September Coffee Date

Hi everyone, welcome to my first coffee date post in a very long time (two years?!). Here’s a little update on life lately, including this past summer, and what you can expect from me in the coming months. Grab a coffee (or scroll down for my favourite pumpkin spice blender latte recipe of late) and enjoy. 🙂

1) this month’s coffee date recipe: healthy blender pumpkin spice latte

I’ve been making this latte pretty much every other day since the beginning of September. 🙂

Ingredients: 

2 tablespoons pumpkin puree 
1 tablespoon sunflower seed butter
1 ½ teaspoons MCT oil 
1 pitted Medjool date
½ teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
½ teaspoon vanilla extract 
Pinch of sea salt
1 ½ cups (12 oz) hot coffee

Instructions: Add all ingredients to a blender and blend for 30 seconds, until smooth. Let settle for a few seconds, pour into a mug, and enjoy. 

2) life lately 

Much of summer 2021 was uneventful. I worked as a summer intern at Ottawa Farm Fresh and developed lots of recipes for Up Beet Kitchen. At the end of August, I travelled to Prince Edward Island to attend my brother’s wedding. It was a beautiful, intimate occasion, and we spent two wonderful and relaxing weeks together as a family. 

But before that…

I finally graduated! 

Yes, I finally went back to university in 2020/2021 to get the last few courses that I needed to graduate with my Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies. Better late than never, I always say! 

prince Edward island photos!

 

some of our favourite restaurant meals in Prince Edward Island

We ate most of our meals at our Air BnBs, but we managed to try a handful of great restaurants during our day trips, too! Here are a few of our favourites:

1) Stir It Up Vegan Kitchen (inside Founders’ Food Hall in Charlottetown)

Stir it Up had been on my list of places to try for a very long time. I had been following them on social media for awhile, so I was pretty hyped to visit and it delivered big time! We ordered the Crunch Wrap Superior, the Mooless Mac, and Crispy Jerk Tofu Sandwich… plus a side order of fries and cabbage salad. 

2) Merchantman, Charlottetown

Another Charlottetown restaurant that we enjoyed for lunch another day. We all ordered fish tacos, because when on PEI, you eat all the fresh-caught Atlantic seafood. They were delicious. 

3) Evermore Brewing, Summerside

We stumbled upon this lovely microbrewery in Summerside, PEI during our day trip there, and the food was great: made from scratch with local ingredients. I was tempted to order the wood-fired pizza, but didn’t want to get too full seeing as it was just lunch, so I went with the fish boxty. It was tasty! 

4) Blue Mussel Cafe, North Rustico

On our last night in PEI, we had a nice dinner with my brother, his wife, her mother, and my parents at the Blue Mussel Cafe in North Rustico. I’m so happy we finally made it there, as we’d been meaning to go the whole time we were there but the wait time was always exceptionally long to get a table (it’s a very popular restaurant). I ordered the halibut, which came with a vegetable medley. And I was so cold because we had been out in the cold rain during the afternoon, so I even ordered a glass of red wine. So rare for me; I’m usually a beer drinker, but I couldn’t conceive of drinking anything cold at that time! We all ordered dessert, too: Dad got the blueberry pie (lucky him; we rarely make pie at home), Mom and I shared the peanut butter chocolate cheesecake (roll your eyes back good), and I think the others got cheesecake and pie to share, too. It was the perfect way to end the perfect vacation. 

until next time, Prince Edward Island!

life lately, and what’s next

Coming back to Ottawa was an adjustment and I felt a bit lost, to be honest. I had decided that as soon as we returned from our trip, I would get serious about finding a job in my field and take steps to move elsewhere. I fell in love with PEI and while I would love to move there, there don’t seem to be very many jobs out that way, even in the one main city on the island. I have always known that I don’t want to stay in Ottawa long-term, so I applied for a couple of environmental jobs in Canada. 

But in the meantime, I found clarity on something else, which is my longtime dream of becoming a registered dietitian/nutritionist. What has held me back from pursuing this dream is my limiting belief that I do not excel in the sciences. I have decided to let go of this limiting belief and forge ahead with this goal of mine. I have registered in the prerequisite classes that I did not take in high school so long ago (when I didn’t know what I wanted to do), in order to get into a nutrition and dietetics university program. I will be working on those 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, until I complete them. I will also be working part-time outside the home for the first time in ages, so I don’t know where blogging will fit into everything.

I want so badly to continue to develop and share recipes in this space, but I don’t make nearly enough money from it to warrant doing it full-time or even part-time. I do have a few weeks worth of recipes ready to share, but beyond that, I think my blogging is going to be a bit sporadic for the foreseeable future. (We’re also moving houses in a couple of months, and in the midst of getting our house ready to sell and prepped for showings, I’ve temporarily lost my photography space.) 🙁 I’m sad about that, yet at the same time, I’m happy that I have finally made a decision about “what to do with my life.” Once again, better late than never. I’m 26, by the way. So if any of you are around the same age and in a similar situation, I hope reading this makes you feel like you are not alone! 

I will continue to share recipes whenever possible, as well as “What I Ate Wednesdays,” fun little life updates here and there, and monthly coffee dates. But I can’t promise any sort of regularity until at least early 2022. I hope that the recipes that I have shared over the past few years continue to bring you happiness and nourishment, however! And I promise that I’ll be back at it in full force as soon as possible. 

I will also be sharing more quick, easy, and fun recipes over on Instagram, @upbeet.kitchen. So if you are on Instagram and would like to check that out, feel free to follow along there. 

Have a wonderful rest of your weekend, my dear readers! Hugs. 

-Allison