i also love birthdays and mine is on sunday!

I wasn't sure how to write a list of things I love without being semi-boring. Obviously I love Aaron, and I love my family, and I love my friends, and usually I love chemistry. So here's a list of things that maybe you didn't know I love instead?

sparkly nail polish (used sparingly because removing sparkly nail polish is horrible, unless you use pure acetone...which I've never taken enough advantage of in my lab...hmmm)

wandering around Center City by myself on Saturdays (weird?)

Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon

tiny stirbars in lab that are the size of grains of rice (I hoard them in my drawer)

bright bright pink Cy3 dye and bright bright blue Cy5 dye (used to fluorescently label my protein)

taking care of my cast iron skillet (also probably weird. but no babies or puppies around here, so I have to take care of something. It might as well be a skillet.)

Tell me what you love! It will make me happy.

Cy3 dye. I love you and your fabulous pinkness.

"leave it, it fuels my hate fire"

I was going to write up a post about love and Valentine's Day and nice things, but instead, here is a list of things I irrationally dislike a lot (plus parenthetical comments!):

construction companies

"free printable" (I don't know why??)

"gluten-free"

"no chemicals!" (this one's rational)

quinoa (I've never actually tried it but am averse to the rampant quinoa worshipping online)

dealing with raw chicken (UGH it's so gross and I'm convinced I'm going to die of salmonella)

trucks

I think that's all I've got for now. Maybe I'll come up with a list of things I love to even out the tone around here. Hmmm.

make these

I feel like it's been a little while since I've pretended this was a cooking blog, so I present to you a few recipes I've been making over and over again lately:

granola bars
I can throw these together in less than 10 minutes, and then I have a snack for the rest of the week. WIN. I always throw in almonds, and swapping normal chocolate chips for white was really delicious.

rolls
This is my favorite roll recipe so far. Today is my 4th time making them, and they've been really, really good and soft and delicious every time (knock on wood, they're currently rising). A couple of things I do differently because I am lazy: I don't roll the dough out into a circle and slice into triangles, I just do a rectangle with fat strips and roll them up. I'm incapable of making circles of dough...you should see my rectangular pizza and lopsided pie crust. I also don't put any butter on them before rolling them up, since that requires getting a bowl dirty to melt butter. Instead, I just take a stick of butter and rub it over the tops when they come out of the oven. Yummmm.

Do you have any favorite recipes you're currently obsessing over?

currently...

listening to Florence and the Machine and missing this sister, the only person I could text outfit pictures to and feel normal.

back when we had identical haircuts and colors (no longer true!)

Christmas 2013 is going to be one epic reunion in the Andrus home.

resolutions (mostly of the culinary variety)

Well, now that it's February I might as well post my resolutions for this year! Spoiler alert: none of these have to do with dieting or exercise.

1. Bake a ridiculous chocolate + caramel dessert. Some tempting options include: salted caramel budino a la Barbuzzo, chocolate caramel tart, or salted caramel chocolate fudge cake.

2. Make things to go along with main dishes for dinner. I don't know if it's because we don't really love salad or because Aaron detests most vegetables, but this is so hard for me to do. Tips?

3. Vanquish Les Miserables, unabridged (dun dun dun).

4. Go to Boston.

5. Get better at yeast breads. I kind of really want this gorgeous bread knife for my birthday, but...there is never any beautiful artisan bread to be cut in my kitchen, just Shoprite $1/loaf sandwich bread. So 2013, how about we fix this?

6. More consistent/better personal scripture study. I would like to learn more about women in the scriptures and in Church history. I'd also like to go back to reading the Book of Mormon in French (I swear I have lost almost all French skills I ever had).

Cooking, reading, traveling. A good plan for a year if you ask me!