Better than Air Freshener

Wow, I'm a terrible blogger--nearly 2 weeks since my last post! But that's okay. Midterms may have temporarily stopped me, but I'm going to get going again. Huzzah! I haven't made anything particularly cool recently, so I won't be sharing a recipe, just something neat I learned from my awesome parents.

A little while ago, my room was smelling really weird. I think something went bad in the fridge (I just threw out a bunch of stuff in the hopes that one of them was the culprit), but I'm not sure. I really hated that my room smelled funky, so I decided to remedy this situation--without using an air freshener. All I did was throw some water, cinnamon, clove, a bay leaf, and some orange peel into my rice cooker (which I haven't named yet! I can't seem to settle on something that'll stick), and set it to cook. Whenever it came close to boiling over, I just set it to "Keep Warm" for a little while.

My room ended up smelling really nice in a relatively brief amount of time! Yay! The cool thing is that a rice cooker is definitely not necessary--a hot pot would work just as well. All you need is to have the spices available and keep an eye on whatever appliance is being used. It probably would have worked better to use a cinnamon stick instead of ground cinnamon, and some vanilla extract for extra goodness, but I have little use for these, so I haven't purchased them.

Anyway, I'm having a lovely time taking a break from cooking for myself in a cramped dorm room! I love spring break.

(P.S. Even though I sound like one of those super cool crazy partiers who LOVE being social and NEVER spend their weekend nights doing laundry and having Big Bang Theory marathons, I'm not actually partying like these people this spring break.)