goodbye spring break

Today is the last day of my spring break. I'm back at school now and back in the library catching up before classes start tomorrow. It was so hard to leave home this morning, but at least I know I'll be back in just a few weeks (seven counts as a few right?)

April is going to be busy. Aside from all the assignments I have to do it'll also be my last full month of school. Crazy!

i made a pie!

I made an apple pie y'all!
I've always thought of pies as extremely complicated things to make, and I don't actually know why it is that I thought that except maybe for the fact that I had never seen a pie made from scratch before. This past year one of the things on my "21 before 22" list was to make a cheesecake in a springform pan, but I think that making a pie is a worthy substitute. I had an early birthday dinner with my family tonight, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to try out pie making. I used this recipe from A Beautiful Mess, and I used vanilla instead of bourbon only because we didn't have any bourbon on hand. I also used Trader Joe's frozen pie crust, because it was my first pie ever and I felt like I was entitled to a shortcut.




It was actually a lot easier to make than I thought it would be. I used my Mandoline to slice up the apples after I peeled them and from there pretty much all I had to do was whisk together the other ingredients for the filling and pour them over the apples.

Next time I will definitely make the crust from scratch as well. Got any pie recipes to share?

a coconut breve and an americano with room

I'm home for spring break this week and very much enjoying relaxing and not writing papers. I spent the weekend hanging out around the house with my mom and my grandparents, and today I met up with Lena for coffee.
We went to our regular spot, Jameson Brown. Lena introduced me to it a few years ago and it has (in my humble opinion) the best coffee in the world. I'm hooked on their Coconut Breves.
I hope your Monday was as lovely as mine. :]

Bittersweet

It may be the first day of spring, but it's rainy here so Nicole and I decided to make a spontaneous trip to Bittersweet today.

If you live in the Bay Area and like chocolate then you have to get a hot chocolate from Bittersweet, it is the best hot chocolate I've ever had.

san francisco

As you can see, I'm still working out the kinks with this whole posting regularly thing. We'll get there! I promise.

Last weekend my friend Lena came up from LA to visit me during her spring break. It was so nice having her here! I've never had a friend has come up to Mills to see me before.

I've been up here for so long that I'm used to everything, but Lena had never been to Mills, so when I was showing her around it felt like I was seeing everything with new eyes. I kept remembering what it was like to see the bay area for the first time and it was nice to get to see it from that perspective again. This might just be a symptom of my senioritis though. Any excuse to get sentimental as graduation approaches.

But anyway, we spent a lot of the weekend in San Francisco wandering around the Mission and Japantown and we got to catch a few of the Signal Flow concerts, which were excellent. It was so awesome that it makes me sad that it'll probably be the last time that I have someone visit me up here! There I go again with the sentimentality.


Waiting for the bus.


Tartine!


Pastrami


Best coconut tart in the world.


Sign we found in the Mission that pretty much encapsulates my feelings about Pho.