Tag Archives: Life

Nourishment Lately 1.10.21

Leave a reply

Happy Sunday, friends! I’m so excited to be writing and sharing a new Nourishment Lately post with you.

Here are 5 things that have been nourishing me lately.

These cranberry ginger oatmeal cookies! Yep, I just posted this recipe, but I’m sharing again because I am obsessed with these cookies right now. I love enjoying them as an afternoon snack with a cup of hot tea – taking my time to eat one and savoring each and every bite! They are comforting, warming, and nourishing.

Everything Is Spiritual by Rob Bell. I finished this book several weeks ago, and after reading the last page, I immediately turned to the first page to read it again. I haven’t been so inspired by a book in a long time, and my take aways from it keep growing and influencing my thoughts and actions daily. I highly recommend this book in general but especially so if you feel like you’re in a rut, or lacking connection or not finding meaning. This book may help you to recognize that it’s all already there for you.

WoodWick candles. These have been adding a serious cozy element to our tiny motor home. I’ve been lighting one of these candles either in the morning while it’s still dark and we’re making coffee, or just before making dinner. Candles make things cozy in general, but I love the sound these make as well. Lighting one of these is like having my own tiny fire.

Big salads. As much as I have been enjoying cookies lately (ha!), I have been craving fresh, raw veggies just as much. I have been making salads filled with all the raw veggies I can get as often as I can. Check out this one, here, on my Instagram page, and follow along there for more simple, quick every day recipe ideas! And check out this post, here, where I talk about tips on making epic salads!

Watching the sunrise and sunset. If there is one thing that I maybe like about winter it is the ease of watching the sunrise and sunset daily! We have been making it a point to sit down and take in the sun rise and set each day, and I have been loving it. We drink coffee with the sunrise and often have a beverage to wind down with while the sun sets. It has been so nice, and the timing is just perfect right now. I’ve been posting lots of sunset content on our motorhome life Instagram, if you’d like to follow along :).

I have a feeling that we could all use a little extra comfort and nourishment right now. I hope that wherever you are, you are able to find and enjoy the things that nourish you in this season. Also, if you are here and reading this, know that I so appreciate you! Thank you so much for being here. Have a beautiful day, and a beautiful week.

In love and nourishment//
The Dreaming Foodie

Nourishment Lately – Food, Intention, Love, Gratitude

1 Reply

I am back, to posting here on the blog, as well as to Instagram, and I couldn’t be more excited about it! Over the last weeks, a Dreaming Foodie fire has been ignited in me and I am more passionate than ever about creating and sharing content on this site. My vision and intention has never been more clear for what I want to share and why I want to share it, and I can’t wait to be bringing more recipes to all of you in 2021 and beyond.

I’m also excited about bringing back Nourishment Lately posts! I started these posts years ago, as a way to share things the that bring me nourishment – both food and non-food releated. I believe that there’s always room for a little more nourishment in our lives, so I’m super excited to be bringing these posts back. I thought that today’s Nourishment Lately post could just be a little life update and re-introduction of The Dreaming Foodie!

Over the last year or so, I have been doing a lot of work around thinking about what it is that I want to do, how I want to spend my time, what is important to me, why I do the things I do, etc. All the life things.

There are a lot of things that interest me, but one thing that has been a constant in my life, something that I come back to again and again and again is my love for food. I’ve thought a lot about that in the last year and have asked myself a lot of questions like:
– Why do I like cooking so much?
– What does it really mean to me?
– I spend so much time cooking and thinking about cooking – is that what I really want to do with my time?
– Is sharing recipes what I really want to do with my time?
– And if so, why?
– What’s my intention?

Not that I have it all figured out, but I’ve come to realize that for me, food is about more than just survival. It’s an opportunity every single day to express gratitude and love for all of life. That may sound a bit crazy to some, but for me, it’s so true. Cooking is definitely a ritual for me in my every day life, and one that I have come to associate with gratitude. It’s the act of starting with whole foods – fruits, vegetable, seeds, nuts, legumes – and taking the time to prepare and turn them into a meal that not only tastes good, but makes me feel good and nourishes my mind, body, and soul. It’s one of the biggest acts of love that I can show myself and those who I can cook for. It’s a way to express gratitude to everything and everybody that helped bring that food to my plate. Cooking and eating gives me an opportunity every single day to pause and be grateful.

Additionally, I just love to cook! I’ve been helping out in the kitchen my entire life, and started taking it seriously in my early teens. I was sprinkling flax seed on my yogurt and spreading hummus on my sandwiches before I was even in high school. I was trying to master the perfect cheesecake from scratch at 16. My love of cooking has only expanded and grown every day since, and now, I’m more confident than ever about how I eat and nourish myself. Cooking and working with food is just fun for me, it makes me feel alive, and it’s a way in which I can express creativity. There’s a quote that I love from Howard Thurman:
“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

The Dreaming Foodie is my attempt to share that love, gratitude, nourishment, aliveness and creativity that I feel with the world. It’s my way to share the recipes and ideas that inspire and nourish me, so that maybe they will inspire and nourish you as well. That’s my intention here, and going forward, I hope that you are able to feel some of that love and gratitude that goes into each recipe and post on The Dreaming Foodie. 🙂

Last, but certainly not least, I care about food and what I consume because I truly believe that what we eat is a huge factor in how we feel, or as Dr. Mark Hyman, a physician and leader in Functional Medicine, says, “Food is our number one tool for creating the vibrant health we deserve.” He also says, “We often don’t connect the dots between what’s on our plate and our mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.” Those two things inspire me greatly and are core beliefs behind everything you will see on The Dreaming Foodie.

I do not believe in calling food good or bad, and I don’t believe there is a right or wrong way to eat. But I do believe in creating a consciousness around the food that we eat. Rather than calling food good or bad, I think the focus should be on questions like:
– How does the food that we’re eating make us feel?
– What is it doing to and for our body, mind and spirit?
– Why are we eating it?
– Does it taste good? Does it bring us joy?

The recipes that I share here will be created with those questions in mind. I will share recipes using ingredients that I consider health supportive, ingredients that have purpose, and I will give the how and why I use the ingredients that I do. The recipes that I share will be ones that support my mental, physical, emotional and spiritual well-being, so that maybe they can support yours, too.

I also want to note that I have noticed that when I do consciously consume in a way that supports the health of my mind, body and soul, the gratitude and love that I talk about above flows more easily and abundantly. It’s all connected and I’ll do anything I can to (literally and figuratively) feed that flow of gratitude.

And as far as a life update, I’m currently living, cooking and nourishing out of a tiny motor home. That’s a photo of my kitchen at the start of this post. If you’d like, you can follow along on that adventure here. 🙂

In love, gratitude and nourishment//
The Dreaming Foodie

A Description of Right Now

Leave a reply

Owyhee desert. Far up the dirt road.
Forest and Greg nearby. We’re all still, on a blanket – blue, green and white stripes.
Sun, then clouds, then sun again. It’s bright, it’s warm, it’s powerful. The clouds fluffy white and the sky a brilliant blue.
The colors I see in front of me – golden, yellow, green and stone. A majestic peak and face of a mountain staring, unflinchingly, back at me.
The wind blows, but not strong. Desert grasses dance, my hair blows loose.
The sound of the wind, Forest panting, birds chirping every now and then.
I sit, I lay, I write, I think. This is right here, right now.

That was an entry in my journal from May 2, 2020, that I called ‘A Description of Right Now.’ Greg, Forest and I spent 8+ hours in the spot that you see in the photo above. We hiked around a good bit, but much of our day was spent right there. At one point I was journaling and found myself thinking a lot about the future and past, and realized that I needed to come into the present. I decided to turn the page, and write a description of right now. I tried not to think about it too much, I just wrote, and then took the photos above.

It worked well, and I am now so glad that I have those words and photos. ‘A description of right now’ just might become a thing for me :).

City of Trees

Leave a reply

It’s been awhile since I’ve published anything here, but I’ve received a lot of requests about life updates, and I thought that this would be a good way to share what’s new.

Greg and I are officially residents of Idaho! While the journey to here and now started long ago, I am going to start with 3 weeks ago – the end of September. My last day of work was September 19, and that was also the day that Greg and I left for a short vacation with my family to Burlington, VT. We drove to Albany, NY on the 19th and then to Burlington on the 20th. We had awesome weather and an amazing time – highlights included biking and walking to everywhere we went, the Burlington Farmers’ Market, August First, Citizen Cider, The Skinny Pancake, biking the Island Line Trail and exploring Red Rocks Park.

*Note: all photos in this post are unedited, straight from my phone 🙂

We drove from Burlington back to Adams County on the 23rd, and then the 24th and 25th were focused solely on packing. We had done a lot of cleaning out prior to the 24th but had nothing actually packed. Those two days consisted of packing all of our belongings from the time we woke up to the time we went to sleep. At the end of the day on the 25th, everything we were taking to Idaho was in one room of our house.

We moved our stuff across the country with UPack. You load all of your stuff into a moving cube, and it is shipped across the country for you. We chose to load and unload our stuff at the trucking terminal rather than at our house because it was the cheaper option. So the 26th was dedicated to loading our UPack. With the help of Greg’s stepdad, we loaded the belongings from the room pictured above into a moving cube. I had some serious doubts about fitting everything in, but we somehow managed to fit nearly everything. Just a few small things had to stay behind. Once we were done, we closed and locked the doors and said goodbye to our stuff for more than a week. The next time we saw it would be in Boise!


After our UPack was loaded, we had 5 days left in Pennsylvania and those were filled with visits and taking care of last minute things. We wanted to get to bed early on the 1st, the day before we left, but that didn’t happen and that was okay. We were up at 4 a.m. on the day we left, the 2nd, and we pulled out of our driveway while it was still dark, at 5:45 a.m. The stars were so bright and clear on the morning that we left, and I sat on our back deck with Forest one last time before we left that morning.

Our first day of driving was our longest, 12 hours of drive time. We drove from Aspers, PA to East Moline, IL. We drove through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois on day one. East Moline is right on the border of Illinois and Iowa – right along the Mississippi River. We arrived at our AirBnb at around 6:30 p.m., settled in with Ivy and Forest and then ate delicious Mexican take-out from a spot we found once we got there – Adolphs. The drive went by pretty quickly on day one, even though it was the least scenic and longest day. We had packed our coffee, breakfast and lunch for each day in a cooler in the car, which worked out so well and enabled our stops to be super quick. 

Anyone who had talked with me before the move knows that I was nervous about how Forest and Ivy would do in the car. Traditionally, Forest doesn’t settle down during car rides and Ivy just doesn’t do them, so to put them in a completely packed up car for 12 hours had me a bit nervous. Well – not only did it go better than expected, it actually went incredibly well! Ivy actually seemed to enjoy it, so much so that we joked that we would take him for rides just for fun from now on. And Forest was such a trooper for being cooped up for so long. We could not have been happier with how they did. 🙂

Day two was another early day – we were all packed up and on the road by 5:45 a.m. We drove from East Moline to Cheyenne, WY. The drive was again not that scenic until we reached western Nebraska. The landscape became beautiful in western Nebraska which was a welcome sight. We arrived in Cheyenne at around 5:30 p.m. Our AirBnb was about 10 minutes outside of the city of Cheyenne and we had the most gorgeous view of the sunset. We got Forest and Ivy settled into the space, and then Greg and I drove into the town to pick up Thai takeout. The town was adorable and I would like to visit again someday for sure. 

Day three was our final day! We were on the road again at 5:45 a.m., but with a quick stop for hot coffee for our drive. We had packed cold brew in our cooler, but with temperatures in the 30’s in Cheyenne when we left, we were craving some hot coffee to start our trip. The sunrise and drive through Wyoming was incredible. We took so many photos and videos out the window and could not stop commenting on how gorgeous the scenery was. Wyoming is a beautiful state, and it just got better and better as we drove through northern Utah.

We were so excited when we crossed into Idaho and the drive from the border to Boise seemed like it took forever just because we were so ready to get there. We drove through some pretty heavy rain in southern Idaho, but we were greeted by a beautifully sunny day when we pulled into our apartment complex at about 5:30 p.m.

Not only did we not see our apartment before moving in, we had never been to Idaho at all. We knew that the moment we first saw our apartment would be exciting, and it was, and it was also a super pleasant surprise. We are so grateful that we loved the space as soon as we saw it. 

We arrived in Boise on Friday, October 4, and wouldn’t be unpacking our UPack until Monday, so we had a pretty empty apartment for the first few days. Once Monday came, Greg and I were up super early to get to our UPack, drive our stuff to our apartment and haul everything up the three flights of stairs. It was a long day and we were spent at the end of it, but we were so happy to have our stuff and be able to start making our apartment our home.

We’ve been in Boise – the City of Trees – for a week now and we are absolutely loving it. We love our apartment and it’s location within the city, and the city itself is amazing. We are able to get on our bikes at our apartment and go anywhere we need to go. We’ve been hiking, mountain biking, gone to farmers’ markets, coffee shops, a brewery and all of the grocery stores. All of that is bike-able or walk-able from out apartment and I love that lifestyle. Boise has a paved commuter trail that runs the entire way around the city and we are ale to hop on that right from our apartment complex – either on our bikes or with Forest for a walk. The scenery is incredible every where you look.

We can’t wait to see what is in store for us in the City of Trees!

 

Make-Your-Own Mountain Pies

Leave a reply

Today’s post is not a recipe, but an idea that I’m so excited to share. Fall is the perfect time to have a make-your-own mountain pie get-together!

To start, for those who don’t know what mountain pies are, they are basically pressed sandwiches that are made over a fire. I grew up eating mountain pies, but recently realized that there are lots of people who don’t know what they are. All that you need to make them is your favorite sandwich ingredients, a fire and a mountain pie maker – which are inexpensive and easy to come by.

I grew up eating super traditional mountain pies – it was either pizza (tomato sauce, cheese, pepperoni) or dessert (canned pie filling). Not that there’s anything wrong with those traditional combos, but a couple of years ago, we started having ‘gourmet’ mountain pie parties at my parents house, and my mountain pie experience will never be the same. Instead of sticking to those traditional ingredients, my mom and I prepared a ton of different ingredients, then laid everything out so that it was a make-your-own mountain pie bar. We’ve had these get-togethers several times over the last few years, and although it can be a lot of work (especially for a big group of people), it is always so fun and so delicious. I thought I’d share the idea today, as well as some ingredient ideas and some of our favorite ‘gourmet’ mountain pie combinations!

The key to a make-your-own mountain pie bar is to have a wide variety of ingredients in a few categories of foods – you need a variety of meats, vegetables, cheeses, sauces/condiments and ‘extras.’ It’s nice to have all of the ingredients prepped and in small bowls/containers and then laid out on a table next to the fire. It can take some time and can be a bit of work, but if you set aside enough time, it can be a lot of fun to get everything ready. One other note – the type of bread that you use does make a difference. Use a high quality bread of your choice for the best results. The last time Greg and I made mountain pies, we used homemade sourdough from a local bakery (Gettysburg Baking Company!), and it was amazing.

Here are some mountain pie ingredient ideas:

Meats: pulled chicken or pork, ground beef, bacon, smoked salmon, ham
Vegetables: onions (raw or caramelized), peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, broccoli, spinach
Fruits: peaches, apples, berries, bananas
Cheese: cheddar, swiss, provolone, goat cheese, mozzarella, feta, cream cheese, gouda, parmesan
Sauces/condiments: mustard, pesto, barbecue sauce, hot sauce, tomato sauce, peanut butter, salad dressings, salsa
Extras: capers, olives, banana peppers, artichokes, saurkraut, fresh herbs (basil, thyme, rosemary), chocolate, marshmallows, nuts (like pecans, walnuts, peanuts), brown sugar, fruit jam, lemon curd

And some combination ideas:

Savory:
Bacon, peach, goat cheese (herbs would be good on this too)
Tomato, caramelized onion, olive, caper, mozzarella
Chicken, caramelized onion, saurkraut and cheddar
Chicken, banana peppers, cream cheese, cheddar cheese, hot sauce
Ground beef, mushrooms, banana peppers, tomato sauce, mozzarella, parmesan
Chicken, mushroom, pesto, gouda
Ham, broccoli, mustard, gouda
Smoked salmon, tomato, capers, cream cheese
Pulled pork, onions, peppers, barbecue sauce, provolone
Ham, apple, mustard, cheddar
Chicken, salsa, cheddar
Spinach, caramelized onion, artichoke, parmesan, feta

Sweet:
Cream cheese, berries, brown sugar
Banana, peanut butter, chocolate
Marshmallow, chocolate, banana, peanuts
Cream cheese, peaches, pecans, brown sugar
Cream cheese, lemon curd
Peanut butter, jam, peanuts

So, that’s it! The mountain pie filling ideas are endless, so pick your favorite foods and try it out. Honestly, the craziest combinations are usually the tastiest mountain pies! Another key when you have a big group of people is to have the bread pre-buttered. That way, each person can just grab their bread, place it buttered side down in the mountain pie maker, top it as they please and then put it in the fire until pressed and toasted.

This post has me craving another make-your-own mountain pie night! If you have any awesome mountain pie combination ideas, or any questions about the process, let me know in the comments below!