I know, I know - it sounds weird. But I promise this meal is delicious and packed with nutrition!
So yummy!
What you need:
7 ts Low Fat Crème Fraîche (You could probably substitute with sour cream)
1 lb Pasta
1 Scallion
1 lb Red beets
1 ts Olive Oil
3 1/2 oz Vegetable Broth
1 splash of Apple Vinegar
To your liking:
Salt & Pepper
Parmesan
Pine Nuts
How to:
Peel the beets and shred them. Cut the scallion into little dices and glaze them in the oil, add beets and sauté. Pour in vegetable broth and bring to a boil. Season with vinegar, salt and pepper. Covere over low heat for about 25 minutes until al dente. Meanwhile cook the pasta in salted water. Mix the veggies with your crème fraîche and roast those pine nuts (careful here - they burn really fast - no additional oil needed!). Top pasta with beets mix, pine nuts, and parmesan. Voilá :)
This should feed about 4 people. Hope your tastebuds enjoy!
Max has been gone for over a week now. That leaves me plenty of time to be bored around the day. I only have one week of school left, then I'll be done with the semester and can completely focus on getting everything ready for immigration. We haven't heard back from NVC yet, but I'm hopeful it won't be taking too long until I can finally go to the visa interview in Frankfurt.
Well, since I have plenty of time right now, I decided it would be perfect to get into a healthier mode and focus on cooking from scratch (well, for the most part). I have come to find that I don't have to go to bed hungry if I just cook food that focuses on "natural" ingredients. Meaning - I want to eat food that is not produced with a bunch of chemical substances that I can't even pronounce. So far, I've been eating that way for a week and I have to say it works! I don't really like weighing myself, I try to avoid it as much as possible since I don't think that numbers should have any influence about how I feel about myself. What I do is so simple. I check the mirror - and lately - I've been feeling pretty damn good about myself.
And isn't that what it's all about? You feeling good about yourself? I'm still curvy and I want to stay that way. I like my curves and would not trade them for anything. At the same time though - I noticed eating the way I am lately makes me feel better. It's weird but I used to have nightmares every night and they seem to be gone! I wake up every morning and am not exhausted but looking forward to the day ahead. I've been only doing this for a week, but the results speak for themselves.
I got a couple of recipes that I really enjoy cooking and I want to share them with you! I will start posting them under the topic - on the healthy side of yummy - from now on. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
Max has been here since December 20th. I kinda logged out of the blogging world for a while and just concentrated on being with him. We're so happy we're together right now. It finally feels like 'real' life again. And not just time I have to pass in order to be with him. This man is so unbelievably perfect for me - it's scary ;) He's the best!
In my family, christmas is rather crazy. My parents are divorced and my mom split with her boyfriend that we lived together with for more than 12 years, so he's my unofficial second dad. Needless to say, I wanna see them all for christmas and that means taking a 6 hour trip to Western Germany the day after christmas. Every year. Haha, those trips are really exhausting, but it's totally worth spending that time with my family - especially now that we're 'complete'.
ALSO. We received our NOA2. For everyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about: That is a huge milestone in our visa journey. We originally thought it is a matter of weeks since I'm getting the visa now, but it turns out that this is unfortunately not the case. Our lawyer even said it might take up unto 6 months until I'll be able to fly over there. To be honest, I don't really buy it though. Or maybe my brain doesn't want to buy it. So I'll just pretend I'll be home in the middle of February. For now.
We've used the time we had to just relax and spend time with family and friends. We're also working on renovating my mom's new house. I'm so happy she got the opportunity to finally call a house her 'almost' own. Well, it is rented, but the landlords are our friends, so it almost feels like it's hers.
Things are rather crazy right now. We want to get everything in and make every single one of our close ones happy, but that sometimes becomes a little tricky. You want to help everyone, see everyone, please everyone and along the way you use precious time that you could have spend enjoying each others company - so we took today off and just laid in bed all day. After all, I might be home with Max soon, so this might be the last time we will have to concentrate on us - without having to think about our jobs, schedules, etc.
Found this quote today. It makes me feel so thankful for what Max and I have, so I thought I'd share. Hope you're all having a good start to your week!
x Juli
“Marry someone who lets you have a bite of their brownie, even when you said you weren’t hungry. Marry someone who laughs at the same things you do. Marry someone who kisses your nose on a cold day. Marry someone who you can watch Disney movies with. Marry someone who is proud of you whether you earn £5 a week or £5,000 a week. Marry someone who you can tell everything to. Marry someone who isn’t afraid or embarrassed to hold your hand in public. Marry someone who lets you take over when decorating a cake. Marry someone who you can spend the day in Ikea with without feeling stressed. Marry someone who wraps you up inside their coat in the winter. Marry someone who accepts your fears and phobias. Marry someone who gives you butterflies every time you hear their key in the door. Marry someone who you don’t always have to shave your legs for. Marry someone who accepts you all day every day, even when you don’t look or feel your best. Marry someone who puts three sugars in your tea, despite telling them “just the two”. Marry someone who doesn’t judge you when you eat your body weight in cookies. Marry someone who doesn’t make you want to check your phone, because you know they will reply. Marry someone who waits with you to get on the train. Marry someone who understands that you need to be alone sometimes. Marry someone who gets on well with your parents and isn’t uptight about family events. Marry someone who calms you down when you get mad about stupid stuff, and never tells you it’s “only stupid stuff”. Marry someone who makes you want to be a better person. Marry someone who makes you laugh. Marry someone who you love. Marry your soulmate, your lover, your best friend."
You know, being in limbo, apart from missing your lover and best friend, sometimes also means missing your home. Obviously, the worst part about that is missing my man, because he is part of what makes home home. But there's also those little things you miss about your routines or little things that really bugged you about something - which you've now come to appreciate.
Sometimes it's funny thinking about what I consider my home, just because there's plenty of places that could - in theory - be labeled "Juli's home". In theory, I got 4 houses (in Germany) that I know every aspect of. Every hidden detail, every leaking water tap. I can tell you where the tupperware is hidden in each of those households in a second. Right now, I live in my mom's living room. You might think this is what I should call my home (at least for now) - but when I think about home, I think about Max. How he asked me about everything he bought for the apartment (even before we were engaged), how we built our tv-stand together, or how I thought it was really important to have the living room wall covered in pictures of our family.
When I think of home, I think of getting up early. Each of us hiding in the bedroom when the other one would do those embarrassing moves to our workout-dvd. When I think of home I think of walking to the dollar store and spending way too much money on decoration that we didn't need. Max picking me up from a cooking class not even half a mile away. I think of stains in our carpet, washing the dishes, rearranging our furniture and lying on our rug together.
Those places that I know by heart, are all in my heart. They're filled with loved ones and lovely memories. But what you call your home is something that is not only in your heart. It's much more, it fills your whole body, there's smells, feelings, memories that give you goosebumps. It's another thing that when you found it you'll know (you just know).
I'm an October baby. I love it with all it comes - the rain, the colors, the cold, even the storms and darkness. I know people started this thing a while ago; saying fall is their favorite time of the year, and I usually hate when that happens. It's a stupid thing to feel, but every time I enjoy a particular thing and it becomes popular to enjoy it - I abandon it (This happened the first time after the band Rooney played on OC California while I - in my teenage naiveness - assumed me to be the only person to know them). However, the point is - even though I do tend to abandon popular gone things, I still LOVE fall.
It must be a really strong relationship then - mine and fall's, at least after taking that concept into account. Let me explain to you why that is. While people say spring is when people fall in love and summer is when love blooms - I think fall is the time of REAL love. Spring and Summer might be the time when people feel lust or passion, but fall is the time when people get to concentrate on themselves.
So how is that? For once, there's less activities to do outside, we get to sit inside, drink tea, read books and just be for once in the spare time that we have.
Our lives get cozy, we get to snuggle in the warmth, knowing the cold is creeping up on us outside. Kind of what we tend to do when we're in love. After all, being in love is just that little bubble that you can concentrate on - that one good thing that's keeping you going - even though you know there's no escape from that big dark cloud called human mortality.
In fall, instead of going to town and surrounding us with all kinds of distractions, we usually surround ourselves with silence. I like silence. It makes you become more aware of who you are, makes you start to think about the world and what you appreciate most. Instead of concentrating on skin and the obvious we concentrate on thoughts and feelings.
Fall makes me focus on what's most important to me - and that's Max.
Juli
(I know I should have substituted 'we' with 'I' - I'm probably just some weird person who's alone with that belief. Additionally, I don't like heat.)
Today I wanted to address the food issue some couple sometimes have when coming from different parts of the world.
Since Max is from the US and I am from Germany we're both used to different kinds of food. Both of us have lived in the others' country for at least 3 months and we both could form opinions on what we like and what we rather not eat everyday.
Max is from Wisconsin, where it seems like everything people eat has to include at least some form of cheese. Which, don't get me wrong, I like cheese, but cheese and cheese can be very different, if you know what I mean. Max has come to love "Brötchen", German bread rolls, now, after despising them in the beginning. Not only is the type of food we are used different, but what you eat to what time is different as well. When we started living together in the beginning of this year, I did not have to go to work and would cook lunch for Max, waiting to eat with him, when he came back from school. After a couple of days he told me how much that confused him, because he was used to eating a light meal as his lunch and the main meal as dinner, at night. Needless to say, eating together was an adjustment for both of us, when cooking at home.
There is food that I do not like that Max would never give up, just as much as there is food that I thoroughly enjoy but just do not know how to properly prepare. I started taking cooking classes back in the US, with the intent to become familiar to home cooked American meals. Since I have some time to kill while I'm waiting for my visa I thought it would be a great idea to try out new recipes that I know Max and I will both enjoy (don't worry I'll still cook German from time to time). Therefore, I want to start a new series where I tryout new stuff that I find online or got recipes for from Max' family and post the results to this page.
The first recipe I tried out is Blueberry Cheesecake Cookies, you can find the original recipe here. I changed the original recipe from going with a blueberry muffin mix to using fresh blueberries, do whatever you like best ;)
I actually made a video for trying it out and out it on youtube too:
What you need:
400 grams - 2 packs Muffin Mix
113 grams - 4 oz Cream Cheese
113 grams - 1 stick (unsalted) Butter
110 grams - 1/2 cup Brown Sugar
2 eggs
225 grams - 1 1/2 cups White Chocolate Chips
1. Combine Butter, Cream Cheese and Brown Sugar in a bowl -mix until smooth
2. Add the eggs - one at a time - mix
3. Gradually add the Muffin Mix
4. Add Chocolate Chips and Blueberries (don't use a mixer - preferably a spoon)
5. Set to chill in a fridge for at leas an hour! (This step is very important - if you skip it the cookies might become flat)
6. Preheat the oven to 160° C (top-/bottom heat)
7. Bake for around 12 minutes (mine took a little longer) until golden brown
8. Enjoy :)
