I *Love Cooking (*Sort of Like)

 Now that school is over, I truly feel like I have "free time" for the first time in two years, and it is glorious!  I have not been very good at documenting what I have done with this time yet..but am vowing to be better.  So todays blog is all about what I did on my free Sunday at home.  This morning I went for a quick run (still don't understand how and why people like running), followed by an amazing homemade latte.  I am definitely addicted to coffee and feel completely fine with this.  This afternoon I had Judd help me rearrange the furniture in our guest bedroom.  Since we moved in I have not been too pleased with the feng-shui of this room.  It always has felt too crowded, and our two desk chairs always bump into each other.  After spending two nights this week thoroughly "spring cleaning" and dumping lots of unnecessary junk we have held onto for years, we were ready to move things around today.  All in all I think I really like the new layout.  Pictures to come later...(I still don't feel "Real Simple" worthy  yet.)

Also included in my day was watering and looking after my many pots on the balcony.  I was pretty stoked to find flowers on one of my tomatoe plants today!  Last year I tried an heirloom tomatoe plant, it flowered but no tomatoes ever came.  This year I have 9 cherry tomatoe plants and am hoping we get some fruit.  I also have italian parseley, basil, mint and sunflowers (because they are pretty).

Today I also decided to venture into the kitchen and try my hand at a strawberry- rhubarb pie.  I don't think there is rhubarb in California, because before I worked at Whole Foods in Colorado, I had never heard of this vegetable pie.  Things got a little messy, but from the looks of things it seems to have turned out all right.  I actually made this pie for what would have been a surprise-party for a friend tomorrow night.  Turns out this surprise isn't going to happen, so Judd and I are digging in tonight.  I'll let you know how it tastes???  Not even sure I know what I'm going for.

Since I was in the kitchen, I also decided to try out roasting tomatoes.  The picture in the magazine made this look easy and amazing so I figured, easy-peasy.  Not-so-much.  The nine tomatoes I roasted whittled down to literally half a cup of substance.  This is a bummer because I was planning to use half of them on a grilled pizza we were going to have for dinner, and the other half in a roasted tomatoe salsa.  By the time I had been in the kitchen for 2 hours (between the two projects) I decided that roasting tomatoes was a total failure, there wasn't enough for pizza, and I was done for the night.  So Mod-Market it was where I ordered a BEAUTIFUL "Arrugula Pizza".  It was amazing, and I definitely could not have pulled off such a great dinner for $8.50.  Lesson learned - as beautiful as the pictures are in magazines of food, I think my max prep-time (other than say Thanksgiving or Christmas) is about 30 minutes.  Any longer and I am grumpy.  Judd knows that when I get this way, we're going out.  Sorry babe...I try, but sometimes I learn to never do some of these things again!