Noelle likes Good Food

Yesterday was a great day. I spent the morning volunteering at an Organic Medicinal Herb Garden that is run through my university and harvested some herbs for making tinctures. Then I came home and harvested some garden vegetables and herbs and spent the rest of the day experimenting in the kitchen. Those are my favorite kind of days :).   This is somewhat of a tangent but something I have been thinking about lately. I have realized that I struggle with living in the present because all I can think about is the future. I think about what I want to accomplish and learn and can easily get overwhelmed by all the things I wish I was/could be doing RIGHT NOW. Since there is never going to be an infinite amount of time or an infinite amount of energy I realize I must work more at being present.  Something that I know helps to ground me is by working out in the garden. It has a way of bringing the here and now into focus. I can only think about what can be harvested and used...

 This was a particularly delicious lunch I made the other day. I came home from school very hungry and remembered I had some leftover cooked spaghetti squash in the fridge.  Here are the players. 3 cloves of garlic, about 10 medium sized basil leaves,  2 cups of arugula, 2 cups spaghetti squash, salt, pepper, lots of red pepper flakes, and a sprinkling of parmesan. I put a little olive oil in a pan and sauteed the garlic. I added all the other ingredients and cooked until everything was heated through. I dumped it all in a bowl and sprinkled parmesan on top. It was delicious! In other news, I met with my academic advisor today at school. We came up with plan that will have me graduating in Spring 2013. I wrote out what I need to take for each semester to be able to finish. I am very excited to have a goal to work towards. It will be a little rough with having to complete 6 more science courses in three semesters. But I believe I am up to the challenge. I also found o...

Hey everyone! I can't believe I have only blogged once since classes started back in January. I was challenged in many ways, but it was a great first semester, and I finished my last final on May 5th. I decided not to take any classes over the summer, and will start back up in the fall. Since school has been out I have catered a wedding, worked a lot, and last week I had surgery. The surgery went really well, and I have just been resting and healing since then.  Now, onto the purpose of this post. Besides all the working and resting, I have been gardening. I don't know a lot about gardening. My strategy has been to prepare myself as much as I can through research and reading gardening books, and then do it myself and learn from my failures and successes. This year I started everything from seed and some stuff has done better than others.  Here are my pepper plants. I have had problems with little bugs on the undersides of the leaves and I am reading around to try and f...