I, M Kat, am a huge breakfast person. I love to eat until full in the morning to fuel me for the rest of the day. Usually the meals need to good sustenance to provide enough energy too. Due to having busy mornings these past few months breakfasts have been quickly whipped up; I've been preparing foods such as cereal, hash browns and such, which are not bad, but not so satisfying. I last week I decided to make things that both tasted great and gave good nutrition. Here was the menu:

Monday: Homemade sourdough bread topped with corn (bread made by husband :))

Tuesday: Oatmeal with brown sugared strawberries and sour cream (a recipe from Martha Stewart) 

Wednesday: Mini gratins which had tomatoes, bell peppers, egg, Japanese sausages and mozzarella cheese 

Thursday: Smoothie made with 1/2 apple, orange, 1 banana, several frozen strawberries, 2 spoons of plain yogurt, & one spoonful of sugar

Friday & Sat: I can't remember!

Lets say that last week my tummy was quite satisfied early on in the morning! I look forward to more nutritious, energizing breakfasts in the future :)

Here are a few photos of two of the breakfasts which I got to photograph from that menu. Enjoy!

Mondays's corn on sourdough bread.

Wednesday's Gratin. Yummmmm!

See you soon

Masumi

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So we are all back from our Memorial Day weekend huh? I hope everyone had an enjoyable one! 

When my husband and I go out on weekends, we like to try eating at unique & healthy restaurants. So last Friday night my husband took me to My Vegan, out in Pasadena. As you can tell, it is a vegan restaurant. In fact they are so vegan that they asked that customers do not bring in any non-vegan items from outside in the vicinity; I respect that (but I may have forgotten about the chocolate candy in my purse while eating there, sorry!). We didn't know exactly what to expect in regards to how the food would taste because we've never had vegan Thai food before, but the food blew us away. We've been fortunate to try many Thai restaurants, but none of them have ever topped our all-time favorite Thai place: Thai Corner, in Chino Hills. Allow me to tell you that the food that this vegan restaurant serves, ladies and gentlemen was up to par with Thai Corner. It was shockingly good. It may have possibly been because our expectation was not too high also, haha. I ordered Pad See Ew with soy chicken and Chadsen got Yellow Curry Noodle. Both of our dishes were so good. Personally I may have liked the Yellow Curry Noodle a tad bit more. This place was a humble little restaurant, not too fancy. You wouldn't imagine such delicious food being served here but ladies & gentlemen, do not judge a book by its cover. 

I can't wait to come back to this place! Let me know if you try it and what you think!

Masumi 

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Today I tried creating a type of picture that I've been noticing for the past few months on Flickr & other social media outlets: Double Exposure photos. Double Exposure photos have two (or more) photos or images enmeshed or layered together. So after this week of wanting a chance to try it, today was the day. I am the type of person who usually has an image of what I want especially when it comes to art. Usually I try to find a model for my personal experimental shoots, but for this double exposure experiment I saw myself as the model. 

Loving the music artist Nujabes, I was inspired to try a Double Exposure photo that looked like one of his album covers (which is a girl with birds & flowers, very beautiful!). So of course I went onto one of my favorite, easy sources of learning Youtube, to quickly learn how to make this work. Thank you to this site for teaching the audience quickly and simply. Another Youtube link that I would recommend to learn the art of creating a double exposure shot via Photoshop is this one. Although he talks for a few minutes on his own, I find how he discusses his "artsy fartsy"-ness pretty funny. He's very entertaining and definitely artsy-fartsy.

Without getting too deep into the details of how it works, this is how I made it work! 

So the first thing I did was take a photo of myself on a rather blank (white-ish) background. Thanks to my patient husband who dealt with my picky-ness, after several long minutes I got a workable photo of myself. The next step was to get it up on Photoshop, adjust it how I want (playing with Levels), then get another photo of something that I wanted on me. I am a nature-y person so I pulled up a recent photo I took of leaves. I set that photo on top of my picture, set it to screen, turned it around and pressed enter. After playing with several other Photoshop features such as Curves and Hue/Saturation and Color Fill and used the eraser here & there I got a result that got me excited! If you would like to try this yourself please click one of the two links I added in this blog, they are so helpful! If you would like the look on this picture and want to know exactly how this image was created feel free to comment or send me a msg :)

See you soon! Have a great Memorial Day weekend.

Masumi

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A few days ago I began falling in love with landscape photography, something that has never really struck a chord within me. My reunion with Stumbleupon has really got me to see the beauty of it! Today I tried my closest possible attempt to it and am hoping to travel to a few beautiful locations throughout this year to get a few landscape shots. Can't wait! Today has been a day of growth for me both personally and photography-wise. You may notice that my photography style is a bit different today, but I definitely am liking it :). I love trying new things and finding new things to love.

See you soon. :)

Masumi

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Wednesdays are calm days - my rest days. It was nice getting up a little later than usual, starting the day off on a slower pace than usual. I got to play with my chinchillas get some chores done and make my usual smoothie as a part of breakfast. My to-go smoothies consists of one green apple, one orange, one banana, about seven frozen strawberries and three spoonfuls of yogurt. I love this mix (and frankly speaking have not tried mixing the recipe with any other fruit yet haha...)! With this intensifying heat it's so nice having a nice, healthy cold smoothie :)

Masumi

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Hello!

With much relief and gratitude I want to tell you all that this past Sunday was very relaxing, very calming. Usually my husband and I are quite busy on Sundays, going back to visit in-laws and join them for dinner. Lately we have begun giving ourselves a few Sundays to stay home to take a break from the hustle and bustle of traveling back to our parents' shortly after church on Sundays.

This Sunday, having much more free time than usual, I decided that I wanted to do some baking again! As a young teen one thing I loved doing on Sundays was baking cookies. Oh how I've missed it so. Using our in-laws' graciously given lemons, Sunday night I decided to bake lemon cookies- something I've never tried. The whole process actually ended up taking two days since I started the baking process a little too late into the night. So, the cookies were baked Sunday night, and a portion of Monday night was thence dedicated to making and applying the frosting. Having used a new recipe, I was a little worried about how they would turn out but, my gosh they turned out so good!

Please take a look at the results.

If you would like to try the recipe, it is in Japanese but Google usually does a great job at translating. :) Or you can also ask me & I can try translating it for you. This is it: http://cookpad.com/recipe/521040.

Masumi

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