Food, Again...

I like food. A lot. I eat out. A lot.

This gets very expensive on a young PR pro's salary. While breakfast is pretty straight forward each day (toast), I work near lots of neat restaurants that make bringing my lunch to work seem like a very sad idea. I also spend the majority of my day talking about restaurants, since we do a lot of restaurant PR. Suffice it to say, I'm not very good at bringing my lunch to work.

However, I admire people who have the discipline to make meal plans each week, like my high school friend Katy. Using people like her as an inspiration, I decided to attempt meal planning for one week. I kept it pretty simple, with sandwiches, pasta and salads. Pretty boring foods, I know, but I wanted to give myself the best odds for success.

And the verdict is...

Meal planning is great! For some reason, taking the mystery out of each meal made it much easier to stick to the plan. It also made grocery shopping much easier, since I already knew what I needed for every meal for a week. I spent $50 in groceries for the week, which is pretty good compared to the $35-40 a week I could spend on eating lunch out alone.

Eventually, I'll post recipes and photos from some of my favorite kitchen adventures, but for now I'm scouring the internet for good recipes to try. Some of my favorite sites so far are Pioneer Woman and Smitten Kitchen. Do you have any go-to recipe sites?

So Hungry

So, I have been laying low since Friday, when I had the dreaded wisdom teeth extraction. While this is hardly noteworthy for the general audience, it's very noteworthy to me. For anyone who knows me, they know I have been dreading this procedure for quite a while. However, they started hurting quite a bit, so the surgery was more than necessary. The whole process started out fine, and the oral surgeon recommended by a coworker's father was amazing. I've never been put under before, so the whole IV sedation process was fascinating. I felt like I was in a movie, with slow blinking eyes and peoples' voices drifting off in the distance. Very odd.

The recovery process was not as bad as I thought it would be, but I was a little disappointed by the pain medication. As someone who has never used recreational drugs, I'm not sure what I was expecting. However, I was not expecting to feel terribly hung-over, have anxiety-inducing dreams and become violently ill. Needless to say, I stopped taking those pills pretty quickly and felt much better as a result.

Since I am still eating mostly soft foods (blech), I have been daydreaming about all of the lovely foods I would like to eat.

First of all, how adorable are the little bundtlet bundt cakes from Nothing Bundt Cakes!? I would love to try this little red velvet number.

I'm also craving breakfast pizza, which is apparently all the rage in New York right now. That one with ricotta cheese and bacon looks divine. Where are all the Denver breakfast pizza joints at?

In other news, I'm so ridiculously excited about my trip to Austin this weekend. I see lots of laughter, late nights and Mexican food in my future, and I couldn't be happier about that.

Sundays

Sundays are an odd sort of day. Sometimes they are for hymns and potluck dinners and family. Sometimes they are for sleeping in until noon and eating breakfast for lunch. Sometimes they are about housework and laundry and washing dishes. Sometimes they are for actively doing nothing at all. Today, Sunday was for...

Not sleeping in...

But having a vanilla latte to take the edge off.

Picking up my guitar after an extended break.

Watching an almost love story.

Looking up at the sunny sky through the trees.

Talking to my grandmother about the holidays, and gambling.

Dreaming about the future.

The smell of fajitas wafting in from the kitchen.

And going to bed early.