what jen does

Life, home, and a little travel

Category: Uncategorized

  • weekend in review

    weekend in review

    It’s Monday morning and the weather man told me that today would be a perfect beach day. Sadly, I’ll be sitting in a swivel desk chair for most of the day instead of smelling like sunblock and cruising through magazines. That being said, the weekend was pretty dreamy and including lots of quality time with…

  • galette season!
    recipes

    galette season!

    Ever since I made the first galette, I’ve been dying to make another one. While it would have been easy to just make the same-ish version I had already made (I’m still loaded with ice cream), I figured I should take advantage of the seemingly endless supply of tomatoes from my parents garden. While some…

  • Roasted tomatoes with goat cheese on naan
    recipes

    Roasted tomatoes with goat cheese on naan

    It takes a fair amount to get me to turn on the oven in the summer. I don’t have one of those fancy apartments where the heat tends to stay inside the oven. If I set the oven to 375 F, my apartment tends to turn into 375 F. But, when summer calls for heat…

  • Berry Galette with Salted Caramel Ice Cream
    recipes

    Berry Galette with Salted Caramel Ice Cream

    I had dinner with someone this past weekend who continued to mispronounce quinoa repeatedly over the course of 3 hours. He pronounced it “QWIN-O-WAH” and I pronounced it “KEEN-WAH”. I’m too much of a lady – and fundamentally it made me feel awkward – to confront the situation so we both just continued to reference…

  • Turning 30: Building Your Team

    Turning 30: Building Your Team

    I think one of the best things about getting older is that you know more about what you need and where to get it from. I like to refer to this as “building a team”. I’ve been building my team for 30 years now but not really realized it until quite recently. I know now…

  • Turning 30: Independence

    Turning 30: Independence

    Turning 30 is different things for different people. I’ll be honest and say that I haven’t always had the easiest time adjusting to the impending threshold. Initially, it made me feel like I should have more accomplished. Five years ago, I would have expected that by 30 I would be married and probably have a…

  • Quinoa Cakes with Grilled Asparagus & Goat Cheese
    recipes

    Quinoa Cakes with Grilled Asparagus & Goat Cheese

    Like I said last week, I haven’t really been cooking. I’ve even been habitually buying lunch – which is just really not me. After all, I did eat crockpot pomegranate chicken for like 9 work days last summer. I’m dedicated to the cause of saving a few bucks each day. But tonight, I felt a smidge inspired…

  • Life Lately

    Life Lately

    Not many things have seemed worthy of a whole post… but the cumulative effort of the last month or so has been pretty great… in an uneventful way. Which is just fine by me. It’s a lot of prosciutto eating, skyline gawking, and rolling on the floor/lawn with a new family puppy.

  • prepping for 30

    prepping for 30

    In about a month I will be turning 30. That means I’ll have been around for 3 complete runs of the series Friends – which was on for 10 seasons. I’ve been thinking about turning the big 3 times 10 for about 8 months I would say. I’ve even gone so far as to take…

  • english muffin bread
    recipes

    english muffin bread

    This is a story of how I killed the yeast and brought it back to life. There is only one picture of the entire thing because I was quite convinced the entire time it was a slow moving car accident. Over the past few weeks, I have been attempting to purge my apartment of things…