What to make when you are seriously craving sushi but don’t have a lot of time:

Sushi bowls!

All I did was cook some sushi rice in the rice cooker (then stir in a bit of rice vinegar and sugar), slice up tons of cucumber and avocado and a bit of nori. I sliced up some salmon and we topped it all with a little bit of soy sauce. It definitely satisfied my craving and took barely any time at all to make.

Yesterday was pretty cool because I won a free meal on Twitter! Scott and I will get to have a 7 course Indian meal courtesy of vaneats.ca which is obviously awesome. I won the Siddhartha’s Nirvana package. It’s actually funny timing because we were already planning on using another vaneats.ca voucher tonight! I bought the La Casita Botanas package a few weeks ago and am definitely looking forward to eating it. I do love me some Mexican food.

The Sens loss was sad. Womp womp Canada. At least now my grades should improve a bit.

That was the other day after the Canucks loss. Lol.

Scott has been working very hard lately. I have barely seen him in the past three days!!

Well that sucks. Some company has bought jornakat.com so I guess even if I did want it back I can’t have it. Hopefully most of my old readers have switched over to this site anyway by now.

We made margaritas last night. It seemed like a good way to use up the cheap tequila someone left at our house a while ago. They were yummy and much better than drinking pop, which I seem to have lost the taste for.

I did my shift at the Open House yesterday. Before I went I was worried that people were going to ask me hard questions that I wouldn’t be able to answer, but actually once I was there I really wished people would ask ANYTHING AT ALL instead of just staring at us. It was awkward. Lesley and I ran a little booth where we had a Geiger-Muller counter and a tripad with two drops of hidden radioactivity that people could try and find.

It wasn’t very busy so instead I just ate all the treats they had got to bribe us into volunteering, and chatted with the second years and teachers, which was good. I finally found out for sure that yes we will be working full time, 5 days a week over the summer.

Well I should get back to work on my essay now. Need to get some more work done before our epic 1+ hour bus ride to my grandmas’ nieces’ cousins’ daughters’ moms’ (ok I exaggerate slightly) house for dinner tonight.

We spent too much money on food and drink in March. We’re usually very thrifty but last month we got sloppy I guess. We went out to eat a lot, drank at bars, and spent a lot at the grocery stores.

To get back on track we’ve decided to try and bring that food and drink amount way way down, and back under budget for April.

Some ways that we cut costs:

1. Don’t eat out as much. Duh, that one is a given. If we’ve been invited out we can eat at home first so that we don’t end up hungry while out, even if it means eating at an awkward time of day.

2. Make a meal plan. Scott and I do this together on the weekend. We try to plan ahead for the next 5 or 6 days, so that we have lunches and dinners arranged and can do all the shopping at once. I’m pretty sure that you spend less when you do the shopping once than if you do the shopping every day. And we almost never end up having to buy lunch at work/school.

  • check the flyers for sales, and plan a menu around that. The stuff on sale is usually the stuff that is in season, so as well as saving money you are getting nicer quality.
  • take inventory of the food you already have in your fridge, and plan a menu around that, so less gets wasted.
  • plan out meals that have similar ingredients, reducing produce waste.

3. Eating cheaper stuff. This doesn’t mean we have to eat Mr. Noodles every day, just maybe not eating steak every day. This blog has tons and tons of very economical recipes: http://budgetbytes.blogspot.ca/ Nearly every single thing that Rosemarie or Scott or I have made from this website has been a success. I’ve mentioned her blog before and I continue to stand by it. She’s got an amazing website there.

Um well I can’t think of anything else at the moment. Some common sense tips that you probably would have come up with on your own. Saving money isn’t too hard!

The other night we were having veggie burgers for dinner (the Costco ones are SOOO GOOD!!, even for non-vegetarians) but around 5:00 PM Scott realized we had no buns. Instead of going back out to buy some, he decided it would be easier to just make them from scratch! I’m not sure I quite follow his logic, but he likes making bread, and they turned out quite nice.

Yesterday was a big day.

1. I found out that I am going to be doing my summer placement at Vancouver General Hospital. VGH was my second choice, so this is pretty good news. It’s not too hard to get there from our house, it has the latest early start, and it’s a big busy hospital where I should get to see a lot of variety. I’m pleased.

2. Almost all of my classmates went out for a sushi lunch after school. We went to Sushi Garden, near Lougheed Mall. I had an Alaska roll, a yam roll, and a tuna roll. The Alaska roll was very delicious (it is apparently their speciality) and the other two were fine, but not great. It was cheap though and overall seemed like a good place. I’ve been told there is another one right near our house, so maybe I will try it out again sometime.

3. Scott and I went to the Aussie pub last night to go watch some footy. It’s the very first round of the season and Melbourne (my team) was playing Brisbane (Scott’s team) so of course we wanted to see the game. Unfortunately my Demons got beat pretty bad.

4. I bought my new camera!! I got the Canon SX260 HS. I haven’t used it too much yet but so far it seems very nice and fast and smart. I am looking forward to using it in the future. Now I need to go somewhere where I want to take a lot of pictures! This probably means leaving the apartment…

Well that’s pretty much all the fun stuff I have to say at the moment. I have A LOT of school work to do this weekend so I’ll just be here at my desk for the majority of today and tomorrow. Bummer.