Geocaching and Kitchen Adventures

I spend a lot of time trying to find ways to pass the time in Roanoke. Generally, I get disillusioned after only finding information for shuffleboard tournaments and girl scout award ceremonies, but sometimes something comes up that seems legitimately interesting.

One of the blogs I follow, Rage Against the Minivan, mentioned geocaching. Upon further observation and some solid researching (thanks, Wikipedia!), I learned that it's really just a scavenger hunt for nerds. They even have a legit site for which you need a login. People hide waterproof containers in random locations, and then you get to find it using your GPS device. Or, in my and OfficeMate's case - our iPhones. Sometimes they're filled with fun trinkets, and the idea is if you take something, you leave something as well.

So we did what any normal 20-something in Roanoke would do (because honestly, there can't be more than like 5 more of us) - we went geocaching. There's a park-ish type area a few blocks from our place, so off we went. We began with the caches ranked one-star, or the most simple, and ended up scaling some serious cliffs, and later, walking on some now-out-of-use railroad tracks. Child-friendly? Please. Keep in mind, I of course, was not dressed for this occasion and was scaling cliffs in traction-less flats and trying to keep my Raybans from falling off my head.

After approximately an hour or so of this madness, I began to think this whole thing was a hoax. It was some master plan created by the internet to make two people in Roanoke look like idiots in their neighborhood and potentially trespass for the second time in two weeks. I also questioned whether this was a Peter Pan type scenario - that perhaps we were just too old to properly geocache - since it is really created for children.And then I spotted it. A flash of white inside a tree trunk. At first I thought it was my awful eyes seeing what they wanted to see, but no! It was there! A plastic container with a sheet to sign claiming you had found it, full of fun things for the taking. I took a magic capsule (currently growing into what I can only hope is a dinosaur) in exchange for an old cell phone charm from high school. Walking back to the apartment, we spotted the initial one we were searching for just by chance - of course. I still have a lone monkey from a barrel of monkeys that I need to give to another geocache, so there's still at least one adventure left in this department. Also, I'm telling myself this totally counts as exercise.

Meanwhile, in my kitchen...
When my sister came to visit, she brought with her a bag of spinach, courtesy of my mother. Not being sure what to do with it, I left it for a few days. On Monday, I used my fancy Epicurious app (quite possibly my favorite one on my phone) and found a recipe for Bibimbap. I threw in some spinach and carrots, and had to stop there for lack of space in my bowl. Now, I am far from Korean, and I've had legitimate Bibimbap two or three times, and while mine was not nearly as tasty, it was still pretty solid and not half bad for a Latina trying to be Asian for one night.

This morning, I made sour cream pancakes to rid myself of sour cream that had been building up since Mexican a few nights back. Also courtesy of the Epicurious app, and also delicious. All my culinary successes from the week (I OWNED that spaghetti!) had made me ambitious, and I decided to try a souffle. A spinach-mushroom Parmesan-Chevre souffle.

He's beautiful, as you can see. However, I folded my egg whites in all wrong, ruining the consistency towards the center. Seeing as he was my very first souffle though, I shall continue to be proud of myself.