About Gina Marie

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So far Gina Marie has created 328 blog entries.

Grain-Free Chipotle Lime Salmon Cakes + A Giveaway from Primal Kitchen! {Whole30 Friendly, Paleo, Gluten-Free}

This post was sponsored by the lovely people over at Primal Kitchen, however, all opinions  on their bomb-diggity products are my own. 
Today I’ve partnered up with Primal Kitchen to bring you guys a crazy delicious recipe, that’s not only easy to make, but totally clean eats. That’s right, dudes–these fried up little cakes are completely Whole30 friendly! You might remember that one time I did Whole30 and told you all about how I ate an entire jar of cocktail olives? Oh, and that other time I did it again over at The Kitchn and received ALL of the angry comments about how I should really just stop being a horrible person and eat legumes already? Yeah, friends. The internet is weird. So many feelings.  […]

Daikon And Carrot Noodle Salad With Sesame Ginger Dressing

I haven’t sat down to write in this space for three months.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve come here. I’ve flipped the lid of my laptop. I’ve stared blankly into the screen. I’ve opened up a fresh document and wrote over a thousand emotional words about the hollow exhaustion I feel on this lengthy health journey–plus, just all the feelings.

Feelings about shootings,  infuriatingly flippant rape convictions and all of the tirelessly troubling news that seemed to hit over and over again during the summer. The 2016 political climate and how IDONTUNDERSTANDWHATISHAPPENING.  I wrote about why I wasn’t writing. I just wrote all the words that came up. The word vomit. Out of my finger tips. Finger vomit? Feelings vomit? Finger feelings? I wrote those.

How do I say all the things I need to say? How vulnerable is too vulnerable? Do I even have anything important to say? I’ve been silent for too long. Do I even remember how to blog?  This is a food blog, should I even talk about rape here? So many important things are going on, not to mention the crippling exhaustion I’ve faced these last months struggling with my own health. Should I let them know that sometimes, even though I’m strong, I cry and sincerely fear that I will never be healthy again? Should I really just write about salad? Look, here’s a nice salad. Surely I can’t come back from not saying any words, and being silently overwhelmed with emotions, just to jump back in like nothing ever happened and make you guys a salad!! […]

Caramel Chai White Russians

This Caramel Chai White Russian is a brunch peacemaker.

I live in a house divided by coffee and tea. My husband is a die hard coffee enthusiast, always seeking the best, most time-consuming way to grind and brew beans. The other day I found him in the kitchen borrowing my baking scale, painstakingly measuring out his morning cup of joe by weight while using some sort of fancy filter-y plunger contraption in order to extract maximum coffee-ness. I like the way a cup of coffee tastes, but my heart is forever and always deeply in a romance with tea. You wont find me special ordering coffee beans from Guatemala, but you will find me hoarding all types of herbal brews in the cabinet next to the sink. They are all stacked in there like a game of floral and ginger smelling Tetris. When you pull one out, you might find that the game more resembles losing at Jenga. I’m still figuring out an organizational system. Nobody’s perfect.

So, while my marriage and our mornings tend to be divided by a thick line of differing brews, we can come together and agree on this: brunch drinks are most excellent, especially when they taste like dessert. They’re even better when we can incorporate elements of both our morning cups. Plus, we both really like The Big Lebowski, so enjoying this drink in a bathrobe and talking about how the rug really ties the room together is not above us. At all.  […]

Quick & Easy Homemade Guacamole

Who’s in the mood for a little storytelling? I’m going to give you the origin story of how I learned to make the worlds easiest guacamole. But, mostly this is an in memoriam to the kitchens of college past.

When I went off to college I was armed with an arsenal of low cut tops, chunky platform flip-flops and a handful of recipes that I had learned from my mother. The first year of school was spent in a crowded dorm room with two other girls. The microwave was attached the the refrigerator, creating this for-rent contraption called a “Microfridge”. Like any good Hawaiian girl, I brought along a rice pot. My Filipino roommate moved in with the largest bag of rice I’d ever seen, and a Costco pack of Vienna Sausage stored on the upper tier of our closet, above the coats. These things made up our “kitchen”. Cooking that year didn’t resemble cooking. I ate a lot of frozen burritos, and whatever suspicious “maybe it’s chicken, or is this fish?” they served us in the cafeteria. Our Microfridge only caught on fire three times that year, burning whatever questionable food we were trying to nuke at the time. I suppose this was a regular occurrence in other dorm rooms as well. Sometimes when walking the halls, it would smell like a Chicken Chow Mein electrical fire–wafting the scents of takeout mixed with dangerous university issued appliances from under the doors. I missed being able to cook my own food. I missed having personal space. I missed not falling asleep to the sound of one of my roommates smacking lips with her new boyfriend.  […]