Manufacturing time

The question I am constantly asked by those who either see this blog or are the unfortunate recepients of my schpiel about it is, "How do you have enough time?" Here's how:

I got home from the hospital at 5:30 p.m. At 5:53 I began cooking, and by 6:09 I had:

Preheated the oven, rinsed a can of Goya black beans and put them in a bowl, added some leftover brown rice, chopped, deseeded and added a jalapeno, touched my eyes and grunted in pain and self-admonishment for awhile while chopping and adding a tomato, chopped and added a red bell pepper, chopped and added some cheddar cheese (crap, I keep forgetting to buy a grater!), seasoned it all with cumin and cilantro and a bit of salt, wished I had fresh cilantro as I hollowed out two green bell peppers, stuffed said peppers, and realized that I had more than enough to stuff two more bell peppers.

Granted, my kitchen table looked like this:



But I also had two of these!



Half an hour later, I pulled them out of the oven and enjoyed one of them (the other is tomorrow's lunch) with some raisins, a multivitamin, and a rare (free!) Diet Coke while typing this post; in the interim, I cleaned up after myself and reviewed for tomorrow's histology lab. Now, I would like to point out that if I hadn't wanted to decompress from the events of the day, I could have relistened to a lecture while doing all that chopping, or even read from a book propped up on the microwave (granted, that poses some moderate danger to my fingers).





Do I have a lot left to do today? Yes. Before I go to bed, I will (well, should):

Work out, pick up my room, read a couple academic papers, study amino acids, make some immune system-related flashcards and read the immunology textbook, print things back at the medical center, and probably something I've forgotten by now. Would cooking and blogging have allowed me to go to bed earlier? Certainly. But not so much earlier that I'd give up a fresh roasted stuffed bell pepper dinner.