bound to leave you feeling good this Friday!

Happy weekend, everybody.  Tomorrow is my birthday, so my weekend is looking pretty good already!

Hope you find time to do something that makes you feel good.

The first time I heard of Daniella Germain it was through her blog and now I’m broke.  This blog began after she spent her last $300 on a pair of boots, and decided to use her skills in illustration to motivate herself to watch her pennies.  Over the course of the project she illustrated every little purchase – big and small – and shared them on her blog.  Lucky us!

Daniella was a student of graphic design at RMIT when she embarked on a project to document her family’s collection of recipes.  Her abuela (grandmother) had kept a collection of recipes in a manila folder for 30 years, and these were passed on from generation to generation.

My Abuela’s Table is a cookbook of more than 100 authentic mexican recipes, but it is also an incredibly inspiring book of illustration.  Daniella made a decision to not photograph her recipes and instead drew them in incredible detail.  I honestly don’t know whether it was the foodie or art nerd in me that ripped this book off its shelf when I saw it this afternoon!

There is a certain Americano living in this house who adores Mexican food, and every now and then he complains that it’s hard to find good authentic Mexican cuisine on this side of the Pacific.  When I showed him this book tonight his eyes lit up, and then he informed me that there’s about to be a whole lot of chillis in my life for the next little while!

My Abuela’s Table is published here in Melbourne by Hardie Grant, and you can buy it a lots of Aussie book stores including Readings (RRP $35).  If you’re outside of Australia you can also find it at Amazon, but don’t forget that measurements are metric and our Australian cup is slightly different to the US cup!  Don’t let that put you off – quantities are easy to convert and all my favourite recipe books are full of little pencil notes anyway.  And besides, it’s not as though you’ll find a soufflé in need of such precision!

This lovely book is worth owning even if you’re not a foodie.  I love the story behind the creation of this book, and the lovely illustrations would be right at home on my kitchen walls.

I kind of want to buy a copy for everybody I know!

Oh, and the best part?  Next month Daniella will hand-deliver a copy of her book to her beloved abuela.  What a precious gift!

At the rate we’re going, chocolate is going to be a rare—and extremely pricey—commodity within the next twenty years. Somebody needs to light a fire under those Oompa-Loompas, stat.

The problem’s easy to explain, and much harder to fix. According to the Cocoa Research Association, we’re consuming more chocolate than we’re producing cocoa. Which means, eventually, we’re going to run out.

Cocoa’s notoriously difficult to harvest, meaning more and more small-scale West African growers—who make an average of 80 cents per day—have little incentive not to turn to more lucrative crops, like rubber, or give up farming altogether in favor of more stable opportunities in cities.

What will the shortage mean? $11 Snickers bars, sooner than you think. Pretzels given out for Halloween. Or more candy made from carob, a poor substitute for the sweet and sticky real deal. And a tectonic shift in how we view our mochas, according the Nature Conservation Research Council’s John Mason:

“In 20 years chocolate will be like caviar. It will become so rare and so expensive that the average Joe just won’t be able to afford it.”

But don’t lose hope! Both Hershey and Mars, Inc. have sequenced the cacao genome, meaning more resilient trees could be in our future. And 20 years seems like enough time to figure out how to incentivize farmers appropriately.

Read the original post at Gizmodo, who found it at The Independent, who fou… oh, I can’t keep this up when there’s a chocolate shortage happening out there!

It’s time to panic, everybody.

This post is dedicated to Laura.

Because…

Cupcakes on cupcakes. Made with the help of mini peanut butter cups, and a whole stack of awesome.

This is the genius creation of Confessions of a Cookbook Queen. Granted, the wheel was a pretty great invention but I think this wins, right?

Right.

Halloween isn’t something that most Aussie kids care about, but I’ve noticed its popularity is starting to grow (at least in the merchandise department). This year Tim and I thought it would be fun to put together a little Halloween party for our friends, and coming up with ideas was lots of fun!

First of all, we had to tell them what was in store. I made these invitations out of glitter card and foil wrapping paper, and included a severed finger in each envelope…

Gross, right? Even worse was the text on the back, which promised delicacies such as “cultured mould” (cheese), “cured epidermis” (prosciutto) and “a boutique brew of swamp water” (lemonade with tapioca pearls, a gummy killer python and a glow stick)

Tim and I gradually spooked up our house throughout the week leading up to Halloween, and hid fake spiders in all sorts of places. Who wants to bet that I find a forgotten spider in an unexpected place two weeks from now, and end up screaming like a girl?

Yup.

But the best part of all was putting together the menu! We managed to come up with some pretty disgusting stuff, although I had a last-minute failure with my egg eyeballs when I realised that they’d been frozen at the back of my fridge.

Here are some of the gross stuff we enjoyed:

“Witches Fingers” (mozzarella sticks, with dyed shaved almonds for fingernails)

“Blood Worms” – made from gelatin & cream, and set inside bendy straws. These were awesome! Here’s the recipe.

We had jars full of baby teeth, earthworms, brown snakes, frog eyes and artificial eyes.

The “Cultured Mould” and “Cured Epidermis” attracted some fake flies!

Everybody who came was awesome and brought something, but I didn’t think to take photos of their excellent offerings. One person brought cupcakes with M&M spiders on top, another made a spooky pool of green jelly and snakes, and someone else brought brain poppers (pop rocks)! We all had diabetes by the end of the night.

Lastly, here are my owl and witch cupcakes (decorated with oreo cookies and chocolate dipped sherbert cones)

I highly recommend “Drag Me to Hell” for a scary (but silly) movie for a crowd. It gave me dumb nightmares, but it was worth it!

One of my 101 Things in 1001 Days tasks was to resurrect my old recipe blog. It began (and ended) in 2007, and it’s always bothered me that I abandoned it.

I should make one thing clear: I don’t have any aspirations of becoming a food blogger! I’m not that talented, nor do I have the required dedication. And besides, I prefer to eat when my food is hot rather than run to perfect lighting to compose a photo!

The idea behind my food blog is really simple – I just want to collect all of my favourite recipes in one place. Over time I hope to have a strong collection of food that I adore, and it’s an added bonus that I can share it with others at the same time. I have temporarily named it “cracked pepper” until I am blessed with an idea that’s more creative.

Updates will sometimes be infrequent, so throw it in your RSS reader and forget about it. Be assured that when I do blog over there it will be because it’s worth it!

I’m ticking three things off my 101 List this weekend – the clock is ticking!

ETA: Did anyone notice the part where I forgot to link to my awesome new recipe blog? Geez.

Here we go: a blog post in which I go right ahead and BLOW YOUR MIND.

I suppose I shouldn’t take all the credit for this recipe, considering that I stole it straight from the pages of Married/Single Parent.  You’d better go say hi to Michelle and thank her for the inspiration.

But first…

PEANUT BUTTER CUP COOKIES

INGREDIENTS
(including rough Australian conversions)

- 1.5 cups plain flour
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 125g butter, softened
- 1/2 cup caster sugar
- 1/2 cup peanut butter
- 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
- 1 egg, beaten
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 Tablespoons milk
- 40 miniature chocolate covered peanut butter cups

HERE’S WHAT TO DO:

STEP 1: Preheat the oven to 190 degrees Celcius, and unwrap all those little miniature peanut butter cups.  The recipe calls for 40, but you’re going to need an extra 5 or so to allow for “accidents”.  KnowwhatImean?  And never fear – Aussies can buy these online in packs of about 120 at USA Foods (or from their storefront in Melbourne).

STEP 2: Cream the butter, sugar (both types) and peanut butter in a large mixing bowl. Add the beaten egg, vanilla extract and milk and mix well.

STEP 3: In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda and salt.  Throw it into the sugar/butter bowl and mix it all together.

STEP 4: Consider, briefly, a world in which peanut butter does not exist.  Give George Washington Carver a mental high-five, and line a tray with baking paper.

Form the dough into 40 round balls, and bake for 8 minutes (I did this in a couple of batches, but feel free to show off and cook all 40 at once).

STEP 5: Remind your dog that chocolate is a toxic substance, and that it is your duty as his owner to expose yourself to this poison on his behalf.  Give him a pat, and silently congratulate yourself for booking him into the dog groomer tomorrow.  He’s starting to look like he might be homeless.

STEP 6: Remove the tray from the oven, and immediately push a peanut butter cup into the centre of each cookie.  Allow cookies to cool completely before transferring them to a wire rack.  Don’t freak out, they’re supposed to be that soft.

STEP 7:

These cookies take a long time to cool, and disaster will strike if you try to shift them too early.  While you’re waiting, why not familiarise yourself with Diabetes Australia or find a dentist in your local area?

]]> http://scarletwords.com/2010/01/10/this-post-will-change-your-life-reeces-peanut-butter-cup-cookies/feed/ 11 http://scarletwords.com/2009/11/29/holiday-love/ http://scarletwords.com/2009/11/29/holiday-love/#comments Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:02:37 +0000 Elizabeth http://scarletwords.com/?p=2361

Last night’s belated, antipodean Thanksgiving was heaps of fun. I was too busy enjoying the company and incredible food to take any other photos, so tonight I am forced to relive the memories in the form of leftover pumpkin and apple pie.

It’s a tough job, but I’m just trying to get through it without complaining. I hope nobody minds if I blog with a full mouth.

Tim took complete ownership of the food for yesterday’s event, cooking a red currant glazed turkey in the BBQ (sooooo good) and a bunch of “family recipe” side dishes that his mum sent him during the week. A trip to USA Foods last weekend sorted out some last minute ingredients, including fried onions for the green bean casserole and Reeces peanut butter chips for his amazing chocolate cookies. Our talented guests provided the pumpkin and apple pies, and the wine floooowed!

The SingStar fairy visited a couple of hours after dinner, and didn’t leave again until about 3am. I woke this morning to the smell of bacon & eggs, and the last of our guests headed home at about 1pm today!

Post-Thanksgiving depression set in at approximately 1.04pm, so I began pestering Tim to help me put up the Christmas tree. We agreed to give it a couple more days to get the turkey coma wear off before kicking off Christmas, so instead of my tree I thought I’d show you Naomi and Josh’s tree from last year!

(If you’re not already following the adventures of Naomi and Josh via their blog, you really should. It’s basically the happiest place on the Internet.)

Maybe Tim would have been more excited if I’d suggested a more contemporary tree this year?

Panty Tree by VSPink.com – thank you for the link, Dooce!