New Blog!

I know, I know. I've let you down. I promised to blog once the move was complete, and here it is two months later and I still haven't updated. I've decided to start fresh with a new blog, and will no longer be updating this one. Click here to find the new blog!

-Lauren

Preparing for the move...

Sorry for the long absence again! Shocking, I know, that I haven't posted in a month. But really - I've been busy! There is so much to do when you're moving, especially when you decide you want to refinish multiple pieces of furniture before the moving truck arrives! That's what a lot of my spare time has been spent doing the past couple of weeks. I've been refinishing the dining room table, and painting a cedar chest that will be my new coffee table, and working on painting a smaller table that will act as a nightstand.  Here's a few pictures of the adventures I've had learning about working on furniture from my mom.

Using a handheld sander like this is WAY preferable to sanding by hand!

No, my hands aren't that white! I'm wearing gloves :)

Eek! Look at how beautiful it's turning out! I love it!

I would like to point out that my mother makes everything crafty sound like a piece of cake. "Oh yeah, we can do that. No problem. It'll be a real quick fix!" Granted, it's not the most complicated task I've ever taken on, but it does require a bit more work than she makes it sound like! I'm still not completely finished with the dining room table, due to the weather not cooperating 100% on my days off recently. It still needs a coat or two more of polyurethane, but I'll be sure to show the final product once it's done. I still can't believe how well it's turned out, especially considering that this is my first attempt at this sort of thing!

Two weeks from tonight, I'll be packing up all the last minute stuff and preparing to move into my new place! I'm so excited and I can't wait to see how everything looks in my new apartment with a fresh coat of paint and finish on it! Also, what should this blog be called once we move? 'Apartment Girl' kind of sounds boring and lonely. Any suggestions?

Change In Plans...

Ok. So I was super excited about buying a house. But then circumstances started changing and it became less practical to buy a house instead of continuing to rent. However, we'll still be moving at the end of April! We're both very excited about what the next several months holds for each of us, even though we won't be living together anymore after April. Kayla decided to move back in with her dad to save some money, and I've decided to get a one bedroom apartment that's actually even more awesome than this one! I'm so excited to move in and start decorating all over again! The new place is in an even better location for me (which I didn't think was possible) and the property itself is absolutely gorgeous! There's a stream running through the new property, which will be so much fun to watch and listen to in the summer! It's in pretty much my favorite area of town, closest to all of my favorite things about this area! I mean really, who wouldn't love this view?!?

While I'll really miss living with Kayla, we'll still see each other plenty, both at work and outside of work. I'm not really sure what will happen with this blog once the transition has been made, but until then at least, I'll try to keep updating as often as possible. In the mean time, I think I'll get a head start on packing things up!

Progress Can't Come Soon Enough

Ok, so I'm going to look at several houses tomorrow and officially begin my home search. This is exciting, right? Well yes, but it's also freaking me out more than anything! I suddenly feel very much under pressure to make a decision, and a good one at that, FAST. I got the letter from my apartment complex today asking me to make my intentions clear as far as lease renewal. Which made me look at a calendar and suddenly think "OH NO. OH MY GOSH. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN??? WE ONLY HAVE 12 WEEKS UNTIL OUR LEASE IS UP!!"

Yeah. Twelve weeks until our rent goes up by $175 a month, if I don't find a house and close on it before then. I'm thinking we need a miracle here! Also, the thought of packing this whole place up and moving again in just 12 weeks (or hopefully not much longer than that!) is stressing me out. I know I'm jumping ahead of myself, but I can't help but think how much work it was to pack up everything that fit into the one little room I was living in before we moved here, and how much more work it will be to pack up all the things that can fit in almost 900 square feet! All I can say is, I'm really glad I'm not in school right now! It would be way more than I could handle while still keeping my sanity.

I'll try to keep updating and posting more often, but bear with me while I try to keep myself organized and make the largest purchasing decision I've ever made!

Family Time...

My Sundays are pretty much always spent at mom and dad's house. It's the only time we can all get our schedules cleared and they make all my favorite homemade meals :) I can cook for myself, but nothing ever tastes as good as mom and dad's cooking! We usually just relax and watch a movie (last week we watched Food, Inc., which was shocking and disturbing. I'm planning on buying a lot more organic food now, thanks to that movie!) or watch tv. We always call my sister and put her on speakerphone so we can all enjoy her hilarity. But last week mom and I decided that we didn't just want to watch a movie and lay around all day. Instead, we decided to make some cookies!

We made a yummy, shortbread-type cookie with raspberry jam centers and chocolate centers. They were more trouble than your average cookie, but they were extremely delicious! I would definitely make them again. For some of the cookies, we put jam between the top and bottom layer and filled in the middle with chocolate, and for other cookies we did the opposite. Chocolate + raspberry jam + cookies = DELICIOUS! I don't remember what these cookies were called or where mom found the recipe, but maybe she will post a link in the comments if she remembers where she found it.

I'm off to get my taxes done so I can use my refund to help buy myself a house! The hunt officially begins this week once my realtor gets back into town! I'll be sure to update you all on the exciting and somewhat terrifying process!!

We're Back!

This is where I'd love to be right now! This is actually part of a castle in England (photo courtesy of my boyfriend, who's currently stationed there), and it looks so much prettier than this Michigan winter that surrounds us right now! Sorry for the long absence, but this boring white winter just hasn't been inspiring me to do much writing (or much anything else for that matter!). What I have been inspired to do however, is to start looking for a house to buy! I'm still in the very early stages of the whole process, but it's one I'm excited about! I hope to be able to find something in my price range that's in a good neighborhood and close to work and family. I'm starting to get nervous about this whole process, but if this is what God wants for me, it will happen! Perhaps before I officially start my search I should consider taking down my Christmas decorations... :) I'm a bit of a procrastinator when it comes to that. I promise to try to blog more now and to keep ya'll updated on my home search, but right now I have to get ready for work!

Gettin' crafty with my momma...

A couple of weeks ago, my mom and I spent the afternoon creating a small wreath. We had gotten the idea from another blog and decided to adapt it a little bit. The final result looked something like this...

We made the wreath using a small wooden dollar store picture frame, some pages from an old book, and some ribbons and pine cones. It took us a couple of hours, but it was a lot of fun to just hang out and create together. We cut circles out of the book pages and used the end of a pencil to crinkle and curl the pages up to get the effect you see above. We then used hot glue to attach the pieces of paper to the frame, and when we were all done, I took a walk down to the corner of our road with dad and picked up some pine cones to add the finishing touches. Mom just happened to have a small key hanging around and we thought it would be a nice addition to the pine cones. The wreath is currently hanging on our apartment door, safe from the elements. It'll be a nice wreath for the fall, until it's time to put up a Christmas wreath! I don't think it will be too long before that happens though, since I'm already starting to think about purchasing a Christmas tree. It's never too early to start decorating for Christmas as long as it's cold outside! :)

Signs You're Officially A Grown-Up...

It turns out that as much as I thought I was "all grown up," I wasn't. At least, not until I learned the most basic of "grown-up" things yesterday - how to change a tire. If you know me at all, you understand that as much as I love my car, I have never liked taking care of it myself. I will gladly pay other people to change my oil, check the fluids, and do pretty much everything except check my tire pressure (I can handle that on my own, thank-you-very-much). Yes, my father taught me how to do most of these things on my own, but I have no interest in doing it on my own, and I certainly don't trust myself enough with most of these tasks to be sure that I didn't forget one little step, thereby making my car unsafe to drive. The thing I really didn't want to learn to do myself however, was changing a tire. Unfortunately, I was forced to learn yesterday when I went to pull out of my parking space at home and head to work, only to discover that my front passenger tire was FLAT. When I say flat, I mean...

not drivable.  But I had no choice. I was either going to have to change it myself or call a tow-truck. And in this case, it was worth it for me to learn something new in the name of saving a few dollars!

 So since I didn't really know what I was doing, I asked my boyfriend to walk me through it over the phone from England. I would ask him what the next step was, hang up, complete that step, and then call him again. Overall, it took me about an hour to complete the job, but I felt so proud of myself once it was done! But of course, it couldn't be as simple as just changing a tire.

Once the spare was on, and the jack was in the trunk again, I discovered that the spare was flat as well. I love my life. At this point I pretty much just quit caring and drove to the gas station to fill up the spare enough to get me to the tire store where they fixed my tire for free! I do love me some Discount Tire :)

Once I was finished getting my tires fixed, I decided to go get an oil change (ya know, since I was like 2,000 miles overdue and my car now almost has 150,000 miles on it. Did I mention I have a small oil leak? Yeah, I'm not sure how my car is still running either). While sitting there waiting for this fun task to be completed, I was informed that I had burnt out lights on the back of my car, oh and by the way, did you know you need a new serpentine belt? I'm telling you. This car. It's on it's way out.

Ok, ok....you've guilted us into posting!

Sorry about the long absence. I'm glad to see my sister was able to tide you all over, even if it was a sneaky trick on her part! The Apartment Girls have been busy lately! Kayla is still doing full time school and pretty much full time work like she has been, and I've joined her crazy schedule. I've also been trying to change my sleep patterns, which seems to be a full time job of its own. My body seems to think I need approximately 11-12 hours of sleep per night, which really isn't helpful when you've got school and work going on at the same time. It also leaves you no time for fun things, or even just everyday tasks in general. While trying to change my sleep schedule, I seem to be making it through my days as a zombie. Maybe that's what I should be for Halloween. I have managed to start cooking a little more often though, which is a plus! Last week I made Chinese Chicken Soup (a family favorite!) and I also made my own marinade to soak the rest of my organic chicken in (can you believe that the organic chicken was the cheapest package of chicken breasts I could find at our local Meijer store last week?!?)  When I cooked the marinated chicken, I also made some rice, and this is what it ended up looking like:

It turned out pretty delicious. I made the marinade out of soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, ginger and a small bit of brown sugar. YUM!

As Victoria mentioned in her post, we had a pumpkin carving party with a bunch of Kayla's friends last Sunday. We watched movies, had pizza, talked, and of course, carved pumpkins. Here are a few of the highlights from the party....

 This is apparently the only "action" shot we got of the night :)

 Kayla's very first carved pumpkin! I'm so proud of her for doing such an awesome job! :)

 This beautiful pumpkin was carved by Kayla's friend Charlotte. So pretty!

I decided to do a polka dot pumpkin. Victoria made me an awesome "swirly art" template to use, but I didn't have time to go to Kinko's to get the template enlarged enough for a pumpkin. I'm hoping to use that template this weekend on my pumpkin for work!

That's about all of the news right now! It's time to go do some more textbook reading for my online class! We'll try to update the blog more often! :)

Girls, you have neglected your blog!

Hi there, this is Victoria, Lauren's younger sister, asking all of you out there to please join me in shouting: LAME!!!! at Lauren and Kayla for not posting in almost three weeks. 

Girls, now that I am at school, HOW do you expect me to creep/spy on you without posting?!?!  It's ridiculous.  Also, thank you for sending me an email with your login info a few months ago.  I never clear out my inbox.  whoops :)

So how about an update for everyone out there who's been missing their favorite pair of cousins?  Well ok.... since you begged....

1.  Apparently last night there was an AMAZING pumpkin carving party, hosted by none other than the infamous Apartment Girls themselves... I have no idea who attended this illustrious event, but please, give a shout out to my homegirls if you want a post with sweet pictures from this amazing evening!  For now, I can only offer up this meager snapshot of a pumpkin in my parent's garden in order to appease your appetites.  I hope this holds you over for a while.

2.  Last weekend (as in 8 days ago, not 2 days ago) Lauren and I (Victoria) attended the beautiful wedding of two of her co-workers.  It was lovely, I forced Lauren to dance, and even though I KNOW she enjoyed it, there is no way in heck she'll ever admit that, or stop hounding me about my ridiculous behavior - wherein I am the cause of her actually having fun for a change.  Shame on me.  She looked gorgeous, and she helped pick out my dress, so I wasn't too shabby either :)  I won't post pictures though, because me creating this post is a little teensy surprise, and I don't want her to become so overcome by a giant photo of her face that she up and dies, thereby making Kayla change the title on the blog to "Apartment Girl:  One cousin being lame all by herself."  That just doesn't have the same ring.   (BREAKING NEWS THAT I JUST REMEMBERED... If anyone who reads this is a fan of the Bed Intruder Song, you wish you were at this wedding where an AMAZING string quartet played it.  And the Beatles.  That is, the quartet played the Beatles.  Not that the Beatles turned into a string quartet which played the Bed Intruder Song.  Because that would be expensive.  And impossible.  Anyway...it was awesome.  Just saying)

3.  On the subject of Kayla...  Well, who really knows?  Today she was working a ridiculously long shift, and while I was home for the weekend I only got to see her for a grand total of like, 20 minutes.  But she did let me use her tinted lotion in an effort to keep my legs from looking like I cut them out of the bride's skirt.  They were white.  That's what I'm trying to say here.  Anyway, she saved my bacon... or whatever.  You get the picture.

WHO'S UP FOR A FUN GAME?!?!?!

I'm going to need everyone's participation on this one!  Ok, here it goes....


We need everyone to give SUGGESTIONS for HALLOWEEN COSTUMES!!!!  YAYYYY!!!!  I would like to hear your creative and amazing ideas for awesome, budget-friendly costumes you think the cousins would look ah-mazing in!  Please remember:  While just plain old costumes are good, costumes they can wear to make them a PAIR are even better!!!!
Hoping this is the most amusing thing ever,
~Victoria ;)

Time For Change...

It's official! I (Lauren) will be starting school again on October 12th! I was planning on going back sometime in January, but it turns out I don't have to wait! I'll be finishing my degree through Ashford University. It's traditional campus is located in Iowa but they have a great online program, which I'm really excited about. They will accept all of the 83 credits I've already earned at Oakland University, and the part I'm most excited about is how they schedule their classes. You only take once class at a time and each class lasts 5 weeks. I think this will work great with my schedule and I'm excited to be able to work on my schoolwork at my own pace and at whatever time of day I choose! It looks like it was a good thing I went back to school shopping with Kayla after all!

In other news, we just had a match burning experiment and it turns out the only time I can light a match, hold it completely horizontal and not have it burn out within 1 second is when Kayla is also lighting a match at the same time. I'm really not sure what this means, scientifically speaking, but I just lit 8 matches trying to make them not burn out so fast, but it didn't work. I'm really not sure what's going on with my match-lighting skills.

Also, we went to Pei-Wei tonight for dinner and had an awesome roomie date. Kayla will probably want to kill me for phrasing it like that when she reads this post, but it's ok. We're cousins and we're just awesome enough to have roomie dates.Be jealous. You know you wish you were us.  I had some honey glazed crispy chicken, and Kayla got sweet and sour vegetables. DELICIOUS. If you haven't been to Pei-Wei (or P.F. Chang's for that matter), you should totally go. Make it your next dinner out.

So right now you're probably thinking that we've been purposely withholding our adventurous lives from you for two weeks. It's not true. We've pretty much just been living a boring life (Kayla is now an old lady apparently. I came home at 10 last night and she was already in bed. I think I've mentioned this before, but it totally takes the fun out of having a roomie if when you come home from work, you discover that said roomie is already sleeping and therefore cannot hear your crazy work stories from the day, nor can she share her crazy work stories.) But we did accomplish a couple of somewhat exciting things recently. For starters, we re-arranged our monstrous couch as my mom had been advising us to do, and we really love it! My mom also made some covers for our throw pillows. You wouldn't believe it- they actually match our ugly couch but they look really pretty! I know, it's a miracle. But what can I say? My mom is just awesome like that. We were so inspired by our couch moving success that Kayla bought some posters at a concert she went to recently and today we framed two of them! We discovered that we need some nails in order to hang them on the wall, but we'll probably end up getting some this weekend so we can do that. So far, this is what the posters look like in the frames (doesn't our nice clean carpet make such a great background for them?? lol)

Wow! Two Posts In One Day!

I know, I know. It's a miracle. We've gone eight days without posting, and now you get two fantabulous posts within mere hours of each other? No, the world isn't coming to an end, we were both just feeling guilty about not posting. It's been a crazy week for me- I got back from house-sitting on Tuesday night. I was SO happy to be able to sleep in my own bed in my own little cozy apartment! House-sitting is great, until you realize that you miss your roomie terribly and you miss your own bedroom, even if it is torn apart due to a few maintenance mishaps.

I thought I'd fill ya'll in on everything that's been going on around here lately! First of all, can I just say that I was extremely disappointed to come home from work at 10 p.m. today only to find out that Kayla was already asleep? Here I was all excited to hang out with my favorite roomie, and she was already in bed! I'm assuming she must have to work early tomorrow. Oh well. Perhaps tomorrow... :( As for the accusations that I've been "vaulting" fodder for Things My Cousin Says, trust me - you would too if you said as many embarrassing things as I say in a day. I think the only thing I didn't vault with Kayla yet was when I asked her "Wait. Serbia and Montenegro are just one country? Why is it Serbia and Montenegro? Why can't it just be one or the other, or split up into two separate nations??" In my defense, I've really never paid that much attention to the geography of any area (you all know I've actually gotten lost on the first floor of the airport parking structure, right?) so I can't really be blamed for not knowing about Serbia and Montenegro. On the bright side, while we were googling this "two names/one country" business, I also learned that Bosnia and Herzegovina are (is?) also one country. Oh, the things you learn when you Google random information...

In other news, I think I may have caused Kayla to gag this morning in class when I texted her to inform her that I was having a steak for breakfast and that I was washing it down with a nice glass of milk. Oh, and did I mention that I had some double chocolate gelato for dessert after that? (Maybe this sort of eating habit is why I've decided to finally get a gym membership? Hahaha) I'm really not sure how we're roommates. She's a vegan who's allergic to soy, and I'm the girl who will pretty much only eat what she won't! I do enjoy freaking her out with my eating habits though :) And I must say, I've gotten pretty good at making a delicious steak! You know it's good when you dip it in A1 and decide it's better without the sauce! And mom, just to prove to you that I'm not joking, here is a picture of my delicious steak. :) (And the gelato I had afterward. Turns out you can get some pretty good gelato at Meijer for a pretty decent price!)

My favorite way to prepare the steak: mix together some season salt, paprika, cumin, and a little garlic salt and rub it all over the steak before you cook it. In this case, I let it sit like that overnight, and it turned out delicious!

Well, that's about it for this post. I need to actually go to bed at a decent time (for the first time all week) so that I can actually get up and get things done tomorrow before work! I think I'll go have a couple spoonfuls of gelato first though. ;)

...

We've been neglecting our blog- I'll be the first to admit it- it's just that life has suddenly gotten busy. My free time has greatly diminished and my life has been taken over with diagramming sentences, invalid arguments, fricative f's, the worst customers that I have ever experienced at work and an apartment that will apparently not clean itself. I'm hoping that maybe Lauren will pick up my slack and start writing more entries. There have been a few possible entries for "stuff my cousin said" however, someone (who shall remain nameless)  has "vaulted" them. The other possibility would be recapping episodes of  "Hoarders." Although those recaps would involve stories of Lauren and me sitting on the couch with me literally gagging, while Lauren earnestly pleads with me not to throw up. I'll spare you the gory details... You're welcome.

I just found out that blogging is the best way to procrastinate from homework!

So, Lauren is currently house/dog/guinea pig/rabbit-sitting, and I thought that I would update the old blog... We have been throwing out the idea that we want to start writing entries about "stuff my cousin says..." I based the idea on a certain twitter that has some coarse language and is actually about someone's dad. Now, if you know Lauren and me at all, you know that 90% or more of the things we say are utterly absurd. For example: the other night on our bottle return trip to Meijer we had to walk through the entrance to the bottle return, which blows gale force winds onto you. (Note: I may be slightly exaggerating.) So on our way out of the bottle return my hair was blown into my face which prompted the following, "that wind just Biebered my hair..." If you don't know who Justin Bieber is you might want to google it. Although you may also want to keep it that way. Anyhow, you can expect about a billion entries with stuff my cousin says because the source material is literally endless. Hopefully future entries will actually be entertaining. Until then... hey here's a picture of Lauren and me being awesome (or not).

Men of Meijer also known as late night shopping trip...

First of all let me just say how thankful I am that fall is here. The weather has been absolutely perfect the last two days, and Lauren and I are more than excited to break out our sweaters. Now onto slightly more lame matters. If you know Lauren and me at all you will know that we stay up far too late most nights and love taking late night trips to Meijer. We were given a suggestion to make a post about the Men of Meijer. The intentions were good but you would not believe how hard it is to inconspicuously take a picture of someone when they are the only other human beings in the store... Let's just say that Meijer is not a hotbed of activity at 12:30 at night. You also might guess that two girls who do not look like meth-addicts get stared at a little bit. Apparently, it's not normal to be out grocery shopping so late. Who knew? We didn't get too many pictures (read: 1) and it turned out extremely blurry. But here it is:

Somewhere in that picture is a dude... I now feel more than a little creepy. So, while our late-night shopping trip was successful for shopping it was not so lucky for picking up guys. Although I can't say i'm upset given the clientele of Meijer afterhours...
Lauren and I did stop and stare at their large Burt's Bee's section for quite awhile. Eventually we pulled ourselves away without buying anything. I couldn't be more proud of us.

I mean, just look at all of those absolutely necessary products that we really really needed! Anti-aging cream? A million different lip balms? We needed it! Self-control won out in the end and we spent the next 15 minutes searching for Q-Tips. What an absolutely great time. (Ed. Note: I was about 3 minutes away from throwing myself onto the floor and screaming like a 3 year old child. It was a long night at work.) Thankfully we eventually got out of Meijer sometime around 1 a.m. I guess we'll end this post by saying good-luck to Victoria who is moving back to college this week-end. We are going to miss you so much! That's it for now.

Back to School, Back to School

Apparently Lauren likes to celebrate Christmas in late August, only she calls it "back to school shopping." That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I cannot express the excitement Lauren felt when I asked her to go shopping with me for school supplies. For an accurate idea of her excitement it was similar to the commercial for Meijer's back to school sale.
         
The sad part is that Lauren could honestly be in that commercial and she wouldn't be acting. She gets that excited about shopping for school supplies.

                                                    For further proof:

 

Now, Lauren is not actually going to school this fall, but she claimed that she needed supplies for when she starts back up in the winter... I won't make too much fun though. 

There is my haul of school supplies, I didn't have to spend too much thanks to Walmart, but my wallet will be getting a workout this weekend when I have to purchase all of the books for my four classes. I think that is about it for now. Hopefully the pretty school supplies will distract from the fact that we are averaging about one post every two weeks...

A Trip To The Zoo With Grandma...

We had a great day today! We drove a few hours to a fantastic zoo in Battle Creek with our Grandma, and it ended up being a really fun time. Granted, we had to get up at the crack of dawn (after we'd both worked late the night before), but it ended up being a great trip!

We saw kangaroos, wallabies, kookaburras, snow leopards, giraffes (known as twigas in swahili!) and (my personal FAVORITE) ring tailed lemurs! Oh my goodness...they were SO adorable, and they kept sitting and moving like little furry humans! Unfortunately, since it was so early when we left the apartment, I forgot my camera. But I was able to get some pictures with my phone!

 They're not the world's greatest pictures, but they're not bad for a camera phone! We spent just under 3 hours at the zoo. It had been quite a while since I had been to our local zoo, which I thought was great, but this zoo was even better! It was smaller, but it had enough cute animals to keep me happy, and pretty much everything was in the shade!  To top it all off, it wasn't crowded at all! We got to the African Safari portion of the zoo and Grandma decided to sit this portion out and just wait for us to walk through it. I took as many pictures as possible so she wouldn't feel like she totally missed out on this part of the zoo. There were zebras, giraffes (even babies!), ostriches, orangutans, exotic birds, vultures, and red river hogs (similar to warthogs). The giraffes were very friendly, and you could purchase lettuce leaves for $1 apiece. Unfortunately, I didn't have any cash on me, and my little sister just had to be the voice of reason when it came to spending her cash. [I love you, Victoria! ;)]  So of course, the giraffe licked her hand and wouldn't touch me. But look how cute it was!

 I could post all of the adorable pictures I took today, but that would make this the longest post you've ever read hahaha. Ok, ok. I'll post a few more. But really, you should go check it out yourself! Go to Binder Park Zoo and make a day of it like we did!

It's a Red Panda! Awww...

Thanks to our grandma, who spent hours on the road with us today, and who prepared a fantastic lunch (including vegan options for Kayla!) for all of us. We love you grandma, and we had tons of fun hanging out with you today! :)

Dinner Day... OK I really blew it with this one...

Alright, I will be the first to admit it. I got lazy. OK, now that that is out of the way, I will talk about the successes and failures of the rest of the meals that were made. On Friday I got quite lazy and decided to just make myself some whole wheat pasta with marinara sauce... nothing fancy. Saturday I got back on track and made perhaps the best dinner of the week: Thai coconut vegetables. It was a delicious stir fry with coconut milk, sweet chili sauce, veggie broth and cumin. I put it over some brown rice and it turned out to be really delicious. Now the bad news, I completely forgot to take pictures. I really have no excuse so we'll just move on. Sunday was the disaster of the week. Southwestern Bean Salad...

The ingredients for this recipe sounded really great but it was one of the worst things that I have eaten in quite some time. I honestly gagged from just smelling it... After seeing that happen Lauren made perhaps her wisest decision ever and did not try it. So, Sunday night's dinner ended up being Chinese take-out at work. Oh well, sometimes a recipe fails. So there it is, a recap of recipes, some good, some awful but all in all it was a great time cooking this week and something I plan to keep up with.
In other news, I may be developing a black eye as I hit my eye quite hard on the corner of my car door today. Bad times. Lauren is having to listen to me whine a lot about it. Alright, I think that's it for this quickly assembled/disjointed blog entry.

Sweet & Sour Chicken With Rice

All of Kayla's cooking last week inspired me to cook something for myself. Her cooking was good, but unlike Kayla, I am a total carnivore, so the vegan diet just wasn't working out for me. I ended up making some quick and easy sweet and sour chicken with some rice pilaf (I didn't realize until I had already started cooking that Kayla had used the last of our normal rice earlier in the day, so I ended up just making do with the pilaf). It was super simple and pretty yummy too!

I just used Tyson's popcorn chicken, some Kikkoman sweet & sour sauce, and some Near East almond rice pilaf! I let the chicken sit and soak in the sweet and sour sauce for about 20 minutes, and then I just threw it all in a pan and let it saute for about 15 minutes, to let it brown. The end result was delicious, and just what I'd been craving after a week of eating vegan meals!

     And of course, I had to have some organic milk to go with my non-vegan meal!

Organic milk is more expensive than regular milk, but it's one of my occasional splurges. It just tastes so much better than regular milk! I love it!

Keep an eye out for more cooking posts from Kayla in the next day or two. I know she has more vegan cooking adventures to share!

Dinner Day 4 (Victoria Style)

Sorry it's been so long.  It's all my fault. 

I'm Victoria:  Honorary apartment resident, sister of Lauren and Cousin of Kayla. (I have my own toothbrush there.  Because I'm special and they love me best.)  I'm guest posting/hijacking their blog today because I was invited to dinner on thursday night.  Now I know, that was like 3 trillion years ago, but I've been very busy plucking my eyebrows and reading books and waiting for my older sister to email me the pictures. 

Now tell me this... Who emails their perfectly sane sister pictures of dinner at 1 in the morning and expects her to sense this with her mind, wake up, turn on her computer, and make a post on a blog?  I'll tell you:  Lauren.

On to the dinner.  Obviously, since Kayla is vegan, this dinner harmed no animals, or their byproducts.  I felt really good about eating it.

So the recipe was Sesame Hot Noodles.  It involved sesame seeds, soy sauce, peanut butter, a whisk, mild green chilies, garlic, some bowls, some noodles, and a big pile o' yumminess.  It was really good, we'll leave it at that.

As you can see, there were also spring rolls.  These were made with a variety of chopped veggies tossed in a light sauce.  The filling (and the pool of plum sauce we dipped them in, which in the above picture may or may not look like something out of a badly acted teen movie) was delicious.  The wrappers gave us a little trouble.  No, a lot.  A lot of trouble.  They wouldn't wrap right, and they stuck together, and then decided to be contrary and come apart when we tried to make them all delicious and golden by dropping them in hot oil.  The nerve.  In the end, out of 9 spring rolls, three turned out decent and they were pretty good.  (They would have been better if Kayla ate things with egg in them though, because the normal wrappers looked yummy.  But they had egg.  But they looked yummy.  But Kayla couldn't handle the guilt.  So we went with rice.)
It was a really good dinner, and we had fun cooking it together.  Listen up though:  Don't fry spring rolls and then eat them, because then you might feel guilty, or a little sick, and then you might go on a three mile post-dinner walk, and if you stole your sister's shoes for the walk without her permission, they might rub on your feet and make you bleed.  Just some advice.  (PS, I would never steal your shoes and then inadvertently bleed on the Lauren.  Never.)

This was a guest post by Victoria.  All content must be taken with a grain of salt because she's really jealous that Lauren and Kayla do fun stuff without her.  Not too much salt though, because that's bad for you.