Onions and Flour

 So once upon a time I got married to Nicholas.  Life was great but he was used to eating healthy-ish and we had no money.  So I began a quest to find cheap, good food.  It appears one cannot simply buy this food at Walmart.  One must nurture it from an infancy of basic ingredients like flour and onions.  And now that it’s summer and I’m only taking six credits I have the necessary time to accomplish my quest. Also I found this blog that I love budgetbytes.blogspot.com So basically lately I’ve been cooking a lot.  It’s probably just a phase I’m going through that will pass.  Poor Nick when we’re back to eating mac and cheese.

Last Saturday night I made this potato, onion, veggie soup in the crock pot to cook overnight for Sunday.  Our whole house smelled so strongly of onions for two days! We put cheese and bacon on top! Nick loves bacon.  Everyone loves bacon. (recipe)

I made these pepperoni rolls to take in our lunches to school.  They’re just rolls with cheese and pepperoni inside but they’re super good.  They’re really popular in West Virginia where Nick served his mission. (They really have more pepperoni than it looks like in the picture)

Yesterday I made pizza. We received a pizza stone for our wedding and it makes the crust so nice.  I’d used all our pepperoni so we used chicken.  BBQ chicken and chicken, bacon, ranch. Mmmmmmm.  

Brian and I made these peanut butter oatmeal chocolate bars.  They were tasty and don’t even have any added sugar.  (recipe)

And finally today we made these delicious meatballs with teriyaki sauce we also made (recipe). We ate it with fancy chopsticks Nick got in China.  They were even made in China. 

Graduation Party Adventure Part II

[Once upon a time I was a student and I was taking a Humanities class while taking a Bible and British Culture class.  For Humanities I wrote an essay comparing T.S. Eliot's poem "The Wasteland" to the Book of Ecclesiastes (which has always been a favorite).  Later in the semester we had an essay due in Bible that I realized the Humanities essay would work perfect for.  So I slightly tweaked it and turned it in again!  So following that same tradition I am reposting a part of a letter we sent to my brother Steven who is currently serving a mission in Dallas Texas.  This will probably happen a lot because I feel more obligated to write him than to post on this blog :)]

The skydiving was a ton of fun.  The two of us rode up together in the plane (we could only do two at a time).  I (Nick) was supposed to be the first one out so that Amanda could be a witness to any questionable language and/or behavior that my fear-induced panic generated.  She drew the short stick and had to go first, lucky her.  It ended up being for the best since we were both cooler than cucumbers when that door opened.  Seriously, we were so high in the sky, the height didn't really even register!  It was a ton of fun, but definitely not as fun as missionary work so you definitely didn't miss out on anything...

(Disclaimer: I was so scared on that plane ride.  Nick was totally okay (which was weird) because the plane was so old and about to fall apart and we spent 20 minutes flying up higher and higher to our DEATHS!  I was experiencing a lot of anxiety.  But I didn't die so we're all good now)




Scott and Brian went up first.

 Then us :)