Food, Glorious Food!

Hello Everyone,

In case you've lived in a cave and have never seen the movie/musical Oliver!, as my old music theory teacher used to say, "Run, run, run! and go get this." It's definitely worth a watch, especially if you like musicals in the first place, and if you don't then go get it anyway and expose yourself to some culture!!! My point? the title for this week's blog comes from it. In fact it's the very first song in the movie. It's great. A link can be found by CLICKING HERE. It's good because it's got the subtitles, and the little kids with the English accent are sometimes hard to understand. The little boy who has the solo, in case you didn't guess is Oliver Twist, himself! lol Anyway, onto our week.

Monday night Brittany and I went to visit our good friend in the hospital, who just had a beautiful baby girl. It was lots of fun to see such a tiny baby, and Brittany really enjoyed holding a child that was only born 22 hours before. Our friends are doing great and were basically on their way out the next day. They said they had a wonderful experience at the Utah Valley Hospital up here. Apparently it's one of the leading hospitals in the nation for babies (for obvious reasons don't you think?). We are very excited for them and wish them the best of luck with their new little one.

Monday and Wednesday we performed our compositions that we posted last week. They went really well, and our groups had lots of good things to say about them. We tried to record them, and Brittany's came out great! (Download and listen to it HERE.) Mine however, I guess it was too much for my cell phone's microphone to have a French horn, tuba, and glockenspiel all playing at the same time because the quality was just terrible. So you're just stuck with the midi on that one. Sorry. We'll get our grades for that, along with our tests hopefully tomorrow or Wednesday.

Friday night my friend Chris and I donated blooded because my stake was hosting a blood drive. I hadn't donated since last semester, so it was definitely time for it. I've realized how important it is to do this kind of thing, especially because of natural disasters like what happened in Haiti. I would like to put in a plug here for all who can to donate blood, especially double red blood cells if you can do it. So many people in the world need this kind of thing and only a very small percentage of qualified people actually donate. It's kinda sad, when it only takes 10-15 minutes of your time to donate whole blood, and 45-50 minutes for double red blood cells. Seriously, the last time I donated whole blood, I took 10 minutes for paperwork, and the actual blood giving part took a little over 5 minutes. And then you get the yummy free cookies and snacks afterwards. :)

Anyway, enough ranting. Last night, Brittany and I had a little mini date night. It was really laid back and low key, but I think it was lots of fun. We bought ingredients on Thursday when we went shopping for No-Bake Cookies (or as Brittany's family calls it, Gorilla Poop) and we made them last night. While they were cooling, we got ready for bed and watched Harry Potter 6. We had our cookies (SOOO GOOD), and then went to bed. It wasn't much, but it was fun to just be with each other. We love being married :D.

Well we hope all are doing well. We sure are! Oh, the recipe for this week, if you can call it a recipe is for the Brazilian dish feijao. Brittany introduced me to this shortly into our marriage. It takes a HUGELY long time to make and takes soooo many ingredients. Here ya go!

Enough cooked rice for everyone you're cooking for

About 1-1.5 cans of black beans for every two people

Cook the rice, warm the beans, and then put the rice over the beans.

DONE. You can put some hot dogs or smoked sausage in there as well and season how you want. It doesn't need a whole lot though. It's a lot more delicious than it sounds, and what can get cheaper than black beans and rice?? It can be a lot more cheaper if you can find a good way to make your own black beans from dried ones. We tried that once, but it didn't work out like it was supposed to. Anyway, it's good.

Love ya,

Christian and Brittany