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This is a chili recipe our family has used for quite a while.  It’s a pretty standard no frills recipe, but quite delicious.

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Wonderful southern sweet potato casserole dish with sweet crunchy topping.  One of my favorite Thanksgiving dishes.

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A wonderful cookie/brownie recipe with a peanut butter twist.  Based on the brownie cookie recipe from Cooks.com.
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Try this extremely simple fruit turnover recipe when you need a tasty fast desert.  You only need croissant pastry dough and fruit filling. Read more…

Rachael’s stuffed peppers are fantastic!  Though apparently this is a simplified version of her mom’s recipe which is even more delicious.  Pretty fast dish, great for times when you find peppers on sale.
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Rachael made this questionably 7-layer dip for our engagement party.  It must have been pretty tasty as it went quick and we had none left over after the party.

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Wednesday night a group of SIParCS interns gathered for a night of sushi making and eating.  The group consisted of Evan, Kuo, Nick, Dan, Kate, and myself.  After work Evan stopped by Whole Foods and picked up some supplies, including sushi grade fish, rice, vinegar, wasabi powder, soy sauce, and vegetables.  It turns out someone just cleaned out most of the sushi-grade fish just before Evan.  We ended up with a small amount of tuna and around a pound of salmon.

Surprisingly, making a roll that tastes good was quite easy.  Not surprisingly, making a roll that looked good was very hard.  I can definitely understand why people can study sushi making their whole lives and never master the art.  There are so many interesting tastes, ingredients, and techniques to explore–the variations are so numerous!  I’m definitely going to have to make more of this type of cuisine in the future.

Following the sushi making/eating and beer drinking, we headed out (around 10pm) to play ‘bocce ball’ around Evan’s apartment complex.  I put it in quotes because, despite knowing the exact rules of the real game, I doubt we were actually following them at all.  Mostly we just made up a game using the ceramic balls from the bocce ball set Evan had purchased a few days before.  It reminded me of when I was much younger and we would make up games on our own and play for hours.  Apparently it takes late nights, sushi, and beer to do this now.  Regardless, it was lots of fun!

Kate and I took a second trip down to Boulder today to finish up the temporary apartment logistics and turn in some paperwork at NCAR.  We timed the trip again, this time with some decent traffic, and it looks like it is safe to say it takes very close to an hour from Kate’s apartment to the NCAR lab at the top of the mesa.  This is definitely longer than I want to drive twice a day, so I’m glad we decided to take the temporary apartment route.  I think 10 hours a week is more than I’m willing to put into commuting…

After we finished up signing all of the apartment paperwork we had about 30 mins to kill.  We stopped by Caffe Sole for a coffee and snack.  This may be the place I hang out if/when I’m not at the lab working.

We met with John around 11.  We chatted for a bit, got a brief tour of the building, found our future (though hopefully too needed) cubes, saw some big (though in the grand scheme of things not that big) machines that they use to run some simulations on, and had a (free!) lunch.  I really like the atmosphere (no pun intended!) there, it is very open, everyone is friendly and seems very approachable, and I immediately felt included and a part of the lab.  After lunch we chatted with most of the CS researchers there.  Every time I meet a new person or group of people that work in my field (or something close) I always seem to get along instantly with them.  I suppose it is the thinking alike thing that causes this…  Regardless, everyone seemed really nice, smart, and will be great to work with.

After another hour drive back, I met briefly with Michelle about the status of IEGen and her progress with the related full space tiling work.  Things are going well and I may actually be able to run some experiments soon!

Finally, we ended the day at Jim’s Wings on Elizabeth St, very close to Adam’s (soon to be) old apartment.  Hot wings go great with a few pints of beer.  We also discovered a small local ice cream shop where we enjoyed some tasty treats before I headed home on my bike.

I’m tired, it’s time for bed.

Over the past weekend I took part in a few exciting events.  It started off with a 6 person ride around Fort Collins hitting up the local breweries on Friday.  Adam, Eric (networking post-doc), Doug, Kate, Jesh, and myself took part.  We started off by stopping by New Belgium but it was a bit too busy for our tastes.  We skipped out there and headed straight to Odell’s.  We had a few interesting conversations over a few beers (Nukes!) and then headed off to Fort Collins Brewery.  Again, as is usual with our group, interesting conversations ensued.  We ended the touring at Coopersmith’s with food and more beer.  The night wound down at Adam’s by playing a telephone-like game that uses small drawings/descriptions on post-it notes.  Adam’s crazy (but cool) neighbor stopped by and played some songs on guitar for us.  It was a good start to what turned out to be a great weekend.

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Last week Rachael and I started working out every morning.  Along with the workouts came our push to start eating/cooking healthier.  Anyone who thinks eating healthy implies bland, boring, tasteless food better think again.  Some of the dishes we’ve cooked the last few nights have been some of the best we’ve ever cooked.

Here is a taste of some of the recipies we’ve based our meals/snacks on lately:

• Southwestern pasta salad
• Sweet potato crisps
• Chicken burritos
• Mexican Manicotti
• Cilantro lime salsa
• Chicken veggie southwestern wraps
• Fruit smoothies

We’ve also got some great ideas for the coming days/weeks.

I hope to develop a recipe database soon.  This will allow each of the above listed items to be described in detail, including name, ingredients, preparation details, comments for making it next time, etc.  All this will be easily searchable for easy recall later.  I can then link to the recipe the night it gets made and comment on it in a blog post.  Now I just need to find the time to write the code for such an application…