...cooking my little heart out.

Making money, not as a concept, but in practice is foreign to me. The idea that I can be saving money and still have enough money is brand new. I worked my ass off in my undergrad to save enough money to move to the city. By the end of my final year I’d saved enough to cover living expenses for about a month, plus May, June, July and last month's rent- but I was also living on about a hundred dollars a week, including groceries.

So now once again I’m saving money, for grad school this time. After six months of paying off debts and getting things in order, this January 2011 I am finally ready to start saving. And I’m not a student this time, I have a real job. But sometimes I still forget that now U of T pays me. When I decided to start saving I thought great, its fifth year all over again. That’s where this foreign concept of making money comes in. Knock on wood, barring any major financial disasters, I should be able to save money and still have enough money to live well from day to day. Ok, live well by my standards, which is on the border of living comfortably and just ok by the standards of most.

What excites me the most about my new found “wealth”? Grocery shopping. The idea of going to the grocery store and being able to buy what I want- finally being able to splurge on the good, colourful tomatoes and buy cheese other than the no name brand gives me a warm fuzzy feeling all the way down to my liver. Finally after months of printing off recipes I can actually make them! (No Jamie Oliver, I don’t have my own garden of fresh herbs but now I can afford to buy them.)

A couple of months ago I found a Rachael Ray pasta recipe I can actually afford to make and I’m obsessed with it. I really could eat it every day and be happy but I’m getting bored of cooking it. So now that I can grocery shop to my heart’s content (don’t get too excited and try to rob me on the subway—my heart has pretty low expectations when it comes to spending money) I am going to call February my “No recipe left behind tour.” It starts next Saturday. I’m pretty excited.