I now have a warm house.

...since I got a housewarming gift! It's actually not really warm. In fact, it gets kinda freezing sometimes...which I love.

I opened my door today, and look what I found!!

A package! My first package!!! :) From Penzeys Spices, so you know it has to be good. I jumped around and clapped my hands for a while, then I opened it. It was from Mom and Kay!! Awwwww they're so thoughtful.

Look what's inside...spicy spices!! :) :)

Every spicy goodness you can imagine...above the crushed red pepper they put "very hot" and yes, it is VERY hot! Love it! Andy came over to help me finish moving stuff over, and we stood there and smelled/tasted them all. SO awesome.

It came with a little booklet with recipes to use with each one of the spices. Recipes such as fire shrimp, corn salsa, spicy cheese bread, vegetable curry stir fry, and curry pasta salad!! I cant wait to try them all!

Thank you Mom and Kay so much!!! xoxoxo

How does one get red wax out of everything one owns?

a) stick everything you own in the freezer and hope you can flake it off

b) use your imaginary iron and a damp towel to iron it all out of everything you own

c) throw everything you own away

d) don't be a huge MORON and leave three huge red pillar candles on top of everything you own in your car while you take a ten hour nap on a hot humid day before moving it all inside

Yes, really.

Now here are some pictures that will bring us all away from the stress back into the beer drinking glory of my weekend.

Here we have a Green Flash West Coast IPA. The hoppiest beer in town. Makes you burp Christmas trees. Delicious.

This is an Arrogant Bastard Ale. Heaven.

And your classic Sapporo. Very refreshing. Andy and I were alone in a sushi bar at 10PM when we drank it. We watched the dudes make sushi and then the chef gave us a complimentary appetizer. Score!

Now excuse me while I go scrape red floral-scented wax off of my hand weights.

Hell.

Andy took me to a flea market this past weekend.

At least if I go to hell, I will already know what it's like.

Uh.....Hello????

...that's what I said when I heard glass breaking in my living room and thought someone had broken into the glass doors.

But nope! It was this...

The plastic piece holding up the fan broke causing the fan to drop, and one of the light bulbs to fly out against the wall...hence the glass-breaking sound. My landlord came over, and the fan is now resting safely on the ground until the electrician comes this week and reinstalls it. Apparently it had been functioning perfectly for the past 15 years and had to pick Friday to break and SCARE THE FREAKIN CRAP OUT OF ME!!!!

In other news, I am home after a nice weekend...now I get to go to work. Oh joy.

Good News/Bad News

Good News: I now have curtains in my bedroom so that the neighbors can't watch me sleep.

Bad News: They're towels.

I made something really tasty for my 8AM dinner yesterday. I was really craving mac n cheese (like I do every day of my life) so I made this tasty cheesy pasta dish. Other than my 8AM dinner, nothing else exciting happened in my day. Oh, well I did watch The Lovely Bones which was SO GOOD but pretty intense. Has anyone else seen it? Who played the dad? He was dreamy.

Anyway, here is my cheesy pasta.

Yes, that picture is of a bowl filled with cheese, and yes, I will soon devour the whole thing. Well, there's also curry and red pepper flakes in it if that helps. After cooking the pasta I dumped that into the pot with some beer and milk.

Finished product. It looks kinda cruddy, but the picture was taken under the kitchen light.

Yum. It was extraordinarily cheesy and gooey. I would have liked to have added in a can of diced tomatoes, but my bare cupboards said NO.

I would like to take this moment to welcome my big Liesl to my trusty group of blog followers. Thank you Liesl for making up 33.333333333333333333333% of my followers. It means a lot. Hey, maybe I'll even come to Boston and thank you in person! Oh wait, I am!!

Furniture.

Furniture! Woohoo! I sortakinda arranged the furniture today. This is what you see when laying on my couch. It's a very comfy spot...I highly recommend it. As you can see, I have not found a place for the little brown dresser. I think that will end up in my bedroom. The table and chairs are in the far corner, but I'm not sure if I like them there.



This is the lonely part of the living room. Looks like a nice wall for a piano. Oh wait...I'm being forced into disposing my lifelong friend. Maybe I can put a buffet table there instead. Now excuse me while I go mourn.

Okay I'm back...sniff...sniff.
Do I need an area rug? Maybe I should pull the table away from the corner of the room so it doesn't look like a "color a picture while mommy shops" corner.

I'm putting this table to good use. These chocolate cheerios ROCK. They taste like cocoa puffs for grown ups.

Aww...my seating area. Seating areas are seriously no fun unless you have a TV. The wall to the right of the rocking chair is the PERFECT wall for a flat screen TV. That will never happen though. Maybe I can get Emily to paint me some trippy painting that will entertain guests instead.

Ooooo a salad! Since Andy and I gorged ourselves on pasta and porter, there was no room for our pretty little salads. I got the toppings from the salad bar, and the lettuce from a bag. Good thing, cause the lettuce didn't get soggy, and now I can go back and get more toppings for the rest of my lettuce! Sweet!
There's something about sunflower seeds, peas, and feta that make my heart sing.

I just wanted to give you all a glimpse of the MOST DISGUSTING THING EVER.
Ew! WTF??!? Who would buy custard in a can that is called "Ambrosia" and EAT it? The caf at Bethany would make stuff that they called Ambrosia, but I think it was just whipped cream mixed with mandarin oranges and marshmallows. Still funky, especially from the caf, but not as near as bad as canned custard. Gross.

Lastly, here are my leftovers from dinner on Sunday. I had a coupon for buy one entree get the second one free at a place called Mulligan's near by, so Andy and I had dinner there. Look how big my raviolis were!! The wine glass is there for reference. They are spinach and cheese ravioli with a creamy red pepper sauce...much like the Pioneer Woman red pepper sauce I made a week or so ago. The food was awesome. I'm totally going back once I raid every Clipper magazine in Pittsburgh.

Happy Monday!

Happy Monday! I hope you all two had a very nice weekend :)
Here are the exciting events of my weekend!
First of all, the results of the poll! The shower curtain won by a landslide. Geez you people two are lame. They were on sale at Kmart, and they had light lavender! Woohoo! I also got hooks instead of those stupid plastic rings, and I am now the happiest person in the entire world.
I also got a 12 piece silverware set for $8, but unfortunately that was the last set. So...I can easily entertain four friends. Anyone else has to bring their own fork.
Now the good stuff...the six pack store near me has Yuengling Porter! MMMMMM!!! I've never seen it anywhere else, so I'm pretty pumped.



The shower curtain is up! I still need a liner though. Kmart was selling them for $5. Pssshhhhttt. Yeah right. Dollar store liners work just fine.

Then Andy came over! Due to the overwhelming response to the pasta with artichokes recipe, we went with it. Amazing choice...it was so awesome.
So I got to sit back and enjoy a cold luxurious porter (oh yeah, and obnoxiously stick my camera phone in his face) while Andy cooked! Good deal!

The sauce is done! I don't know exactly what he did, but it was so freakin good. We bought fire roasted diced tomatoes, so I think it gave it a nice smoky taste.

The finished product! He also made garlic bread with sourdough bread, fresh garlic, olive oil, and sharp cheddar. I'm sobbing just thinking about it.

And a nice sunset at the end of the evening!

On Saturday, we discovered the Oakmont Bakery. Oakmont is a fancy shmancy town across the river from Springdale. It's where the Women's US Open was held a couple weeks ago.

This bakery was heaven. Pure joy, peace, happiness, love. For each type of cake they had, they also had one of these mini cakes that they sold for $4.75. Then, they sold a cupcake version of the cake for $1!! This carrot cake was so rich, creamy, moist, FREAKIN AMAZING, that the few bites off the end was all we could do. (Mind you, this is right after Andy ate a cookie sandwich in 0.7 seconds, so really I'm the dainty "oh please I'm stuffed!" one in this situation. Thank you.)

The other pretty little gal is an almond torte. Andy bought it for his mom (awwwwwww) but luckily she shared when we took it to her. It probably helped that I was hovering over the box with slobber seeping from my mouth.

"um...Kelly would you like some of the almond torte?"

"oh...me? what? umm....well...I mean, YES PLEASE GIVE ME A PIECE NOW!!!!!"

Sugar coated roasted almond slivers, creamy frosting, moist vanilla almond cake, perfect yellow custard. Solitary tear running down cheek.

Then it was Sunday...ugh.

Thanks to Andy's dad, we had a truck to move my furniture...and thanks to Andy's years of boy scouts we had...knots.

Knots, cargo straps, strategy...

BOYSCOUT DOWN!! BOYSCOUT DOWN!! Oh what's that? You're making more knots? K good...I was just gonna stand here snapping pictures anyway.

But we made it...lots of sweat, but luckily no blood or tears.
Oh hi Andy!! Oh, there's still stuff to carry up? I was just gonna take one more picture of you carrying stuff...so uh...do you need my help? What's that? No? Oh come on, are you SURE?? I mean, I'm really good at carrying stu...oh you're already at the door? Oh...heh...hey look we're all done!

View from my balcony which now has a chair!

Phew! All done...now where did that Yuengling go?

Furniture placement pictures coming soon!

Today

Oh wait, that should say "Yesterday." Oh well...pretend this all happened today.

So...as you can see I bought some CHOCOLATE Cheerios and Nutrigrain bars at the store. Sweet. Now I'll have snacks at work! Haven't tried the Cheerios yet.

I also had another apple/almond butter/herbed chevre snack "today." Tasty as always.

Got some more essentials...to-go containers and ziplock baggies.

I got these diced tomatoes at TJ's the other day...turns out if you DON'T have salt in your apartment, it's a bad idea to buy no salt added diced tomatoes. Oops. 

Maybe I showed you these already. If so, my bad. 

This tends to happen to me with Andy a lot. It goes a little something like this: "OMG ANDY!!! The funniest thing happened at work today! This one guy did this one thing and OMG HAHAHA IT WAS TOO FUNNY!"

"Oh yeah...haha...remember you said that last night?"

"oh...yeah...damn...sorry."

Or sometimes it's a little more...hurtful...

"OMG ANDY!!! I had the BEST time at this one place the other night! It was SOOO cool and the people were GREAT and the food was AWESOME!!!!"

"yeah...heh...remember I was there too?"

"oh...yeah...damn...sorry."

Maybe I should have gotten ginko biloba instead of tomatoes. I'm sure you understand Mom.

I tried to find a lavender and/or silver basket for all of my bathroom items, but DG only had crap. This brown one was nice though, but it won't go with my theme! Grr!!!

So then...I made pasta (shocking) for dinner with a tomato/goat cheese sauce I saw Pioneer Woman make one time. I'm sure mine was much different as there are only 5-8 items in my cupboard currently, but it was still quite delicious.

This is what I used for the sauce. The bread crumbs totally rocked. Due to my saltless kitchen, I just dumped a ton of Slap Ya Mama in.

See? YUMMY!!! That is whole grain angel hair, although it kinda looks like spaghetti. You can totally taste the goat cheese in the sauce too!

Soon I will post the "poll purchase/s" and the results of Andy's dinner!

A Salad.

For my first meal in my new apartment last night, I made a mango and avocado salad! I've seen recipes with herbs and salt and what not, but my cupboards are bare. MY salad just used three ingredients.

I tried peeling the mango with a peeler, but after I got this far, it got so messy and juicy that I just started digging at the mango with a knife. Whatever...it worked.

My avocado had those brown specks in parts of it, but I ate it anyway. Is that bad? MOM AM I GOING TO DIE???

I sliced a grid pattern in the half and then popped the pieces out with my thumb.

I couldn't get the damn pit out of the other half, so I just peeled it and made cubes from the outside instead.

Yay! So, the mango pieces are definitely not uniform. How the hell are you supposed to slice a mango anyway? It's so hard!

I also squeezed lime juice over it.

Side note: My soap smells awesome...it's Black Amethyst. Dad, I promise if you visit that I'll hide this soap and buy some boring non-scented crappy mccrap soap. 

I forgot that I don't have silverware either, so I took a fork from my work stash in my car. And there you have it! My very first new-apartment-meal! (It tasted a lot better than it looks).

First day in the new place! I went to Walmart to pick up some stuff for the apartment, but all I could decide on was shelf liner, a mango, and a lime. The shelves right now have some weird metallic-y liner on them, and they are starting to flake, and I'd rather not be picking gold leaf out of my food. My reasoning for the fruit? They were colorful, and produce is cheap.

This is my computer area for the time being. Since I have no other hard surfaces moved in yet, and I don't want my first day in my new apartment to result in a carpet fire from my blazing hot laptop, I decided the kitchen counter would make a nice place to do important computer things watch the new episode of Pretty Little Liars and go on Facebook! :-)

I forgot to take a picture of the tasty salad I had for lunch...it would have been hard to anyway since I shoveled it in my face in under 4 min. The local Giant Eagle has a great salad bar and sells beer! Woohoo! No lunch beer for me though :-)

I'm always so happy when I keep my salad under 1 pound. With all the yummy things on the salad bar, it's easy to go over a pound. Like couscous...it's so freakin heavy! Stupid salad bars are way too expensive.

I hope to get more stuff moved in tomorrow. Like my clothes...that would be nice. Oh, and thanks to my mom and sister, I finally have two followers!! YAY!