Our Saturday date at "My Girlfriend's Kitchen"...

Happy Saturday!!!

Today Chris and I trailblazed our way into a new way of making dinner (at least new for us!) After talking about it for months we finally made an appointment at My Girlfriend's Kitchen to make 12 meals. This week, before we decided to do this, I spent an afternoon looking up the different businesses that offer this kind of service. Here in Utah there is a place called Dream Dinners, and the place that we chose: My Girlfriend's Kitchen. Outside of Utah there's also a place called Super Suppers. My Girlfriend's Kitchen seemed a little more affordable than Dream Dinners and the recipes look great. Because it's just us two we decided to split up most of the meals into smaller portions so we figure we'll have about a month's worth of food. At one point, after I had made a meatloaf in about 5 minutes, I thought about how it would have happened at home....I would have spent 15 minutes looking for some seasoning that we probably didn't have to begin with--cut my finger chopping the onions, dirtied every dish in the kitchen, etc. etc. one hour later I would have finally finished the preparation only to be too hungry to wait for the meatloaf to cook. Don't get me wrong--I love to cook but when your kitchen is the same size as your closet it becomes a little bit more of a chore.
I know this post is sounding like a commercial but I am just so excited! You can't believe the sense of accomplishment that comes from cooking 20 meals in two hours! I do have to confess though, my favorite part was putting everything into little containers and putting stickers on them! Organization is intoxicating! Well, I'd better go...Chris is putting our Cajun shrimp kabobs (yep we made them this morning) on the grill and they smell wonderful! Bon apetit!

Here we are--ready to plug My Girlfriend's Kitchen to the world!

A new form of expression...

Some people claim that art imitates life. Others argue that life imitates art. At my house Monday night we, that being my husband Chris and I, discovered that art imitates food...or is it food imitating art? I'm not really sure--at any rate life and art merged into one as we created our very own free-form pizzas. Free-form pizza you ask? Yes, that is right! By casting away the shackles of societal conventions regarding pizza shapes, Chris and I were able to immerse ourselves in a singular experience of originality. Somehow we found ourselves liberated from the burden of making a pizzas that conform to the typical round or square ideals. While we maintained the conventional formula of crust+sauce+cheese+toppings=pizza we did play around with the overall aesthetic of the works of "art." I chose to make my pizza into a shape that vaguely resembles the African continent. Chris, on the other hand, chose to replicate Pangea, a land where pepperoni could roam freely.

Some might say that we merely lacked the skills necessary to attain a "real" pizza shape. Others may argue that we were simply too lazy to, as Chris says, "enrounden" the dough. Regardless of why or how these glorious forms came to be one thing is for certain: artistic shapes do not necessarily cater to typical baking times. My opus was sadly burnt while Chris's neophyte exercise reflected the platonic ideal of what a pizza should truly be.

We are the dreamers of the dreams...

Greetings!

Welcome to my attempt at writing. Whether or not it is worth reading is up to you. Feel free to abandon this post at any time, especially if you feel the need to attend one of my fellow blogger's sites. I thought for my first official post I would write about my recent trip to Chicago. My job as a travel agent brought me to the very "windy city" there for a training class. While the class was helpful the true highlight of my trip came when I got to visit the Art Institute of Chicago. I loved so many things about this museum. The collections were fantastic and the size of the museum was just right. One of the worst feelings a traveler can have comes from leaving a museum, knowing that one won't be back for a long time, and having seen only about a tenth of what they came there to see in the first place. That did not happen with me and the Art Institute. There were certainly some things that I couldn't spend as much time as I would have liked and I did miss several exhibits that will be at the top of my list if I ever return--but the feeling of complete satisfaction that I felt upon leaving, makes me think that I got a good taste of the works. This Sargent painting above was one of my favorites. The light reflecting off of the gown's satiny sheen is marvelous. Another of my sillier favorites is a composition piece that I don't even remember the name to. It was something like "20 Bulbs on a Cord," I think. As you can tell from the picture it is just that--a string of lights sitting on the floor. Don't you just love modern art?! I laughed when I saw it and then hoped that the artist wasn't trying to make some statement about the demoralization of banana growers or something equally obtuse. I hope that they meant it to be a fun, thought provoking way to challenge the way we look at commonplace objects. I love that artists can see art in everything. I wish I could more often. After my visit to the museum I went across the street to the Millenial Park. There, in the park, lives a giant silver bean. It's mirror-like surface is intoxicating. You can't help but walk up to touch it. I walked under it and around it. One of my best pictures of the trip came from this wonderous bean and as I close this post I leave you with my own work of art. I call it "Flashy Bean Belly," because it's what happened when I used my flash under the belly of the giant bean. I hope you like it!