It's a First

I confess. It's been a week since my last blog post. It's been a crazy month here at the Humiston house. In fact, I have some pretty exciting news to share. After renting our quaint little one bedroom apartment in Jersey City for the last two years, Shaun and I took the plunge and purchased our very first home (!). Still carrying a bit of urbanniteness around with us, we decided that the apartment/condo route was the way to go. After extensive searching in Hoboken and Jersey City, we finally settled on a loft in the JC. Our new home is brand spankin' new, complete with higher-than-your-average-ceiling ceilings, 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and a terrace to boot - all of which is a major upgrade from our old one bedroom with dingy floors and appliances circa 1985 (though the place was in a luxury building, it seemingly hadn't been properly cared for until Shaun and I came along and gave it some serious TLC to make it a happy home for us over the last two years). So needless to say, it's been a mad dash to the finish line in terms of making our decision, doing the deal and uprooting all of our posessions (you'd be truly shocked to see how much 'stuff' can accumulate in a small 1 bedroom apt) which hasn't left much time for concocting delicious dinners and delectable sweets.

Of course one of my favorite parts of our new home is the brandy-new kitchen, in which I'm just dying to get cookin'. That is, once all of my favorite appliances are unpacked and in their happy new homes. Oh, and I should also mention that I'm simply over the moon about our new terrace. In fact, we refer to it as the terrace as we are still pinching ourselves over the fact that we are living in an urban environment yet have a huge outdoor space of our very own. And since we can't stop singing its praises, we made our very first  purchase for our new place and more specifically, the terrace.

Since Shaun and I are all about the food, we purchased a sweet little grill for our new terrace. It's an item that we pined over for two years in our last home and even went so far as to eat cheeseburgers and hot dogs beyond the appropriate level of consumption at each and every barbecue to which we were invited just to get our proper fill of the grill. So after a Memorial Day party in Hoboken on Sunday, we drove on over to Home Depot and picked up a Weber charcoal grill, some charcoal and an extra fire extinguisher (to keep on hand for safety). We figured that while the terrace is quite spacious, it is super close to our loft and therefore we didn't exactly feel safe having a tank of butane within a few feet our our living room and bedroom. So we went the charcoal route, which not only eliminates the gas issue, but we prefer the cooking method to gas grilling. And it smells oh-so-good. There she is, sitting pretty on the terrace along with some flowers that my mom gifted to us right after our move. Doesn't it already look like the makings of a sweet outdoor area?

And since I like to keep things food related, here's a peak at the inaugral dinner that Shaun grilled up for us. I really just have one word for it...yummm. So that's the beginning story of our new home and our first food purchase for the new place - a charcoal grill that's the perfect way to kick off the summer in the brand new joint. But what I really want to know is, how do you get your grill on? Do you go gas or go charcoal? Can you notice a difference?