The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

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So a little behind the times. Read the book. Liked it. You should read it to.. but you probably already have. You know you are old fashioned when your parents lend you a book that they already finished.

Coming from someone who has read all the Harry Potter books, I would say I know a thing or two about reading. So in my humble opinion, it was very thrilling and addicting. It really takes you into the world of investigative journalism in the financial industry of Sweden, which is something I have always wondered about. The beginning gets going pretty slow and is a tad confusing, but once you get past page 200, it's smooth sailing from there. Reading mystery/thrillers are always fun because you find yourself guessing who the killer is and in most cases you are wrong. My premontions were actually correct to an extent, so that was exciting. I also love reading a book that is about to come out in theatres. It really makes me feel like I have to finish it and its also interesting to how Hollywood illustrates. Everyone always images the people/places/landscapes in a book differently so seeing it come to life from someone else's point of view is quite interesting. They did already make this film in a Swedish version but I am more excited to see the American version, set to release sometime this year. Daniel Craig will make a great Blomkvist. Here is the trailor. Very creepy Led Zeppelin cover playing, FYI.

Recipes - Los Angeles magazine - Roasted Baby Beet Salad

Roasted Baby Beet Salad

Raphael chef Adam Horton shares his recipe
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6/8/2011

The beet and goat cheese salad has become synonymous with the SoCal food scene and, let's face it, a little predictable. Adam Horton, formerly ofSaddle Peak Lodge and now the shiny-new chef at the revamped Raphael in Studio City, has revived this new classic by using downright adorable baby beets and getting a little chem-lab on us with a pumpkin seed powder. (Ooooh, ahhh.) The result celebrates what made this sweet-and-tangy combo so popular in the first place—with a little extra sparkle.

Ingredients:
4 bunches of baby beets (mixed colors, like chiogga, red and gold)
2 sprigs chervil 
3 sprigs tarragon 
1 bunch watercress (stems intact)
2 tangerines
4 ounces California goat cheese (like Cypress Grove chevre)
Good quality olive oil (like Terre Bormaine Riviera Ligure)
1 ounce roasted pumpkin seed oil
1 ounce tapioca maltodextrin (can be found online via. Le-sanctuaire.com or willpowder.com)
Salt
Pepper

Directions:
1.    Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

2.    For the beets: Remove leafy tops, wash beets, season with olive oil, salt and pepper, and place in a shallow casserole dish with 3 ounces of water. Cover with foil and bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour or until fork tender. You want to be careful not to overcook the beets or the tails will fall off when you are peeling them. Remove the beets from the oven and place on a rack to cool. Once at room temperature (I suggest wearing gloves so you don’t get purple hands), use a kitchen towel to rub off the skin of the beets, taking care not to break the tails for a more dramatic presentation. Cut the bottoms where the leafy tops were to allow beets to stand on end. Reserve the liquid from the bottom of the pan for the vinaigrette.

3.    For the herbs: tarragon, chervil and watercress. Pick the leaves from the tarragon and chervil and cut the watercress at the lowest point on the stem. Place in ice water for 2 minutes, then remove, dry and wrap in a damp paper towel, keeping them cool in the refrigerator until serving. Can be chilled up to (but not more than) an hour before serving.

4.    For the goat cheese: Remove from the package and crumble. Set aside.

5.    For the pumpkin seed powder: Weigh 1 ounce of tapioca maltodextrin and 1 ounce of pumpkin seed oil.  Place tapioca in a food processor and drizzle in pumpkin seed oil. The finished result should look dry, not clumpy. If it looks too wet (like wet sand) add more tapioca, if it looks too powdery without any green hue, add a drizzle of pumpkin seed oil. For a finer powder pass through a sieve.

6.    For the tangerines: Cut skin off and slice segments away from membranes. Squeeze the remaining membrane for juice and reserve for vinaigrette.

7.
    For the vinaigrette: Mix equal parts of reserved cooking liquid and tangerine juice (2 ounces of each) whisk in 2.5 ounces of olive oil, season with salt and pepper.

8.    To assemble: Toss beets in vinaigrette, place beets with the root tips facing upwards on a plate in a random scattered pattern, in between the beets crumble goat cheese, place tangerine segments in a random pattern. Place tarragon leaves on each beet tail to give a “floating effect.” Lay the watercress against the beets stem up, lay the leaves of the chervil in between the beets on the plate. To finish, spoon pumpkin seed powder between the layers of beets, cheese and tangerines.

Serves 4.

*Posting this so it haunts me enough that I try making it.

Runner or Product of Consumerism?

I will admit it.. I'm a wannabe runner. Meaning: I run at slow paces, while believing I am good at it or something. This also includes my false belief that I can live the way I do and be a good runner. If I would only cut out a few things in my lifestyle, I would be great. But I don't foresee that day coming any time soon. 

One weird day in December 2011, I came across this interactive film by Chris Milk featuring Arcade Fire's "We Used to Wait." This video is both amazing and inspiring. It actually made be believe I could run for days! On the site, you type in the address of the home where you grew up and it uses images from Google Earth to incorporate live footage of your home town. So, while remembering your long-forgotten youth and treasuring what it meant to be innocent and naive, you also have a strange desire to just...run. The site is called  The Wilderness Downtown, which is a line used in the Arcade Fire song, which makes sense as the lyrics of the song connect to the reaction you feel from the video. I now run to their recent album, The Suburbs, all the time because it often helps with restoring that motivartion to run- because Lords knows, I need it. 

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Moments after seeing The Wilderness Downtown, I immediately decided, "I must run a race!" Like any dedicated runner, I gave myself even more motivation to run...by buying new running shoes. Within seconds, I am sacrificing my credit card information to Nike and purchasing myself a brand new pair of Nike Free's. These shoes are quite brilliant. Extremely light-weight and flexible- they make me feel like I am running on air. A few more views of Wilderness Downtown, combined with a killer iPod playlist and my new kicks, and I'm on the trail! 

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This Nike Free Ad only further reinforces my purchase. 

 

After a few good runs, I tell myself I am ready for a race. I scan Active.com for something appealing and come across the Old Agoura 10k. According to the site, it is the top rated 10K in the US so obviously, I believe it and register right away. My training went pretty well, I think. I owe my motivation largely to shoes and music but I guess, to each their own, right? Here I am finishing the race- 3rd in my division. 

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Let's just say, the last 2 miles of straight-up hill were neither expected or desired. Or fun. But I finished nonetheless, and am currently, half-assedly preparing for my next race. Here's my aunt and I after finishing the race. Can you believe they give every racer a medal? I even got a trophy in the mail for finishing 3rd- it went straight to the household wall of trinkets and is now collecting dust as I type. 

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My next race is the San Diego Rock N' Roll Half Marathon, and I am embarrassed to admit that I am not at all ready. It should be very interesting. I have 3 friends running with me and I pray every night that they are at my same level of suck. I have 2 weeks to go and have yet to even run 10 miles... or even 8!  I think I am gonna need to get me this pair of New Balance's or I am sh*& out of luck! 

Newsies

Breakin' The Bay... One Maid at a Time

May 13th, L.A.--  Mark Twain once said, "The coldest winter I ever saw was the summer I spent in San Francisco." 

Now, I am not sure what that quote has to do with my personal rendition of my whirlwind of a weekend spent in San Francisco but I think it gives the basic idea that the place is straight up backwards and crazy- in a good way, of course. I have seriously considered moving after this weekends events. 

..And so begins my tale. I duck out of the workplace at approximately 3:30pm and swoop up my fellow partners in crime. We meet our driver in Santa Monica and head out of LA by 5pm. A world record if you ask me! No one did, but still. Pee stop at 5:05pm at the Cabo Cantina. A little delay due to us icing a passenger by asking her to reach in the cooler to grab a string cheese. Classic! 

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So we hit the road for our 7 hour treck to San Fran with as much American Spirit as possible.

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A must needed In N' Out stop off the Kettleman City exit occurs and a few pee stops here and there but no craziness. We were determined. No more Stage Coach fiascos! A few games of Shut-The-Box and a 30 bomb of Coors Light later, we arrive before 12am! 

To our dismay, a party bus is waiting for us at our lodging quarters. Dang it! We had no choice but to board the thing with a bottle of HW2 and deal with it! The night goes as expected... and ends with a drunken walk through China Town. We pop into a sketchy bar for a nightcap. Upon entrance, an elderly Asian bouncer is passed out by the door and the bar tender blurts out, "SHOTS ONLY." Naturally, we obliged. Not sure what we drank, but I will just say it was bad and left a burning down the throat region. We end at an amazing BYOB place and realize we only have one beer. Oh well, the food was great- from what I remember. 

May 14th, San Francisco, 8:00am-- We awake to the best creation ever... MEGACOUCH!!! I really owe the architect that constructed this while I was sleeping.. I never wanted to leave this creation, however we had some sights to see! 

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As any good tourist knows. It's only polite to walk around in a new city with PBR tall boys in a paper bag! DUH! Plus, we are hipsters, so thats how we roll. 

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Next order of business. Take a trolly ride. Ehhh, trolly line is too long, so take a picture by a parked one and pretend you actually did the real thing. Done and done and on to the next.. 

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Reroute back to our accommodations. Ice our host. Make a decision: Oyster fest vs. Sight-Seeing?? We split up. However, that is after our next party bus ride toward the water. Incase you haven't been so lucky to experience a party bus in broad daylight, it really is fun so I recommend it immediately if you ever want to truly live your life! 

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As a member of the sight seeing team we had to get as close to the Gate as possible. Unfortunately the weather was as Mark Twain predicted. 

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We walk around the Marina area and decide it's time to get indoors. We and indulge on a recreational game of Pigs accompanied by some Mirror Pond Pale Ale's at  Mauna Loa, which is apparently rated the best dive bar in the Marina. Score! This place will forever be special to me because I won my first game of  Pass the Pigs! I got the score card to prove it! 

 Tummies started a-growlin' so it became time to find some grub... 

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...but not before stopping by The Tanner household in Alamo Square! Needless to say, we took jumping pics (coming soon). 

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Finally on the road again to the Lower-Haight for some beers & sausage. Our kind travel guide introduces us to a great local spot called  Rosamunde Sausage Grill. The concept is that you order your sausage and then take it over to the beer place, Tornado, next door. I ordered the Andouille, which was a Cajun smoked, spicy pork sausage. Bomb. Tornado was equally as awesome. Lots of local/obscure brews. I had never heard of any of the beers they had so I nicely inquired, "Got any good Ambers?" 

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Any seasoned Bay 2 Breaker participant attendee could tell you that going out the night before is just plain stupid. But being the wild Hermosian tourists that we are, we hit the town! I was overjoyed to find ski-ball at this local establishment called  Buckshot.

Kevfro and I tie at a whopping 270- which I think was my highest score yet. We rematch and I roll a 230 and he rolls a 330.. Owned. 

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We later end up at a piano bar in Union Square. Good news: They were playing the hits. Bad news: it made me get wild enough that I took a nap in the back corner... woops!

May 15th, San Francisco-- Eyes open the next day to a hard carpet and ears open to blasting music at approximately 6am. I am able to tune it out for 30 minutes but after a while I came to terms with the fact that I wasn't getting out of partying that morning. Good thing for the Molly Maid name tags I constructed for the team! 

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It took a while, but we eventually found all our costume articles and dusted the dirt off our shoulders, if you will. Take a good look at these dusters now because they get lost a few hours later. 

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Instead of actually running the race we designate our own party area in between mile 3 and 4 and start limbo! This got pretty interesting. It worked well with our interactive Molly Maid costumes because that street needed some serious cleaning. Lucky we brought two 'Caution, Slippery When Wet' signs to alert other racers of the safety hazard. 

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The best part about our little area was that there happened to be a DJ within close ear-shot so it became a wonderful dance party in the street. Honestly the best dance party I experienced from 9am-Noon. 

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Our costumes were such a hit, we made it in the  San Francisco Weekly Bay to Breakers recap slideshow of the event (below). Notice the image is of much better quality than the previous images. 

 

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The race began to slow down around 12pm so we headed back to our homestead and rooftop partied for a bit, while dreading the 7 hour drive home that awaited us. Intern napped and I drank a Bud Light while simultaneously herding everyone to the car. 

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I vowed not to speak of our driver's 0.26 that he blew into the breathalyzer before leaving San Francisco, however, I have lived to tell the tale, so I think it's more than appropriate to mention. If that had not of happened, we wouldn't have missed the turn-off for the 580, which convienetly forced us to take the scenic 152 to get over to the 5. I had no issue with this as the 152 was a gorgeous drive. 

I can't say that anything significant happened on the drive home. We were all pretty much delirious from the weekend and just wanted showers and our beds. We roll into Hermosa around 11:30 pm and I make it to work the next day feeling pretty good considering what I had just done. Until next time! 

 

Sunshine & Sunsets

Is it just me, or did the weekend once again fly by with remarkable speed?

Mondays, are by far my least favorite day of the week. If you loathe trekking to the office as much as me, once the clock strikes 5PM on Sunday, it's game over. As Caeli likes to say, "the Sunday night blues" start to kick in and you begin to dread the work week ahead. To help me get over the inevitable onset of Monday morning depression, I took a look through some random photos that I snapped this weekend. These two pictures capture what I love most about Southern California; sunshine & sunsets.

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Henry & I were out for a quick jaunt when I snapped this photo. The street outside my apartment is lined with the most striking lavender foliage.

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Who doesn't love the silhouette of a palm tree against a gorgeous California sunset? I never tire of this image.

{P.S. go see Bridesmaids, it will change your life.}

xo Alex

*On a side note; this past Sunday I participated in the Santa Monica Classic 10k Race. I achieved my goal which was to keep my body running (sometimes very slowly) at all times. I ran across the finish line in just over an hour, but there were still many 8 year olds & senior citizens that 'out-ran' me. The race was a fantastic experience & I cannot wait to run the San Diego Rock N Roll Half Marathon next month!

 

So Cal Classics

Hello Summer! Yes, that’s right, its officially beach season & if you’re like me you will be taking full advantage of the weekends to soak up every last drop of sunlight & take a dip in the crisp California surf.

For the last month or so we have been experiencing random 80 + degree days. Hence, I found myself feverishly digging through my closet & dresser drawers searching for last years beach necessities. To my dismay; last year’s beach gear did not hold quite the same appeal as it did 12 months ago. I got to thinking that it was time to splurge on some fresh summer items.

Here are my 3 Southern California Classics that never go out of style:

1.     Rainbow Sandals

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Photo courtesy of:  Rainbow

Rainbow Sandals

Does it get any more So Cal than this? Didn’t think so.  Produced in San Clemente, CA for going on 37 years now, these impossible to ruin sandals are a California natives must have.  Rainbow leather sandals come in a variety of styles & colors and are known for their durability. While known for their durability, the neutral colors of the sandals make them easy to wear with just about anything. Weather it be a bikini or a casual summer dress. Trust me when I say that you will not regret making this purchase.

2.   Beach Tote

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Photo courtesy of: Zappos

Find this nautical inspired toteHere

When venturing to the beach you will undoubtedly be carrying an array of different items. For me, I am always carrying a beach towel, 2 or 3 magazines, multiple bottles of sunscreen & tanning oil, chapstick, and some kind of drink {Let's be real, its usually Gatorade to ease my hangover}. Still, I’ve never really had a designated beach bag, you know, one that I use solely for the beach. So I’m taking this opportunity to just make the purchase. A beach bag should also be affordable. You don’t want to spend upwards of $200 only to have tanning oil, sand, and other messes spilled and mashed into the bag's lining. Chose something that is visually pleasing, but will not break the bank. 

Fedora

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photo courtesy of: Village Hat Shop

Find this Here

I'm not talking about the ever-so-popular 'hipster style' fedora that is wildly present. You know, the hat that trendy hipsters wear at the back of their heads & looks as though it will go tumbling to the ground at any second? Well, no. We're talking about the classic fedora. Made from a variety of materials from straw to suede this chic beach accessory has been in style for decades. Not only does it protect your scalp from the sun's harmful rays, but it looks effortlessly stylish while doing so.

XO Alex 

Bridesmaids!

Los Angeles - Today is a very exciting day for me because producer Judd Apatow (Knocked Up, Superbad.. to name a few) has given me another reason to LMFAO all night and ROFL everyday with the debut of Bridesmaids. Especially since I have been wanting more of my gal Kristen Wiig. Ever since Gilly happened to me I have been crazy about the woman! Then add Maya Rudolph and Ellie Kemper (The Office) on top of that and the movie won't even have to follow a story line, at least for me. Just seeing the interactions between these funny females will definitely have me fully enterained for a complete 90 minutes. I won't even go to the bathroom, I swear. I was also pleased to see a Jon Hamm (Don Draper) appearance in the trailer. As an advocate of Mad Men, I always love seeing him do a role completely juxtaposing everything that is Don Draper. His apperance in 30 Rock as "the perfect guy who didn't realize he was a complete moron" was amazing. 

I know this movie isn't going to win any Golden Globes but I still think it will be wildly enteratining. I can't understand a person who is always wanting to understand a point or purpose to a movie. If you look for that in every film you see, you could wind up doing a lot of unnecessary thinking. I'm going into this with a Strange Wilderness kind of mentality. I don't think people give that movie enough credit! Great cast, silly yet hilerious jokes and a brutal murder of Big Foot, whats not to like guys??? 

Never Hide

When I said, 'Sunglasses' I meant Sunglasses!! Sunglasses, to me, represent much more than a guard from cancer causing UV rays. It's a way of life, a lifeSTYLE. They are not a means to hide who are, yet more of a way to show who you are- ultimately enhanced by the pair you choose. How do you spot someone who does not abide by this mantra? Easy. She wears her sunglasses inside when trying to hide that she's not wearing any makeup. Okay, I did that once but it was because I was in the middle of the desert and more concerned with partying than a mirror. I think that makes it okay. Plus, it was hot. Also, I was rockin' my Sabre's. 

I like Ray Ban. Not just because of MIB, but because they represent everything refined, yet BOLD. Elegant and Edgy. Genuine. Speaking of which, I think it's time for a new pair. Something colorful for summer. 



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