bite-sized inspo * music * meals * and more
Easy vegan key lime pies requiring just 9 simple ingredients – perfect for creating ‘The Last Great American Dynasty’ vibes (iykyk) The Last Great American Dynasty I can so clearly remember listening to Folklore for the very first time. Do you remember that surprise drop?! …
Links to every single Taylor Swift playlist I’ve curated and shared on social media – happy listening! I *love* making Taylor Swift-themed playlists – I post at least one every month (often more), curating playlists for every month, season and more. Let me know if …
Links to all 5 of Taylor Swift’s TTPD Playlists – on Spotify, YouTube and Amazon Music – taking listeners through the 5 Stages of Heartbreak
It’s a fortnight before The Tortured Poets Department release on April 19th, and of course Taylor Swift marked the occasion – with TTPD Playlists!
Taylor made these playlists for Apple Music, with special short messages for Apple Music listeners. Here’s how she describes each playlist:
“A list of songs about getting so caught up in the idea of something that you have a hard time seeing the red flags, possibly resulting in moments of denial and maybe a little bit of delusion. Results may vary.” (A Message From Taylor)
“These songs all have one thing in common – I wrote them while feeling anger. Over the years I’ve learned that anger can manifest itself in a lot of different ways. But the healthiest way that it manifests itself in my life is when I can write a song about it, and then often times that helps me get past it.” (A Message From Taylor)
“This playlist takes you through the songs that I’ve written when I was in the bargaining stage. Times when, you know you’re trying to make deals with yourself or someone that you care about. You’re trying to make things better, you’re often times feeling really desperate, because often times we have a sort of gut intuition that tells us things are not gonna go the way that we hope – which makes us more desperate, which makes us bargain more.” (A Message From Taylor)
“We’re going to be exploring the feelings of depression that often lace their way through my songs. In times like these I’ll write a song because I feel lonely or hopeless, and writing a song feels like the only way to process that intensity of an emotion. And while these things are really, really hard to go through, I often feel like when I’m either listening to songs, or writing songs that deal with this intensity of loss and hopelessness, usually that’s in the phase where I’m close to getting past that feeling.” (A Message From Taylor)
“You’ve made it to my “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart: playlist, where we finally find acceptance and can start moving forward from loss or heartbreak. These songs represent making room for more good in your life, making that choice, because a lot of times when we lose things, we gain things too.” (A Message From Taylor)
I mainly use Apple Music myself, so I was excited to be able to access these playlists right away! But as someone who shares Swiftie playlists a lot, I know there’s a huge amount of people who mainly listen to music on Spotify.
I asked in my Instagram stories whether anyone would like me to create these playlists on Spotify, and immediately got a resounding yes! With multiple links, one for each playlist, I thought it would be easiest to send people to a landing page with links to all the playlists.
Update: I’ve now created these TTPD playlists on Spotify, YouTube and Amazon Music! Let me know if you’d like to see any clean versions as well.
And finally, in case you missed it…
Here’s a link to the landing page for all these Apple Music playlists as well.
I hope these help, happy listening!
A red and blue swirled Midnights album smoothie bowl – perfect for celebrating February and Taylor Swift’s Grammy nominations! The Grammy’s and Midnights The Grammy’s are now just a few days away, so you can bet I’ve got Midnights on my mind. Will you be watching? It’s …
Sourdough bagels but make it 1989 (Taylor’s Version) – these ‘Welcome To New York’ bagels are a fun and delicious way to use up sourdough discard! There are two Taylor Swift songs I have long associated with New Year’s. One is New Year’s Day – for obvious …
Taylor Swift’s Chai Sugar Cookies recipe – including both Taylor’s (handwritten) version, and my veganized version for any plant-based Swifties!
If there’s something you should probably know about Taylor Swift, it’s that she’s an amazing baker. I mean, I don’t know from personal experience (I wish 😅), but people who have tried her baked goodies seem to rave about it. And she’s been an active baker for years.
Back in 2014, for a 1989 ‘Secret Session’, Taylor Swift baked these Chai Sugar Cookies – and then shared the recipe on her Tumblr. Every year, especially around this time of year, I’ve been meaning to try out her recipe – and this year I finally did! Coming off of the 1989 TV Era, it just feels right to make these cookies. Plus they’re full of all those seasonal spices, perfect for this time of year!
Here’s her original recipe – handwritten and shared on her Timblr.
I’m plant-based, so I also veganized the recipe – it’s super simple to do! I just swapped the butter for vegan butter (I used Miyoko’s unsalted butter) and made a vegan egg using Bob Red Mill’s Egg Replacer (you could also make a flax egg using 1tbsp ground flax + 3 tbsp water). I also didn’t have vegetable oil on hand so I used coconut oil instead.
The cookies came out of the oven quite soft, but they firmed up quickly, and let me tell you – the texture was divine 😍
Allow to cool and top with icing (I used store-bought icing and then sprinkled nutmeg on top)
Have you tried making these cookies? Will you?! If you do, I’d love to see it! Tag me @bitesbybekah on Instagram.
My Swiftie Gift Guide – organized by Taylor Swift Era, with a wide range of prices and items to fit different budgets and interests! ‘Tis the season! The holidays are here, and whether you’re looking for a gift for the Swiftie in your life, or …
How to make Dong Geu-ra-mi’s Gimbap, as seen in the show Extraordinary Attorney Woo: a meal that’s just as fun to make as it is to eat! Extraordinary Attorney Woo On August 28th, 2022, ma and I watching the season 1 finale of the show …
A blue-tiful overnight oats ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ breakfast bowl, with all the fruit toppings to take you to Cousins Beach.
This summer I finally started watching The Summer I Turned Pretty. And I have to say, I’m kinda obsessed. It’s your typical teen drama – except that it isn’t. The relationships, conversations, narratives, everything feels so natural and authentic. There’s drama, and a love triangle that’s really pretty awkward. But overall it feels like an open door into the lives of two families, and how the waves of life affect their different relationships.
I started Season 1 enjoying the show, but I wasn’t super invested until a few episodes in. I’m not sure what exactly did it for me. The fact that cancer became part of the storyline definitely left me feeling a bit more raw than I’m used to by the end of the season. (My mum recently went through breast cancer treatment.) It’s handled really carefully in the show, and you don’t see any of the cancer itself, just the effects of it – which is quite powerful and really well done.
Even without such a personal tying factor, I think the show would have gripped me regardless. The actors are all so talented, and at any given time I could be in love with each of them, and then equally annoyed and frustrated with them all. Which sounds about right for a teenage drama, don’t you think?
If you want to follow along with my live reactions to each episode as I watch it, you can follow along with my Thread. (Yes, I’m on Thread! I just never got into Twitter and then Instagram made it so easy to set up a Thread account. And now I cannot stop LOL.)
Of course I had to made a The Summer I Turned Pretty breakfast bowl. And overnight oats are the perfect summertime breakfast to pair the show with. While making my typical bowl of hot porridge this morning, I found myself thinking that it was definitely way too hot for that. It’s been in the 90s this whole week, and the humidity in Washington DC is no joke. So move over hot breakfasts, cause it’s about to become the summer of overnight oats for me!
A bowl like this is the best way to start the day when you want something equally refreshing and delicious.
To get this gorgeous blue color, I use blue spirulina powder. You really can’t taste it at all. Plus it brings some health benefits along with the prettiest blue color to your bowl. The Summer I Turned Pretty gives me all the blue vibes. I was picturing the blue of the beach and the pools that are so frequently highlighted in the show. The rest of the toppings are adaptable, but I went for vibrant fruits to make the bowl as pretty as possible. Hopefully it lives up to the shows’ title.
I’ve also recently gotten into making music mashups (putting those music degrees to good use!). I’m having the best time mashing up Taylor Swift songs! Her songs are so prominent on The Summer I Turned Pretty soundtrack. (To be honest, it’s the main reason I started watching in the first place!). Season 2 is already off to a flying start with the first three episodes. I wanted my mashup to be meaningful to the show, so I used the songs This Love and Back to December. Or, as someone commented on my mashup post, Conrad and Belly’s love song and break up song (tears). You can go give it a listen here!
My top tips for picking the perfect ripe watermelon, every single time! Are you a watermelon lover? For me, summer time is all about digging into a perfectly sweet and refreshing ripe watermelon. But do you feel like you can never quite pick the ripest …
It wasn’t this blog, this blog just launched today! But it was a blog and I had high hopes for it. At the time I was embarking on one of the greatest adventures of my life – I had taken my first international flight moving to another country where I would finally get to explore the wider world (and hopefully pick up a British accent) whilst living in London, UK. It was all incredibly exciting and I wanted to document everything – mostly for myself, but also for family and friends back home. I actually just had a cheeky look back at that blog and it was so fun to walk down memory lane, so I suppose it served its purpose a little bit.
As I’m sure you’ve gathered, that blog never really got off the ground. It had a few sputtering starts and restarts. I put up posts every now and then. And (to my credit) I uploaded loads of photos somewhat regularly because I’m a bit of a photographing fiend – have you seen my Instagram stories? However, exciting things just kept happening too fast (don’t you just hate it when that happens?), and a blog became too much for me to keep up with. I wonder if any of you can relate, and have your own lost blogs that live somewhere forgotten on the Internet, or in the files on your laptop?
I’ve thought quite a bit about why this happened, especially as I’ve been working on this new blog – and how long it’s taken to get off the ground. Mainly I think I got swamped with the amount of stuff I felt I had to do – the hundreds, which quickly became thousands of photos to sort through and edit (my photographing strategy has always been to take loads of photos and hope that some turn out halfway decent – usually it works, but it requires so much time to wade through). And then there was all of the writing, proofreading, formatting, and as experiences piled up it began to feel like too much to keep up with.
All of this, combined with my indecision and perfectionism, resulted in a false start. I felt like I couldn’t craft blog posts that I deemed worthy of publishing. I don’t know why I felt so much pressure given that my readers were family and a few close friends who I knew wouldn’t have judged my posts (too harshly at least). But I’ve always felt a strong degree of (self-imposed) pressure to produce things to a certain standard, and in my head I couldn’t meet the bar.
That same perfectionism and pressure has played a big part in keeping me from starting this blog.
You may (or may not) be surprised to hear that I’d been thinking about starting a food blog for over a year now, with the original intention to launch at the beginning of the new year – yes this year, 2018. I know, I know, it’s August…so you can see how that went!
Side note for my Instagram peeps who have followed along with the whole slight saga – thanks for sticking with me! Can you believe it’s finally happening?? I hardly can, it’s really been a long time coming.
I think the main thing was that I had thought the content I was sharing, and even myself as a person, needed to be at a certain point before I could start – that I had to be super healthy and fit, a whiz in the kitchen, and an organised writer who had something polished to share with the world. Over time, as I’ve struggled with balancing studies and life and Instagram, dealt with some health issues, and felt further and further from that ‘ready version’ I thought I needed to be, I kept pushing blogging further and further away. It’s been a slow and gradual process, but I’ve come to realise that I’ll never reach that polished level of expertise I’m aiming for. And now I genuinely think a lot of the value of this community and sharing a blog is to bring you along for the ride and show you the journey along the way.
This blog might (definitely) be messy.
It will likely not be as organised or as professional as I want – especially when I look at how many incredible and beautiful blogs there are out there. I have to face the realities that I am at a different stage in my health journey, my blogging journey (hello beginnings!), and in my life as a full-time doctoral student also trying to live in an expensive city abroad.
But I’ve also recognised that I don’t have to be the end product right now.
And I hope that by bringing you into my life at this moment, as I’m still working on balance and health and life, that you can find some value, inspiration, encouragement or comfort from any of it.
I want to share the process of launching and growing this little corner of the Internet. And I guess this is a space for me to muse about what that process is like. I hope it might be interesting. I hope even more so that it might be helpful. I’m not entirely sure what this series will look like, but at the moment I envision it being a place to share helpful tips and tricks that I learn and implement along my blogging journey.
So, this is the beginning of my blogging journey. Where are you on yours? Have you started a blog? Or ever wanted to? I’d love to hear any stories you might want to share (and how long it took/is taking you to launch yours? =P)