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I have some days off and I’m finally on a planned break for my grad school classes, so it’s realllllly nice and kind of a big relief to soak into the new place right now. It feels so peaceful and comfy even though we’re still not completely settled. We still have some boxes to unpack, but part of the problem is we need a few more furniture items. We can also stand to pair down, which we are also doing. I think we’ve made like 4 donation boxes so far and I want to do more. It’s wild how things accumulate. I suppose also, we have duplicates because we were both single for a couple years and became set in our ways and a bit more self-sufficient.

Most things have found natural homes easily just as we have been living here the past week and change. My plants have been a little tricky to distribute appropriately. I keep forgetting that the windows upstairs that face North still get much more light than my previous unit did, so I can put the ones that don’t need consistent, direct sunlight up there.

My Christmas cactus has buds and is getting ready to bloom. It hasn’t bloomed for well over 10 years. I wonder if it is blooming closer to its natural bloom cycle than the one that it was originally forced/taught to at the store that my aunt bought it from. One of my plants probably didn’t survive the move, but it’s ok, I can take pretty hearty cuttings and I just have a bunch of smaller ones until they also grow larger.

We have a little crawl-in closet under the stairs that the previous tenants stapled a bunch of blue tarp into as the walls, floor, and ceiling for some reason. We call it “the blue room”. I’m scared of enclosed spaces that are small, but we are going to use it as canning storage in the off-season so I will often find myself in there as I grab my jars and stash filled ones for winter time. I’ll get used to it. It’s nice to have a designated canning pantry. I feel so fancy.

My cat continues to love exploring every little nook and cranny. She was fully settled after the first night. She has come so far in her anxiety and stress journey from when I got her. She is more confident meeting new people and tolerating loud noises like the vacuum. She gets zoomies in the morning and runs with her tail completely poofed out up and down the carpeted stairs, and sometimes jumps through the space inbetween the open stairs to slap us with her paws. She side-lays and loafs everywhere, especially when the sun comes in. I think this is the first place she’s been in since I got her that she gets direct sunlight? Like proper full South-facing sunlight. She was naughty and got out while we were bringing things in and explored the hallways. She’s become curious and brave which makes me proud, but it also makes me nervous because I don’t want her to get out of the building and get hurt or lost or worse because she is naive about being outside.

Food making has been absolutely fucking stellar here. I made a hearty beef stew recently. It was cold for a bit, so I wanted something comforting. I got one package of stew beef that was already cut into chunks. I also got a big bag of carrots, a big bag of celery, parsley, sweet peppers, portabella mushrooms, a can of diced tomatoes, beef broth, and garlic. We had to buy a bottle of red wine for it, which is funny because my partner doesn’t drink at all and I have too many bleh memories of red wine from childhood to ever drink it. Cooking with it is yummy though!

First I rested the beef chunks on the counter with some salt and black pepper for like 20 minutes while I heated my Dutch oven and about ¼ stick of unsalted butter on the stove. Next I browned the beef chunks in the butter and set them aside to fry my veggies to give them a little skin to hold up to getting stewed over a long period of time. Then I went crazy free style with the spices and it paid off. What I remember is...I fried celery seeds, marjoram, sage, and thyme. Then I threw the meat back in and I eye-balled adding the red wine, let it reduce a little bit, and then added my beef broth and canned tomatoes. And! Then I used an umami trick my friend taught me recently. My stew was too sour somehow! So I dissolved 2 tablespoons of “sweet” miso paste into the broth, and it fixed the problem and gave it a creaminess and like a pleasant savory note I wouldn’t have been able to place if I weren’t the one that added it. I topped it off with like 5 bay leaves because the Dutch oven was pretty full, and then put it in the oven at 350 F for at least 2 hours. I don’t know how long actually. And then it was done and it was glorious and we ate it all week with a long baguette. I wish I had pearled barley in my pantry before I had started so that it didn’t need a side carb to make sense, but I’ll have it ready for next time.

I had half a bag of celery leftover and wanted to use it before it went bad, so I also made a curry chicken salad, which I haven’t done in probably 8-10 years honestly??? Aldi’s had really crunchy grapes. I don’t usually like grapes, or anything that you have to like, burst in your mouth? I always halve them so that I don’t get that sensory experience. Maybe that’s silly, but it’s been one of the sole sensory issues around food I have maintained into my adulthood. Anyway! I got those grapes, an apple, two chicken breasts, cilantro, red onions, and green onions and I already had that celery, the curry powder we’ve been using lately, and a squeeze jar of mayonnaise. I’m not really a mayonnaise person, but my partner likes it on sandwiches and burgers so we have it around. I always forget it’s like one of the main flavor carriers in white-American salads. So I gently cooked the chicken breasts in a covered pan with a little salt and olive oil until they were cooked through. While I was waiting for them to be done, I chopped the celery (including the leaves because they add a lot of flavor), some of the cilantro, red onion, green onion, and apple and I halved the grapes. I let the chicken cool a little bit and then cubed it and added it to the big container as well. Then I just squeezed mayo and added curry powder, salt, and black pepper until I was satisfied with the flavor blend. My partner and I liked it. We have been eating it as a salad and also putting it on buns to make sandwiches for lunch sometimes.

My partner’s friends gave them a big bag of their little garden tomatoes. I decided I wanted to make a simple salad that highlighted their flavor since the season is done here, so I halved them, added diced English cucumber, salted them to bring their flavors out, and then used the tiny food processor I have to chop into tiny pieces a bunch of mint, dill, cilantro, and green onion to give it an herby pop. Then I put it all together with some olive oil and black pepper. It was really refreshing as a side! I think next time, I would add a can of chickpeas, and some cooked quinoa to make it more of a stand-alone dish with more nutritional value. It would change the profile from being a nice, light accompaniment. I like making things like that sometimes, but I also like being able to pull one dish type out of the fridge when I’m really hungry and just scoop it into a bowl without thinking too much.

I need to use up the rest of our carrots, so I think I’m going to braise some pork with them. My partner is starting to get their seasonal depression so I asked them what kind of home-cooked meal would be comforting for them. They didn’t know so I gave a list, and that was what they picked. I don’t normally cook with pork because it makes me sad. To be honest, it all makes me sad, but pigs can be really sweet and empathetic and they are bratty like toddlers sometimes and it just hurts. My partner has a different life experience around animal slaughter. Being a farm kid, awareness of death and consumption of that death is a part of life. They also didn’t grow up eating factory farm meat, it was animals they knew and loved. I don’t know what that is like. It’s still something I haven’t squared in my head. I can’t feasibly with my health complications be a vegan again, but I would like to approximate vegetarian more often. It’s tricky with lactose intolerance and I also can’t eat coconut for some reason?? Since my finances will be more stable (they already are, but they’ll be getting better next year again), I think it makes sense to start investing more into plant proteins that are pricier again. And also raw silken tofu with sauces is pretty goooood.

Anyway, wowie that was a lot of guilt to dump haha. Since I don’t cook with pork hardly ever, I’m going to have to do some research today to figure out how exactly I want to cook it for optimal texture before it gets put in the Dutch oven to get stewed to a point of falling off the bone with the veggies I’m throwing in.

We’ve needed to get more furniture, I think I already mentioned that. We’ve been using the fb marketplace to get things. We got a kitchen cart that’s pretty sturdy and it adds more “counter” space that we have designated as the coffee and tea spot in the corner. It also holds our pots and pans and small appliances because there is less built-in storage than we originally had planned for. We got a pretty bookshelf that has a rounded set of shelves that rounds towards a corner in our wall pleasingly. It has a nice amalgamation of our little items displayed on it. I think my partner is having fun decorating. It sounds like their previous partners were less collaborative about spaces and how they are maintained. I think that’s part of the fun of living with other people, it’s the mixing up of your pallettes and comforts and everything and how it looks can be a physical representation of your bond. Maybe that’s silly, I just really value it having grown up in a hoarding situation and having complex relationships with my own and other peoples’ things. We are both dedicated to having a safe, clean, functional space which is incredibly important to me. It’s interesting because they have clean and soft taste, and my things add pockets of vibrant color and texture, and I think the mix is more calming than my space was and more more cozy than their space was? We’re both extended out of our comfort zone but we have similar placing instincts so it’s been a lot of fun putting it all together. We got a rug yesterday from the fb marketplace, and it was so odd. It was a house-flipping couple, I think. It seemed like they didn’t know the worth of what they had. We got it for probably a tenth of what they could have asked? But I don’t have a lot of interest in giving flippers money. It’s green and we put it in the living room with all the plants and it’s soft and I like it.

Oh because we have that little designated hot beverages making spot, I’ve started trying to replicate boba tea drinks from my two favorite local places (sans the boba until I get a straw I can live with owning and washing). I really love going to those places to sit and work and just enjoy the spaces they’ve created. They both have full vertical plant walls and one of them has plants hanging down from the ceiling. It creates this cozy, safe feeling for me. One of them also has a self-serve ramen station with all of the different fixings like the 7/11s in Asia. I also love the tack boards, there are always so many neat local things on them to do. I just have such a soft spot for little locally-owned-and-ran cafes. I know they are first and foremost a business, but people pour so much of themselves into them and curate these beautiful third spaces for people, places of connection and love. A lot of our local businesses also give back to the community and host community-good events like food drives, harm reduction classes, and meet-ups. I think I’m really in my feelings today about where I live and the community I serve through my job.

The bubble tea flavor that nearly makes me cry whenever I get it is this non-dairy Jasmine milk tea. It’s the perfect amount of sweet and creamy while being like the strongest but still floral distillation of Jasmine flavor I’ve ever had. It’s like I can physically feel it’s presence on my tongue, like it’s kinda sticky, or more accurately, velvety? It’s really well-balanced among all of its components and I’ve gotten close to replicating it at home with honey and oatmilk, but my Jasmine isn’t as strong... Jasmine is my favorite flavor and scent. Someday I want to keep a Jasmine shrub. I have no idea if they’re expensive. Actually I do, we used to sell them at one of the stores I worked at when I was in my retail hell years. It was 30 US dollars. That felt like a reality-shattering amount of money at the time since I was eating literal garbage at work. The plant would have died in the apartment I was in at the time due to inconsistent moisture and temperature issues. After a quick google about it, I guess I could make this dream literally come true today lol.

It’s funny how my brain writes things off so easily because I was so far limited financially and housing-wise and so many other things. And now I can literally just go do things. I mean, not as much because I am back to half what I made last year, but I built myself up carefully financially so an occasional “cheap” dream is well within my reach. I still haven’t fully acclimated to the fact that I can buy groceries without tracking exactly how much the total will be as I move through the store and then need to figure out which things to put back if I go over.

I’m going to make some oatmeal cookies today because I think baking something will solidify for my brain that this is home now. I also want to play a video game really bad. I never really got back into playing that newer Metroid game because I’ve been too busy and my Switch is still lent out. I can use my partner’s, though! I think I’m burnt out because the things I normally enjoy at home right now feel like work to start. Probably once I’m doing it though, it will be fun and fine.

My partner and I took a little brain break date night and went to an arcade for a couple of hours one weekday evening recently. It was a lot of fun. We played a lot of coordination-based games and some classics like Pac-man and pod racing. There were a few art installations to see while we were there that I enjoyed. We stopped to sit in the karaoke area for a minute and I liked the energy of the friend groups supporting each other as they sang their songs. It was sweet.

It’s my birthday soon and I’m still old lol, but my partner and family and friends have been spending time with me and it’s been lovely. I feel full and content for the time being.

Thanks for reading, I’ll see you again when I’m avoiding my homework again probably lol! I hope you’re doing well and eating good food. And also my partner says "hello!"