Tag Archives: fun

How to cook pasta

adulting, , , , , , ,

Dear millennials, adulting is difficult. As a result, I’m going to cover here the things that I’ve slowly learned over the last few years. Tiny steps that I’ve made towards being an adult that I am actually pretty proud of. As a heads up, they’re mostly going to be recipes that surprised me as actually pretty easy to make.

Whenever I open Instagram (which is more often than I would like), there are basically two types posts: dogs and food. My response to dogs = awwww! and food = oooo yummm! But whenever I read the recipes from professional food bloggers, I’m always intimidated by how many ingredients there are (endless), how beautifully it is put together (even filters can’t save me from that), and the fact that it is always portioned for 4-8 people (I’m either 1, at most 2. maaayybe 4 if we do leftovers, 8 if I end up hating my leftovers). As much as I love the food pictures I’m scrolling through, I never imagine myself making it. Everything about it seemed so perfect, and as an extension, so daunting.

For dinner tonight, how about I just stick to my boiled pasta + canned sauce instead?

So here’s my first post on #adulting. Let’s start with making pasta at home:

You’ll need:

                   Pasta                   Pasta Sauce                Salt + Olive Oil                    Potingredients

Steps:

pastacomic

  1. boil water
  2. put pasta in a pot, along with the hot water (add a bit of salt and olive oil to improve taste) and leave it to boil for 13-15 minutes
  3. separate the pasta from the water using a strainer (or however you can separate them, even with a fork or spatula)
  4. pour sauce over the cooked pasta
  5. Enjoy!
Need help with the ingredients?
pasta1pasta
Pasta: you can buy a box from your grocery store. Anything you like – long ones, short ones, fat ones, tiny ones…[forget the fancy Italian names if that’s too much for you – the pappardelle, fettucine, rigatoni…], you can always stick with spaghetti, that’s Italian!
Pasta sauce: also from the store, choose whatever you like. they’re usually right next to the pasta boxes

Special shout out to Marko Mille for illustrating. Check out her other work on instagram @marko_mille.

 

COLORING BOOK

Psychology, , , , ,

My good friend Jenny was visited me in Chicago this weekend. It was a memorable weekend exploring different chi-neighborhoods, attending local cultural events, and showing her my chi-city life (i.e. brunch/workout/drink). In fact, we did so many fun things this past three days, I can’t decide which one to highlight, but stay tuned for my post next week for some of the things we did 🙂

SecretGardenShe also surprised me with a gift – thank you love!! It’s a coloring book called Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Coloring Book, which has elaborate garden designs to color in. She also bought me a set of 24 color pencils, something that I haven’t touched for way too many years. Along with the present, she also expressed that coloring has therapeutic effects, which intrigued me to read more about this. 
ColorPencilSetof24It turns out that coloring book for adults have become so popular that it makes the Top 10 Bestseller Book on Amazon. It is becoming a phenomenon not just within the US but also worldwide, where people are using these beautifully outlined pages as a way to de-stress or lower their anxiety levels.

Research has supported that this works! In an experiment, people were asked to complete an anxiety-inducing task, and then after engage in 20-minutes of coloring session. They were either coloring 1) on a blank piece of paper; 2) on a plaid design (below) that is basically crisscrossing of straight lines ;3) on a mandala, an elaborate and repetitive pattern often seen in Indian religions and associated with meditation. PlaidDesignThey found that after 20 minutes, those who colored the plaid design or the mandala had significantly lower anxiety levels, whereas those who merely colored on blank paper did not relieve any stress. Additionally, they found that there is no difference in how much stress was reduced between coloring the mandala, which is much more difficult to design, and the simple crossing lines that could be drawn on Word. However, I suspect that the reason all the coloring books out there right now are closer to the mandala designs is because marketers and designers would opt for the fancier and prettier option to attract consumer attention. Shoppers might be less intrigued to buy a coloring book made of just straight lines, which I could probably draw with a ruler and a piece of paper myself. PagesinsideSecretGardenCannot wait to start coloring these beautiful pages in the Secret Garden! While I have a set of 24 color pencils, the participants in the experiment only had 6. I wonder if having 4x more choices will make me more stressed out – a choice-overload problem?

MyfriendJennyandI

Miss you already! With Love, Steph