Procrasticooking

I’m a big fan of productive procrastination. Don’t want to write that essay? No worries, you have floors to mop and sheets to wash and clothes to fold! Today, however, my chore of choice was to make dinner. I ate a pound of baby carrots and downed four glasses of almond milk for dins yesterday, so I figured I could get my 50s housewife on and actually cook. My fridge was getting a little too full of wilting vegetables, and to use them all up, I made a broccoli-tomato-and-red-pepper quiche, served on a bed of arugula. It sounds fancy, but honestly, it’s like making an omelette but with a little more chopping. Here’s how to do it, with most quantities guesstimated:

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Pierce (store bought) pie crust half a dozen times with a fork, place on baking tray, and bake it for 7 minutes.
2. Chop all desired vegetables into bite-size pieces, and sauté quickly. (For broccoli and other harder vegetables, you can blanch for a minute first.)
3. Beat together five eggs, 1/2 c. of cow/goat/almond/soy milk, 3 tbsp of flour, 1 tsp of baking powder, whatever desired spices.
4. Add vegetables into egg mixture.
5. Pour mixture into crust. Make sure that you don’t over-fill the crust; scrubbing away burnt egg from baking trays is not fun. You can easily make a mini portion of veggie scrambled eggs with your leftovers, and snack while the quiche is a a-baking.
6. Bake for 40 minutes.

Only after you’ve cooked and gorged yourself on the fruits of your labour do you have to return to the paper of doom. So take your time!

More Hair-Raising Adventures: Good Riddance, Frizz and Knots!

Mirror-image label, ‘cos webcams are fun.

My hair/fashion/career idol.

In my ongoing quest to become super crunchy, in the hippie-granola sense, I have discovered something new from the pantry that I can slather over my hair: coconut oil! In the beauty blogosphere, this seems to be the no. 1 tip handed out for natural, crunchy haircare; I’m surprised it took me so long to stumble upon it.

My hair is lank, messy, and thin. On the same head, some parts are unexpectedly wavy and unmanageable, and I always regret going out for the day with my hair down because it becomes so full of knots that it’s impossible to comb through by the time I get back home. My hair is pretty straight, but it also manages to have some massive frizz issues. Now that I’ve made those knots into shiny disco balls of glamour , I’m looking for products that will keep my hair flowing freely down my back, rather than bunching itself around my neck in tangles.

To the left is the hair I’ve always wanted, on the head of fictional character Laura Holt, private investigator in the glorious 80s television series Remington Steele. It doesn’t seem too hard to achieve; there’s no intense 80s perm going on, and we totally have the same taste in hats. Would it kill my hair to look like that?

Freshly applied.

Enter, coconut oil, into my life. There are four steps to this miracle:

1. rub oil between your hands to warm it up

2. apply to your entire head of hair and rub it into your scalp

3. braid your hair and pin it up for a couple hours

4. shampoo twice and rinse well, so you don’t end up greasy-looking

Not only did I end up smelling delicious, but my hair was incredibly soft and smooth after it dried. I’ve worn my hair down since then, and there was minimal knotting! Still knots, but not the kind I’m used to. I’m still not 80s gorgeous, but I am inching closer to taming my hair.

Close enough.

Hair-Raising Adventures: The Secret Shine Ingredient

Cousin It and I now have something in common: LONG GLORIOUS LOCKS!

After a long hiatus, I am back in the blogosphere, with many posts to catch up on. In my time away (spent writing essays, working on a group project, and being sick for a week) I have learned a great many things. The most important of these has been what to do with my scraggly, messy hair. I saw a photo of the back of my head, and was aghast that what I thought was a glorious mane is actually a stringy rat’s nest. I can’t cut it all off. I am under a stern no-cut commandment from my grandmother (until the Big Chop into a pixie cut after I graduate), and besides, the salons in Montreal are so expensive–I don’t want to fork over $60 dollars just for a trim to get a few layers and remove split ends. I can do that during the summer in small-town Ontario, where the haircuts are cheap and the barbers plentiful.

So I set about trying to fix the hair I have, rather than removing the whole mess with scissors. I turned, naturally, to the internet, and was initially led astray into an awful experiment with egg. It ended with bits of scrambled egg covering my scalp, and a waxy coating on the rest of my hair. Gross, gross, gross. I then moved on to chemicals, purchasing TreSemme shampoo that promised to get rid of 80% of my split ends. 80%! What dark magic was in this crap? It worked pretty well, and the split ends did initially disappear, which leads me to believe that the shampoo is actually a bottle of thinned glue. What else could be keeping my ends together?

Chemical goodness is not the point of this post though. I have found my hair saviour: apple cider vinegar. Dilute it so that there is one part ACV to three parts water, and then pour it over your hair (DO NOT GET THIS CRAP IN YOUR EYES, OH THE AGONY) after you’ve washed it. Let it sit for a few minutes, and then rinse it all out well. Then turn the tap to the coldest water you’ve felt in your life and rinse your hair with that for a few seconds.

Duck face selfie to illustrate the after-effects of an ACV rinse.

It’s so simple! It’s so cheap (a little over 2 dollars for a bottle of the vinegar)! It makes your hair look FABULOUS and shiny and healthy! Next in the realm of DIY Beauty, I will attempt to make a baking soda face scrub. That may or may not end well. At least it doesn’t contain egg.