New place

Team bloggers! Hello to you and yours. Well I have moved back to Provo and my apartment is so cute! I decided that a senior deserves a senior looking apartment. Plus I have had to deal with less than desirable places of residence the past three years, so we upgraded to the cutest little condo. It has three floors and three bathroom and only 4 girls! We all have our own parking spot and closet- what a dream! Plus the kitchen is nice and there is space to really store things. In the past I would never want to really cook in my apartments because it is so squishy and messy and tight. But here, wow different experience. It is so fun to do the dishes and put things away nicely. So I decided that means I really need to cook. But sometimes it is hard to have the motivation to do so, especially when there is no one to share it with or all my room mates are gone and so no one can get excited about it. I figure if I take pictures of my meals and post them on my blog, I will be more excited and motivated to cook. So here is a sampling of this week.

My room-mate, Aly, has a rice cooker which I am super happy about it. I love rice but I usually don't eat it at college because I am scared of stove top rice. I have been spoiled enough to have access to a rice cooker all my life and now it continues to college.

So I fried up some chicken and zucchini, squash, and green pepper from the home garden. Then since I was taking a picture I thought it would be nice to add the parsley sprig and tomatoes :). Sorry about the plating mishaps. There are little brown spots on the bowl because I had to add a little aloha shoyu soy sauce (aka. the Hawaiian kind- which is just sweeter).

Aren't those flowers so cute? This year at the library they have changed up the normal floral situation, and added probably hundreds of these red flower plants. I don't know what they are, but I love them. So I took my pocket knife up to campus one night and snipped tons of these beauties before the landscape management team could track me down. Then we put up a line of clear vases on the windowsill with them. Presh, right?

This is what Aunt Kathy calls "fresh pasta stir fry." It is just olive oil with some garlic and onions sauteed. Then you add lots of fresh tomatoes and tear basil leaves. I didn't have garlic, which ended up being super tragic and not a lot of flavor. But I did add fresh oregano and italian parsley, once again from the home garden. My friend, Steven had some. I knew he would be a critical judge because of his recent two year sabbatical in Italy. And indeed he was a critical judge. Apparently not salting the water is a sin in Italy which I committed. He even had to get a little dish with a couple tablespoons of salt just to get it down. Hopefully it will be better next time. But hey the cyber world can't taste it, and the pictures looks appetizing, so I don't mind.