Cafe Yumm is knocked off!

I'm a stud....well to put it more humbly, I'm proud of myself right now. : ) That's better. I didn't rob Cafe Yumm....literally.....just sorta......I was just being proactive about my situation.....someone else started it. A total stranger, ripped off their Yumm Sauce recipe, posted it on their blog, I found it, and have since used it to my advantage. That's all. : )

Recently, I finally convinced Chad to go to Cafe Yumm with me. It was quite a feat considering it's vegetarian food and he's a complete guy's guy. But Cafe Yumm is very mainstream for vegesaurus food, which is probably why they are popping up everywhere like the spiders near my front door. Don't ask me how many spiderwebs Chad has run into while walking from the garage to our front door.....tehe....at least I think it's funny. Anyway, back to the Yumm story. For him, vegetarian food = hippie food, or weird chic food. I once tried to get him into Laughing Planet Cafe, yeah right! Once he saw there was no meat on the menu and half the customers had dreadlocks and exposed, hairy armpits, he begged to leave. So, you can now understand why it has taken me a few years to get Chad into Cafe Yumm.

For any who don't know, Cafe Yumm specializes in "Yumm bowls" which feature, rice, beans, and Yummy sauce, with toppings (diced tomato, avocado slices, olives, shredded cheese, and sour cream), all served warm. Yumm+MMmmmmmmmm. And Chad concurred!!!! Ha! When we were done, we wanted more. Chad said, "I bet we could make this at home." I said, "I know....we just need the recipe for the sauce and the rest would be as easy as falling asleep in Sacrement Meeting on High Council Sunday....JK......my dad-in-law just got called to the High Council so I had to put a wise-crack in.

Well, I did it. I can make a Yumm bowl from scratch, and I mean, SCRATCH scratch. The best part is that the main ingredients are rice and beans.....hello....perfect for food storage and super cheap, and tasty, and easy, and the list goes on.

First I found the sauce knock-off recipe online. It had some funky stuff in it, but it turned out great. Among the ingredients were garbonzo beans, and soybeans. The first time I used canned garbonzos and silken tofu....but I knew I could get the recipe to be much cheaper by using dry beans, and cooking them myself.

Armed with the internet and my cooking skills I bought dry beans in bulk from WinCo, dirt cheap man. I had NO IDEA how to make my black beans go from dry, to the kind in the can. I knew they had to be soaked, and I thought that was it. So I soaked them overnight. When I sampled them in the morning, they were chewable, but not like normal beans....eeek. So I soaked them another night....lol....how embarrassing. (oh yeah, one of the tubs overfilled onto the counter because I didn't know how much the beans expanded) The next day, they tasted exactly the same. But luckily the internet rescued me, and taught me that I have to cook them.....oh dear.....that should have been obvious. I cooked them in some water for an hour on the stove, and my beans were like canned beans, but cheaper! So now, I can make Yumm bowls with my beans from food storage.

So, Cafe Yumm, I regret to inform you that I will no longer be your customer, but I will always admire your modern dining areas, and your ability to make "hippie-food" popular among the masses.

Crater Lake

This summer, Chad and I took a weekend trip to Crater Lake. Neither of our families are big on camping, so we had ever been there....which I felt was pretty shameful. Crater Lake is famous around the world after all! But we still didn't really know what to expect. HOLY MOSES!!! It's AMAZING!!! We couldn't believe our eyes! I didn't know water could be that blue.....at least not in America. I thought I would have to see Grecian oceans to see water that blue, but nope! After our excursion, I consider Crater Lake to be the sapphire of the northwest. Why didn't people tell us how beautiful it was?!
Okay, I always thought water was the color of the sky (cuz water reflects what the sky looks like)....but that is not entirely true. An information board explained why Crater Lake is so blue, and then I remembered that I had learned about it in middle school....tehe. So, I'm going to try to explain it, cuz it's so cool, but I know it will be confusing...but you just have to know how it works....cuz the world is so neat! Basically, colors are bouncing around everywhere, and we can't see them. Colors are constantly hitting everything. Let's say they hit your red car. The paint in your car has tons of different elements/chemicals etc, and it absorbs all the colors except for RED, the red is refracted back, and that is why your car looks red, because all the other colors were absorbed (i don't know how, sorry...lol) but the red bounces back to your eye. I hope that generally makes sense, I'm not an expert. Anyway, let's apply this to Crater Lake. At the bottom of the lake rests weird elements and chemicals that absorb all colors except blue, so the color bouncing back into our eyes, is blue. Hurrah!
It was surreal.
Phantom Ship, see it?
Can you believe that's water?
Closer angle of Phantom Ship.








We had planned to ride our bikes around the lake.....yeah right!!!! Tons of websites had advertised bike riding....so we took our bikes. You would be a serious nutter if you rode your bike there. The road is SOOOO thin (I made Chad drive), and STEEP (I don't think we could have even gotten over half of those hills on bikes...torture!), plus you can rarely see the lake from it.....LAME! Basically, all you can do there is hike. Cool, I LOVE to hike.....Chad on the other hand hikes because I like it. Weird huh? I thought all guys liked hiking....isn't it supposed to be the other way around, where the hubby is always trying to convince the wife to go hiking, then he learns to never take her cuz she complains too much? (Chad didn't complain though) So, I saw this really cool trail, and I convinced Chad to take it. It wasn't even bad, plus we got incredible views.

It was a great little getaway. But because there was only hiking, and no biking, we only stayed one night (instead of 2) so we could get back to our dog....lol. We took her to the coast the next day instead.
Isn't he cute?

SEATTLE and BELLEVUE!!!

So....I went to visit my sister in Bellevue, Washington in June, and I still haven't posted anything about it. tehe. I took the train. Not only was it a bargain, but I LOVED IT!!! It was so relaxing. I liked it so much, I would take a trip just for the train ride. Plus, all the train stations have these intricate architectural details. I love the charm of old architecture, and the train stations certainly don't disappoint.
This is where my sister, Nicole, works. It's like living in a magazine....it just gleams. She works in this huge design showcasing place, where tons of designers display their pieces ranging from light fixtures, to furniture, to fabric, carpet, rugs, everything you can think of...I think it's 5 stories high, and brimming with the most gorgeous things you could ever imagine.
So, Bellevue is Seattle's eastside neighbor. I know they call Seattle the Emerald City, but its more like Water World. Everywhere you turn there is water, whether it's fountains, bays, waterfalls, streams....it's ever-flowing and glistening. This is a picture taken from the road Nicole drives on everyday to get to work. Serene!
More water.

Here I am at the FIRST Starbucks ever!!! Although I don't drink coffee, and I'm sure there are plenty of bad things about Starbucks, I do appreciate how they brought the coffeeshop lifestyle to America. I love to sit in their modern cafes and read while drinking tea. They have really been able to make it popular in the US, and not just Europe.
What do you know, another fountain!
And another one
And another one....in Bellevue. This is among the most beautiful parks ever!!!
This fountain is close to the space needle, and music project. Surrounding it are all these really unique benches. We couldn't resist a photo shoot.








Snow-qual-me falls. I don't know how to spell it, but that's how it's pronounced.




What a fun time!!! I want to go back and visit! I love Bellevue! Thank you Choles!