sundried tomato avocado pesto (or, being vegan is a cinch!)

Over the past few months I have debated whether I should challenge myself to do a "vegan month" - I figured it wouldn't be too tricky since I'm already mostly vegetarian on weekdays (ah, the combined frugality and laziness of a grad student).  But then I would think long and hard, and visions of cheese, lattes, ice cream, and most importantly morning omelettes/scrambled eggs/savoury breakfast of any sort would dance around in my head, and I would sigh and think "another month, perhaps".  Last week I decided to finally make a compromise, and simply do a "vegan home cooked dinners month" - enough flexibility to give me my cheesy omelettes but also something to motivate me to cook more interesting meals on weeknights! 

Tonight, I made a sun-dried tomato avocado pesto spaghetti, taken from Blissful Basil. It was delicious, creamy, and savoury, and didn't take very long at all. I paired it with garlic mashed cauliflower mixed with nutritional yeast flakes (which apparently mimic the taste of cheese).

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Ingredients

• Half a jar of sundried tomatoes
• 1 avocado
• Lots of basil leaves!
• 2 chopped cloves of garlic 
• 1 package of spaghetti 
• 3 tablespoons of lemon juice 

Supa Straightforward Steps

Put avocado, sundried tomatoes, basil leaves, garlic and lemon juice in a small hand blender (or food processor).

Blend! Add more lemon juice/sundried tomatoes to reach the consistency you prefer.

Add sauce to prep'd spaghetti. 

Before and after blending pesto

A very green summer.

Providence, RI.

Dear non-existent reader population: after a year-long hiatus (i.e. a mostly unsuccessful switch to tumblr), I am back! Things that have happened during my absence include starting grad school and moving to a new city, but perhaps I'll bore you with a ramble about that in another post.  One relevant detail that I will mention is that one of the grandest perks of research is the wonderful opportunity to travel for conferences!  A couple months ago, I travelled to Providence, Rhode Island to present a poster at an acoustics conference.  The conference, aside from instilling a healthy dose of impostor syndrome in me, made me realize how broad the discipline was - attendees included music researchers, biologists, linguists and engineers - I even met someone who worked on hardware development for Google glass!  I learned a lot, received good (or perhaps harsh) feedback about my project, and snapped a few photos on my daily walk from the apartment I was staying to the conference centre. Here they are in all their glory!  

living spaces

When I first bought my new camera in May, I fiddled around with it mostly by taking various test shots of people's apartments and houses (my own included), since I still had my kit wide angle lens.   A few months later, having stumbled upon the photos by accident, I noticed there was something that was a little nostalgic and interesting about photographs of living spaces. Here are a few that I particularly liked. 

This is my sister.

This is somebody's grandmother.

I'm not sure who she is. 

summatime greeeeeen