Adults Only

Two of the things that I think make you an "adult" are being able to balance your check book and cooking a darn good meal. You can hold a job, own a car, pay your bills, have a house, be married and even have kids, but to me those two things are what really separates the mice from men.

So one of the things that has always made me feel like I wasn't a full fledged adult was my grasp on finances (or lack there of). I didn’t really have to be in charge of my own budgeting until I was in college and I had my first job. It was just a little part time job at the library but I had to use the money for food, utilities, and fun money. I lived in an on campus apartment (so housing was covered) and my car was second hand and therefor paid for (plus, my dad paid for insurance and gave me a gas card, like dad’s do). It should have been pretty simple, but I feel like I was overdrawn every other month. Mostly from shopping for clothes.

Flash forward, until quite recently, I’ve never successfully designed a budget that works. It's based on percentages and it's very helpful to me because it basically tells you how much you Should be spending in each category (like housing, auto, utilities, food, insurance, saving, fun, etc) you can adjust it to your own needs, but it's a great place to start.

I hated math when I was in school, but now numbers fascinate me. I enjoy seeing how all the parts come together and have the pleasure when the numbers add up. Lame, nah. We have been using our new budget plan for a few months now, and we're getting the hang of it. I'm not saying I haven't spent too much at the grocery store, but it's defiantly made me feel a little bit more like I'm in control of my life. (Big love to my honey bunny for being extremely understanding when I either don't understand how something adds up and/ or go way over budget like I did on vacation… and my birthday… and when I bought that life size R2-D2 trash can).

So that leaves cooking food that is nutritious, delicious and doesn't cost an arm and a leg in time or money. Enter Alton Brown, our new favorite show and guru. Justin and I tried eating out around here (both off and on base) but we haven't had good luck with anything (or they just steal our credit card number). Then one night we had particularly horrible "Italian" food. It was just awful, we looked at each other and said 'we can do better than that' and so we started cooking at home almost exclusively.

At first we used Allrecipes.com, which was fine, but with our lack of good oven (see other post), and lack of planning it didn't go badly but it wasn't wild cooking success. I'd seen Alton Brown's show before and liked it, so we got all the seasons, and we sat down to learn. Also, most of his recipes are on the foodnetwork website.

We are still trying to prefect our pizza crust, but we can now cook a pizza that you'd think was gourmet. Our Mexican food is fantastic (probably because we are most familiar with how that's supposed to turn out) we make enchiladas in a snap, beef tacos in our sleep and we just made our first batch of Tamales. Italian now boasts garlic butter shrimp that is dreamy, but I still need to learn a good lasagna. And surprisingly Chinese food is pretty darn good too, egg drop soup, fried rice, teriyaki chicken, etc. We do a real good pineapple pork and some normal fast couscous with sausage. Fish is limited by the fact that it's frozen and not great quality but we've done a couple batter/frying that's gone well. Oh, and when we feel like it Parmesan chicken tenders that are really good.

All in all, I wouldn't feel bad for making people ate our food anymore and we have fun in the kitchen (usually, unless I'm grumpy because I'm too hungry while cooking). So yay me, and yay us I feel like it's a good few steps down the road of being An Adult.