I basically resigned myself to the fact that I will never be able to achieve the same level of quality and flavor (or even just correctness) as you find at an Indian restaurant. This saddened me a lot, because I like Indian food, but I’m pretty picky about what dishes I like, so buffets are not a good value for me (I can’t eat much more than 1 plate without exploding). I don’t like shelling out $20 + tax + tip every time Josh and I want to have Indian food. Not to mention what a boon it would be to my culinary skills if I was actually able to pull it off.

Apparently my hard work did finally pay off. This is the result of 4.5 hours of cooking this past Sunday, after 2 weeks of research and hours of tweaking and combining various recipes I had found:

From the top, clockwise: basmati rice, murgh makhani, naan, saag, mint-coriander chutney

I had actually made naan a few weeks ago, but I would not call it authentic by any means (despite hundreds of people who think otherwise from AllRecipes), so this time I tried a new recipe. As you can see, mine didn’t quite turn out like theirs…theirs look a lot more correct. The flavor was a bit better than the previous recipe, but I’m still waiting for a real winner with the naan.

Now about this chicken curry – that is the name given in every Indian restaurant, and then what? Totally useless, since “curry” just means “sauce”. Go look up recipes for chicken curry. Do it. You’ll find about a million with all different ingredients. Ask an Indian person for a chicken curry recipe. They’ll ask which one? My problem exactly.

I have now concluded that the chicken curry, as you find it in restaurants, is actually Murgh Makhani, or Butter Chicken (chicken = murgh, butter = makhani. Now we speak Indian!). Tomatoes but not too tomato-ey (as is the case with chicken tikka masala, a dish with an actual identifying name!), cream (or variations on cream), but not too creamy. I did notice lots of Indian bloggers freaking out over the “vast quantity of butter” that goes into butter chicken….and they then listed 1.5 tbsp of butter to the 1.5 lbs of chicken they also called for. This is nothing. Literally, nothing at all. You use 8 tbsp of butter just in the crust to make 1 pie. This curry serves at least 6, if not more, so really….don’t need to worry about the butter. The 1 cup of cream most recipes called for? Worry about that. A lot. 1 tbsp of cream has something like 50 calories, and there are 16 tbsp in 1 cup. Yeah. 800 calories just in cream. THAT is what you need to be worried about, not the butter, folks.

And so I did. I absolutely refused to purchase any kind of cream to make these dishes. For one thing, I never have any use for the rest of the cream. And for another, I really don’t want to ingest that many calories just to have some spicy chicken. I improvised with a combination of 1% milk and 2% plain Greek yogurt, and let me tell you it was just as delicious, and you load up on protein while smashing fat down to almost nothing!

Here is my conclusion as to the magical ingredients that really make this pop at home:

• Dried fenugreek leaves, or kasoori methi. You can find them at your local Indian grocer (I actually had one of these just 1 block from my regular Ralphs). They cost almost nothing and they are ESSENTIAL to making it taste authentic. Several Indian bloggers mentioned that the smell of fenugreek leaves is the main smell when you go to Indian restaurants.
• Tandoori masala. Again you can find this at your Indian grocer. It’s a spice blend, similar to garam masala, but the flavor is SO spot on. I smelled this as I was spooning it out and I thought wow will this be a winner! This also contains some fenugreek, so that might be part of it.
• Tomatoes. Throughout the course of the evening, I learned the instrumental part that tomatoes play in Indian cuisine. Does it taste full of tomato in the end? Not at all. Not even close. But it is absolutely essential. I used crushed tomatoes, as it was the closest thing I had, but in the future I will try to use tomato puree.
• Don’t be afraid to use your spices. A lot. I nearly doubled the spices as I was making it, compared to the recipe I had pieced together. It’s not that my spices are weak, it definitely tasted right with the initial quantity, but I really wanted to give it some oomph.
• Don’t use too much clove. Initially I used 3 cloves, and all I could taste was clove! Luckily I fished out 2 of them and it ended up being ok after the simmer.

Here is my beauty, fully cooked and ready to serve:

I’m the first to say that this picture does not look that appetizing. In fact it’s a pretty poor representation of what it looked like in real life. But trust me when I tell you that the flavor was 1) amazing, and truly 2) authentic.

Now for my other favorite, and definitely my favorite vegetable, in Indian cuisine: saag. What is this, you ask? I’ve never heard of it, you say? Well, it is Indian spiced, creamed spinach. You’ve probably heard it under the name Palak Paneer. Apparently both palak and saag mean spinach, and paneer means cheese, so Palak Paneer is exactly what I have made, only with bonus cubes of homemade cheese (they look like tofu). Personally that cheese grosses me out. I understand most people eat Palak Paneer as a vehicle for having the paneer, but when I eat it….it’s so I can eat the palak. I usually leave the paneer at the buffet as much as possible.

Why do I call it saag? Because most of the Indian food I had in my life was from a place called Khyber Express, a nice little fast food type stand in the mall (in 2 malls, actually. No longer in either mall, sadly). And they called it saag. So I call it saag. Sometimes I encounter it in buffets with no name and no paneer, and I get confused. It’s like they don’t want people knowing it’s not Palak Paneer or something.

When I’ve asked Indian people about this dish before, I’ve gotten a horrible reaction from them. They really dislike it, and tell me it’s very unpopular with Indian people (and every single person I’ve asked, and I’ve asked at least a dozen, has shared this opinion). However, they love Palak Paneer! Go figure. So finding a recipe was pretty much a joke. In the end I pieced together a half dozen recipes for Palak Paneer and just left the paneer out.

Let me tell you, it is perfect. When the final spices were stirred in and I tried it, I was completely shocked. How could it have possibly turned out correct?! How many times had I tried and failed, left with an inedible pile of spinach and cream?! But this, it was perfect. I actually made this first before the curry, and concentrated all my efforts solely on it, so that if it didn’t turn out well, I would know it wasn’t due to me neglecting it and trying to cook too many things at once. Well it turned out so nicely that I don’t think I need to fear that again.

Magical things that make this a success at home:

• Pureeing your spinach. Remember earlier when I said past attempt had been stringy spinach? Well that’s kind of what you get from chopped spinach. Saag, when you take a spoonful, just lifts cleanly away from the rest on your plate. You can only achieve this by pureeing. What a difference a texture makes.
• Tomatoes. Again. I laughed when I saw tomatoes in the recipe. What were they talking about, spinach with cream and tomatoes? What a joke, that had to be the recipe that fails. But I saw it in another. And another. And another. Eventually the ones that called for tomato outnumbered the ones that did not. And then I thought there had to be something to it. I hadn’t used tomato before, and it hadn’t turned out right, so what did I have to lose?

Really that was the only magic needed to pull off saag. I did use ghee in all dishes in place of oil for sauteeing the onions, and I think that was probably a big factor in the authentic flavor, but I can’t say for sure. Ghee is just clarified butter that has cooked a bit longer and developed a nice nutty flavor. I made my own a few weeks ago, it was easy and cheap (and delicious!).

Don’t worry, that’s not butter or oil pooling in those areas. The spinach was pureed with 1/2 cup of water and the watery residue from the puree looked like that before it even went in the pan. I swear It’s tinged orange from the turmeric. Again, I creamed with a combo of milk and greek yogurt, rather than actual cream.

The final thing I made was mint-coriander chutney. That’s the tiny mound of green you can see on our plates. It’s the spice sauce thing you get at the buffet. This one I still need to work on. I used Thai green chiles (which is the correct chile to use in most Indian cooking), which I had never used before, and it turned out they were obscenely spicy. Since I had already used all my cilantro and mint, I didn’t really have a way to correct it. Also I used too much lime juice in it. It did taste better the next day, but I think more research is needed. Some bloggers did recommend using jalapenos here instead of Thai chiles so that you can get more bulk without overdoing the heat, so I might try that. It’s pretty hard to puree simple cilantro and mint leaves into a smooth paste with 0 liquid…

Since this made so much food, we had tons of leftovers! After having dinner last night, I decided the time I saved not having to cook dinner could be spent making an Indian dessert, Gulab Jamun. I used this recipe and tried to follow it exactly. It looked great as it was soaking in the syrup (this is after we ate 6, oops! Nearly forgot to grab a photo).

But then inside…

Hollow?! Even weirder than hollow, the insides seemed to be filled with delicious ghee, mmm. Tasty, but odd! Otherwise the taste was perfect, and the texture of the non-hollow part was spot on. Aren’t they cute.

Then, my next bit of excellent news is that I wrote up the recipes I had crafted for the murgh makhani and the saag and submitted them to Food.com, and this morning they were published! So I encourage you to go now and make these, and give them a rating on there I know I’ll be making them again, and soon!

Murgh Makhani

Saag

Fast forward 2 years, and the perfect spice jar had proven anything but. It only held 20 spices, or about half her collection, and they all came pre-filled, at least half of which were not any decent. The flip top lid, which at time of purchase had seemed the best of both the scoop and shake worlds, proved useless on both counts. Too small to fit any larger than 1/4 tsp, too messy to shake. And if she unscrewed the lid, spices went all over the floor due to a horrible top mechanism.

No longer could she stand this. And what’s more, she wanted the rest of her spices to also find their way into a comfy jar home, no longer in random tins, bags, and bottles. And preferably, the new home would be something totally expandable, so as to not confine her collection of spices.

The jumbled mess before the reorg.

Unsurprisingly, I actually found more upon closer inspection

These pretties were my selected benefactors. Aren’t they pretty? I thought so. I bought 60 of them. Yes, 60 of them. They’re sold in cases of 12 and I sure didn’t want to find myself with 49 spices and no jar to hold the 49th spice!!!

Then I got a labelmaker (which I also wanted for various other labelling) and made these pretty labels on clear tape. I actually spent a couple of hours perfecting the size and font choice on these. You only redo your spice cabinet once, right? Right?????

When it was all said and done (which actually took HOURS, I think I spent some 9 hours on this from start to finish??? I’m sure I took longer than was necessary, but not by too much!), I had this GORGEOUS array of easy to scoop, not too big and not too small, airtight, uniform jars!!! I had 45 spices in all (and yes I am counting a couple of blends as well as table salt “spices”, because they definitely benefited from this reorg), and filled the remaining 3 of my first 48 jars with turbinado sugar (sugar in the raw), catnip (for the cats), and temptations (also for the cats – they like airtight seals, too).

And to give you some idea of the scale of the jars and sheer magnitude of the number of spices involved…

You may also notice the spot on the carpet where I spilled a whole ton of turmeric. Ah well.

And so, the girl turned home-chef found herself with such a lovely collection of spices, in such a pleasing array of colors and uniform containers, that she was overjoyed. Never again would she spill spices all over the floor while just trying to use them. Never would she have to limit her scoops to 1/4 tsp. And never again would she dump the entire container of table salt into her dessert while trying to measure out 1/2 tsp. Not that that ever happened. Really, it didn’t. But there were some close calls.

Next up? Finding some kind of way of putting these jars away….They’re kind of just stacked everywhere I could make a single layer of the jars (they’re too rounded to stack, and they’re glass…and I don’t want to risk it) and still easily access all of them. My top 15 are in the cabinet next to the stove, and the rest are ordered alphabetically in another cabinet.

By the way, if you do clear spice jars, do your best to keep them in a cabinet or other dark surrounding. I feel obligated to say this, lest someone comment and tell me I misled them to leave their spices in direct sunlight and they became useless overnight. Don’t do that.

I just love them!

The last couple weeks I was on a digital organization kick. All of the sudden I had to have a new backup hard drive, and I had to fill it up right away. And promptly physically broke the thing and lost all my data (the only copy of some of it). This, in turn, required I buy yet another hard drive, copy everything I had left, and start to really organize files that have never seen organization over the past 10 years. It took over a week just to get to the point of being able to start organizing the files. I got them into general categories and ran lots of tools to ensure I had no duplicate files (not anymore – I did have tons and tons of duplicate files. This is what happens when you copy your folders again and again out of paranoia).

So what did that mean? That meant it was time to really get down to business! And that’s when I lost all interest in it. I had achieved my main goal – I now have dual backups fully replicated of all of my data ever. I can feel free to break 1 more hard drive and still be ok. Ideally, those backup drives would be fully organized and magnificent. But you know what, that is a lot of data. A lot of data. And the task became overwhelming. There was no hurry to organize files, as there had been to back everything up after I broke the drive, even though the initial drive (no pun intended) to start on this task came out of nowhere.

I had about 3 or 4 days after I gave up on digital organization where I floundered. I felt like I had nothing to do, and I actually thought it was from no longer having something as massive as planning a wedding always hanging overhead to fill up any free time. I think I was just waiting to hop on board my next quick train, though. Turns out that train was real-life organization!

For the last 3 days, I have been cleaning totally nonstop. I started in the living room, going through old boxes I’d been ignoring for…at least over a year now. I also cleaned out all of the windowsills (hadn’t done that since we moved in 3 years ago! Ewwww), and any random areas of dirt on the walls (yes, the walls actually get buildup in high traffic areas). The next day I cleaned the bathroom totally from top to bottom – and side to side, for that matter. I’ve never cleaned the bathroom that well or that thoroughly. It’s not only clean (as in grime) but it’s clean (as in organized). Everything is put away in it’s right place, everything is dust-free and beautiful. And it makes me so much happier. The next morning (ie this morning) I walked in and did not recognize it. That was a great feeling! I always feel like the bathroom is one of the hardest place to get in shape, especially when one owns too many bath products….as one might do…

Tonight I tackled what is easily the dungeon of the apartment: the walk-in closet. It sounds glamorous. It sounds like it contains the most fabulous collection of clothing, and most especially shoes. And I’m sure it would if I had a garage, laundry room, linen closet, and/or hobby room. Instead it’s the dumping ground for anything that doesn’t really have a place elsewhere. Sporting equipment, laundry accessories, hobby supplies, wedding decor that needs to be sold, wedding china we don’t have nearly the cupboard space required here, luggage, a giant ballgown that hasn’t yet been preserved and stuffed into a tiny box, bath towels, beach towels, sheets, handbags, a pull up bar, college diploma frame, guitar, skateboard, gift bags, art and MORE fill this space. Oh, and it also has clothes and shoes. Cleaning this beast has been dreaded. Nothing in there seems like anything can be done with it – it’s not junk, there just isn’t anywhere else for it.

Well, it turns out some of it was junk. Not much, but enough to help significantly. I still had my bag of ice skates leftover from the fire (“the fire” = the fire that destroyed my apartment in college 1 month before graduation in 2007) from which I had been meaning to harvest the blades and toss the rest, as nothing else could be salvaged (I’m not even positive the blades are usable). Tonight I harvested those blades and trashed the rest. This cleared off a big chunk of the overhead shelving in there. I also picked out a few items of clothing I haven’t worn in 4+ years, which was enough for me to be able to hang up the hanging sweater holder that Josh and I bought a year ago which we had only managed to fit on his side of the closet so far! It’s pretty exciting. I moved some boxes around and tada, about half of the closet was organized. It looks so much better already, and that feels better.

I also finally went through my leftover wedding items. Everything was sorted into sell, keep, donate, and I even washed all of the table runners so they’re ready to go too. That got rid of a big basket of stuff! What I have left to sell fits together nicely now in a small area, vs the millions of boxes taking up the entire floor in there before.

I’m feeling pretty great about myself through my success in cleaning and organization. I’m also feeling pretty tired though! I basically clean the entire time after work except for about 1 hour to eat and watch some TV. Just like everything else though, I’m sure I’ll be over this soon enough, so I better go all-out while I’m on this kick in order to achieve maximum payoff. So far I’m very happy with my work!

Needless to say, nothing special was planned, unless you count Movie and Chipotle Night. It’s actually the first time in a long, long time that we saw a movie with our Chipotle instead of a TV show (we saw Bedtime Stories – produced by Adam Shankman of SYTYCD and Step Up fame, who knew?). It also marked us being LATE with our thank you notes!!! Ahhh!!! Etiquette dictates that they all be sent out within 2 months of the wedding. I would say we have about 70% left unsent and unwritten….but I’ve also learned that most people don’t know a darn thing about etiquette, especially when it comes to weddings, so perhaps no one will notice or care.

For breakfast on our 2-months-and-1-day anniversary (yeah I know these aren’t all “anniversaries” but it’s fun to say) we tried something brand new: buttermilk pancakes! We’ve had buttermilk before, I want to say for the purpose of making biscuits except for the part where I remember I had to find a recipe that specifically did not use buttermilk, but we’ve never made our own buttermilk pancakes. Now, Josh makes a good non-buttermilk pancake, and I’ve blogged about it before, but this was the first time we tried to match the magic of the buttermilk pancakes from Original Pancake House.

We used this recipe to create them. I actually never tasted buttermilk on its own before – the last time I used it in a recipe (which I can only presume were biscuits), it smelled weird and was really lumpy and I was pretty terrified of it, and thought perhaps it’s not meant to be tasted alone (the end product made from that stuff was fine). Yesterday, I tasted it! It also smelled weird (though not “EWWWW” weird as it had before), and seemed kinda lumpy (though it actually turned out to just be thickness causing it to galumph out of the container [I’ve just learned that “galumph” is an actual word! It didn’t underline it when I typed it and I thought, no way that’s a real word?? It is!]). The taste, however, was that of sour cream (aka not bad at all!). After they finished cooking (which took FOREVER at 1/2 cup per 5-inch pancake! Like 10 minutes per pancake and I could only fit 1 in the pan at a time!), I kept thinking I could taste sour cream – but that was also the case for about an hour afterwards, so I must have tricked myself by trying the buttermilk alone.

Today we have 3 leftover pancakes (they are HUGE!!!). Yesterday we each had 2. The nice thing about these is they seem to be really light – both in terms of texture and in terms of not weighing you down. When I have a reasonable portion (2-3 of 1/4-cup-each pancakes) of the non-buttermilk variety, I feel totally stuffed and heavy afterwards. Having 2 of the 1/2-cup-each pancakes did not make me feel that way at all. And they were soft and moist and fabulous. I quite enjoyed them! Unfortunately, nobody grabbed any photos

Off to enjoy the breakfast of leftovers…and hopefully writing some thank you notes!

I’m glad I got the passport back, and proud of myself for mailing it in ASAP so that 1) I wouldn’t have to pay again since I got it within the last year, and 2) so I would have it back right away and not drag this out any longer. The very last place I went was the DMV, and that’s because there’s a 1 month wait for an appointment! And it’s pretty much impossible to go without an appointment, unless you want to take the day off work. The actual change was easy enough – they didn’t even want to see the social security card! But they did say that they electronically verify it with them, so it needs to already be changed there.

I now have an interim license again for the first time in 9 years. I was surprised by the amount of people also getting interim licenses….people I seriously doubt were getting their first license OR changing their name. I wonder what else would cause that? Also, when I had my permit, it had my picture attached, so you knew right away how your license would look. But the interim license has no picture, so it will just be a big surprise to me how it looks! I didn’t like that I had to get a new photo (thought at least I knew in advance so I could try to look good), my old photo is one of the best pics of me ever (somehow!).

Once I get my new driver license in 2-4 weeks, and my work computer login changed, I think I’ll be all done with my name change! I bet I’ll discover some other crucial area that needs updating that I’ve forgotten, but I really hope not!

The major hurdle in combining our money and making our monthly budget was different pay dates. As I mentioned in a previous post, I get paid twice a month on consistent dates, and Josh gets paid twice a month on totally unknown dates anywhere from a week to 13 days after me. This makes allocating the checks problematic, and the obvious solution was to simply allocate each check individually, right?

Wrong. Then we wouldn’t have a married budget – we would have 2 separate budgets that both people happen to look at. We had to plan it as though each of our checks came at the same time, and simply kept on the way we each had previously, allocating each twice-monthly check to the budgeted items.

Well, the first thing I thought was “wow – we’re rich!”. But that pretty much happens anytime you suddenly tack on an entire other salary. Really we just took a look at each of our previous budgets, adjusted for bills that we hadn’t been budgeting evenly (nice…), and tried to make our savings goals match as closely to our previous separate budgets combined (though we both come out with less money each check now that we’re married and get to pay the marriage penalty – a post for another time).

One thing this meant was adding a debt payment back into my (now “our”) budget We both ended college with a hefty amount of student loans. We had both decided that our debts would be our individual responsibilities, back in the day. I paid off my student loans last year, 2 years after starting repayment. Josh paid his down by half, but understandably could not pay them off entirely (I make the higher salary in our household). Combining all of our finances meant that I would assume responsibility for his debt (yes, I know that legally I assumed that responsibility when we said I Do since California is a common law state, but that really only comes into play if it goes into collections and/or we were to separate).

And then my first thought? Let’s get this thing off of the budget again!!! So really, I was happy to be able to contribute some of my salary to his debt. I mean, I could have always done that anyway…but probably would not have unless he asked for help. I was not willing to put our savings goals on hold in order to really pay it off ASAP, but I’m hoping it will be paid off in less time than it would have been without combined finances.

Today was our first combined budget paycheck (mine)! Things didn’t go exactly as planned…even though I had sent my updated W4 in on the 2nd of the month, it was not processed in time for this paycheck, which meant I still had single withholdings which are all kinds of wrong now (and by “now”, I mean for all of 2010, since the filing status affects the entire year and not just the portion of the year you are married – annoying for some [me], beneficial to others [supposedly this is true]). Sooo this meant it was bigger than we expected, which is nice…but it means we probably won’t have enough withheld, and we also have to wait another month to get a good grasp of what our married salaries will look like net.

I also encountered the “how do I allocate the full budget when I only have 1 check so far” problem. My solution was to simply allocate the entire budget, and put in a negative line item in my super-massive-black-hole-bank-breakdown spreadsheet to hold the amounts we were waiting on from Josh’s first check of the month (which won’t come until Monday – and I don’t mean the Monday in 3 days!!!). I’m not sure how much I liked this solution. I mean… it kind of worked…but it’s totally inaccurate with regard to what we have available, which is bothersome. But there doesn’t seem to really be a better way. I’ll see if I come up with anything better as we continue.

We had the same breakfast as yesterday, the pancakes were just too good! We didn’t get any photos though.

For dinner, Josh tested out the new All-Clad pizza stone! We got a peel at Sur La Table last week, since previous pizza failures had been blamed on the lack of one. Tonight’s pizza featured Alton Brown’s original crust (though we did not do the rise overnight – but we have another ball of dough in the fridge that is taking that trip), Ragu’s “no sugar added” tomato and basil sauce, because I can’t stand the sweetness of commercial sauces these days and didn’t feel like cooking up my own batch of sauce, mozzarella, mushrooms and green pepper.

I am le tasty!

It’s hard to tell from the picture, but it was just slightly larger than personal pizzas. We each had half of this one – and we each complained of being too full after! Good thing we didn’t each have a “personal” pizza.

I really enjoyed the mushrooms and green peppers, but I feel like it needs some kind of cheese mix rather than just mozzarella. I’m trying to think what other Italian cheeses are used on pizzas – provolone, parmesan? I’m not even sure. But I think a bit of a cheese blend would be nice. I’m also not totally sold on the sauce we used. I think if I would have made some fresh, it would have been better. But it worked well enough.

What I really liked was the crust!!! I’m not sure if it was the recipe or the stone or both, but this was far superior to previous pizzas. Previously we had done a mock Pizza Hut personal pan pizza, and it was delicious but it was also reaaaaally greasy, and we undercooked it a bit. After that, we had done some that I believe were the pizza dough version of “pain perdue”, a rustic French style bread – and those were nice but they were too crispy and not enough flavor. This one though, it had good flavor, good chew, AND a nice crisp bottom on it. It was great!!! Even though when making it, the dough refused to come together based on the measurements given. I should also note that pizza is another of Josh’s dishes – he’s the one who made all aforementioned pizzas (though I was the sauce maker, and I frequently help in prepping the toppings as well as doing the actual topping).

Yesterday, my new Social Security card came in the mail! This means I can finally change my name at work! How absurd that work is the last place to get the update. This also means that I am ready for my DMV appointment in 3 weeks. One thing that is weird, is my first name has been misspelled at work since I started there, despite me trying to get them to fix it (well, it’s right everywhere except on my checks and tax documents!). My last paycheck came on Friday, I had not sent them anything (no name change, no new W4 yet), and yet they fixed my name. What is that all about?! All of the sudden, 3 full years later. Hopefully sending in my new W4 with my new name does not cause confusion as they take over 1 month to change my name in the work system.

It seems like just about every weekend, we run out of milk and Josh has to go get some more. Luckily, Trader Joe’s is a scant 3 minute walk, but still – how is it that we manage to always run out before breakfast on the weekend?

Today I woke up wanting pancakes, and it was the second thing Josh suggested after hash browns! Whooo both wanting to have the same breakfast. And pancakes are a Josh-cooks-it item! I don’t know if it was the recipe or the cooking, but whenever I’ve tried to make pancakes in the past they were just…ok. Nothing special. Not bad, but not great, just meh. Josh’s pancakes are quite good though!

Table all set! We don’t always eat at the table for breakfast.

It was quite good. Thank you Joshykins! The last time he made them, somehow we ended up with 12. I’m not sure how this time we got 6, but it worked out fine. I even wanted seconds! Probably better that we didn’t have any, though.

What Josh doesn’t know is that I’m secretly having him build his repertoire of recipes. Well, he will know if he reads this! He is the breakfast potato cooker (both home fries and hashbrowns), occasionally an egg maker, the pancake maker. Breakfast is the meal in which he has the most prep and cooking experience, but he is always my sous-chef for dinner.

We had a teeeeny pancake for the cats, can you see it?

The rest of the day was basically finishing up laundry that didn’t get done the other day, going through clothes to pull out ones that don’t fit or aren’t liked, and general tidying. We filled a huuuge box (one that a wedding dress was originally shipped in!) with clothes and a couple other items to donate! I’m working on paring down my shoe collection, but it’s hard. It’s so much easier to get rid of clothes than shoes or bags, I find. For one thing, you don’t grow out of shoes or bags (well, I guess you could grow out of shoes in adulthood, but it’s more rare). And they seem to wear out less frequently.

I really wanted to work on scanning documents and photos today, but it didn’t happen Hopefully tomorrow. We did wash the car though, something I wanted to do before the wedding! It is all nice and shiny now.

Yesterday, this arrived:

   Hoola hula hoop!

I bought it last week online, because apparently adults need their own special size of hoop, and can’t just get one from Toys R Us. I tried it out right away and was able to hoop for 6 minutes straight! I was able to do that about 3 times. Other times were between 2 and 4 minutes. Something about “adult” hoops though, is they are heavier! They’re made of pipe, I think, instead of out of plastic. They should certainly be more durable…but the extra weight and larger size meant it hurts your tummy to hoop. At least it hurt mine. This morning I had a few bruises from it Hopefully I build up a tolerance to it. It was lots of fun!

Dinner was a quick tuna noodle casserole thrown together last minute thanks to leftover cooked egg noodles from the 1 month anniversary dinner! I’ve never made such an easy meal that still was fairly “home cooked” (there was canned mushroom soup involved). It was delicious!

We watched last year’s remake of Friday the 13th. I rather enjoyed it! I thought I might hate it, as I had the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I had never seen any of the Friday the 13th movies before, but now I’m curious to see some of them.

Tomorrow will probably be another day full of chores. At least the apartment is looking better!

I was inspired to do this after reading an article from The Simple Dollar, from which I basically took away that I needed to write down all of those little things that I knew in my head I wanted to do, that I meant to do, but that I just never seemed to get done. They’re not big projects, they’re nothing amazing, but they are things that will improve my happiness (even if it doesn’t make me that happy to actually do the task, the outcome will).

I invited Josh to play along with a list of his own, just to keep everyone motivated. I didn’t tell him the reason behind my wanting to do this, but he was willing to participate just for the sake of writing things down. I think it will be good for us to have lists to refer back to, so we don’t overlook anything that we had once thought of. Another benefit is that by writing it down, we can take that information out of our minds, which removes clutter from the brain.

The way I started it was by asking Josh, “What do you want to do in life?”. His first answer was “have kids”, so I was quick to refine the scope of “in life” to mean just “in the next year”. I wanted these lists to be specific things that we could just pick and decide to work on that day or that weekend.

I think we came up with a good list of things whose predicted end times range from this weekend to sometime next year. Now we just have to make an effort to not be totally lazy!

Today is a Friday, and Friday is Chipotle night! In college it used to be Movie & Chipotle night, and it was just me alone on a bean bag chair, inches away from my 42” plasma TV. But back then, I had a Blockbuster across the street from my apartment. Now the closest one was a few miles away, but they closed, and now the closest one is farther than I care to go. I also decided I didn’t much care to eat in the dark when I’m a good 4’ away from the glow of the TV. So it is now just Chipotle night, and usually we just watch TV. Actually, for the last year or so, we’ve watched Say Yes To The Dress with our burritos. I have a very, very strong association between wedding dresses and Chipotle burritos!!

I used to always get the steak burrito. Then, I started getting the barbacoa burrito regularly for the last month or 2. But I’ve become disgusted with the bits of gristle or LARGE chunks of unrendered fat, and so I decided that this week I would try the vegetarian burrito.

This is not the veggie burrito, but this is vegging!

I decided that I did enjoy the veggie burrito (you get guac on it in place of meat, for no additional charge, which I gladly took advantage of). It did, however, kind of end up tasting like a giant nacho. Maybe I need to get extra beans when I get vegetarian? I wish I could get half meat, half guac. Even when there wasn’t gristle, there were always overwhelming patches of nothing but meat, and it was just too much. I also noticed that the burrito ends up pretty cold without meat – the only hot items in it are rice and beans. This wasn’t a bad thing, and will make leftovers easier, but it also contributed to the nacho feeling.

I gobbled it up so quickly that I forgot to get a picture! Just imagine the big silver burrito – now cut it in half. That’s what I ate. Along with a cream soda. Mmmm cream soda. How did I used to eat the entire burrito + soda?! I don’t even know. Sometimes I would have the entire burrito and still feel hungry! Oh the damage.

I am looking forward to Josh and I starting on our tasks this weekend! I emphasized that these are not things we NEED to do, they are things we WANT to do – and if we don’t actually want to do them, then take them off the list – but also stop thinking that you will do it. If it’s removed from the list, it’s not something that will be done, by choice, and should no longer be dwelled upon. We’ll see how it goes!

I managed to do this while getting frustrated with attempting to fold a fitted bed sheet. I’ve never actually folded one before at all. I’ve just crumpled them in a ball, or left them to sit in my desk chair until it was time to use them again. This time I was determined to fold them properly!

It took me I think 1 entire hour to actually get it done, along with the matching flat sheet and pillowcases. Here is the final result (this picture is more pink than the sheets really are):

Looks good, right? Well, the stack is about twice as large as the packages these come in, and it didn’t quite fit all the way on the shelf, the way it should have. I followed some Youtube tutorials, but I’m not sure if they were meant for twin sheets instead of queen or king. I’ll try folding them a bit differently next time and see if it comes out the right size. Maybe I’ll even take some photos or videos along the way so that I’m able to repeat it later! But this is still better than crumpled in a ball, right?

After my fit of rage at the sheet’s lack of cooperation, and my resulting injury, dinner was simple. Delicious, nutritious, frozen fish sticks! With gummy, medium-grain rice. I guess that’s a risotto rice? I thought risotto rice was short grain rice. In any case, it was gummier than I would enjoy, but it was ok. At least it featured homemade tartar sauce!

As I was writing this, Chopstick started eating some tape off of a box, which is one of her all-time favorite activities and “foods”. She kept making crazy faces as she chewed up the tape, here is the best shot I could get from across the room:

What a crazy!