Life Update and Buffalo Burgers!

It's been quite some time since I last updated this, and quite a bit has happened in my life since then. A quick review:

In late May, I celebrated my 5 year anniversary at my last job, and I started working one date a week for my family. In late June, I made the switch to working full-time for my family. It was a total change of pace and I really love working for my family.

In July I went out to Montana to visit my best friend for a few days. I think I ate more meat in my three days there than I usually eat in an entire month! I had 3 different kinds of pulled pork and I got to try buffalo. I had a buffalo patty melt and I had buffalo meatloaf. They were so good!

I've been back home for about a month ago. One of my friends on a different blog site posted a recipe for Moroccan turkey burgers a few days ago, and it made me start craving a burger. So tonight, I had this for dinner:

This is a cheese-stuffed buffalo burger and potato hash. I seasoned the meat with a mixture of cumin, cayenne, paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, black pepper, and 2 different chili powders. I then formed 4 burgers, each using about a quarter pound of meat, around some Pepper Jack cheese. I put them on a cooling rack nestled into a cookie sheet and cooked them in the oven. When there were only a few more minutes left to cook, I added some more cheese to the top (what can I say, I really like cheese!). I used a mutli-grain burger roll and some spicy salsa to finish things up.

The hash was made with garlic, jalapeno, baby Yukon Gold potatoes, and the leftover spice mixture from the burgers. I started by pre-cooking the garlic with some olive oil and them added everything else in. I cooked the potatoes on medium heat, covered, for about 15 minutes.

The burger wasn't quite as cooked as I usually like them (I'm a well-done kind of girl, and this was still slightly pink), but it was definitely edible and the others will cook up a bit more during the reheat. Overall though, I think it was a pretty good meal.

I'm going to try to post more often, since I know I've really been slacking. At the very least, you can expect a post about buffalo meatloaf later on this week!

Spring has Sprung!

Yes, I did go with a cheesy headline...deal with it =P

After a few weeks of not-quite-characteristic weather (temperature in the 70s in last March, followed by a relatively-chilly April), it's finally getting warm out - in fact, it was 83 degrees today, and weather.com shows temperatures in the mid-70s for most of the next week. This excites me greatly, especially because it means that there will soon be things to do at night!


I spent the majority of last summer at various coffee shops for bands, stand-up comedy, and open mic nights. My favorite event last summer was the Wednesday night Open Jazz Jam at Huntington Street Cafe. They're starting up with Tuesday night Open Jazz Jam, Wednesday night Open Bluegrass Jam, and Thursday night Open Mic in a couple of weeks, and I'm so excited!

Today was spent doing schoolwork, although I did walk a block to Dunkin' Donuts to buy an iced coffee and enjoy some sunshine. My semester ends in 2 weeks, so it's time to really hit the books! In fact, other than a Cinco de Mayo dinner at Acapulcos, most off this week will be spent finishing assignments for my online Sociology and Statistics classes and studying for my Chemistry exam on May 16th.

I'm hoping that this summer will bring me many good things to post about - I know that I've been relatively boring lately, what with the lack of updates and all. Although the winter brought posts about eating and cooking, summer will mostly like be about places to go and things to do.

Well, I'm starting to ramble and my textbooks are calling, but I promise that I'll post again in the next 2 weeks!

Spring Cleaning

This past week was spring break at the college I'm attending, so I also took a week off from work so that I could do some stuff around the house. The first 2 days were spent fully cleaning my living room and dining room, which included FINALLY unpacking a box that hadn't really been touched since I moved out of my parents' house three years ago.

Today, I'm going through my clothes so that I can see if there's anything I can throw out/donate. While I was folding some t-shirts, my cat decided once again to try catching the bird stickers I have on my bedroom wall. She attempts this every couple of days - the stickers have been up for about 2 1/2 months. You would think that by now she'd realize they aren't going anywhere...

Things are shaping up around the condo, and I've finally found furniture layouts that work for me. I recently rearranged everything in my kitchen cabinets as well, which makes it a bit difficult to find the box of cereal at 6 am, but I'm sure I'll be used to that soon enough. I need to get back on top of posting here, and not just writing about food! Luckily, nice weather is on the way (it's currently 65 degrees outside! In March! It's wonderful!) so I'm sure that'll bring things to do, places to go, etc. But for now...I have to fold and put away clothes. Ah well.

Lasagna

I get paid bi-weekly, so last Sunday night I was investigating my refrigerator and cabinets in an effort to figure out what I could eat for the next few days until I got paid (I am terrible with money). I ended up making meat sauce in my crock pot out of a few crumbled burger patties and jars of store-bought sauce. I filled 2 of the empty jars with meat sauce and stuck them in the freezer with plans to make lasagna over the weekend. Because of the way life works, lasagna night ended up being postponed until tonight.

I bought a box of Barilla no-boil lasagna noodles and mostly followed the directions on the back. In addition to the 2 jars of "home made" meat sauce, I used a 15 ox can of store brand tomato sauce for the top and bottom of the lasagna and added some crumbled bacon and chopped vegetables to the layers.

This is, without a doubt, the most delicious lasagna I've ever had in my entire life. The vegetables I used were 1 green bell pepper, 1 red bell pepper, 2 tomatoes (bought on the vine), and 2 cloves of elephant garlic. The peppers stayed relatively crisp instead of getting mushy, and the crumbled bacon really enhanced the flavor of the ground beef in the sauce.

I made an entire tray of this which, according to the Barilla box, will serve 12 people. We'll see about that.

Recovering from the Holi-daze

I'm finally getting back into the swing of things, now that the holidays are over and done with and everyone's gone back home. Life's been busy - I'm taking a winter intercession course (only 1 week left) and I've had a couple of projects tying up my time at work. The past couple of weeks all I;ve wanted to do when I got home from work was take a nap or read.

I moved my computer into my living room about a month and a half ago so that I could put wallpaper on my desk as a shelf-liner. I still have one shelf left and then I can stop using my desk for whatever I'm holding when I come through the door and start using it for my computer again. On the plus side, I did manage to put up some pretty awesome wall stickers - doesn't that look neat?

I have a few unfinished decorating projects around here and it's time for me to just get them over with. I'll be doing a major cleaning job this week so that I can finish some stuff up the weekend, like painting frames, touching up my dressers, and possibly even hemming my curtains. Well, maybe not that last part.

Also! Christmas brought me the gift of...a crock pot! I've used it twice now - once for chicken, and once to make meat sauce - and it's amazing. I love coming home and having dinner ready and waiting.

Also! This will most likely be the last time that you're subjected to shoddy camera-phone photography on this blog. My computer had not wanted to cooperate with my camera for a while, but they're finally willing to play nice again, so...you can look forward to that.

This for me to get some sleep - I work tomorrow morning (yes, even though it's a Sunday). I hope you're all doing well!

A Great and Terrible Beauty

It's been a while since I last posted. I haven't done much cooking lately because of the holidays, although my kitchen now has a food processor, a blender, and a crock pot, so...look forward to new food posts soon. The holidays kept me pretty busy - my cousins were here from Louisiana with their children and two of my best friends were in town, so I was keeping busy. Then I came down with some kind of virus that left me feeling awful for a few days...which meant that I did a lot of reading.

On Christmas, my sisters Colleen and Maggie gave me the Gemma Doyle trilogy by Libba Bray. I couldn't put these books down! The series takes place in Victorian England and revolves around a 16-year-old girl named Gemma Doyle who finds out that she has special powers. I loved the characters, and Libba Bray wrote some fantastic dialogue throughout the three books as well.

According to Wikipedia, the first book was going to be turned into a movie but the production company decided against it. I'm crossing my fingers that someone else will pick up the project, because I'd love to see this on screen!