Birthday Tomatoes and Sadness

Story-time -  Way back when I was just a little tot, my mom got a tomato plant for her birthday in May. Apparently I was less than impressed with this birthday present that wasn't a toy until my mom told me that the plant was magical in that it made food. Food? FOOD? Even toddler me loved food. I was fascinated and woke up every day asking if it had made food yet. So my mom told me that it would make food by my birthday in August and I should go watch it grow. So I'd sit there for hours watching the tomato plant grow while my mom did grown up stuff like shower and cook and take care of my infant sister.

My mom was so grateful for that toddler break that for 28 years, I always got the first tomato of the year, called my birthday tomato. It's probably one of the weirdest family traditions ever but I just grew up knowing that come summer, I'd get a birthday tomato and my mom would take a picture of me eating it like an apple with salt and pepper and that's just the way it was.

Then I moved to Florida. For the first time in my memory, I didn't get a birthday tomato. And just in case you don't understand how sad that moment was, think of some little family thing you guys do. Maybe for Thanksgiving, Aunt Bettie always makes her pumpkin pie, or after dinner you play a card game and the losers have to do dishes. If that suddenly stopped, you could go buy a pie or divvy up chores on your own but . . . it's just not the same.

I was bummed. Eventually I decided that it was time for me to grow my own darn birthday tomato so I'd never have to go another year without. I've been planting and growing tomatoes with my mom since I can remember so I knew how to do it, I just didn't know Florida's climate. So I did some Googling and found that in Florida, I can grow tomatoes twice a year. Whoa.

So I bought a plant and it was doing great. So many flowers that grew into perfect little green tomatoes that slowly started turning red. It was glorious. I even got to eat my first tomato and I had about 14 more tomatoes to go. And it was still flowering too!

Then disaster struck. I noticed an itty bitty hole in one of them and some obvious chew marks. I'd been using an organic spray up to that point but decided to up my game to spraying every day. It did nothing. First one tomato was eaten to the stem, then another.

It was caterpillars and those monsters are unrelenting. I spent ages trying to comb my plant and pull them off to no avail. I even paid the neighbor kids to come over and hunt for them. For every caterpillar they found, I'd give them a dollar. They found one. I knew enough to be afraid of hornworms which are flipping huge but these caterpillars were tiny little things. About the size of a grain of rice and an exact match for the color of the leaves. Basically impossible to see.

By the time I moved on to the big guns of caterpillar pesticides, it was too late. Those suckers ate my plant to death in a little over two weeks.

I'm going to keep trying but I'm not going to lie, it kinda discouraged me from Florida gardening. I've grown basil inside and an onion that started sprouting and that went well but . . . sigh. It was sad.

I guess the good news is, I did get my birthday tomato this year?

What kind of silly family traditions do you have? I know I can't be the only one with a tradition that has to be explained!

My Favorite Cheap Eats Story

Every once in a while, the stars align and I can feed fiancé and I for pennies. Last month was one of those times. I stopped by Winn Dixie to buy eggs but decided to check out the rest of the store for deals. I walked by the whole chicken section and saw that there were a couple marked down for quick sale. The best by date was still a few days out so I decided to get one. A six pound chicken cost me 3 dollars. That's 50 cents a pound!

Now cooking whole poultry is not my favorite because it's kind of a pain getting the bird prepared and then you have to deal with carving it. However, it is delicious so sometimes it is worth it. I threw it in my largest cast iron skillet with a cut up onion inside the cavity and some butter and garlic under the skin. I baked it for an hour and served it with mashed potatoes and gravy ( made in the skillet with the chicken drippings.) Pretty easy meal right?

[Sorry for the terrible pictures and my messy kitchen. I took these pictures to text to my sister and didn't plan on blogging about it! Forgive me please.]

Then as I carved the chicken, I threw the icky parts, the cooked onion and the carcess straight into my crockpot and made stock. I had never made chicken broth before but it was embarrassingly easy. Throw bones into a crockpot set on low, fill with water and add spices and a bay leaf. Then you leave it for 12 to 24 hours. When you come back, you fish out the bones and bits with a slotted spoon and throw it away. The broth was so much better than the store bought crap I usually get that when I got my Instant Pot, the first thing I made was broth for my freezer. It was that good. My crockpot ended up making about ten cups of broth And it was made with ingredients that I would have thrown away!

However, I planned for this batch to be made into homemade chicken noodle soup. After I scooped out the bones and other solids, I added some frozen carrots, celery, and pearl onions and threw in a couple cups of the leftover chicken.  Then I let that cook on low for awhile and then added a package of uncooked egg noodles and some kale I had in the fridge. Once those were done and I added salt and pepper, I filled up ten pint freezer containers with the soup and put them in my freezer for later.

[No, I don't know why this was the only picture I took of my awesome soup. This was like my third bowl and half eaten at that. Dishonor on me, dishonor on my cow.]

At this point, I STILL had lots of chicken left over so I made a chicken pot pie in my cast iron skillet with a pre-made piecrust, leftover chicken, kale and a frozen mix of carrots and peas and pearl onions. Made a white sauce and baked. Fiancé ate almost the entire thing!!! And he has been begging me to make it again! It was delicious.

Then, if you can even believe it, we still had a cup or so of leftover chicken so Fiancé brought it with him for lunch on the fourth day.

To recap -  I paid:

$3.00 for the chicken
$1.50 for the ready to microwave, mashed potatoes
$3.00 (approximately) for the carrots, celery, bag of peas and carrots and pearl onions
$2.49 for the pie crust
$1.29 for the egg noodles
$1.79 for the kale
and a small amount for flour, spices, and milk.

For under 14 dollars, we had a roast chicken meal with mashed potatoes and gravy, a chicken pot pie and ten servings of chicken noodle soup. Oh and some leftover chicken. Obviously this wouldn't stretch quite as well for a larger family but it works pretty well for two!

I know I write a lot about food and saving money on this blog that is supposed to be about law school but I swear it is connected. Right now, I am trying to save for the Bar exam next summer. Not only do I have to commit to not working or only working minimal hours during the bar study course, the course itself costs $3,000. Taking the bar exam itself costs about $700. Oh, but don't forget you need to pay your state to even apply to take the bar and to convert your student application to a full application. Plus, the school advises to have 5-6 months of expenses saved up because it takes months for the results to come out and who knows how long it will take to find a job after that. The more I can prepare now, the less horrible next year will be. 

First Attempt with the Instant Pot

Well, I bit the bullet and used my new Instant Pot today. I made chicken broth because I had all the ingredients on hand and I wanted to compare it to my crockpot recipe.

The Instant Pot wasn't nearly as complicated as I thought it would be. When I first read the instructions, I felt seriously overwhelmed but once I started actually doing it, it was pretty self explanatory. Just go step by step and it works.

Step One - Put all the ingredients and the liquid in the pot.

Step Two - Twist the lid until it latches and you can't lift it up anymore.

Step Three -  Make sure the Steam Valve is set to Sealing.

Step Four - Push the button you need to use and then press Adjust and then the + or - sign to change the timer. Since I was making broth, I pressed Soup and then adjusted the time to two hours.

Step Five - Wait a minute and it'll beep and start all on it's own.

I swear, if the manual was formatted like this, I wouldn't have stressed out about it nearly as much. It's pretty much as easy as a crockpot with just a few extra steps.

Then, when the food was done, the Instant Pot beeps again and the timer switches over to let you know how long to leave it for a Natural Release. The Natural Release basically means you leave it alone for 10 to 15 minutes and the pressure releases (mostly) on it's own. You still flip the valve over to Venting right before you open the lid to prevent suction but that's it.

If you need to open the Instant Pot right away, you use the Quick Release method instead. For that, all you do is flip the valve over to Venting right after the Instant Pot beeps to alert you that it is done cooking. Steam comes shooting out (Be careful) and when enough pressure is released, the valve drops and you can open the lid.

It's not nearly as complicated as the manual makes it seem and that makes it much more likely that I will use this new contraption often. Yay for sisters who buy you cool presents like an Instant Pot.

Also, the broth was just as good as my crockpot version. It was rich and flavorful and all around better than store bought. And made in 22 hours less time. WOW.

Best Sister Ever

Months and months ago, my sister got an Instant Pot for Valentines day and she's been singing the praises ever since. In case you don't know, an Instant Pot is a type of electric pressure cooker with six other functions like a slow cooker, yogurt maker, rice maker, etc.

I was curious about my sister's Instant Pot but I didn't plan on ever buying one. Pressure cookers kind of intimidate me and I couldn't imagine adding another gadget to my kitchen. Plus, they're a little expensive for a student budget.

Then I went to visit my sister this spring. Oh how I stared at this thing! My envy started growing by the day. My sister and I talked numerous times about how I needed to start saving for one.

Then came Prime Day when I saw they were almost 50% off. I quickly double checked my bank account ... and realized I couldn't do it. Waaaaah. So like any normal sister, I texted my sister the link with this message, "I want it, I need it, I can't afford it. BOOOOO."

She boo'd back and I moved on. Two days later, I come outside to a huge box from Amazon and can't figure out what the heck I had bought. Yup, she bought it for me.

Now, just in case you don't understand my surprise, my family doesn't really give gifts. My mom stopped giving us Christmas and birthday presents when I was nine and my sister was seven. My sister and I go years without exchanging gifts. AND THIS WASN'T EVEN MY BIRTHDAY. I was so surprised!

The included note said Happy Birthday, Merry Christmas, and Happy Kwanza! Which really shows how rare it is for us to buy each other gifts.

I'm so excited but I'm also slightly terrified of this thing. I added all the ingredients to make bone broth and then chickened out and put the inner bowl in the fridge. Yesterday. I've read the instruction manual 3 times and I still don't understand how to make it work.

Help!

Batch Cooking Fail?

I have been craving bean burritos like crazy lately. Generally my cravings aren't a problem but because Fiancé is allergic to beans, I knew I wouldn't be making them for dinner anytime soon.

Then I ran across this recipe for budget freezer burritos. I was sold. Super cheap, burritos and freezer cooking? How could I not be.

So I went to Aldi's and bought all the ingredients for a grand total of $8.24 and came home and made 18 bean and cheese burritos. My cost was only 45 cents per burrito! This should totally be a batch cooking win right?

No. Apparently when you don't eat beans for a long time (say because your fiancé is allergic to them and you don't buy them) your body forgets how to digest them. My neighbor ate one and is perfectly fine. I ate one and I feel like I'm dying. It's been over 24 hours and I still feel blah.

And I have 16 burritos left. I think I am going to see if I can slowly reintroduce beans to my diet so I can eat these. They are REALLY GOOD.  I spent a long time Googling last night and apparently other people have had the same problem and they could fix it. Here's hoping!

Finances Update

Last December I wrote a post about how Fiancé and I had dug ourselves into a financial hole that was rapidly getting too deep. Digging us out of a hole

After half a year, I decided to see how we did. Law school is expensive in so many ways that don't include tuition and books and it only gets worse the farther along I go.

I had six goals and only about half were a complete success.

GOAL ONE: Stop Eating Out - This one was mostly a success. We had a few hiccups when I got stressed around due dates and finals but overall, we ate at home way more often. In general, I do most of the cooking because fiancé isn't very good at meal planning. However, he made it a point to have the ingredients for the couple meals he does well and if I didn't have time to cook, he made the time. I also found a few really frugal meal ideals that drastically stretched our food dollars. I will probably write about that later.

GOAL TWO: Batch Cook Easy Cheap Meals - Definitely a success. I get email alerts for the weekend sales at Winn Dixie and when they had chicken leg quarters on sale for 25 cents a pound, I bought 20 pounds of chicken! It sounds insane but I broke it down into about 12 different freezer bags and each one had a different sauce. I had BBQ, Italian, Teriyaki, Sweet and Sour and many others. Then all I had to do was throw it in the crockpot before class and make rice or noodles when I got home. The sauces were all inexpensive marinades bought on sale so dinner cost between 2 to 4 dollars total (depending on the vegetable) and we usually had two or three days worth of leftovers. We obviously didn't always eat chicken but I made a couple ground beef and pasta freezer meals as well and the whole freezer lasted us months.

GOAL THREE: Work More Hours - Well, this was an utter failure on my part but was a success for Fiancé. My job ended shortly after the new semester and due to my insane course load, I didn't really see how I could get a new one. Fiancé found a new, great paying job and kept his part time one on top of it. That was a fabulous financial decision because a couple months later, his department at the new job shut down and he was back looking for a job. Him keeping his part time job really saved us a lot of stress.

GOAL FOUR: Stop Being A Crutch For The Other - Success! So the last couple years, we had had so many family emergencies, surgeries, and long periods of unemployment that we had stopped budgeting and splitting the bills. Whoever had more money would pay the bill and then when they were broke, they'd look to the other person to save the day. We have stabilized quite a bit and so have not had to fall into that trap for quite a while. We split all bills 50/50 so we are more able to anticipate future bills and budgets. As a consequence, we don't end up flat broke quite so often.

GOAL FIVE: Keep Our Bills Low - Until last month, this was definitely a success. We cut out all sorts of unnecessary bills before the New Year and didn't add any of them back. Then, we got overconfident. Fiancé's job was going well, I was employed for the summer and we had lived in Florida for two years and had never gone to Disney World. Yup, we ended up signing up for the annual pass (which is paid for monthly). Four days later, we found out his department was getting shut down. Oops. So this got downgraded to better but not a success. We should have put that extra money on our credit cards but we got caught up with the Disney excitement. You live and learn.

GOAL SIX: Pay Off Credit Cards - Failure. Complete failure on both our parts. My balance is pretty much the same as it was last December and I think Fiancé's is a little higher. On my part, I tried to pay more than the minimum due but couldn't always manage it. Then I forgot about some annual bills that were linked to my credit card instead of my debit and that pretty much undid all the work I had done on it. Fiancé did really, really well on paying down his credit cards but then his mom came to visit for the first time since we moved out here. He wanted to show her all the things he loves about Florida and he put it all on his credit card. Sigh.

Overall, I'd say we did better that we had been but we still have so much to work on. We obviously need to focus on our credit cards and keeping within our budget for food and such. We also have a friend coming to visit us this summer so I hope we can budget for that instead of going crazy with expensive ideas.

One thing that wasn't exactly a goal but I am glad I started doing was finding small ways to bring in extra money. Not necessarily jobs but small things like getting paid for research studies (not medical or anything) or mail in surveys (pays better than online ones but aren't as easy to find) and saving gift cards for expenses instead of using them to splurge on things we didn't need. I even started getting small gift cards (think 5 dollar walmart ones) by switching from searching on Google to searching on smaller, less known search engines. After awhile, those five dollar gift cards add up.

I also make it a point to use coupons on the necessities that I tend to forget that I will need. Every couple weeks I cut out the coupons for makeup, paper towels, soap and the like. When I need to buy something, I look at my coupon pile first and then spend a few minutes trying to find a store coupon that matches. If I can find a store sale at the same time, so much the better. In the last week, I bought Pantene shampoo and conditioner at $1.67 a bottle because I had two coupons and a store deal. I also used my CVS extra care bucks and a coupon to buy paper towels where it actually put more money in my pocket than I spent. CVS had the big pack of Bounty paper towels for ten dollars and I used two five dollar extra care bucks plus a dollar off coupon. Because my savings were more than the cost, I got a couple cans of dog food. I paid a $1.54 but got 10 new extra care bucks to spend on whatever I want. Eggs, toilet paper, frozen pizza, whatever I need. Think about that for a second, I paid a little over a dollar and a half for a 12 pack of paper towels and dog food and got ten dollars to spend on anything (except alcohol) at CVS. If I had just waited until we were out of paper towels and picked some up without a plan, I would have paid ten dollars, wouldn't have had dog food, and wouldn't have ten extra care bucks to spend on next weeks random need. What a waste!

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Digging us out of a hole

I bet you thought that if I hid from the blogging world for months, I'd come back and blog about law school. (The blog is called Taking On Law School after all) But you would think wrong.

I'm going to talk about finances and confess how Fiancé and I dug ourselves into a hole this last year that we now have to find a way out of. Between Fiancé bouncing back and forth across the entire nation due to family issues, unexpected unemployment, one surgery (mine), one significant back injury (his) and the feast and famine aspect of living off my student loan check twice a year, well, we put more debt on credit cards than any one couple should ever have. This last month has been the worst in the seven years we've been together. Fiancé injured his back in November and couldn't work for two weeks. In the almost eight years I've known him, he's called in sick one time. ONCE. Since we were already living paycheck to paycheck to pay back everything from my surgery and me not being able to work for awhile, this knocked us out of the game. For the first time in my life, I had to borrow rent money. We immediately cut every bill we possibly could, stopped buying food and canceled Christmas. I also doubled my work hours two weeks before finals. I had to do what I had to do and I wanted to avoid living in my car more than I wanted good grades. We shall see how that panned out next week when grades are released.

The good news is that 1) Fiance is now back at work and 2) it made us realize that we stopped looking at our finances just because it scared us.

So here is our new plan for 2016 -

GOAL ONE: Stop Eating Out - Now, in a funny turn of events, grabbing Mcdonalds too much last semester kind of saved our butt this last month but not exactly in a good way. In September, I did my normal batch cooking for the semester but rarely had the motivation to actually cook out of it. So when it came time to stop buying things cold turkey, we had over ten casseroles in the freezer, 8 crockpot meals and numerous sides. Why didn't we eat them before? Because I was lazy. However, when I went back and looked at how much we spent on fast food, we easily could have managed to pay our rent last month. So POOF. No more eating out.

GOAL TWO: Batch Cook Easy Cheap Meals - I'm thinking lots and lots of dump chicken meals with enough ground beef meals to keep us sane. If I remember in the morning, I can dump it in the crockpot. If I don't, I can dump it in the oven. Either way, we need to stop treating ourselves with food just because we had a bad day.

GOAL THREE: Work More Hours - This is something we're both committed to. Fiancé just got a second job and will be working 6 days a week, over 60 hours a week. I'm still in school but I'm going to keep my hours higher for as long as my boss will let me. I'm volunteering for every extra assignment I can and it seems to be helping. By working more, we will hopefully be able to dig ourselves out of this debt mess and save for the next big emergency.

GOAL FOUR: Stop Being A Crutch For The Other - One reason we go in this mess is that when my surgery happened, Fiancé was working. So I relied on him to pay my half of the bills. Then when Fiancé lost his job, I had just gotten my financial aid money. We obviously have no problem covering each other (we are getting married after all) but we sort of stopped dividing bills. A big bill would come up and one would pay it without the other having any clue how much we were spending. We used to be pretty good with a budget but this last year has just been so crazy, there was no way to budget so we stopped trying. Now that things are slightly more stable, it's time to get back to it. So this week, we finally sat down and went through every bill we have and taped it to the living room wall. Our goal is to have both of us split all our bills so one, my loans aren't covering two people when it's meant to cover one, and two, my loan money doesn't run out like it did this semester.

GOAL FIVE: Keep Our Bills Low - When we crashed and burned, we went and stopped all the bills that are nice to have but not necessary. Netflix, kindle unlimited, knitting software and my wine club went out the window and I have no intention of getting them back until we pay off our credit cards. Those ten dollars or less a month bills are sneaky. Half of them, I didn't even remember we had! Good grief.

GOAL SIX: Pay Off Credit Cards - Now I'm not sure how long this one will take us but I'd like to at least double our current payment plan. It would be awesome to pay them off in 2016 but with two people making less than 10 dollars an hour, that might not be possible. We will have to see.

Now this whole post is all about the things we did wrong. However, we did do some things right. Right before this latest catastrophe, I applied for a bunch more scholarships and I was just informed last week that I got an additional $5,000 a year scholarship. Added to my previous scholarships, this basically means I don't pay tuition anymore. YAY!! Another thing I did to help avoid this mess was when Fiancé was unemployed, I got a paying job. Yes, I still have my unpaid internship too so it's been a tricky balance but it was really the only thing that kept us going as long as we did. I'm so so glad that I didn't wait until we were broke to do this because by then it would have been much too late.

What do you guys do to cut spending?


EDITED TO ADD - I literally just hit publish and I get a text from Fiancé with the news that they're cutting his hours at work again. UGH. Sometimes we just can't win.


UPDATE: Click HERE to see how I did after six months (or so).

I'd like that super-sized please.

I'm spending the day at a cafe/coffee shop trying to catch up on Property. They sells normal sized cupcakes, the ones you'd make at home in a normal muffin pan.

This family just came in and ooohed and ahhhhed about the "baby cupcakes" and how cute they were. They ultimately decided that everyone (including the five year old) would get two or three cupcakes because they were so small.

This is why Americans are so fat compared to the rest of the world.

Fooooooooooood

So the other day I was trying to power through another hour of reading before calling it a night and I was struggling mightily. So I sat for a second and tried to figure out why I was so run down. I'd slept okay the night before, it wasn't that late, what was my problem? And then I thought about what I'd eaten that day. I'd skipped breakfast because I had an interview before class. I had a couple free cupcakes for lunch and when I got home I realized that I had forgotten to go to the store so I munched on a can of black olives as I studied. No breakfast, cupcakes for lunch and a can of olives for dinner does not constitute brain food! Not to mention, I'm not sure there is a nutrient to be found in any of that.

Since then, I have been trying to at least be a little more conscientious about what I am eating through out the day. I can't say I am eating healthy because I still haven't had even half an hour to run to the store which means a whole lot of pizza but at least I'm taking the time to order that pizza.  It's a step in the right direction. I've also started adding ensure to my coffee. Now I personally think that ensure is nothing more than some sugar water with some vitamins added but it's better than coffee creamer and tastes the same to me. It certainly can't hurt.

Oh, I can't wait until summer break so I can go back to my love affair with vegetables. I really need to look into a delivery service that drops off fruits and veggies to my door. I know they have them and since I have a wine club that does it, I really should have a veggie one too.

You can measure my stress level by the food I eat

I know when I am under too much stress because I start having crazy cravings that I can't ignore. When I start feeling a little frantic or have a bad day, all I want is comfort food. Mashed potatoes and gravy, homemade queso, ravioli with Alfredo sauce. Well you get the idea. 

When the stress gets a little worse and I start having to cut down on my sleep, then I want sugary sweets to give me a little boost. Donuts, ice cream and cupcakes. Oh the cravings I have for cupcakes. 

But when it's do or die time and I'm pounding back the red bull like a champ, well, that's the point that my body goes Yo Stupid! Do you have any idea what you're doing to us?? And that's when I start craving spinach. Or summer squash. Or both. 

I was trying to write the statement of facts section of my Memorandum of Law and all I could think of was veggies. Lots and lots of veggies. I knew I needed to buckle down and NOT go to the store but I couldn't concentrate. Finally I gave in and called my neighbor/friend to see if she had anything fresh and green. Noooope. So I gave in and ran to the store. Just to get spinach. Nothing more. Yeaaaaah. I came home with spinach, asparagus, tomatoes, avocados, cucumbers, and green onions. And then I ate and ate and ate. It was fabulous but my memo is no closer to being finished. Sigh. 

I made what I call Caprese Toast which is one of my favorite lunches. I love Caprese salads but as a main meal, they aren't quite enough for me. One day I decided to put it on some italian bread I wanted to get rid of and now I'll never look back. 

I should warn you that if you ever show this to a true Italian, they will want to smack you. This is nothing new to me because I add cream cheese to my spaghetti sauce (GASP) but I don't want anyone to be taken by surprise. 

Ingredients: 

• 1 ripe tomato, sliced 
• 2 slices of italian bread, sliced thin 
• Mozzarella cheese, either shredded or sliced thin. The shredded was on sale so that's what I used this time.  
• Fresh basil roughly chopped
• Olive oil
• Balsamic vinegar
• Garlic salt
• Avocado (optional - sometimes I add it sometimes I don't)

Start by brushing some olive oil on the italian bread and a sprinkle of garlic salt. Go easy with this, we aren't trying to make garlic bread, just add a bit of flavor. Place it on a cookie sheet and broil until brown and crispy. 

Take out of the oven and load it up with cheese. I was running low but usually, I'm a wee bit more generous with the cheese than in the picture. 

Put it back under the broiler until mostly melted, pull it out and turn off the oven. Add the sliced tomato and basil and drizzle some balsamic vinegar over the top. 

Add avocado if wanted and EAT. The avocado does make it a little more of an adventure trying to get it into my mouth in one piece but usually it is so worth it. 

If I set everything out before hand, I have enough time to slice the tomato and avocado while the bread is toasting, so from cupboard to mouth is about five minutes. Even a law student can manage that!

What do you mean Queso isn't real food?

Last night Fiancé wandered into the kitchen and whined that he was hungry but didn't want to make anything. I told him to look in the crock pot. He looked at it, looked at me, looked at the crockpot again before turning to me and telling me that I am the best thing that ever happened to him.

Of course, we didn't only eat queso and chips for dinner. We also had beer.

I'm pretty sure we are going to get immensely fat. I'm also pretty sure that this is why I'll never feel like a real adult. I am positive that this is one major reason why he wants to marry me.

Generally, I do try to eat a balanced diet. Veggies with every meal. Whole grain breads and brown rice and such. But after my legal brief got torn to shreds yesterday, all I wanted was comfort food.


Everyone's queso is a little bit different. I didn't exactly get this from a recipe but I didn't really invent anything new with it either. I fiddled with different recipes and it just happened to evolve to my favorite queso ever.

Ingredients:

• 32 oz Block of Velveeta cheese product
• 1/2 8oz block of cream cheese
• 1 can bean less chili 
• 1 can hot green chilies w/ juice
• 2 cans Rotel drained

Instructions: 

Roughly cube the Velveeta and cream cheese and place in your crockpot. (Crockpot liners are your best friend for this. No one wants to scrub a pot full of melted cheese!) Dump in the chili, green chilies and the drained Rotel. Stir and turn on the crock pot. Stir every half hour or so. It'll look disgusting until the cheese melts but wait it out. 

I've only cooked this on high (but I'm sure low would work if you have more patience than I do) and it takes about an hour and a half to fully melt down. Then I turn it to warm while we are munching on it. It lasts for hours. Assuming the queso lasts that long. 

Free food

I lost count of the number of people who told me something like If you have to buy lunch at the law school, you're doing it wrong. 

Guys, they weren't lying. I have gotten a free lunch every day this week! Last week was at least three times. Seminars, SBA meetings, info sessions and I can't even remember what else. Now don't get me wrong, three times this week it was pizza and I bet eventually I'll get sick of it. For this week at least, it was awesome! 

I wonder what I'll get for lunch today?

Cooking

This is a very non law school post about ... food and cooking.

I HATE COOKING. I find it stressful and annoying and it takes much too much of my precious time. Unfortunately, I happen to be pretty good at it. And my fiance is very, very, very bad at it. Try running out of milk so substituting tequila BAD. ( Yes, he was drunk when he made this decision but there have been many times when he has proven over and over again that he should never be allowed to create subsistence for himself or others.) He is an awful, can not make tuna helper without help cook.

This creates a problem because I like to eat. I really like to eat. And I seriously dislike eating boring cold foods such as sandwiches or cereal or really, anything that is convenient. I crave some sort of meat, potato, veggie and bread for every meal. Now this obviously creates a problem when you can't afford to eat out every meal and you also hate to cook. Not to mention not wanting to weight five hundred pounds.

My solution? Batch/Freezer cooking! I have two plans of attack for this. I either set aside an entire weekend and make three months of food to hide in the freezer or I make a huge amount of one meal and stick the rest in the freezer. (Both meant I had to buy a chest freezer but trust me, it more than made up for it's cost in only a few months. I love my chest freezer and even named him Nelson. I have problems but that is neither here nor now.)

While I was still in college, I would do the three month plan. I would get my financial aid check and spend about three or four hundred at the local Walmart, three or so days cooking six or seven hours a day and BAM, we had food through finals. It was awesome!! All I would have to do is come home from class, grab something, throw it in the oven and an hour later we would be eating. No prep, no standing over the stove and no mess.  Genius!!!!!! I will say it again, GENIUS!!

This method started to fail me once I entered the real world of full time, Monday through Friday employment. And then I added a second job. Once I began working 6am to 8pm Monday through Friday, the absolute LAST thing I wanted to do was spend my entire weekend cooking! (Remember, I completely hate the process of cooking!) So what happened? My second job ended up paying for us to eat out everyday. My entire paycheck was spent on restaurants and fast food. So NOT why I got a second job in the first place.

This was not going to work long term.

So I started my second batch cooking method. Each weekend, my goal was to make one meal that I could triple and put in the freezer. For example, I would prepare one dish on Sunday, put two quarters of it in the freezer, in two separate containers. We would eat it Sunday and probably Monday evening as we both love leftovers. But then a month later, I could throw another container of it in the oven and we would have a ready made meal. Then a month later, I could do it again.

The next week, I would make a different meal and rinse and repeat.

Even somebody who hates to cook can fulfill a goal of cooking only once a week!

It is not as convenient as the three month plan because it takes a while to stock up on enough meals to not be bored with the food choices. It also is a little more expensive as you can not buy in bulk quite as well nor get all the chopping of say ten onions done all at once. But it is indefinitely better than cooking a new meal each night.


This week, I am making spaghetti.