connordonaldsonblog-blog

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Hey guys ! sorry for the delayed posts but I have had such a busy weekend!! On Friday my housemates and I decided to go on a bar crawl called 12 Barz which was a total blast! I and my housemates decided to start drinking at 6pm and we went straight until 2am so you could imagine the general consensus of the house the following morning lol. So Saturday (being yesterday) when I initially planned on writing another blog posts about what I was going to cook that night - being fajitas- I did not eat and instead laid on the couch with 3 of my other roommates and just watched numerous Christmas themed movies. This morning however I woke up surprisingly feeling great (even though I did not go out last night I am just not good with mornings ever. I finally made the Fajitas I had been planning on make for the past while for a big lunch which will probably also double as my dinner tonight. So how I cooked this meal is actually one of my more elaborate time consuming recipes to cook as it takes usually around 1 hour for everything to finally be cooked ready and set. How I start this meal is I went to Walmart - surprising right?- and bought a $2 Old El Paso Fajita seasoning for chicken, a $2.50 three pack of bell peppers, A package of cherry tomatoes around $3, a small block of marble cheese which was about $4 - one random thought that comes with buying cheese is that never in my life did I know it was so expensive like why is cheese so expensive?!?!- cracker barrel is my favourite,  a $3 can of Old El Paso refried beans, $7 Costco package of mini “Wholy Guacamole” guacamole, $3 sour cream - however my roommates and I share sour cream and it was not my week to buy it so :),  One onion that was like .70 to purchase, my family friend is a head manager for Pinty’s Chicken Canada so she always sends care packages of bags of chicken which is free, my roommate let me use some of her salsa so that was also free :), and of course to wash it all down I had a .75 cent grape juice tin that I made. So the approximate total for this whole meal which was not only satisfyingly tasty but also filling, relatively healthy for my crohns diesease, and I still have left overs which will last me is approximately $26 but I still have left over cherry tomatoes, guacamole, sour cream, grape juice, and cheese not to mention the left over food I have so I would say around $15 is a more accurate representation as to how much this meal cost. Once I finally had all the items needed to make this meal I immediately started to cut up the onions and peppers into thin slices so that I could sauté them with some olive oil on my pan for approximately 15 minutes on a medium heat to get a proper sauté. While those were cooking minus the occasional moving around of the peppers and onions, I shredded some cheese into a bowl, cut up some cherry tomatoes, and placed the tortillas on a place, once the vegetables were finished I then put them in a container to save dishes as they would be going into a container anyways so to save myself a little time cleaning up I put them all into one thing. I then started to cook the chicken on a medium heat which took about 15 minutes to do and after it was finally fried to a decent looking not raw colour I poured the package of fajita seasoning on the chicken with a quarter cup of water and mixed it around until the seasoning became like thick smooth I would be lying if I said I knew how to describe what the liquid texture is like lol. So once that was done I put it in a bowl and had all my other finally add ins complete around me and as you see in the photo it was a nice feast for one :) ! My overall rating for this as fajitas are my absolute favourite thing to eat is 11/10 (yes I know I said 11) as it is so tasty, filling, and makes me look like I know how to cook a lot better than I actually do. The one downfall I have on it would be it is time consuming and creates a lot of dishes to clean afterwards.

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So on Tuesday’s this semester (Fall 2017) I have class starting from 10am (with Digital Humanities) that goes until 11:25am then I have my Theoretical Foundations in Communications class from 11:30-2:30pm (tutorial included). then I have a brief break between classes where I get home around 3pm then have to head out for class again around 5:30pm for my Big Data and Society class from 6-9PM. So as you could imagine, I am very crunched for time and trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle and overall sanity on Tuesdays proves to be very exhausting. So last Tuesday (as this previous Tuesday I was driving back up from Toronto due to other concerns..) I decided to try and do something I have never in my life done before. I decided to try and use a slow cooker! The slow cooker I have photoed above in the first photo was actually a wedding gift to my parents 30 years ago haha so the fact it still works is beyond my imagination. However, my parents gave me my slow cooker when I decided to move out so it works out for me! In a mass hysteria of never knowing how to even use a slow cooker I decided to call my sister whom is a bit more of a chef than I am to help me figure out a recipe. She gave me the simple recipe of just going to Walmart -again a student on a budget here- and buying a cheap spaghetti sauce, tomato chunks, chilli powder (old el paso is my brand choice), red and black beans, a tube of cheap ground beef, some diced onions, and bell peppers. I then put it all into the slow cooker around 4:30PM prior to my Big Data and Society class on a low heat and truly I would be lying to you if I didnt say I was hoping for the best as I really did have no clue as to how this would go... So off to class I went! After a long 3 hours of heavily anticipating how my cooking skills would go. I came back to see the slow cooker slightly overflowing (I presume when everything got hot it expanded so my really full slow cooker started to spill out)... But other then that I got a spoon and put some hot chilli in a bowl shredded some marble cheese on top and sprinkled some Kraft parmesan out of a shaker on top of the shredded cheese and wow.. I truly did something remarkable as never in my life have I been so happy with how I cooked!! Lots of spices but lots of flavours I was so happy! Overall my first attempt at making chilli I would give myself a 7/10 and highly recommend this to any other struggling student who has no idea of what they are doing when it comes to cooking but on a tight schedule & budget!

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Hi there! if you have reached this tumblr blog page then welcome!! I am very excited for you to join and experience my foodie blog which I will be basing off my what I am going to describe as “ a university student with crohn’s disease on a budget trying to eat remotely healthy while eating food that looks somewhat edible”. So to jump right into a quick background of me: I am currently a 19 year old student of Carleton University with a major of Communications and Media studies minoring in Digital Humanities (which yes this class I am doing this blog on is about). I am from the city of Oakville Ontario which is just a quick 20 minute drive from Downtown Toronto. Growing up I never really was taught how to cook as my mom was always at work when I was younger/ did not know how to really cook either, and my dad when I was around four years old went blind. So a lot of the food I ate growing up was traditionally take out food or basic food which my dad would cook to the best of his ability for my sister and I. So coming to university I did not know many life skills as back home I had two maids who would clean my house and do all those chores for my family, and a gardener who would do all the landscaping for my property. So the whole cooking thing and learning how to do that was never really on the top of a list for my parents to teach me what to do. So bare with me as I try to create different recipes and my review of them based on what I am trying to teach myself off of websites such as youtube, or even facebook videos from that website of “Tasty”. Photographed above is what I like to call the perfect hangover Sunday meal - not that I would ever drink or anything lol- but “theoretically” if I was to ever be hungover, this is exactly what I would recommend to myself. As every suburban child does on a Sunday, I went to Costco and picked up some exciting food products. I prefer to buy from Costco certain things as it makes sense to buy in bulk certain items that are non perishable and will last a while (rice for example). So I purchased the Kirkland maple sausages and a giant bulk minute rice box from Costco as a cheap but hopefully tasty meal. How I made this was the “I do not really want to do a lot of dishes as I am for some reason exhausted and dizzy” so I put some cheap olive oil I bought from Walmart on a pan and cut up the maple sausages so they would cook faster on a pan. I then put 1 cup of minute rice in a pot with 1 cup of water and a table spoon of butter and pinch of salt and let it boil out the water for 10 minutes. Once the rice was cooked I put it on a plate and whileI was trying to save dishes immediately just piled it all onto my plate in hopes I would be able to eat it all then put some $2 Great Value brand teriyaki sauce on it and mixed it around. Once my sausage was cooked I put it next to the rice and ate them. Overall it was a perfect sweet but meaty “hangover” food which only took about 15 minutes to cook with minimal dishes and 10/10 satisfaction :) 

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kicking the day off with productivity (and yummy overnight oats)! my first class starts at 3pm so i might as well squeeze some reading and note-taking into my morning. hope you have a great day ahead, studyblr friends! <3

(yes, that is a “niall horan 4 life” sticker)

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Imperial by Sebastian Tontsch