Can I just point something out?

Modcloth is selling this dress:

Which to me looks vaguely familiar to one I made last summer, no?

Except I made mine for a lot less than the $160 they're asking for :)

You may have noticed

That I have more or less abandoned this poor thing. That's not to say I've stopped cooking - on the contrary I've done lots of experimenting. I've made this sausage and rice timbale which Garrick said he could eat every day for the rest of his life (it even looked like the one in the picture!). I had my birthday party in which I prepared everything for my guests to make homemade pizzas (and oh they were delicious). I made an eggs benedict pizza which was pretty good but I needed to use a recipe for a thicker crust because homemade hollandaise is just so rich. I made pork and chive dumplings with dipping sauce. I made Star Wars sugar cookies for Garrick for Valentine's day. I may still post about all of these lovely things, but I wanted to take this time to announce a couple of things.

The first is that I'M ENGAGED. Woo hoo!

It happened when Garrick and I went on vacation to St Louis over Spring Break. Our first night there, after dinner and back in the hotel, he popped the question. My immediate reaction was "Are you kidding me?!" But I did eventually say yes. Then completely freaked out - in a good way.

So my head has been swimming with wedding stuff more so than food stuff lately. It doesn't help that I was given like 30 wedding magazines from some of Garrick's coworkers. I can really only focus on anything wedding related for about 30 minutes before I get bored and/or overwhelmed. Thank goodness I have over a year to get everything done. It only took us 3 weeks to decide on colors. We're doing purple, teal, and green. We're getting married June 16, 2012.

The next piece of news is that upon arriving home from St Louis I immediately went on a diet (actually not at all related to getting married, I had planned on doing it before we even went to St Louis). As of this past Tuesday I have lost 9.6 pounds in 3 1/2 weeks on it. Now, the reason I tell you this is because the diet is extremely restrictive during the first (and longest) phase. I can't have fruit or any kind of grain/starch. My vegetables are even restricted. I can only have meat once a day at dinner. Thus, the idea of making, say, a cupcake and then not getting to eat it makes me want to kill myself. So I haven't been doing a lot of exciting or creative cooking because, well, I can't eat it therefore I don't want to be around it. So I probably won't have much new for a while, with the exception of the things previously mentioned.

Back to the wedding. I had originally planned on making my own cake. I was convinced by several people that this is a horribly stupid idea, so I won't be doing that anymore. But I still wanted to have my hand in something, so we decided we are going to make cake pops for our wedding favors! I'm so excited about this idea, I can't even tell you. We're going to have 2-4 different flavors and decorate them as we please. A little homemade touch to show our guests that we appreciate them being there. And of course we're going to have to test out some recipes so pretty much every holiday from now until then I'm bringing cake pops. End of story.

Lately I just want to cook. It's hard to explain, but I want to make things that keep me in the kitchen all day but in the end it's so worth it. Like homemade ravioli. Or 12 layer cake. Or something. I also want to get into canning. I like the idea of having homemade things readily available, and it's cheaper. Love it. But I don't know the first thing about it. I will need to explore this.