Category: Eggs

Easy Freezer Breakfast Sliders Recipe

by Maria

Freezer Breakfast Sliders Recipe

Do you cook breakfast every morning? Of course not. Who does that? There’s something about busy weekday mornings that leads to cutting some corners, and the corner I always cut? Breakfast.

As I wrote about here, I’m a coffee-as-breakfast kind of gal. A nice hot cup of good coffee with soy milk is usually enough to get me through to lunch. But because I’m trying to 1. Eat more vegetables, 2. Be less lazy, 3. Stop being so jittery in the morning, 4. Get my damn act together already, it was time for a change.

And by a change I mean being lazy in a creative way. By freezing easy breakfast options. So one weekend we cooked a big batch of these healthy double chocolate zucchini muffins from my lovely author, Monique, and a giant batch of freezeable ham and egg breakfast sliders.

These freezeable sandwiches will be your new breakfast best buds. For one, they are cute, and sometimes that’s the most important thing, right? But they’re also protein-packed, healthyish, easy, veggie-infused, and delicious. And cute. Did I mention that?

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Read, Eat, Drink: Why We Can’t Read Anymore and a Mother’s Day Menu

by Maria

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Hugh McGuire on reading

Do you read books anymore? I mean real, whole, chapter-by-chapter books? When was the last time you sat down with a book and read for an hour straight, without stopping to check your phone for a text or email, or taking a break to look up something on your tablet?

It turns out that online reading–emails, social media updates, articles, even this blog post–is stunting our ability to maintain our focus long enough to read whole chapters at a time in a book. As Hugh McGuire writes in this Medium article on Why We Can’t Read Anymore, which I love so much I want to quote it for days and weeks until people ask me to please shut up:

It turns out that digital devices and software are finely tuned to train us to pay attention to them, no matter what else we should be doing. The mechanism, borne out by recent neuroscience studies, is something like this:

New information creates a rush of dopamine to the brain, a neurotransmitter that makes you feel good.
The promise of new information compels your brain to seek out that dopamine rush.
With fMRIs, you can see the brain’s pleasure centres light up with activity when new emails arrive.

So, every new email you get gives you a little flood of dopamine. Every little flood of dopamine reinforces your brain’s memory that checking email gives a flood of dopamine. And our brains are programmed to seek out things that will give us little floods of dopamine. Further, these patterns of behaviour start creating neural pathways, so that they become unconscious habits: Work on something important, brain itch, check email, dopamine, refresh, dopamine, check Twitter, dopamine, back to work. Over and over, and each time the habit becomes more ingrained in the actual structures of our brains.

How can books compete?

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Read, Eat, Drink–Weekend Roundup

by Maria

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This week’s “read” is more of a “look”–just as we’re on the conversation of book covers, Buzzfeed released a list of 32 of the Most Beautiful Book Covers of 2014. There are some really excellent covers on here, and though the list skews toward upmarket literary fiction (where there are less conventions to adhere to than genre fiction or nonfiction), it’s still a great example of what’s working in the market now. And while it’s tempting to just say “It’s pretty. I like it.” (I do this ALL the time, heh), it’s much more helpful to try to dissect why it works. Here are my favorites and why I think they are awesome:

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Gold foil is very hot right now in the online world, but this is the first book cover I’ve seen tap into the trend. It’s a bit hard to tell from this image if they used full gold foil on the entire cover or just reserved it for the author’s name (since this is an expensive production add-on), but it looks incredible. It’s eye-catching enough to stand out on a bookstore table, but it also doesn’t pigeonhole the book into too narrow of a genre. I think the cover of the hardcover edition of the work (which you can see here) looked too science-fiction-y, but you can tell by the back cover copy that this book is meant to be genre-defying. And for that, you need an ungenred, ungendered cover!

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Read, Eat, Drink–Weekend Roundup

by Maria

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As much as agents do our best to try to help writers and offer insight into the wild, whacky world that is publishing, sometimes nothing resonates quite like hearing directly from other writers. So here’s my favorite author blog post of the week–Colleen Hoover’s incredible story of how writing changed her life. Three years ago, she was living in a trailer, working 12 hours a day, and barely making ends meet. She picked up writing in her spare time and self-published her first book. She sold about 30 copies in the first week, but she kept at it. Today, she’s the New York Times bestselling author of 6 books and has a lucrative book deal with Atria/Simon & Schuster. And the best part of it all? In her words:

Three years ago, my husband and I dreamed about the day we would be able to build a new house. Tomorrow, that’s going to happen. On the same land where we happily lived in our single-wide trailer, we will be breaking ground on the house we will spend the rest of our lives in, and I still can’t wrap my head around it.

I know this started with the fact that I wrote and finished a book, but that was as simple as putting a pen to paper. Nothing would have followed had it not been for the support of my readers. Thank you, thank you, thank you for the motivation. And remember-

Dreams are free, so make sure you have a shit-load of them.

And THAT right there is exactly why we’re all in this crazy, unpredictable, shaky business.

You can read Colleen’s full story here.

Eat:
Raise your hand if you like bacon. Looks like…everyone on the planet. And the only thing better than bacon is bacon + pasta, especially when it’s Mario Batali’s Spaghetti Carbonara. This is (I think) the same recipe he uses at his restaurant Otto in New York, but you can make it yourself at home for, oh, a 95% discount.

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