I took a few photos a couple of weeks ago, when Trist and I visited our friend Josh at The Piercing Urge in Prahran. Trist got his knuckles tattooed again, and I lurked behind my camera like the introvert I am.
Also, this old building had me freaking out, it's stunning! Look at those perfect boarded-up windows , uggghhh.
x A
Ps: how is it November already? Am I taking crazy pills or what?!
Well, since my cookie recipe post got 53 views (FIFTY THREE??!! I am not even over-reacting, that is literally the most views I've ever had in my entire history of blogging), I figured it was time a for second KINDA HEALTHY RECIPE. So. I wouldn't exactly call this "healthy" (cream cheese isn't exactly renowned for it's health benefits, SHOCK), but I did my best to make this healtier by replacing the refined sugar with stevia and the butter with coconut oil. I also used Mayver's Peanut Butter Cacao spread from the health food isle in my local supermarket, which is literally just peanut butter and cacao without any added sugar, salt or preservatives. There are all kinds of fancy/awesome vegan alternatives to cream cheese you could attempt, but I'm just not ready to commit myself to soaking cashews for 6 hours just for a cheesecake. If I do, I'll let you know about it.
INGREDIENTS.
For the crust:
250 grams of digestive biscuits (thats like, 14 biscuits roughly)
1/3 cup coconut oil, melted
1 tbsp Mayver's Peanut Butter Cacao spread (found in most Australian supermarkets)
100 grams of raw peanuts, roasted (roast them yourself for 20 minutes at 180 degrees in the oven)
2 tbsp stevia
1/4 cup raw cacao power (or regular cocoa powder)
For the filling:
500g cream cheese. I avoid "light" cream cheese as it typically contains more sugar than "full fat" (Hint: zap your cheese in the microwave for about a minute so it's easier to work with).
1/2 cup stevia (or less if you're not a raging sugar addict like I am)
375g jar of Mayvers Peanut Butter Cacao spread
1 tsp vanilla bean paste
1/2 tsp himalayan pink salt
1 cup water
METHOD.
For the crust:
Blitz all ingredients in a food processor until a sandy mixture forms.
Press into the base of a 23cm springform cake tin and put in the freezer to set while you make your filling.
If your base seems slightly oily, don't stress. The coconut oil will harden up in the freezer.
For the filling:
Blitz all ingredients except water in food processor until well combined.
Slowly add in a cup of water with the food processor running, so that the mixture becomes smooth and creamy.
Pour mixture into the springform cake tin over the base, then set in freezer for about half an hour.
Now please enjoy your cake and this photo of me lookin' weird.
So, according to the terms and conditions I set myself when I started this blog re: photo a day challenge ("and if I get slack and miss a day/week, then the devil will eat my soul"), I am now unfortunately a soulless heathen. So to inspire and motivate my terrible blog skillz, I'm aiming to blog a monthly volume of random things I consider to be GOOD SHIT.
GOOD SHIT, Vol 1.
Number one. This mystical human creature with the enchanting voice is indeed my little sister, who launched this stupidly beautiful voice into the world only a few months ago after years of quietly teaching herself the guitar and singing songs in secret. To say I'm proud is an understatement. To say that I want to burst into tears and pinch her cheeks and squish her lil face is a more accurate description of my feelings.
Number two. NOFX. Trist and I have tickets to see NOFX next month so, of course, that's all we've been listening to. I've declared this song my personal Theme Song, because I hate weekends and people.
"I never really liked Fridays, can't do what I wanna do. Sold out at the movies, can't eat at the restaurants. Everybody want a good time, but the bar's full of cigarette smoke. I think I'll stay home, I think I'll wait for Monday."
Which is a nice segue to number 3:
Number three.The Introvert Advantage: How to Trive in an Extrovert World
About a year ago, I noticed that I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable in social situations. Not in an anxious kind of way, but I was finding myself exhausted, overwhelmed and generally frustrated after spending time socialising or out and about in crowds. I was seeking alone time more than I had before in my life, and I found myself withdrawing from situations that were starting to drain me on a daily basis- both mentally and physically. I started getting down on myself, thinking there was something wrong with me, and wondering why everybody else seemed "charged up" by the very same things that were draining me (ie: clubbing: fun times for all/my personal version of hell). I don't recall how I came about this book but I'm glad I did, because it explained introversion and extroversion in a way that I could personally identify with and, most importantly, it made me realise that I was perfectly normal- albeit being in the minority group of introverts. Since reading this book, I now not only embrace my traits as an introvert, but I actually see it as a positive attribute. Good shit.
Number four. As mentioned in one of my last posts, I'm obsessed with documentaries. I'm mainly interested in learning all I can about our food and our health. The world is a fucking crazy place and, before I whip out my tin foil hat, let me just say this: I believe that it is profoundly important to take control of your own life and your own health, question the things you've always been told are true, and to exercise your right to seek alternative ways of living and thriving. The older I get, the less I believe and the more I want to know. 'The Quest for the Cures... Continues" is an 11 part series that is freaking blowing my mind with information. It centers around the cure, treatment and prevention of cancer from the opinions of real doctors and experts, but touches on a LOT of good shit that I think everybody should at least be aware of (ie: GMO's, toxins, pesticides, nutrition). To me, it's been (so far, at only 3 episodes in) eye opening, a little bit scary, a little bit sad, but totally empowering. Cancer fucking sucks. Just WATCH.
Number five.
NYX Extra Creamy Round Lipstick in Bruised, because it's vampy as fuck.
This was originally posted on the Fatlip Apparel lifestyle blog, so 100 awesome points to you if you've already seen it.
I love cookies. Like, I fucking love cookies. But I also enjoy not being morbidly obese and dying of diabetes, so I invented what I consider the perfect cookie; gooey, sweet, overloaded with chocolate chips, but without the extra processed sugar, butter and refined white flour.
INGREDIENTS.
2 cups spelt flour (I've used both wholemeal and white, and both are fine. Wholemeal makes a slightly denser cookie, while white gives these cookies a more chewy texture.)
1/4 cups of unrefined coconut oil. Melt it first in the microwave, then measure it out.
1/2 cup of Natvia brand stevia (but my sweet tooth is off the hook, so you might wanna tone it down a bit if you're so inclined)
1 egg, room temp
1/4 tsp pink Himalayan salt
1 or 2 tsp vanilla extract (use the good shit with the vanilla pods in it, TRUST ME)
1 tsp baking powder
A whoooooooole fuck load of chocolate chips. My cookie to chocolate chip ratio is like, 10% dough, 90% chocolate. NOTE: This is the "unhealthy" part of the recipe, because I use Cadbury dark chocolate baking chips, which are obviously full of refined sugar. I am, however, planning on replacing these with sugar-free alternatives. Use what you like. I ain't judgin',
METHOD.
I highly recommend using a food processor, especially if you're using white spelt flour because I find it pretty hard to mix properly by hand (the dough gets real gluey and weird, and it's especially hard if you've got feeble little girl arms like I do). A food processor or a really good blender will mix everything together perfectly!
Preheat oven to 170c.
Add the melted coconut oil, stevia, egg, vanilla extract and salt to the bowl of your food processor and blend until combined.
Add flour and baking powder one cup at a time, and process until a nice dough forms. Transfer your dough to a mixing bowl and mix in your chocolate chips (I use my hands to get it all mixed in).
Line a baking tray with baking paper, and roll cookie dough into balls. You should get a minimum of 12 cookies outta this, depending on how big or small you make em.
Bake in the oven for 8 - 9 minutes. When you take the cookies out, they'll be ridiculously gooey. So gooey you'll probably be like, what the fuck is this madness??!! But this is good!
Leave them to cool for about 10 minutes. They'll start to firm slightly on the outside, but the inside will still be deliciously melty mess.
Anyway, this is usually the part where normal food bloggers make a joke like, "these are so delicious you'll want to eat the whole batch (AND SOMETIMES I DO LOL) but yeah, literally I inhale like 5 of these in a row, so.. Enjoy that.
It's a little known fact about me that I'm very much a hippie on the inside (little known because I probably don't use enough #cleaneating hashtags on insta?) I am irrationally excited about healthy food. I have trouble containing myself in health food stores (I often exclaim things out loud, like "yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" and "oh my god they actually sell this here!?!?!"). Liquid chlorophyll? I'll drink that. Hemp seeds? Fuck yeah! All varieties of cooking oils as facial moisturiser? You bet. I juice my vegetables almost every day, and often find I feel anxious and out of control of my life when I'm not in control of my food. That's probably a really unhealthy attitude (and there's a whole corresponding back story there, by the way), but at least a health food habit is better than being a crack whore.
I believe that food is medicine, and that we all have the power to heal and cure ourselves through the food we eat, and the food we don't eat.
Disclaimer (before you all JUDGE ME): though I feel good about nurturing myself through food and nutrition, I'm first and foremost a food lover in general. Which means that, god yes, I do enjoy ice cream, and wine, and even a good burger every now and then. In fact, I have this super rare genetic disorder that scrambles the receptors between my brain and my mouth, which means that when presented with a chocolate chip cookie I physically can not not say no. In fact, the only response my brain can register is 'hell fuck yeah'. Food gives me great pleasure in life and though I mostly keep it healthy and real, I absolutely don't believe in depriving myself of the good (bad?) shit. Just keep it in moderation.
Which brings me to this. MY "FOOD BLOG", (LOL NOT).
It's long been a personal goal of mine to re-create my favourite bad foods, and turn them into somewhat healthy, kinda less bad versions. After a hundred soul-crushing failures, I've finally managed to create a couple of delicious recipes, and what better place to share them than right here with you guys (que cheese).
So stayed tuned for my totally irregular but totally delicious "KINDA HEALTHY RECIPES".
Also, just as an aside, I have some new food & health goals:
- Drink more water (I'm trying to drink 2 - 3 litres a day without wetting myself)
- Step up my juice game, because I just watched Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead and now I'm all about dat 10 day juice reboot with Joe.
- Move more. 30 minutes of walking really isn't as horribly unpleasant as I assume it is.
- Kick the sugar addiction, because I'm a monster.
What a pleasant surprise it was to log into the ol' blogger and re-read a bunch of stuff I'd completely forgotten about!
A LOT has changed in my six month absence from blogging. I've been shooting a tonne of stuff for Fatlip Apparel and really honing my craft. Trist and I launched a second business in the hopes of eventually becoming completely financially independent from jerk-companies. I got me a sewing machine and sewed my very first skirt (that was on the bucket list for a looooooong time), and am now planning on making cute shit and selling to it cute people. I've become quite addicted to watching documentaries about the world, ya know? I've been really interested in our food and where it comes from, and I'm thinking seriously about becoming a vegetarian (/hippy? Let's be honest). I'm also planning to start writing my book, I moved into a great new place with Trist and we're thinking about some travel in 2015. Things are good, when I really think about it, and I'm working on making them even better.
I'll be posting here a lot more from now on, because I fucking hate Facebook and I dislike Instagram, and I'd like a place to share my life and work without being advertised at all the time.
For now, here are some shots I took yesterday for Trist's new musical endevour. I went with gritty green hued colours, slightly under-exposed to give it a real punk rock/basement show kind of vibe. I'm absolutely obsessed with under-exposing, and playing with the contrast between light and shadow.
Whooooooooooa, I've had a gigantic couple of weeks, so please excuse my poor blogging skills. Things in my life are really starting to look up, and the changes I've been planning for so long are finally starting to come to fruition. I'm both really excited and a lot apprehensive, such is the nature of changing your life.
I have this re-occuring nightmare in which I'm trapped at my day job on a day I'm not supposed to be there. I have the doors locked, and right as I realise, "shit! I'm not supposed to be here!", people start to pry open the locked doors and come inside, ignoring me when I tell them we're closed. Soon, the trickle of people turns into hoards and hoards of people, showing up in droves, huge group after huge group. The shop is overcrowded, and still nobody listens to me.
At some point, somebody breaks something, usually the glass in the front door. I try calling for help, but the phone usually morphs itself into something utterly useless, like a carton of milk, and all the numbers I dial into the milk-carton phone are jumbled and wrong. Text messages I try to send from my mobile autocorrect to jibberish, and I'm stressed to the point of tears.
Finally, after screaming profanities and literally pushing and dragging these faceless people out of the store, I lock the doors again, and turn and breathe a sigh of relief into the now empty shop.
Then it all starts again.
For anyone who watched the latest series of American Horror Story (which I thought was terrible, by the way), in which the characters are forced to escape their own personal versions of hell- well, that dream is my hell. I wake up anxious and stressed out, with an overwhelming sense of being trapped in my own life.
I think I've lived the last few years in fear of change. The last time I experienced a major change in my life, it was horrible. Everything turned upside down and spiraled out of control, and so I naturally grew an aversion to embracing change. For a long time, I stayed in a place where I was comfortable, but not happy.
Eventually, I paid enough attention to my nightmare to hear what it was trying to tell me, and today I'm slowly starting to overcome those fears. I'm still not anywhere near where I'd like to be in life, but at least I can say I'm finally taking steps to get there.
One of the things I actually like about my hometown is it's history, and it's abundance of old 1800's era buildings ('architecture porn') and creepy places. It's kind of a given that when you move to a new house in Ballarat, you're probably moving in with a ghost. Everybody in this town has a ghost story; I have a novel's worth of my own, in fact.
Yesterday I had a completely unplanned opportunity to explore the upper floors of one of the shops on the main street and discovered an old home complete with a claw-foot bath (CLAW FOOT BATH UGH), a huge cast iron stove and original wallpaper. (Ughh, originaaaal wallpaperrrrrrr.) It was dank, dark and lonely, but endlessly fascinating. I love trying to imagine the people who once lived there, who they were, and what they did with their lives when their home wasn't decaying and missing it's ceiling.
I only had my phone camera with me (kicking self), but I'm hoping I can bribe the owners to let me come back soon with my Canon (the lighting in the front room was stunning: lighting porn?)
DELIGHTFULLY CREEPY HALLWAY. Look at that arch!
DAT WALLPAPER, DAMN.
Old (and apparently dangerous) chemicals from back when the shop below was a chemist.
Last night at the opening of Sam Octigan's "What You Can't Forget" art show in Prahran. If had a whole bunch o' money to just spend on shit, I would love to own an original piece. I'd also love a New York style loft apartment to hang in it, but in the mean time I'll just hang it in the apartment in my mind... Anyway, Sam is definitely one of my new favourite artists, his use of color is beeeautiful. Check out his show at Just Another Project Space in Greville Street this month.
This blog should more accurately be named "photos I've taken of my boyfriend". Girl can't help herself, he is ridiculously good looking.
I took this with my pentax k1000 and an expired roll of portra 400. I actually really love the graininess of it, I think I enjoy film more when the photos turn out kinda shitty looking. The first roll of film I shot was Kodak ektar, and the photo quality was perfect and I sorta hated it.
I have a huuuuge week looming ahead, please keep all your fingers and toes crossed that these major changes in my life work out for the best.
Trist and I took some practice snaps of each other today with his Canon 6D. (I tried my best to keep my derp at a minimum; I think the ray bans helped.)
I was pretty keen on getting out my pentax k1000 to play with- you know, just in case the sunglasses didn't make me quite hipster enough (some days I want to punch myself right in the face), but discovered my light meter has shit itself and I'm nowhere near camera-literate enough to navigate a 35mm SLR without it. I have a separate light meter I can play with to get a good reading, but I think you must have to be some kind of scientist to use it because it's a complicated looking contraption.
Though, I guess there's no better way to learn new skills than by throwing yourself right into the deep end.
Anyway, camera talk. Disinterested persons can look at the pretty pictures below instead.
I adore Melbourne City, the hidden lane ways and alleys, the art, the music, the quirkiness. You can shoot a photo of some crummy buildings and it all just looks so beautifully urban.
In about a month or so I'll finally be calling this city home, and I'm excited to live in a place so inspiring, endless, and awake; a place where I can really pursue my creative endeavors.
So, as my eternal struggle to maintain a blog for longer than a month rages on, I've decided that a bit of forward planning might help unclog my stubborn writers blog that plagues me every time I click that terrifying 'new post' button. (I don't know, man, that white screen? Sitting there, judging me...) For once, in the battle between posi-me: "BLOGGING IS THE BEST IDEA IVE EVER HAD" and negi-me: "what am I even doing, blogging is the worst idea I've ever had", I would like the former team to reign victorious.
One of my grand plans to slay the ol 'block is in two parts, both photography related. 1: to post a photo a day "journal" type dealy. That means, specifically, that I need to take a new photo every day to post to the blog, whether it be digital, film, instant or a sneaky (/lazy/shitty) phone photo. And 2: I want to start a 52 week "self portrait" challenge. The conditions: selfies don't count, and if I get slack and miss a day/week, then the devil will eat my soul.
Ideally, I would have loved to start this whole shindig on April 1st, but I've had CONJUNCTIVITUS in one of my eyeballs this week (am I six?!) and, as well as looking like a lazy-eyed weirdo who keeps half winking at everybody, an eyeful of goop just didn't inspire much of the photographer in me. (by the way, the cure? God damn, salt water. Salt. And water. The internet told me steroid drops and antibiotics. I said, fuck you: salt and water.)
Anyway, all tangents aside, this has been a really long winded way of telling you that I'm going to take some photos for my blog. Ta da! The end.
Ps: this can be day 1: photo of my boyfriend being nonchalantly badass. Shot with my Canon 60d.
I'm back!
(Tentatively).
I really like blogging. Well, I really like the idea of it. I have all these grand visions of writing these super interesting, genuinely thought-provoking, witty blog posts that like, everybody just fricken loves. Maybe I become internet famous. Maybe become an influential kind of person. Travel the world. Obtain fabulous hair. Crack a thousand followers on my insta. But then - every single time - I have a fit of self-induced insecurity and deem everything I've ever written to be horrendously, unread-ably awful; words which a blind, drunken, pissed off monkey could have written better than I- and I slink back to obscurity, bad haired and friendless.
There are more important things in life than writing a blog, I tell myself, whilst wishing I was writing a blog.
So dear friends, strangers, random lurkers and weirdos, my Dad; welcome. Here I am again, blog attempt eight hundred million, attempting this time not to be too hard on myself.
Peace out!
(Is that an appropriate way to sign off a blog post?)
