I got in the kitchen and made me a sandwich.

Giant mutant strawberries are coming for us all.

Over the past four years of splitting my life between Morristown and Meadville, I've found that one thing remains constant when I come home: there's never any food in the house. There will always be leftovers more than a week old, a giant tub of baking powder that expired in 2010, a plastic lemon half-filled with juice that grows ever more acidic and not in a good way, and whole milk when I've grown used to skim and 2%, but there has never been anything I'd be excited to eat. I've been home for a month now, and yesterday was the first time I had a chance to go grocery shopping with my mom (read: without using my own money; starving grad student habits start now)...and I did with a vengeance. (Or a hunger. Damn, missed that pun.) It took two stores and four hours, but the kitchen is stocked and my stomach doesn't have any reason to complain for a few weeks.

With the proper ingredients in the house, the obvious first step is to bake. I woke up this morning and made buttermilk biscuits for my best friend, who's off to start her new life in the South and will probably have more and better biscuits in Kentucky. I ate the ugly biscuit, made up of all the fragments of dough left from cutting the prettier biscuits, as soon as it came out of the oven; the rest are sealed up in foil for future reasons that I will elaborate upon shortly.

I got more ambitious for late lunch/early dinner (had a verrry long nap this afternoon, so) and made a sandwich that came to me in a vision yesterday afternoon: prosciutto, mozzarella, and baby spinach with cracked black pepper, toasted and pressed in a buttered skillet. The abundance of food blogs I read have always helpfully suggested that a home cook with a panini craving but no sandwich press to call her own can concoct a sort-of substitution with a foil-covered brick, a clothing iron, or a particularly heavy saucepan, so being without brick and skeptical of ironing my sandwich, I tried the third method today. It looked like this:

THREE saucepans.

Not quite food blog worthy. Check out the sandwich, though!

Yeah, I eat in front of my laptop, whatever I'm a millenial.

Then I had an ice cream sandwich and cut up some strawberries, tossed them in white sugar, and put them in the fridge so that I can take them out tomorrow when they're all syrupy and make strawberry shortcake with the leftover biscuits and vanilla ice cream and maybe some melted chocolate over top and I just really love food, you know?