First Post!!!!!!!!!!!11!!1!

Well, here it is! The much anticipated first blog post. I'll say a little more about myself than my short profile lets on to: I'm a girl gamer who also loves food. I value hard work, cleanliness, dedication... many values that go right along with cooking! If I had my way, I'd be going to a vegetarian cooking school to become a full-fledged chef, and spend time in various countries learning their food ways, mainly France and India. But, alas, I'm going a much more practical route, which is to get an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, and place food in a far less central part of my life (put it on the back burner, one might say : P first bad pun!). My way of doing this is to do this food blog. By doing this, I hope to hold myself to higher and higher standards of food creation, as I'll be competing among peers who have had years more experience, in photography, cooking, and life. In the coming years, I would love to get my blog entries posted onto Tastespotting.com, a site which was the crux in my food obsession. It has lead me to start blogging, and to make new and exciting foods for the world to try.

To start this off, I'm just going to do a simple lunch meal I made today. It's a classic college-kid meal, but one that I have been perfecting for some time now. Fast and easy to make after 4 hours of straight classes, but still filling and healthful. I always try to make my meals balanced, tasty, and inexpensive. This year's budget: 40$ a week for groceries, and I have 100$ a semester on my student ID card to purchase foods from the on campus restaurants, dining halls, and convenience stores.

INGREDIENTS: QUESADILLA:: This is a medium-sized tortilla, with fried egg, mild Annie's organic refried beans with green chilies, and Kraft Authentic Mexican style cheese mix (which is all white, and quite tasty!).
I've discovered that adding the egg makes the dish way more filling, and adds some great protein.

INGREDIENTS: SALAD:: I had this along with a salad: mixed spring greens, diced tomato, and chopped radish, cucumber, and carrot, with ranch dressing, topped with cashews.

Tip: I've found that putting the salsa in a small sauce container, as shown, is great for dipping, as the salsa is not sliding all over the plate and also not combining with the other plated foods, and alleviates the need to worry about proportions and wasting food. If you pour too much, just cap it afterwards! I'm definitely not going to pour salsa on each individual quesadilla slice from that huge salsa container (I found that I use a lot of salsa in my kitchen, since I make many quesadillas, so buying the smaller containers was wasteful. Also: quesadilla is not in the dictionary that blogger.com uses).

For lunch's desert: cantaloupe! 1$ a cantaloupe at Hy-vee. Couldn't pass up that opportunity. ^_^ Well, thanks for reading! Maybe one day you readers out there will be rewarded for your patience with prize drawings!