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For the next four weeks I start work at 7:00 AM, so I spent today prepping a bunch of breakfast foods so that I hopefully don’t have to wake up much before 6 AM. I made 12 oatmeal chocolate chip muffins this morning, and just finished making 10 breakfast burritos this afternoon. All that combined with bagels being on sale for $1 a bag at No Frills means that our freezer is totally ridiculous right now!!

Is it weird that I took a picture of my freezer? Probably.

Last week at work was enjoyable. Things are becoming more familiar and I’m getting better at dealing with patients. There really are a lot of details I need to eventually know!!! I’ll be on a new camera for the next two weeks, similar to what I was on before but with only one camera head instead of two. This camera also gets a whole lot of different scans scheduled on it so it will be another two weeks of randomness.

In other news, Scott is home! He worked something like 140 hours over the last two weeks in Edmonton so we’ve been taking it very easy this weekend. We’ve been watching a lot of Australian Masterchef.

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I’M GOING CRAZY HERE.

The whole apartment has been smelling like cooking onions ALL DAY. Scott is making a batch of balsamic caramelized onions in the slow cooker and it has to cook for 8 hours and oh my, the smells coming from that thing. Three pounds of onions are cooking down and down and down, I think they are actually turning into candy. We will see. I’ve been drooling for 6 hours and I still have another 2 hours to go. O_O

It doesn’t help that I’ve been reading all these papers about sausages. We have to write a paper for our radiation safety course about “anything to do with radiation”. I started off just researching food irradiation, but after coming across a bunch of useful articles I decided to focus on the irradiation of sausages. Mostly because it is kind of hilarious. Who knew there would be so much information about it! Who knew that there is a scientific journal called Meat Science???!!

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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.

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We had a nice Easter dinner with Rosemarie and Rob on Monday night. Rosemarie came over in the afternoon so we could have some sister-time while Scott was at work. Gotta squeeze in as much sister-time before she leaves!! By the way, have I mentioned that she’s going to FIJI FOR A WHOLE YEAR ON EXCHANGE???????!!!! SO jealous, although hopefully Scott and I will be able to visit her at some point so that is pretty exciting. She has started up her own blog so check that out: http://threepiece.wordpress.com/

Anyway back to last Monday.

Rosemarie and I made a tourtiere (French Canadian meat pie). It was actually extremely simple to make, and very tasty. Pie dinners are so tasty.

We also had salad, mashed potatoes, peas and gravvvvvy. Om nom nom.

Rob made us a nice fruity dessert. I liked the strawberry sauce a lot.

We played some Dominion, but that game kind of annoys me. Why are the rules so vague?? I always have this feeling like we are not playing the game correctly. We also played a couple games of cribbage with my new crib board that I found in the mail room. Scott thinks I’m gross for taking it, but I think it’s ok!!!

I had a big midterm yesterday and had a lot of work due this week so I’ve been studying all week. Very boring. We have today off though because BCIT is having an Open House. I have to go in tomorrow for two hours to help out. I plan on getting a big chunk on one of my papers that is due in a couple weeks today, but so far I’ve just been procrastinating. Oops.

I got volunteered to make a poster for the Open House about nuclear medicine heart imaging. I didn’t have a lot of time to spend on it due to midterm, so I just kept it extremely extremely basic. Does the poster explain anything new to you? Scott coloured in the letters for me while watching hockey.

Speaking of hockey, my dream of a Canucks-Senators final is not off to a great start. :/ I will continue to believe it could actually happen though, until one of the teams gets knocked out.

Ok really I should do something productive now. This is a busy busy weekend so I should not be wasting precious time.

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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!