Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!  I hope you did something fun to celebrate!  Yesterday Kenneth took photos of me in both of my costumes for this year (I worked two days of a Halloween event for kids at work which meant two costumes!).  Today I found my mini playing cards that I meant to use as props with my Alice costume and took some photos of those for my photo of the day.

Main Library - Columbus Metropolitan Library

I think libraries are awesome!  I have fond memories of the Flesh Public Library in my hometown (the library was named after Leo Flesh, who made a large donation when the library needed a larger building in the 1930s, the name only sounds weird to me now, it didn’t seem weird growing up because we didn’t know the names of any other libraries!).  My parents used to read to me and my sister when we were little and we always participated in the summer reading program.  Every summer the the whole children’s area in the library was transformed into a new fantastic land, like a medieval castle or fairy tale woods.   

I’m a nerd and a bookworm so whenever I move to a new area, even if it’s just for short period of time, I get a library card.  As a college student I spent a lot of time in Ohio University’s Alden Library, studying, drinking coffee and eating addictive sugar cookies with white frosting and green sprinkles (OU has so much school spirit, the baked goods get involved).

Gluten-Free Cheese Rolls

These delicious cheese rolls are naturally gluten-free! The recipe is from Brazil and although there are a lot of variations of the recipe for these cheese rolls (Brazilian Pão de Queijo), I prefer the recipe from Kids World Citizen. Even if you don't have to eat gluten-free, you should try this recipe! I made them this summer in camp and the kids loved them!

The cheese rolls are made from tapioca flour, oil, milk, eggs and parmesan and mozzarella cheeses. They taste best fresh from the oven, but the recipe makes a lot! You can roll all of the cheese rolls and freeze what you don't want to eat right away, then whenever you have a craving you can pop a few in the oven.  Simple and delicious!

Golden

Amelia's Glamour Shot

Mischievous Gnome

A Gaggle of Ghosts

Stretch

Columbus Marathon

I am not a runner.  I did run cross country in high school for four years, but as one of the slowest members on the team, I was there more for the exercise and the chance to hang out with my friends and cheer on our faster teammates.  I loved my cross country team and wouldn’t trade that experience for anything, but I’m still not a runner, at least not a very good one.  My preferred forms of exercise are gentle, like yoga and hiking (my hiking is at a pretty slow pace because I’m distracted with taking photographs or trying to spot a bird I hear… this happens a lot, I walk faster than I hike!).

My mom and sister are runners.  They actually enjoy running and do it both for exercise, and for fun. 

Halloween Lantern Walking Tour - Columbus Landmarks Foundation

I love Halloween – it’s my favorite holiday!  It’s in the middle of my favorite season and I love everything about it: picking out and making a costume, making and putting up fun decorations, hearing spooky stories or watching scary movies and enjoying Halloween candy and pumpkin flavored foods.  My husband, Kenneth, on the other hand, is at best ambivalent about this Fall holiday (though he does love the Fall season and pumpkin flavored foods!).  He hates dressing up (he’s essentially Jim Halpert from The Office when it comes to Halloween costumes) and he doesn’t like scary movies or stories.  He also firmly doesn’t believe in ghosts and is a little embarrassed that I do (again, very much like Jim). 

All of these reasons make it very unlikely that my husband would join me on a haunted ghost tour in downtown Columbus… but he did!  This past Sunday, Kenneth and I went on a Columbus Landmarks Foundation ghost tour, specifically the Haunted Lantern Walking Tour.  In June this summer, we attended an event co-hosted by Greenlawn Cemetery and the Columbus Landmarks Foundation called 201 Years of Stories & Stones, which was awesome!     

OHIO Pumpkin

Last night Kenneth and I went to a Fall potluck at a friend's house.  We shared warm soups, tasty chips and dip and lots of sweet desserts and candy!  We ended the night by carving pumpkins - wonderful Fall tradition!   When my sister and I were kids we started out drawing with Sharpie markers instead of carving pumpkins, once we got older we upgraded to actual carving.  Since I really don't like the feel of pumpkin 'innards' (when I peel and cut squash for recipes it irritates my skin a little - it's not itchy, but they feel weird for a few hours after) I opted to draw the Ohio University mascot, Rufus the bobcat, on our pumpkin.   The whole evening was a lot of fun - I love Fall!

Bubbles

Bubbles.  My bubbles.

Purple Shadows

Gluten-Free Quinoa Chocolate Chip Cookies

I have two gluten-free recipes I like to make that use only quinoa flour, the cookie recipe below and Bob's Red Mill Sour Cream Fudge Cupcakes.  Quinoa (pronounced "KEEN-wah"), is a small, very nutritious, gluten-free grain (it contains calcium, phosphorus, iron and essential amino acids).  Quinoa is related to spinach, beets and goosefoot (also called lamb's quarter, a common, edible weed in Ohio gardens) and is delicious!  The flour is made from ground quinoa seeds.  This year is the international year of quinoa!  Most of the festivities are being held overseas, but you can learn more about quinoa on the International Year of Quinoa 2013 website.

Smirk

My lovely, goofy husband at the Halloween Lantern Walking Tour that we went on tonight.  These ghost tours are given by the Columbus Landmarks Foundation and I'll be posting a review soon!

Bob Evans - Upper Arlington

When I was a kid, Bob Evans was one of my favorite restaurants (my sister and I had a hard time with the name though and usually called it "Bev Obbins").  Breakfast foods like scrambled eggs, omelets, biscuits, pancakes, waffles and bacon are some of my favorite foods and they're all delicious at Bob's!  We used to eat there a lot growing up, and since Bob's serves breakfast foods all day, I'm positive that I have never had anything off of their lunch or dinner menu (breakfast food for dinner is my second favorite meal, after pizza, of course!).

Love

Bruce Munro: Light at Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens

Icos

Bruce Munro: Light at Franklin Park Conservatory is an amazing new exhibition right here in Columbus!  It began on September 25th of this year and will be on view until February 8th 2014.  Bruce Munro is a light-based artist from the United Kingdom with over 30 years of practice working with light as an art form.  This is Bruce Munro’s third solo U.S. exhibition, having previously exhibited at Longwood Gardens and Cheekwood Gardens.

Autumn Chill

It finally feels like Fall in Columbus!  Cool, crisp mornings and warm sunny afternoons were the norm for most of last and part of this week, then yesterday the clouds rolled in and we've now had two rainy autumn days.  I don't mind cloudy days and when they occur infrequently they don't dampen my mood.  (Endless cloudy winter days are a completely different story!) 

The gardens this morning were covered with cold dew that reminded me of little tiny jewels! Speaking of flowers, check out how awesome these flowers look, in October, in Ohio!  

Unfurl

Suspended

Gluten-Free Rosemary Lemon Cornmeal Cookies + Recipe

These sunny little cookies are delicious!  The lemon and rosemary are refreshing together and the cornmeal adds a nice texture.  The cookies are similar to soft sugar cookies, if you want a crunchier cookie, use less lemon juice.  The dough is very soft, since I only have one silpat mat I keep the dough in the freezer in between batches.

Gluten-Free Pumpkin Mac & Cheese + Recipe

This pumpkin mac and cheese is delicious and very easy to make (plus clean-up is a easy because it can be made in one pot)! The most time consuming part of the recipe is chopping the rosemary (it takes me forever to wash the stickiness from rosemary off of my fingers!), but it's totally worth it!  The pumpkin flavor is not overwhelmingly strong and the garlic and rosemary are delicious together!  You could always increase the amount of either if you're a big fan and don't forget to try the mac and cheese with cinnamon!  It sounds strange, but is really delicious (I forgot it for the photo, but I almost always eat this dish with a dash of cinnamon sprinkled on top!).

Love = Life

Today Kenneth and I have been together as a couple for ten years!  This lovely card was waiting for me when I got home from work today.  I'm looking forward to ten more years with my best friend!

So Foxy!

My favorite kids crafts almost always involve recycling!  Tomorrow at work we're making woodland critters like these out of toilet paper tubes and coffee sleeves.  I made a few foxes as examples because they are one of Kenneth's favorite animals (but really, who doesn't like foxes?).  

These foxes haven't said much, but according to Ylvis, they should have some crazy dance moves and quite the repertoire of sounds.

Kitteh Photobooth

What's up Doc?

These are yesterday's photos of the day... I wanted a photo of each of our cats but Emma was having none of it and would not let me take her picture.  Amelia, was much more accommodating!

Photosynthesis

Spooked!

Something spooked Olivia this morning!

Sharon Woods

Schrock Lake

When Kenneth and I moved to Columbus in the summer of 2010, we were eager to discover everything the city has to offer - especially its parks!  The Columbus Metro Parks include seventeen different parks (with a new park, Rocky Fork, currently being developed), all with plenty of hiking trails and interesting habitats.  Kenneth set a goal for us, to visit all of the Metro Parks before he graduates from veterinary school in the spring of 2014.  We visited several parks shortly after our move, some of them for the first time during the Metro Parks extremely popular Winter Hike series (which we plan to participate in again this winter!).

Sharon Woods, however, was the last park we needed to visit.  In early September we finally made it happen!  It took three years, but we have now visited all of the Columbus Metro Parks at least once.  I really enjoyed our hike at Sharon Woods, I think we'll be back soon!

That Subtle Something

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.  
-Robert Louis Stevenson

Texting and Scones

Doctor Who fans should catch the reference to the season six finale of Doctor Who in the title of this blog post (for non-Whovians who are interested, there is a clip here).  This post really has nothing to do with Doctor Who or texting, just delicious, gluten-free scones.

Gluten-Free Dark Chocolate Lime Brownies + Recipe

This is the first chocolate recipe I've made in months... which is weird because I LOVE chocolate!  I found this recipe two years ago on the awesome web magazine, The Kitchn.  The combination of lime and salt with the chocolate is delicious and unique!  

Drops of Dew

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty. From Travels in Alaska by John Muir

The world globes itself in a drop of dew.
From Compensation Essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Garden of Live Flowers

However, there was the hill full in sight, so there was nothing to be done but start again. This time she came upon a large flower-bed, with a border of daisies, and a willow-tree growing in the middle. 

'O Tiger-lily,' said Alice, addressing herself to one that was waving gracefully about in the wind, 'I wish you could talk!' 

'We can talk,' said the Tiger-lily: 'when there's anybody worth talking to." 

Alice was so astonished that she could not speak for a minute: it quite seemed to take her breath away. At length, as the Tiger-lily only went on waving about, she spoke again, in a timid voice — almost in a whisper. 'And can all the flowers talk?'

From Chapter 2: Garden of Live Flowers from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Gluten-Free Orange Pumpkin Bread & Pumpkin Chicken Chili + Recipes

I enjoyed a bowl of pumpkin chicken chili and pumpkin bread for dinner tonight (while pretending that the thermostat hadn't almost reached 80 degrees today).  It's officially Fall - but it doesn't feel that way yet in Columbus!

Thankfully, it doesn't have to feel like Fall to cook or bake some chilly weather food (though I do hope it cools off soon, I'm ready for sweater, jacket and scarf weather!).

Flow