Update: Friday 26 Oct

I'm having fun experimenting with food.

Wednesday, after spending a long day in Amsterdam with Jenn, I came home, threw a few things in a pot, and sat around the kitchen resting my tired feet until I decided food was ready.  What did I throw in the pot? Well I've been wanting beef stew but I don't even care if it has beef in it. My favorite part is delicious squishy carrots and thick soup anyway.  So I chopped some celery nice and small (I dislike celery, but I am willing to admit that it lends nice flavors when cooked), diced an onion and quartered a few mushrooms. Fried them in olive oil for just a few minutes and then added water, carrots, potatoes, beef bouillon, parsley and pepper.  Boiled that for a while until the carrots started getting soft, and then threw in some rice.  Rice and potatoes for thickness. I have no flour.  I succeeded, it was nice and thick. And so delicious. I felt so proud (next time I'll put in more carrots though).

Then there was today's success.

This was actually the second pizza I made (it's a pizza, in case you couldn't tell). The first one was eaten. By me. I really wanted pizza, I hadn't had pizza in quite a while and it just sounded good. So I went to the store and bought this pizza making kit, which I've had before at Jenn's house. It has in it a package of flour (I'm not sure if there's anything in with the flour), a little package of olive oil, and a package of pizza sauce. You get to mix the dough yourself (I did that with my hands as I don't have a mixer with dough hooks. Messy hands, yay) then you are supposed to spread the dough over a baking sheet, cover it in sauce, shred cheese on top of it and put on whatever toppings you want. Obviously since I don't have an oven, I couldn't do it that way. Instead I split the dough in half, and split the sauce and cheese very unevenly in "half" (the first pizza had more cheese and less sauce than the one in the picture). Put olive oil in the pan, spread the dough in the pan on the olive oil, turned on the stove to cook that, then flipped it over and spread on the sauce, cheese and veggies, turned the heat down a bit and covered it all with a wok because my pan doesn't have a lid. It was so good. The second one, I left out to cool a bit, then wrapped it in plastic wrap and stuck it in the fridge. Because I don't need to eat that much.

So now I need to come up with more ideas. And maybe I should start writing these things down so I can do that in the future too. I got really tired of always eating the same things over and over.

Jennifer and I are making hope jars. At least, that's what I'm calling them. The idea is to come up with 365 reasons to smile, reasons to love life, reasons to love yourself, put them on strips of paper, fold the papers up and put them in a jar which we will decorate. Then if ever we get sad or lonely or angry, we can pull out some papers and read good things. Jenn found the idea in a blog. We liked it, so we thought we would do it. The problem is coming up with 365 things.