Good Eats by Jen :)

One week of classes down! And I only went to 3 lectures that even mattered! But now I have my schedule set and I am ready to get crackin! Well kind of….I just have to get in crackin mode again, which never actually happened last semester so maybe I can get back into now because I will have awesome classes. I still have no books, but I don’t know how many I want to buy anyway because they are going to cost me $300! Also, do not fear, I have a credit card and money in my bank account now so I am not going to have to beg and starve. Although at my current spending rate it won’t last long. I just calculated all my costs and it has been pretty outrageous since July 7^th and the 8^th was only like 2 hours long so I didn’t even buy anything that day! But getting settled I guess will do that, but my cupboards have food and I filled my section of the fridge, so I think costs will be decreasing a lot. Plus I will get my free bus pass from the university next week, that $3.20 to go to town and back was adding up! Copying one of my flatmate’s, I put together a little budget, but I am not too sure what I should be spending or what I could be spending, all I have done of the past 2 years is worked and saved so it is weird going the other way and a little scary.  I like shopping in my mom’s pantry J ha ha. That doesn’t work here, they arrest you if you just try and take stuff. A single person can eat a lot a week, even me. Oh but that does bring me to my next point….chicken parmesan from scratch! Yep that’s what I made today. Made my own bread crumb coating and basted the chicken with it then fried it a bit and baked it with cheese and spaghetti sauce, put it on some pasta and broiled some French bread, throw in some passion fruit juice and I was eating good! Ha ha maybe meals like that could be the key of why I have spent so much money already! But it sounded so good I couldn’t resist. Today was pretty low key, just walked into town and got my new Zealand sim card and bought some groceries. Then went through my costs and made a budget and talked to some friends. It has really been a pretty quiet day. Graeme went to the rugby match and I about went but decided to save it for another day.

Chicken Parmesan

                Yesterday was a bit busier. I got my schedule set and even went to 2 classes! That’s a big deal kind of. But I got a lot of administrative stuff taken care of no problem because the people here are super fast. Oh also I got my first letter in the mail! But then I came back and made my own potato stew. I didn’t have a bullion cubes to I tried to make a broth my simmering some onions and extracting the flavor of those then added potatoes, carrots, celery, garlic salt, and tomato sauce. I sort of combined a few different recipes I read about online and took a few other liberties…ya know like garlic salt instead of garlic and salt and tomato sauce instead of tomatoes. But it was actually pretty good! A thickening agent would have really made it more stew like but it was good. Then me and most my flatmates start to play cards when our neighbor came in and was like hey we need some more people for a game and then we just all decided to play, so our neighbor came back with like 5 more of our asian neighbors we hadn’t met yet and we had a big international game night! We would say stuff in one of the 6 different languages we had available. But we all ended up playing spoons and it got pretty brutal. I only lost once though! But I have a huge bruise on my leg from jumping over the table to get a spoon during one round. But every time we lost we had to do something so when I lost I had to stand in the middle of the room and sing part of a katy perry song. It was awful! But it was a fun night. The rest of the night we just hung out and talked about all the crazy differences between countries, culture, and religion. It was super interesting and a lot of fun!