cooking update

Recently Nik and I have seriously expanded our cooking horizons, leaving behind the safe and well-known shores of Italian cooking for the more exotic ones of Asia. Because Nik is off gluten for 60 days due to a gluten sensitivity that runs in his family, we wanted to cook more dishes involving rice. And sadly, other than risotto, Italians don't use rice too much. So, being the adventuresome couple that we are (ha ha), we decided to try to make our own curry. We absolutely adore Thai food and it is one our favorite things to eat when we go out for dinner. It didn't seem too hard to make so we gave it a try and it actually turned out great! Here's a visual of our meal:


So it's just a basic yellow curry with chicken, pineapple, peppers, peas, carrots, celery and coconut milk over some yummy brown rice. In the future, we plan on venturing out and trying to make some of the other types of curry. But for now this is delicious and we were glad to have tried and succeeded at something other than Italian.

we actually decorated

Yes its true. Unlike at our other apartment, we have unpacked everything in our new place and put up all of decorations/pictures/books etc. It is such a good feeling and now our apartment truly feels like we live here. In our old place since we knew we would only be there a couple months, we didn't want to put much effort into getting everything up just to take it down again in a few weeks. But since we know we will be staying in our current place until at least May, we got in the decorating mood. Which means a trip to Ikea, of course. I swear about 90% of the things we get for our home is from Ikea. I thought I would post a few pictures of the place since quite a few in my family haven't seen it and won't see it for a while, if at all.

A section of the living room:
Just so you can get a sense of how OCD we are, the books are organized alphabetically, within a genre. And yes, we have dark blue carpet. Be jealous. GO COUGARS!



We figured this was a good way to display some of Nik's records, we haven't decided what to do with the others. Ideas?


Probably my favorite item we got from Ikea, it may not be a super practical way to store all of Nik's cds but it sure looks cool. In case you were wondering, each shelf holds a different decade of music (except for the 2000's which is so large two shelves were required). Don't let the photo deceive you - there are quite a few cds on those shelves, over 300 (we think).


Our table and our Italian picture from, you guessed it, Ikea. Now, the flowers on the table, Nik got them for me for no special occasion, just to say he loved me. He's pretty much the best husband in the world. I mean the other day he brought me back ice cream as a surprise, chocolate chip cookie dough no less. What can I say, I'm just a lucky girl.

goodbye goatee

so I know I have been horrible at updating the blog and I really have no excuse so I'll do a few posts in an effort to make up for it.

To begin, I have sad, sad news to share. As you can tell from the name of this post, Nik's goatee is no more. As school starts on Monday, he had to shave off all of his facial hair if he wanted to receive any services from BYU. This is what he looked like Friday morning (look at that robust patch of hair on his chin):




And then Friday later morning:




I'm currently in a mourning period. He just looks so dashing and perhaps more like a 22 year old with a goatee. Alas, unless we find a doctor willing to say that Nik shouldn't shave because his skin is too sensitive I won't be able to enjoy seeing him with facial hair until Christmas. I guess its okay since I still think he's the most handsome guy ever, even when clean shaven, he just looks more like the guy I met in high school.