A visitor, and culinary fun

Hello everyone,

I had my first visitor! Tom Kane on his whirlwind trip of excitement stopped by for a couple days and distracted my from my work with worthwhile conversation. He has been traveling for like 120 days or some ridiculous amount of time. Anyway, having him here was great and means I can't wait til family members and friends make stops here!

I also got to cook for someone else for the first time in a long time. Highlights include: Making pesto from scratch with a mortar and pestle, keeping the Hilty tradition of quality french toast going (including homemade banana syrup), some kinda lame but filling burritos, and lastly beer which was purchased but still exciting to share with someone.

This little bit of cooking for someone else and the large amount of working that has been lurching closer has convinced me to do even more cooking fun for myself. Including making refried black beans (interesting note: refried does not refer to frying twice, but instead to thoroughly frying the beans, which isn't even that true of the cooking method, but whatever.) This lead to bean burritos being a solid lunch food for the past couple days, which also allowed me to (through a slight amount of forgetfulness) make sweet potato and black bean burritos. Which apparently are already a thing, but nontheless are super enjoyable. I am fairly certain a certain female friend of mine would find them especially exciting. I have also been experimenting with homemade past sauce and I think I may make lasagna when I come home with all the ingredients starting in base forms, i.e. one word ingredients (this is my new favorite thing in food packaging i.e. tomato paste ingredients: tomatoes).

For those few people that read my blog that don't talk to me or my mom regularly, you probably won't know that my dad just underwent knee surgery, hopefully he will be home sometime within the next 0-36 hours. He will be layed up for awhile, however, if all goes according to plan he should be ready to do some light partying for christmas and open house.

I hope everyone out there has an enjoyable Thanksgiving, and I will likely not be posting much for the next couple weeks as applying to grad school and getting kicked in the face by finals occurs, but after that I will be back in Lakewood.

In other news I may be spending a bit of time in Chicago right after New Year's so if you are around send me an email.