Post Move Update

It’s been about forever since I updated this blog. It’s hard to keep up on it when you don’t have a kitchen of your own, and baking and cooking both kind of got pushed to side. However, we just moved into our own apartment and can use our kitchen whenever and however we want.

The downside…it’s extremely small. In fact, I hesitate to call it a kitchen at all. It’s more like a sink, a counter, and an oven in a hallway (not so strategically placed next to the bathroom, I might add). But it’s great because it’s mine (for the time being).

How much have we cooked in it? Well actually quite a bit, though nothing worth getting excited over. Money’s tight so we haven’t really had the funds to buy things to experiment with new recipes. Mostly it’s been hot dogs, since we got a bunch of them on sale and they’re easy to make. One of our first meals consisted of a crockpot steak, salad with balsamic vinegar, and some “gourmet” bread:

Another one was white cheddar mac and cheese with hot dogs. Not gourmet, but definitely tasty:


One of my new “interests” is Bento boxes done with the food I like (which doesn’t include sushi or most vegetables) in cheap plastic containers (not the $30 traditional boxes you buy online). In reality, it’s nothing more than a packed lunch, but it’s so much more swanky to call it a bento…not to mention the fact that it makes it okay to get artsy with it. My first foray into this was a breakfast bento.


Mine is really messy looking compared to the one my fiancé made me this morning, but we didn’t get a picture of his work of art. This is a banana wrapped in a tortilla shell spread with peanut butter, then chopped to resemble a sushi roll. The colorful things are gummi worms (they were on hand and colorful) and the green stuff is pistachio pudding. I don’t know if it’s Kroger pudding or the fact that I use skim milk to make it, but the pudding always looks strange…not that creamy color but a glassy color. It freaked me out for the butterscotch pudding but it looks neat with pistachio.

Next time I’ll try to have some pictures of my itty bitty kitchen and who knows? Maybe I’ll have made some brilliant baked good by then too!

Two Nights of Simplicity

Things have been crazy around here lately, so we decided to play it low key for a couple days with two really simple meals. Last night was sloppy joes, straight out of the can. I've found all kinds of sloppy joe recipes on the 'net, but I'm pretty sure that for me, sloppy joes will always taste the best from Manwich.

This first picture is my version of the sloppy joe dinner, complete with frozen french fries and ketchup. See how neat and tidy I am?

My boyfriend, on the other hand, really likes to do it up sloppy:

What we have here is two open faced sloppy joes, topped with mustard and french fries. Right behind it is a mustard/Frank's Hot Sauce mixture for fry dippage.

Tonight's fare was even simpler. We went with the fries again and I drew on one of my childhood favorites: hot roast beef and cheddar sandwiches.

This used to be one of my favorite meals and is very simple. The sandwices consist of deli roast beef and cheedar cheese from the dairy department. After baking the fries, I lowered the temp from 450 to 350 degrees and put the sandwiches open faced into the oven for about 5 minutes, until the cheese was melted. It looks a little plastic in this pic but it was delicous. Jon ate his with some generic Miracle Whip and I ate mine topped with zesty italian dressing.

Tomorrow we're getting experimental in the kitchen again, and hopefully I'll be back with something good.