excuse me while i time-travel real quick.

So, I figured out how to time travel/teleport. Well it's the closest thing to time travel or teleportation that I think I will ever experience in my life. I've done it twice now via my taste buds. 

Most recently, I made sweet potato fries with chipotle-mayo dip (vegan mayo, because I hate mayonnaise normally, even on salad olovieh) because I was craving the ones from 6th street grill so badly.

And as I bit into it I was suddenly transported to 6th and Olive in my beloved Eugene, 

sitting in a booth at 6th street grill with a group of friends sipping on a cold deschutes brew and being collegiate.

I MISS COLLEGE. I yearn for it. I pine for it. And I know going back to gradschool will never be the same (even though I know I will go to grad school probably when I'm thirty something after having worked in the field for a good amount of time and knowing exactly what I want to go back to study) Also I feel insane even saying this because I REMEMBER how exhausted I was from college upon graduating, and now 6 months later, I miss it.

my weekends heavily revolve around food. Carolina and I get together and go grocery shopping at least once a weekend (normally 2 times) and we make delicious food! we're both really experimental and enthusiastic about food and cooking so we are a perfect match. its so fun. We just monopolize the kitchen, and talk and cook and drink tea for hours. and then we feast. its my favorite thing every week.  Last night we made mirza ghasemi and it was really good but it was missing that amazing smokey flavor because we made it in an oven instead of over a charcoal grill. We also made hummos and annihilated it with pita bread, and also sweet potato fries with chipotle-vegan mayo dip. kind of a tapas night. OH, we also were going to make pesto sauce so we could just whip up quick pastas to eat for dinner during the week, but carolina accidentally bought bay leaves instead of basil....I guess she had always only seen dried basil and made her purchase based off of smell. So, no pesto last night but we will do it today. I told her she could use her bay leaves for in curries (we made green curry and vegetables over quinoa last week [i believe it was last week...time's been flying]) OH we also made this amazing miso soup with seaweed and some other things in it i probably cant remember because i was so high from all the delicious food i was consuming. oh soba noodles. there were soba noodles in the soup too. YUM.

yesterday I also made november soup again! succesfully without scalding any body parts! (side note: burn totally healed and no scar! way to go, body!)  and I fed some to one of my room mates! even though she was making fun of me when I came home from the grocery store saying "oh here you go again with all your VEGETABLES  jajajaja (thats how spanish people laugh pronounce the j like a really hard h or kh)" [ok another side note: spanish people would make excellent farsi speakers because they definitely can roll their r's, and make the kh AND GH sound!!! the only thing is they only have one a sound, and in farsi we have 2 so thats actually kind of why my name sucks here and they call me chayanne, but other than that one vowel, oh and also the fact that there is no difference between b and v in spanish, i'm pretty convinced they'd be really great at farsi] ok and my room mate REALLY LIKED the soup and wanted the recipe!!!!!! TOMA!!!!! (thats what spanish people say when they want to be like "yes! score!") so this was a huge "toma" for me.

ok like 2 more side notes:
1. i definitely prefer south american spanish accents to spain spanish
2. why am i a weirdo for liking vegetables? why cant we (as in me and spanish people) just agree that their obsession with beer and ham is just as extreme as my obsession with vegetables (and nutrients)? i mean no one is going to convince the other party to change their diet, but lets just agree that we are both equally extreme. that way we don't have to rip on each other's diets all the time. it will be a happier world.
3. ok fine this is 3 side notes. this is how much spanish people hate vegetables, I was having my 4th grade students (or maybe it was 6th, I cant remember) write little essays about their families [im having them practice making introductions, thesis sentences, organized paragraphs in the body, and a conclusion while including the topics they need to know for their language exam at the end of the year. because they didnt know anything about writing composition before and it was terrifying.] and one of my students was like "my mom is great because bla bla bla. and my dad is really weird because he likes vegetables!" ...HAHAHAHAHA! i was like this is absolutely perfect. the epitome of spain's feelings towards vegetables. my dad is weird because he likes vegetables.

oh and i went to hare krishna on friday with juany and kati and elena and her danish friend morten... (morton?) and it was great, as usual, i stuffed myself until i had a stomach ache. not wise. and then juany invited me to her house on sunday (today) at 2 (in 2 hours) for a potluck/learn how to make mexican food lunch partay!!!! i'm very excited. I went to another one of these once and they were making venezuelan food and it was really fun/good.

[carla, my room mate just came out to the living room drinking a coke, she just woke up, and i told her about my dinner last night and she just made fun of me for only eating vegetables....siiiiigghh, oooh, man.]


k now i'm going to go have breakfast. I'm making this smoothie [i really hope carla doesnt come into the kitchen while i'm making it because i will never hear the end of it "zumo de espicanas! jajaja!"...fabulous] ::

spinach
almond milk
flax seed
bananas
a bit of peanut butter
(TRUST ME ITS AMAZING AND NO YOU CANT TASTE THE SPINACH. try it.)

XO